Fairytales

I watched West Ham lose to Liverpool on penalties yesterday. It was a cruel end to a great match. The romantic in me supported West Ham but I was left heartbroken. Somehow, I got the feeling after Harewood and Benayoun missed sitters early in the second half that West Ham would lose. My experience after watching hundreds of matches tells me that if you don't take your chances against a top side, you will end up losing. West Ham gave everything that they got but they still lost. That's life. Hard work does not translate into success. We slowly realise this fact as we grow older. It is pretty disheartening. I had been hoping for a fairytale ending to West Ham's FA Cup adventure. But heartbroken, I went in search of a fairytale story in the Library. I found it in the form of a James Patterson novel, The Lake House. It is my 5th Patterson novel in a liitle more than a month and I'm becoming a fan. His novels are unputdownable as described by the Times. Anyway, Lake House is about a bunch of man-bird kids who are hunted by an evil doctor for some research. These man-birds are actually engineered by scientists who fused avian and human DNA together. The oldest one is called Max, who is a very beautiful female. She is apparently 12 years old if you count by human years. She also has no breasts at all, which is not due to her age but due to her genes. She also had sex with another man-bird, a handsome guy named Ozymandius, a couple of times. They can even have sex in the air. I was pretty amazed. At the end of the novel, Max found herself pregnant and then laid a few eggs. I finished the novel in disbelief but the author said it was possible in the first page. He consulted a few experts on this book who said it was possible for man-birds to be engineered in our lifetimes. After i finished the book, i wondered. Why is it that we believe in Peter Pan and Neverland when we were young but grew sceptical of these fantasy books as we grow older? Is it because we no longer dared to believe in fairytales? Or is it that our imagination is restricted by the harsh realities of modern life?