Eye of the Storm
The cool warmth of lips that could kiss.
Hair I can tangle my fingers in.
A breast I could rest my head upon,
Feeling the soothing heartbeat
Of one close enough for comfort.
It is easy to lie here together,
Listening to the rain and wind rage
Against the window with curtains closed.
To be the calm in the eye of the storm
Where nothing matters
As much as the next heartbeat.
And the only movement of air
Is the next easeful breath.
Jill laughed and broke free from Pete, climbing out of the old building and running off down the sheep track into the dark of the evening. There was a full moon, leaving their clothes behind on the old blanket from his car, Pete chased after Jill’s ghost-like body as she ran. Pete knew exactly where she was going. He sometimes called her his mermaid because they’d met at the local baths early one morning, both there swimming before heading off to work. One of the few things Pete knew about her was her love of water.
Almost at the same moment, he heard the splash from the river and Jill’s yell of surprise. It didn’t seem to matter to her how often she jumped into water; she was always surprised by the temperature of it. Even in the swimming pool she gasped as she entered its heated waters.
Pete paused to pull off his underwear on the bank, ready to dive in after her.
‘Aaagh!’
The scream came just as he had steeled himself for the shock of the cold water.
‘Jill! What’s happened?’ Pete yelled, searching the rough water for a sight of her, but there was nothing there, only the swollen river, tumbling over itself from the heavy rain of the last few weeks out in its middle. Here at the calm edges, though, where he expected to see Jill he could see nothing.
Nothing except….
It looked like dirty foam, as though someone had emptied a massive bubble bath container into the river. As Pete, wondering what the foam was, edged closer to it, he noticed the movement of the foam. At first, he’d assumed the undulations he could see in the foam were caused by the ripples in the river water. Now, he could see it wasn’t that at all….
The foam seemed to be breathing.
Just then he saw Jill, her naked body rising from the water like some creature from mythology. Pete sighed in relief, reaching out his hand to help her from the water.
As he reached towards her, he noticed the strange foam spreading up her legs from the water, the reverse of how the foam should have dripped off her as she rose.
She reached out… took Pete’s hand in a grip far stronger than she’d ever had before, even in the heat of passion. It was then Pete noticed her eyes and the strange undulating light behind them… then he stopped noticing everything as she dragged him back down into the breathing foam.
Usually, at the end of the day we sat; weary, around the camp fire, while the Elder told us a story. He often told the stories of the Old People from the Times Before. The Elder knows many stories of those long-gone people and the Times Before.
The Times Before were strange times, when the people did not wander around the barren lands, seeking some way of surviving. They had places they called homes, built in places called towns and cities where many of them all lived together, many, many more than there are in the tribe now.
When we are trudging through the dust of our days, looking for ways to carry on, some say the Elder makes up all these stories, that there were no Old People from The Times Before at all.
The Elder does not mind their disbelief, does not punish their heresy, although, when he hears such things his lights turn from green to red and stay that way for longer than normal. Usually, the Elder’s lights are always flickering from red to green and back again, except during the hot hours of the sun when we have to turn his mirrored face towards the sun for his meditations.
The Elder says he is getting older and his meditations under the heat of the sun take longer and longer. Sometimes, it takes several hours for that one particular light to turn from red to green and for the Elder to return to us, from wherever it is he goes during those times of meditation.
If Left Unnamed
If left out there, unnamed, it can’t escape
Evade definitions and then return
Becoming something new and giving names
To that unnamed and hidden sense of dread
That turns all days to nights and nights to fears
Which haunt each dream, and grow from shadowed dark
To walk though memory and night and dreams.
So nightmare turns, becomes obsession. Dread
Itself becomes a fear of fear that grows
From days and nights which turn from dreams to fear.
And you are there and waiting for the day
To take your hand and take you on towards
A better form of life, away from here
And all it promised you, and failed to bring
Up to your open door you left ajar
And waiting for the day to come for you
To take you far from here to some unknown
And newer, further place not weighted down
So heavily with histories and tales
The stories, myths and legends all now told
Of golden days from long ago, and times
Before these days became the newest days
And suddenly it seemed as though forever
Was closer, ready now to grow and bloom
Into these moments you could never lose.
