Hooked

A-Z Challenge – ‘H’

To succeed as a writer I’ve been told that I need to ‘hook’ my readers in the first paragraph. That may be true but in my life I have been hooked on other things.

As a young boy I went fishing using a bent pin as a hook and never caught a thing. It was only when someone gave me a proper one that I realised the hook was barbed.

Fishing Hooks - by Retama  (CS A-S A licence)

I then found out Hook could be a pirate when I read Peter Pan. His hand was quite scary but nowhere near as frightening as the hook that Abu Hamza has as a hand.

Hooks are all around us in every day life and many we take for granted like the simple hook and eye. I have vague recollections of being given advice by older boys on how to undo them with one hand; the usefulness of this I’d better leave unsaid.

Hooks and Eyes for Fur Clothing - by Kuerschner

There are hooks on coat hangers, and coat hooks of a variety of shapes. In the north England they refer to chapel hat pegs but these are not always the place to hang you hat.

In industry I came across hooks of different shapes and sizes on cranes although the crane fly and sand cranes don’t have hooks at all.

 Hooks of Polish biggest floating crane 'Maja' - by Brosen, Gdansk, Poland 

(CC A-S A 2.5 generic licence)

On the sports field I found it was foul to hook someone’s stick at hockey. Playing cricket a hook was a risky shoot unless you controlled the shot and kept the ball on the ground. As all golfers know a hook appears from nowhere and your ball deviates wildly from your club. I refused to play in the middle of the front row at rugby; there was no way I wanted to be a hooker. If you believe what you read in the press you may hear of sportsmen and celebrities who get involved with hookers of a different type and I don’t mean a one-masted sailing boat.

With this Challenge you could say we are getting hooked-up with one another. By hook or by crook I aim to get to ‘Z.’ I could tell you a joke in the hope that you would fall for it hook, line and sinker. If you have had enough by now there are two solutions open to you:

1. Play hookey.
2. Tell me to sling my hook.