Weekly Photo Challenge: Mine

Every week WordPress have a photo challenge, and every week I take it on, even though my camera is broken…

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… and they all lived happily ever after.

Well, Snow White did, she married a prince. And the Prince did, he married a girl whom he had kissed even though he’d thought she was dead at the time, which actually is quite disturbing if you think too hard about it.

But not everyone did.

The Queen didn’t, of course, what with falling off a cliff and all that.

And the dwarves weren’t happy.

This sentence is not, of course, strictly true, since one seventh of them was indeed Happy. But even Happy wasn’t happy, which is an upsetting paradox. It’s like being punched in the face by someone called Patience.

Part of the cause of their gloom, of course, was that they had fallen in love with Snow White and she had left them for someone younger and handsomer, and that just has to hurt.

The other problem was that their part in her rescue had brought fame to a group of men used to living quiet lives in the woods. They were interviewed by Graham Norton. They were photographed at home by Hello!. They appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. And soon the media uncovered a very important and hitherto unknown fact about them.

They owned a diamond mine. Once this got out then slowly, like sharks, the gold-diggers began to surround the diamond-diggers.

They weren’t a perfect catch, of course. Each of them seemed to have just one personality trait, and that would surely grate upon you after a while, it would be like being married to Pollyanna.

But let me stress the sentence “They Owned A Diamond Mine”.

A number of women (and indeed some men) were prepared to accept a flawed husband for the chance of a flawless diamond.

More and more lady callers began to arrive at their cottage (why seven millionaires lived together in the one cottage is a mystery, by the way, like why all of the Ewings continued to live together at Southfork). Some of the girls brought pie. Some brought pesticide, offering to rid the cottage of the birds, rabbits and squirrels that continued to infest the house even after Snow White’s departure. One simply brought a fur coat, which she opened to reveal that that was all she had brought. Bashful had nearly exploded.

They were undeterred by Grumpy’s grumpiness, by Dopey’s dopiness, even by Sneezy’s projectile snot. They wooed their way through the wood, seeking to become one of seven brides for seven little brothers.

The dwarves were rescued, though. By Snow White.

It may be every girl’s wish to marry a Prince, but Snow White had soon found that sometimes that isn’t enough. The signs had been there, of course. The Prince was so shallow that he had fallen in love with a girl just by hearing her sing, then had vanished for much of the story when she really could have used his help (perhaps she had thrown a stick for him to chase and he had fallen into a ravine). He had all the personality of a cardboard box, and eventually a life watching jousting, eating roast pig direct from the spit and behind entertained by a court jester as funny as a tooth abscess was no longer enough for a girl who had once fought an evil sorceress, or at any rate been easily duped by her .

She left him (in case you feel sorry for him, the following day he heard Kylie sing on the radio, and fell in love with her instead) and returned to the woods. With the broom with which she had kept the cottage spotless she literally beat off the opposition, and resumed her life with her true friends. And their diamond mine.

And this time, they all lived happily after.