Sometimes, it was easier to take a step sideways, out of danger and out of this world into one of the nearby parallel universes. There was always the possibility, though, that a step sideways would mean I was stepping sideways into a greater danger than I was stepping away from, especially if I forgot I was – for example – several stories above the ground when I slipped one way or another. Nearby universes are very similar, of course, but sometimes the distance is greater than a step and sometimes that step leads to a very different place.
For example, Shireen does not live on this Earth, even though she does exist – or versions of her – do exist in several of the closest parallel universes. In fact, only last week I discovered I’m married to her in some realities, which, if you knew Shireen, would make you wonder what kind of life I have there.
I have met myself over there and asked myself about it, and I still don’t quite believe it myself. Shireen is no easier to live with – no matter what universe you are in – than she is to live without.
Imagine an untamed wild horse, crossed with a hurricane, all living in the kind of body you used to dream about when you were a horny teenager, matched with a mind as sharp as a Saracen sword and you get some kind of idea of what she is like, at least during the daytime. At night Shireen is even wilder, and I have the scratch scars to prove it.
Anyway, there I was slipping sideways into a nearby universe - to avoid someone I’d rather not meet, at least without the money I owed him - when down the alley I found myself in, came Shireen, running and glancing back over her shoulder. We collided and both went sprawling. From the things she called me as we disentangled ourselves from each other, I discovered, she did not know me on this plane and – unless our relationship had hit a very rocky patch – we certainly weren’t married.
Anyway, I pulled her to her feet, and would have introduced myself, if the ricocheting bullet that struck the wall above our heads hadn’t interrupted the little speech I’d been planning….
‘Come on, Shireen!’ I yelled, instead. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I took her hand and began to run. I didn’t get far.
Shireen stood there, her hand gripping mine, staring at me. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ she said ‘…and how do you know my name?’
Good question, I thought as the second bullet struck the wall, even closer to our heads.
Obviously, there was a duck. After all, it would be odd to have a duck pond without one. At first, it – quite naturally (for a duck) - assumed we were there to steal its bread, but of course once we had assured the mallard that its diet of low-quality supermarket white-sliced was not our aim, it cruised off to the other side of the ponds to watch events unfold.
Which they did….
Although, the spontaneity of the event was somewhat – to what remains of my mind, anyway – marred by her insistence on folding her clothes neatly and placing them in a clean dry place, which – when you are adjacent to a duck pond – is not the simple straightforward matter it would otherwise be. My - I thought helpful – suggestion that she hang them on a branch of a nearby tree was rewarded by one of those looks that men tend to learn to recognise at an early age, and it was definitely not one of those looks that would launch a thousand ships, at least, not unless the sailors were fleeing in panic from her and her wrath.
Anyway, soon she was naked and, consequently, I’d completely forgotten why we’d gone there and what I was supposed to do.
She tutted in a way that suggested I’d better not ever suggest such a thing again and strode off – causing the duck to flee in panic – while I stood their watching her, clutching my forgotten equipment in my hand… at least until I realised what a magnificent figure she struck as she strode across the village green and was seemingly now hurrying back towards me - clutching a fallen tree branch - in a manner that suggested those aforementioned sailors would have been right to flee in fear of their lives.
So, after a careful – but rapid – consideration of my options, I did the brave thing and ran for it too.
I knew her, back then. It was a long time ago. I was a different person then. I was young and – of course – I knew everything. Now, I am a different person, much older, and I know so little and care about even less.
Back then, I cared about everything, I wanted to save the world, put it all to rights and bring about a revolution that would end forever injustice, inequality, poverty and so much that I thought was wrong with the world.
These days all of that is still wrong, but I know I cannot put any of it right, and – what is more – one of the few things I do know, beyond any doubt is that those who try to make the world a better place by trying to tackle those big things only ever make things worse.
Jenny, back then, was like me, a believer in changing things. Even though we argued all the time, we both believed in the same things, both thought we could be the ones that could make the difference, be the ones who could make the world see how wrong it was, and how it could - we thought - so easily be so different.
It never occurred to us that the world knew about its own faults, and that those with any sense already knew that change is only ever really possible over time, that evolution is the only way, and revolution only ends with more children crying in the dirt and soaked in the blood of their parents.
