STOLEN CHILD

'come away oh human child

to the waters and and the wild

with a faery hand in hand

for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.'

From the irksome alarm clock with its annoying reminders shattering your radiant dreams of prince charming to actually seeing him remorselessly flee with an arrogant cinderella;from being the hapless victim of a second blackhole tragedy in a crowded public vehicleto gettingyour feet pulped in the same by a welterweight commuter;from your morsel of food being snatched by hungry hoodlums called classmates to throwing a wobbly before unannounced examinations;it does not have to be fridauy and the thirteenth day of the month for things to go wrong.

There are a thousand reasons to sulk in this world of ephemeral pleasures.A million dissapoinmentsemanate from millions of brocken hopes.to be dull and disheartened, bereft and broody ,moped and morose-in brief to be the conspicuous contributor of a survival strategies column in an inconspicuous daily is no difficult task.; joie di vivre eludes most of us and in moments such as these we want to shut the gates against reality, to escape with a "faery hand in hand" to somewhere brighter,nobler a world of plentitude and wonder.For quitting often is the wisest thing to do.Labour ,patience are such good virtuesand yet so impermanent.Escapism however stays with you througfh thick and thin to beguile the depressing monotony of life.And yet , as the child still ignorant of worldly sorrows, escapes with the faery, perhaps it feels a pang for what it leaves behind.perhaps it is what we call attachments or perhaps in allour grumblingswe do have an undercurrent of heartfelt affection for what we outwardly want to desert-this wily world and its wilier inhabitants and that is what makes us go on . To attempt to find in my ogre elusive traces of prince charming and dissapointed miss him nonetheless.That precisely is perhaps what makes life go on and makes the child miss-

'the calves on the warm hillside

the kettle on the hob

and the brown mice bob

round and round the oatmeal chest'.