RR Hood (Reprise)

A fairy tale for 21st Century adults

Not long ago, my dad illustrated these little cut-outs of Little Red Riding Hood frantically typing on her smartphone, with her traditional lupine adversary in hot pursuit. “I’d like to see you write a story to go with this scene,” he said to me last week. So, over the weekend, I took up his challenge, and here’s the result (the full thing is paid subscriber-only, but there’ll be a new free piece here later this week)…

Rowan was closing in on 16 when she bought the poncho, from what her friends called “the murky shop”, using an advance on her birthday money. She fell immediately in love with it, in a way that she had with no item of clothing in the past, but because of the infamously poor lighting on the premises it was not until she got out into the open air that she realised just what a dazzling shade of red the fabric was. The previous owner’s first two initials and surname were sewn into it, close to the hem,, in tiny yellow letters - ‘RR Hood’ - and soon Rowan began to tell herself stories about this person from the distant past, including the story that she too had been named Rowan, and was, like her successor, an individual of admirably refined and heterogenous tastes.

“Why on earth would anyone dispense with a garment of such redoubtable quality and style?” Rowan would sometimes wonder (although not in those exact words, since she didn’t yet know what “redoubtable” meant). She preferred not to dwell on the darker potential answer to her question, nor on the specifics of the faint stain that she was unable, no matter how hard she tried, to scrub off the rear of the poncho, close to where it blew kisses at the tops of her once-fashionable running shoes.

Soon spring vomited on the landscape in the nicest feasible way and the poncho, with its dense, hand-stitched double lining, became a less obvious natural match for the weather, yet Rowan continued to stubbornly, obsessively swaddle herself in it every day and night, mixing the look up with a variety of bold and surprising stripy tights, and ignoring her elder brother Matt’s taunts, including the manifestly untrue one that she “looked like that weird scary Venetian dwarf from that old horror film”. She began to view it like others might view a protective spell. Each time she clipped the silver popper on the collar shut she felt like the superhero she had never previously been: ‘The Red Flounce’, here to save the world from fast fashion. In a gap between revision for her GCSEs she decided to take a walk through the forest to her nan’s place: one of those cottages estate agents like to market with phrases such as “no near neighbours” and “idyllic off-grid lifestyle”. Her nan had recently been on a silent meditation retreat in Greece, so it had been a couple of months since Rowan had seen her, and she had therefore not had chance to show her the poncho. An additional reason the visit was of a pressing nature was the knowledge that her nan had returned from her trip unwell due to a tussle with a pot of questionable tzatziki.

On her way through the forest, carrying a basket full-to-the-brim with remaindered Aldi samosas, Rowan paused to identify a few pretty flowers via the plant identification app on her phone, including some Snake’s Head Fritillaries, which she learned, via Wikipedia, were also known by the name “chess flower”.

“What are you doing? Texting your boyfriend?” a voice to her rear enquired. It was her nan’s lodger, Morgan Minkins, holding three dead rabbits. Morgan had been looking after the cottage while her nan had been away and Rowan had been keeping her fingers tightly crossed that he wouldn’t be around, since her general feeling was that he was a creepy buttmunch of outlandish proportions.