One day, I woke up and realised all this. I tried to tell Jenny, but she – of course – would not listen. So, we had our final argument. I packed up my things and walked away and Jenny went off to save the world.
I’m still here, just trying to get though each day; the world goes on going to hell as it has always done, but Jenny…. Well, she was just defeated by it all and all that remains of her now are my memories of her.
But this is hardly the place for that, so if you don’t mind, could you put it away, at least until this blog’s Christmas party. That is when the overt flaunting of such things is not only acceptable, but regarded by some of the more… er… excitable habitués of this towering organ as something approaching almost de rigour for this particular time of year.
Now as I was about to say before you suddenly interrupted me with your –seemingly rather over zealous flaunting of that… that… decidedly average specimen of….
Hang on, is it supposed to be that colour?
Are you sure…? I mean if it was – as you say something to do with the weather, I mean, well we are indoors, aren’t we? After all, blogging and blog perusing are not – that often – considered outdoor sports are they?
Is it supposed to do that, as well?
I mean, I have heard of being friendly, but that does seem somewhat over-familiar, even for a regular visitor to this heap of deluded ramblings that I like to believe I have some sort of control over.
I would strongly suggest you take it for an examination by someone with a professional interest in such matters. I’m sure that when there used to be such things as phone boxes there were several enterprising young ladies who would – for a modest fee – take a professional interest in such matters, at least until your money ran out. I’m reasonably confident one of them – I’m sure – would be able to offer if not a course of treatment – some advice on how not to frighten the horses and the easily distracted by this constant proffering of your affliction to all and sundry.
But, for now I’ll bid you good day.
‘There are many things in this world that – to the surprise of many - do not taste of pineapple.’ Everyone, these days, is surely familiar with these wise words by the 20th century’s greatest philosopher Ludwig von Wittless, who lived through some of the most tumultuous decades of that benighted century and was even present on that most significant day of the century when West Germany lost the World Cup Final to England in 1966. For von Witless this was a very complex situation as he had left Germany to escape the Nazi menace and now lived and taught at Oxford, in a fish and chip shop quite near one of the colleges.
Consequently, von Wittless was undecided which team to support as he had profound philosophical objections to Alf Ramsey’s use of the 4-3-3 formation. This – of course – led to his notorious philosophical break with the French philosopher, novelist and professional Gauloise-inhaler, Albert Campus, who famously declared that ‘the winger – like God – is dead.’ a statement which caused rioting at the Sorbonne and led to condemnation from one of the French president’s more philosophically-inclined mistresses.
Anyway, once von Wittless, had turned his back on football he – of course – returned to the philosophy of fruit and the age-old paradox – dating back to the time of Plato and Aristotle – of how do we know that an apple is an apple. Leaving aside A. J. Ayer’s contention that: ‘It is bloody obvious that an apple is a sodding apple and if you want to debate it, I’ll see you outside, son!’ as philosophically naïve, von Wittless observed – once he was well out of Ayer’s reach - that just because it is in the supermarket labelled as an apple – it does not necessarily mean that it is an apple, or – for that matter a pomegranate (as Heraclites had insisted before Pythagoras twatted him one around the scrolls with his philosophising bat).
Still, despite all these reservations, Von Witless did indeed make one of the most philosophically-sound fresh fruit salads ever tasted in a university Philosophy Department, and for that we of the succeeding generations should be extremely grateful for his pioneering work in this field.
Even if she was standing there entirely unarmed, the look on her face would be more than enough for anyone to first plead guilty and then beg for mercy even before they were informed of which of her myriad rules they had broken – quite possibly with malice aforethought.
The fact that these rules of hers are not written down, enforced or even acknowledged before they are broken is – of course – no excuse. It is enough that she knows of the rules and knows exactly when they have been broken.
It goes without saying that she is the victim here; she is the one that suffers when these secret rules are broken, because putting everything right is – as is everything else – a job that is always left to her.
However, it is wise not to point out that they are her rules, and that she will not allow anyone else to restore the order that she is the only one to see, and that she is the only one who knows when the secret rules are broken, and that everyone else was getting along in this indifferent world as best they could until she announced the great calamity had occurred and that the world would henceforth be ripped asunder until such time as she could step forth and restore calm and order.
