Saturday 7th of March 2020

The Inkslingers writing group based at the Irish Writer Centre, Parnell Square but using the facilities of The Lab in Foley Street to facilitate the use of the IWC for an International Women’s Day event.
Two prompts
The visual prompt: A miniature blue electric guitar
The written prompt: Place the following words in your story
write, dash, hand, staple, part, circle, flattened
_______________________________________________________________________________
I wrote……

My children being into music and I having had a long desire to learn how to play the guitar correctly and particularly a strong desire to cut a dash at a formal do, dressed in full black tie outfit and singing “Johnny be good”, playing all the riffs and doing the duck walk just like Chuck Berry

With this in mind I enrolled in guitar classes in a music Academy just off Dame street. Lessons would be for one hour at ten o’clock on Saturday mornings. This suited me fine as it would also give me time to attend the Inkslingers writing group at the Irish Writer’s Centre.  We gather at one O’clock for half past one and we then we write to the prompts handed out by our group leader Harry Browne, although he denies all responsibility for any of the prompts he inflicts on the assembled victims.

To get to the guitar lessons meant using the number sixteen bus from the Swords Rd in Whitehall, six minutes from my house in Santry. I gathered up my newly acquired blue electric guitar, washed my hands thoroughly and off I went

I boarded the bus at 9:10 am and stood in the square reserved for people with wheelchairs or prams etc. always ready to move if someone needed the space of course

The bus filled up and all is going swimmingly until we reached Dame St. My nose started to itch, and I had an uncontrollable need to sneeze. I pinched my nose and held it. I shook my head vigorously,  I put my hand completely over my face and then buried my face in the elbow of my coat. The need to sneeze went away and I relaxed but, unfortunately it was a head fake. As I put my arm down an enormous sneeze escaped from my face almost doubling me over with its intensity

All hell broke loose. The driver slammed on the brakes, opened the doors and dived out onto the footpath. Three cars behind smashed into the back of the bus and each other, one of them slewing across the road and causing six more cars to swerve and crash as they tried to dodge the chaos, succeeding only in creating a circle of wrecked cars strewn across the road outside what used to be the Central Bank building.

The passengers exploded from the bus and dispersed in all directions, spraying sanitizer on anything in their path. One of them ran into a tourist on a Dublin City rented bicycle and knocked him over. He was promptly flattened by a taxi that had swerved to avoid the mayhem. The front part of the bicycle was run over by a motorcyclist who had managed to swerve his way around most of the carnage but ended up on the back seat of a wreaked car that was sideways across the road with the back door missing.

With what looked like the aftermath of World War three all around me I decided that a quick exit was the best strategy, so I took my electric guitar and walked briskly up Trinity St

As I walked along Andrew St, I encountered a Dublin City Council operative using a staple gun to attach posters to any surface that would accept the staples. The purpose of the poster was to advise people how to behave in public during the Covid-19 epidemic.   In the middle in huge red letters the admonition

Please do not sneeze loudly and unexpectedly
when surrounded by groups of people

“Noted”, I thought as I walked through the door of Zena’s Music Academy