Storytelling Sunday 2: The Words, The Pictures

Hello there! It's Storytelling Sunday and I have something special for you today. Uncle Dave started us off this year with his thoughts on storytelling. He'll be heading back Stateside soon, so I wanted to give him a chance to tell a story of his own before he goes...

Storytellers, please welcome Uncle Dave

The Pizza Box

This very small story is almost, but not quite, about pizza.

It might be hard to believe and harder still to recall, but there was a time before blogging and time before your friends the Tall One and the (Not So) Small One; and there was a time before pizza. That time was the 1980s. Sian was at university in Belfast, and seeing a gentleman who looked like a younger version of The Accountant.  I was definitely just Dave in those days, the Little Brother, not yet Uncle Dave or Professor David or any of the other much less complimentary things I sometimes get called. 

 I was  living in the small market-town that we all grew up in, and was a little younger than the Tall One is now. However I possessed none of his poise, social skills or general awesomeness. In fact, my horizons and knowledge of the outside world were rather limited, to the extent that my young life's annual highlight took the form of going on a bus to the cosmopolitan metropolis of Belfast to attend the Ulster Motor Show, a display of new cars.  I know, it's not the stuff Teenage Dreams should be made of; but it was my favourite thing by far at a time when not very much at all happened, and what did wasn't always good. Stories can be told about the yearly visit to the now defunct Motor Show, but not today. This is about what happened afterwards

It's late, we're tired and one medium-sized family car has begun to look very much like another, as they tend to do. We're also hungry.  When I say "we" I mean Sian, myself and the younger version of the Accountant. Pizza was suggested, although not by me as up to that point pizza was only something I had ever seen on television, which put it on the same level of exotic as crocodiles or the Queen, only potentially more nutritious.  By some magical process that I did not yet understand, the single pizza (times were tight and budgets small) was ordered and eventually carried to a small room at the top of a tall house (yes really, but not that one - this one was full of students).

 The pizza was everything it should be: hot, cheesy, tasty. But no delicious thing lasts forever, and it was soon gone. The annual pilgrimage to what appeared to me to be the world's most vibrant and exciting city (Belfast in the Eighties) came to an end and another bus took me back to a quiet normality where pizza-shops existed only in fantasies and memories.

A few weeks later saw Sian, my big sister, back in our home town for a brief visit. And with her came a great prize: an old, empty pizza box. No, THE old, empty pizza box - the flat, square repository of good times, memories and hot cheese. You may think me a rather sheltered child, but this wonderful box remained on display in my bedroom for a long time. Trophies are funny things

...Thanks, Dave! That's your story for today folks. I didn't write it, but I do appear in it; and I hope that makes a nice change!

If you have a story of your own (of course you do!), please do join in.  All tales are welcome - short or tall, we read them all. How about a photo and a couple of sentences? We love those too! Write a post mentioning Storytelling Sunday, so your readers know what you are up, come on over and add your link. We are all ready and waiting