In the meantime, the only answer for the transgressor she has already found guilty is self-banishment to the shed to learn the error of his ways, only to emerge some time latter faithfully promising to do better next time… in the sure and certain knowledge that sometime in the very near future he will be found wanting again.
She said to me: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
I couldn’t lie to her, not with how she was holding me. I’d seen her make a lemon meringue and watching her squeezing the lemons had made me nervous, even then. Now, with her holding my delicacies in he same way as she had held those lemons, all my thoughts of spinning her some story went out the window.
Which is a shame….
Because spinning the stories is what I’m good at. Give me anything, say: an elephant and a mandolin and I’ll have that elephant working as the best mandolin salesman the music shop has ever seen within a handful of paragraphs.
So, when she asked me where I got my ideas from, I told her.
I told her about the clearing in the woods.
I told her about the special night when the moon is just right.
I told her about the midnight hour and the chanting.
I made sure I told her all about the naked dancing under that almost-full moon at midnight in the clearing in the woods.
I told her about the special box you had to place in the dead centre of that clearing, and how you had to leave the lid open and walk away without looking back.
I told her all about those lonely hours sitting – still naked – with your back to the clearing until dawn.
I told her about how the dew-wet grass soaks your feet as you walk cautiously back to the clearing and peer through the undergrowth at the edge of the open space to see if the lid is back on the box.
Then I told her about creeping up to the box and opening the lid to find the box overflowing with ideas, more ideas than anyone could write in one lifetime.
Then she let me go….
I told her all about where I get my ideas from, and I’ll tell you this: it is well worth visiting that clearing in the middle of the woods next time it is almost-full moon, because the sight of her dancing naked around that open box is a sight you’ll never forget….
Who knows, maybe it will even give you an idea for a story too.
Flying Free
So, this silence falls down around us
As we let the bird fly free from open palms.
Watching it become a speck and then nothing
Before turning back to break free of that silence
Of a solemn and significant moment.
We wait for breathing to return to tense bodies
And life to flow back through us, before we step away
From this hillside and return to our lives.
We live down in the valley below
Where ordinary days pass in ordinary ways
And the only birds we ever see are those that fly
Too far above us for us ever to take one
Into our hands again, just to hold its freedom close.
She found herself back on the beach, kneeling and staring into a rock pool. She did not know how she had got there. The Last thing Bella could remember was getting into bed and turning the light off, too tired to even read. She did remember, before she fell asleep, wondering what she was doing there at the holiday cottage on her own.
She had expected a troubled, disturbed night without the familiar presence of Richard in the bed beside her, but here she was with the whole night past and the dawn creeping up, turning the grey sky orange behind her.
Bella looked down at herself, glad to see she was dressed, but not knowing how she had managed it. She always slept naked. She did not know, either, how she had apparently opened the tricky cottage door that had given her so much trouble when she’d arrived the afternoon before. She felt the back pocket of her jeans and was reassured the cottage key was there. She could feel the hard outline of the big old-fashioned key, its solidity reassuring.
She looked up; the beach was deserted, the tide almost in… or on the way out, she was not sure which, with only a distant early morning solitary dog walker far over the other side of the beach.
Bella got to her feet, suddenly crying out in shock and pain, as she stood on her bare feet, one of which – the left – leaving a damp and bloody print on the rock where she’d tried to put her weight on it.
I remember the day, the ordinariness of it, just another rainy day in what had seemed like a long year of rain. Back then, I still believed in books and that they could make a difference; make a life richer, deeper.
I sat at the table by the café window, so I could look out on the rain-splattered street outside and those hurrying by. Back then, I thought I was a poet and I thought I needed to pay attention to the world, turn everything I saw, knew, felt or wondered about into words on the page; even though those words could never get close to what I wanted to say.
I opened the bag of books, from the town’s most famous bookshop: a maze of shelves and further rooms of more shelves that existed in an underground warren, a labyrinth of books and books and more books. It was a place I could spend the whole day exploring, sometimes.
Now, though, I had surfaced, come back to the world; the treasures I’d hunted down in that maze safe in the bag in front of me. I took a sip of my too-hot black coffee, savouring the moment before I examined my treasures.
As I fished in the bag and pulled out the first of my prizes, she burst into the café in a flurry of wet hair, broken umbrella and rain-soaked coat.
