No Strings Attached: Fame

No-one ever noticed Ernest Quagmire Blogins with one 'g'. He was the sort of person you could fall over and still not remember seeing, even if you put you foot in his mouth as you went by. Even if you landed the distance of one cricket's hop from his nose. He had the sort of face you could easily forget, and the sort of body that filled in all the gaps when you wanted to express a word like 'average'. He nearly always did everything by halves. In a race he was fourth, in class he was in the middle, by marks and position. When he sat an exam he always got 50% or 51%. And if you are thinking that to be so 'average' is in itself quite remarkable, you ought to know that, just now and then, he was either the worst or the best too, but only enough to blur the matter a little so he was even more average than if he always got 50%.

He was so hard to notice, his mother would say "Ernest? Are you in the room?" before she tried to speak to him. And when he was smaller, and needed a good smack, his father used to inspect Ernest's bottom, because his name was tattooed in little letters, right across the buttocks.

"Mustn't go smacking the wrong one now, can I!" his father used to laugh as he applied the slipper.

By the time Ernest was fifteen, all his brothers and sisters had achieved great things.

Of his sisters, the first was already training to be an astronaut, the second was doing brain-surgery by correspondence, and the third was almost a civil engineer.

Of his brothers, the first was planning a bicycle-tunnel under the Atlantic for budget holidays, the second was raising cockroaches for science, and the third was starting to build a life-size replica of the whole planet of Mars in the back yard.

But Ernest was a nobody. And a nowherebody. He had nothing to brag about, and nothing to show for all his fifteen years of schooling. He was such a non-entity that people often bumped into him on the street because they didn't think he was real.

"I wish ..." said Ernest, as he sat on his bed looking at the stars one night, "I wish I was famous."

He was thinking of Pinnochio when he said it, and thinking about godmothers and magic, but he never really expected anything to happen, so it came as quite a surprise when the very next day people began to notice him.

At first he thought they were referring to someone