Lucy Mangan, in the Guardian, wrote that nobody likes grilled tomato as part of a cooked breakfast, well, I must take issue with you there, Lucy M. I love grilled tomato, much more than black pudding and it's usually edible in hotel breakfasts, which is frequently more than one can say for the various forms of egg that have been either dessicated in a pan or made into a strange, solid yellow mass or boiled and then left to go cold but still soft inside of course, so if you crack it the horrid viscous white trails out. However, the tomato must be properly grilled and not just plopped under a grill for two seconds so inside it is still cold from the fridge.

I do like chilled tomato juice, however, and this gave me pause for thought. During the half-lifetime as Queen of the Vampires, which I described in the previous post, I mentioned that the blood was turned into tomato juice for me by the obliging angel since I do not like raw blood. But I am not sure whether the lovely chilled tomato juice that welled from the throats of beautiful men - this being what female vampires go for, after all, forget the gasping virgin girls - was transformed, at the moment of draught, as it were, into tomato juice, or whether the entire population of Sanguinaria went round with tomato juice permanently flowing in their veins. For if you live in a castle with no doors but only windows from which you issue at night in the form of a bat - good classical stuff here - you have no idea what the population is up to in the daytime. What would be the daily life of a human being with tomato juice flowing in their veins?

Maybe they were all pacifists, also, maybe, they were given to calling each other 'Old Fruit' - tomato being a fruit, after all. This is, I think, a better supposition than the idea that they might be all vegetables. It wouldn't matter for governmental purposes, since Sanguinaria is not a democracy. As a vampire, one was the Queen of the entire country. If they formed a mob to contest this simple fact, they failed due to the absence of doors at the castle, and maybe the tomato juice robbed them of the strength necessary to batter down granite walls - or the intelligence necessary to construct explosive means of doing so.

And now I must describe some of the appurtenances of the castle. The walls were all stone - I believe it was designed, originally, by Lutyens. There was some very nice herring-bone brickwork on the floors, and the furniture was either oak, Elizabethan-style, or else warmly upholstered in deep red velvet. The conservatory was Gothic, of course. There were warm fires constantly burning in all the fireplaces, fuelled by logs of wood. The provision of wood was a little difficult, but some of our younger family members worked out and, being very strong, would go out and wing their way back to the castle with a log held between them. There was a large window for the ingress of heavy materials. The shutters were, of course, kept closed during the daytime and the windows were further protected by heavy red velvet curtains. There was a massive library, full of first novels - it is well known that vampires like New Blood.

You might ask: Why did an angel take you there? Well, reader, I have to tell you that angels are the new vampires. I was told this the other day by a very good author, she must know. And they start off with many similarities: they fly, they can get in anywhere, and - well, they are white instead of black. Unless, of course, they are Dark Angels. Good title, that. But it is true that the angels are acquiring a taste for blood, therefore be careful how you invoke them. If an angel visits you, you may yourself become an angel, ie sexless and condemned to spend your life carrying messages for the Almighty. There is no pay, no pension, no time off, and the clothes are a bit draughty too. You get some pretty nice wings, though.

I have to go and see to the bread in this world, so will adjourn this account, and, if I am requested, maybe I shall continue on another occasion.

VISION STATEMENT

Welcome to Opening Trapdoors, a blog of my daily life - or maybe not. I shan't blog daily, so don't expect it, only when exciting things happen, but this morning a very exciting thing happened to me. I put some brief details on my Facebook page, but unfortunately they won't let you write a lot of stuff, so I have decided it's time to have my own individual blogspot.
What happened was, I was sitting at the computer with my belly full of porridge, when an angel appeared and took me into another dimension. I spent half a lifetime there, in the course of which I became Queen of the Vampires, this was a bit hard at first , but the angel transformed the blood into tomato juice, which I'm quite partial to. I lived in a castle by the sea with various members of my family who were also vampires, the castle had no doors, because of mobs, but plentiful windows that were handy to fly out of. There was a lovely conservatory full of bloodwort.
Then the angel came back and told me the postman was at the door in my other life, with a parcel, so I reappeared in time to receive some seed potatoes. Will I ever get back to Sanguinaria?