She looked around the café, looking for a seat, noticing the spare one at my table, then looking further, before coming back to check which book I was holding.
‘May I?’ she said, taking hold of the back of the empty chair.
‘Yes, of course, please.’ I said in return as I drew my bag of treasures closer to me… and then my whole life changed.
Of course, not everyone has the sangfroid to regard the arrival of the lemon meringue on their nakedness with equanimity; especially when it arrives straight from the fridge.
In many cases, though, that is how it is with new religions. Often people are attracted by the glamour, or the newness, or even the notoriety of a new religion and are eager to embrace it – at least, right up to the arrival of the Ceremonial Lemon Meringue.
However, as our Holy Cookbook so eloquently states:
we should all treat with awe and wonder all of the wondrous creations of the Great Chef in the Sky, for just as he marinaded us all into being we must accept all of the wonders of the myriad of recipes he – in his infinite wisdom – bestowed upon us mere mortals.
As I often say to the lay sisters as they prostrate themselves before my most holy jam roly-poly, they must accept all of his blessings into themselves wholly and completely, and that includes my special ceremonial custard.
Still, no matter how much those tired old religions try to call us heretics and blasphemers, how they attempt to poor scorn – like over-watery gravy – on the Supreme Chef, we – in our most holy way – know deep in our heart of hearts that we may not have all the answers to the questions of existence, but at least we can all come back for seconds.
The Light of another Dawn
The elements of memory,
The barest traces left
In the rocks of time,
Geology heaps the present
Over times long past
Burying it in the layers
Of forgetfulness
We learn to dig much deeper
To uncover the traces
Discover who we once were,
Before it all fell down
Deep into the loss of history.
Still we do not know
What happened here.
We can only guess
How all these days ended
In smoke, flame and fear
As the walls came tumbling down
Around our heads
As we held the young ones close,
Fearing they would never see
The light of another dawn
And all our times would end too soon.
Then there are three of them, which, if you’ve never been quietly engaged in philosophical speculation in your shed and been disturbed by She and her cronies then you are indeed fortunate.
However, like all those unused to philosophical speculation and contemplation, they were immediately curious as to why such deep pondering involves the use of so many pictorial representations of the naked female form. Of course, those of you familiar with Aristotle’s work will immediately see why such philosophical speculation in the calm and privacy of garden shed is so important to a man’s mental well-being.
Not only that, the use of beer as an aid to philosophical inquiry has been proved beyond doubt especially in the tavernas around the philosophical academies and symposia of ancient Greece, where it was not unusual to see a heap of insensate philosophers overpowered by their own philosophical ability and power of thought, all snoring peacefully next to the bin full of empties.
This is of course – as I pointed out to my trio of sceptics - why so much Greek art featured nudity. The ancient Greeks were – rightly – proud of their philosophers and wanted to do all they could to help them in their cogitations. Not something – I pointed out – that seems to have followed through to this day and age.
Suitably chastised, the three made a hasty exit when they saw the errors of their ways, although, why they accidentally seem to have locked me out of the house is hard to grasp, even with such a philosophically-acute mind such as mine… and why they left all my belongings in a heap on the back step is a matter I will have to ponder as soon as I can get more beer in.
The tide was out and the sun was shining. It was one of those summer days that seemed made for remembering. We made our way down from the costal path to a small deserted beach. The path itself was overgrown and almost invisible, as though no-one had used it for at least this summer. Kate held my hand as we made our way over some awkward bits. The cliff had eroded in places right up to the edge of the path and once or twice we thought about turning back, but there was something about the small, hidden, cove that drew us on.
Kate loved the water and she loved swimming, I’d called her a mermaid a few days before when she’d stayed out at sea for what seemed like hours while I sat on the shore and waited for her to come back to me. I’ve never liked swimming, not since that time almost fifteen years ago. Even all these years later, I still sometimes wake up from a dream of night and dark and storms and water, gasping for breath and flailing my way clear of the drowning weight of the bed sheets.
Kate, though, as soon as we reached the beach, was already undressing, not bothering with her swimsuit as soon as she’d seen the tiny beach was deserted. I’d laughed to see her run as though she was dying of some kind of thirst and she wanted to drink the sea, as though, she was some beached aquatic creature that needed the sea to give her life.
