Neat Wheat, Mate!

(i)

It was a summer worthy of the moniker
(whoever SHE is).

I was eleven, maybe twelve years old
and I was on holiday in Portpatrick
during Life Boat Week.

For the fancy dress contest
my parents helped me fashion a costume.
With a cardboard box for a head
and bovver boy braces, I became Brains
the intelligent, bespectacled Weetabix

who along with his friends/siblings/lovers
Brian, Bixie, Dunk and Crunch,
fronted an ad campaign
warning against "airy-fairy cereals"
and "breakfasts fit for sparrows".

Me and half a dozen other brats
lined up on the putting green,
scuffing up the playing surface
with our unsuitable feetwear,
and waited for the judging...

Son of a gun!
I won!
First place!
In your face!
I did a victory lap
of the harbour
in my mind.


(ii)

A week later and back from my holiday
I entered another fancy dress contest.
It was carnival season in Derbyshire.
I duly donned my Weetabix costume
(unscathed from its three hundred mile
journey in the boot of a Vauxhall Nova)
and gathered with the rest of the pubescent moss
for the procession which started
at the outskirts of the village
and wended its interminable way
towards St Peter's Park.

A lot of people twanged my braces,
some quite painfully

but I was confident.
Cocky, even.
The thing was in the bag...

Much later,
cue announcement:
rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb

YOU WHAT?
A measly second!
Picture my dismay -
finishing as runner-up!

I don't know what criteria
(or drugs) the judge was using.
I'm sure there was some nepotism.
Possibly some racism
(discrimination against Scottish Weetabix).

I can't remember who won that day
and I strongly suspect
that neither do they.

B.R. 21/09/2016