On the twenty-second day of Christmas,
The Bakery gave to me:
A couple of Tom Lerman stories

I had to attend a staff conference this year and found a personalised programme for a ‘Tom Lerman’ on my desk. It was obviously meant to read ‘Tom German’. However, I was inspired by this mistake and developed Tom Lerman into a complex alter ego: a super teacher and a fantastic lover. Please find below a couple of stories from the Tom Lerman series, coming soon to all plastic romance book carousels you find in airports and other cheap book outlets.

Story One

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ said Tom Lerman, casually drawing a long cigarillo from his velvet smoking jacket. Katrina von Tromp da Braas, top Swedish supermodel and now his lover, sashayed in from the dining area, naked except for a thin kaftan that obscured her sylph-like frame and pert, upturned breasts.

‘Tell me another story about how you got a grade 1,’ she purred.

‘Not now darling, I worry that your small female brain that is entirely equal to mine except in areas such as engineering and plug changing, can’t handle it’.

The large ocean liner that had carried them from Dubai, parped slowly sending a ripple of smoke that wafted Tom’s perfectly sculpted mullet.

‘Do you love me?’ she asked tenderly.’

‘No darling, partly because you do not fulfill me spiritually, intellectually or sexually; partly because my one true love is teaching children. You see, I am not like other men. Other men are bound by rules, ethics, regulations, parking attendants. My mind soars free like a phoenix or other mythical creature that has at this particular moment vacated my mind. I laugh at defeat yet welcome it into my arms like a close male friend. The secret, you see, to being Tom Lerman is not grade 1 teaching, tight muscular buttocks or making love for hours to beautiful women. It is compassion, heart, beauty and truth.’

Lifting a small wooden flute from the wall, Tom began to play a plaintive Tibetan tune, and for that moment Katrina was no longer in an expensive ocean bound liner, but in an oriental market, or Buddhist temple, and the smell in the air was no longer the salty tang of the sea but of oriental spice (Patchouli? I wasn’t there).

Story Two

‘Tom, you’re so big!’ cried Parvati Minjilla, miss Punjabi 2009. ‘Your moustache I mean.’

‘Ha ha ha! That’s funny because an outside observer, one who is not able to see our actual situation and is therefore not privy to the fact that I am fully clothed, might think that you were referring to my penis, and you knew that, and said it so that we could appreciate how it might sound to said observer, and imagine how it might be to be in his/her shoes using powers of empathy.’

‘Yes Tom, how clever I become in your company.’

‘It’s my grade 1 teaching skills and powerful aura,’ Tom said, his huge moustache bristling like an opulent shoebrush.

Tom had returned from saving children from an unnamed, unnecessary to plotline disaster in a country that doesn’t matter to my readers. He had come back to tutor Parvati in manners and etiquette but had ended up tutoring her in a quite a different way, by which I mean having sex with her.

‘But seriously though, I have been gifted. The good Lord thought well enough to endow me with a seemingly endless supply of money, a fast metabolism and an imposing member. That doesn’t stop me telling others how to be me. Remember, true power in a man has nothing to do with the size of his balls, or his ability to kill a man using his eyes, but his ability to love, cherish and care. In this sense I am poor indeed… Now where was I?’

Parvati giggled as the robe dropped from Tom’s mountainous frame.