I sat down and gathered up her discarded clothes before pulling out my notebook and pen, glancing up every now and then to catch a glimpse of Kate as she made her way far out to sea.
Later, much later, she came back to lie on her towel, her half-dried hair spread out across my leg as she lay, still naked, with her head in my lap, sand and salt sparkling on her dark brown skin.
Then, after she’d slept as I read from my book, she slipped on her shoes and summer dress and we’d set off to explore what there was of this small beach, ending up at the sea-cave eroded into the cliff.
‘Look at this,’ Kate called, as usual far off in front of me.
‘It must have been a smuggler’s tunnel,’ I said when I met up with her, standing in front of the ancient wooden door set into the back wall of the cave.
‘Come on, let’s see where it goes!’ Before I could stop her, Kate was gone thought the door and up the carved stone steps deep into the dark heart of the cliff.
Sighing, I set off after wondering where we would end up this time.
There was a time, you could tell because it was on all the clocks and calendars, when she was the woman to whom every man - who had one - wanted to demonstrate the full extent of his stamp collection. Back in those long-ago days, before home computers, before mobile phones, when there were only two TV channels - and rumours of a third being in colour – there was little a man could do to impress a woman with his technological prowess.
Even the men who did it – for example – then knew that train spotting was not the sort of thing that would get a woman draping herself languidly against your anorak be-coated chest as she sensuously unscrewed the lid from your thermos. Few men too, thought it was the way to a woman’s heart to invite her to an early morning session of twitching in the bushes in the nearest local park or recreational gardens.
Stamp collecting, though, was different with its sensuous use of tongue and fingertip and the echoes of romantic far away places only ever witnessed in James Bond films and Soviet travelogues. The intimacy of the album and the awe with which a woman would want to touch, stroke, fondle, your First Day Covers, though. That was the stuff of true romance, of erotica.
Those were the days when access to pornography beyond the basic nudie book necessitated the purchase of a long brown mac and a visit to that shady part of town where rampant Estate Agent offices preyed on the unwary.
Back then, yes, it was a different time and to get a sultry young woman to lick your stamp hinges was the height of sexual stimulation. Nowadays, people say romance is dead. We scoff, of course, but we also look back on those times and remember….
Anyway, there we were, standing next to the politician, despite the danger.
Some of us were, of course, rather nervous despite having the necessary anti-politics inoculations and all of us – for Health and Safety reasons well outside the reinforced anti-politics cage.
Everyone knows just how infectious politics can be. Many people have heard of, or even know, some one who has – often though no fault of their own – become infected with this debilitating disease. Perfectly ordinary people going about their normal business often have – in the past – suddenly come down with a very bad case of politics.
In the past, it was assumed that there were two strains of politics: known popularly as Left-wing and Right-wing, and a popular folk cure in those days was to counter a sudden outbreak of Left-wing politics with a good dose of the Right-wing ‘alternative’. However, recent research has conclusively proved that there is little or no actual difference between the two strains except for a few trivial side-effects. Both are equally deadly to the thought-processes of those infected and merely offering a counter-dose of the opposite strain more often than not increases the amount of political infection in the patient, often to the complete despair of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of the infected person when the politics breaks out in the victim. This is often where infection spreads; hence the invention of both the anti-politics vaccination program and the development of a political infection-proof coating for various places where politicians are known to gather.
Recently, though, there have been some encouraging signs with the number of people getting infected with either strain of political infection on the decline, probably through the use of the counter-measures outlined above. There is even talk of the entire world becoming – at some point in the near future – completely politics-free, something that even a few years ago would have been dismissed as a naïve utopian fantasy, but now looks almost achievable.
I suppose it all began with the ping-pong bats. She got that look in her eye and started feeling my ping-pong balls in what can only be described as an overly-sensual manner. She ran her finger along the top of the table tennis net as the tip of her tongue echoed the movement across her upper lip.
‘Have you…’ she breathed. ‘…got any mayonnaise?’
I gulped and then stepped over to the fridge. I held the jar up for her as she suggestively sauntered over to the fridge and took out a fresh bunch of celery.
‘We could,’ she said as she stroked my chest with the leafy ends of the celery. ‘have a break… know what I mean?’ She squeezed my ping-pong balls firmly in her other hand.
Putting the balls down, she gestured for me to open the jar as she broke off a stick of celery. She dunked it in the jar and then stepped even closer to me. ‘I want to lick your mayonnaise off the tip,’ she whispered, then demonstrated with the celery.
I felt my knees go weak as she ran her free hand down my body. She turned and picked up one of the table tennis bats. ‘Do you…’ she said, looking up at me from under half-closed eyes, ‘think it was very naughty of me to win the last game?’
I gulped and nodded.
‘Perhaps….’ she said, swinging the bat though the air and hitting the side of her thigh. ‘…perhaps you think I ought to be punished?’
‘Yes..’ I managed to say. ‘Yes you should be punished.’
So I took the celery and the mayonnaise off her and shut the fridge. ‘Tonight,’ I said in my sternest voice. ’Tonight there will be no Downton Abbey for you!’ Turning in triumph I strode out of the room, remembering to tuck my ping-pong balls back into my shorts as I left, congratulating myself on getting it right at last as I heard her yelp of frustration as the door closed behind me.
It was not easy – at the time – which, considering the powerful grip she has got on such occasions is not really that much of a surprise. However, she did - in the end – propose to let go unless I – in turn – promised to see my way clear to tidying out the shed.
Once that was resolved to her satisfaction, she helped me climb back up the cliff to the relative safety of the footpath. I did think of asking why she had chosen a walk along a cliff-edge footpath this late in the evening, and during a howling gale, but then I looked at her and thought better of it. For all I know, she could have me insured and just saved me from falling to my certain death in the pounding waves below because she has always felt that wearing black doesn’t ‘suit her’. An attitude I have tried – so far without success – to change every time she wears the frogman’s wet suit on our ‘special’ Tuesday evenings when the kids are out setting fire to the neighbours.
Still, as we made our way back to the relative shelter of our cliff-top caravan she did assure me that when I had questioned why she was apparently sawing through my safety rope a few minutes earlier, as I dangled over the void, she was merely ‘tidying up a few frayed threads’ and not - despite the evil glint I caught in her eye when the moon made one of its fitful appearances from behind the heavy clouds – planning my demise.
‘After all,’ she wisely pointed out later.’ Without you there, how else would I warm up my ice cold feet in bed at night?’
So, all-in-all, in the end I had to concede she did indeed have a point, after all.
Regal
Her fingers grip this world so carelessly,
a day is lost as easily as her word
all left to fall to the dirt or grass,
or float away down gutter and drains.
On she dances through all her days
towards the possibility of all her
elaborate dreams and those fairy tales
she knows are bound to come true.
So she constructs castles and towers
high above the roofs of the town
that she sees as little more than
a dark shadow across her faraway eyes.
She ignores the men calling out to her
promising her something far less
than her visions of romance can give her
as her due, and the smiles she bestows
on their every awkward gesture or phrase
are not the promises they think they are,
but the indulgent whims of a princess
for the crude obsequiousness of her subjects.
It was not that easy, after all donkeys, by their very nature, are recalcitrant beasts, added to that, the natural fear of any mortal being when confronted by a potential predator – and as everyone who has ever survived a Christmas dinner will know – Brussels sprouts do have lethal tendencies. The donkey as a veteran of more up-market Children’s nativity plays than it ever dared remember was – quite naturally, therefore, more than a little perturbed by anything redolent of the festive season – up to and including traditional vegetable accompaniments.
However, such was the urgency in the situation – which I’m sure doesn’t need much explanation, except to confirm that the lady in question did, indeed, have a temper if left to seethe - it was best we all thought to do our best to find something without yuletide connotations to fill up the donkey’s basket.
I suppose really we should have made more of an attempt to source some tools and other materials more closely associated with gold-prospecting in the Californian gold rush era, but she had sprung the idea on us at what was almost the last minute.
I further suppose it was therefore inevitable that, when a number of injuries resulting from our last neighbourhood game of Strip Twister left many of us feeling we were not up to another bout, there would be a modicum of scepticism when presented with her new idea for a way of breaking the ice at our next… er… intimate evening.
But – surprisingly enough to many of us there that evening – her suggestion of playing Strip-Buckeroo with a live donkey and real accoutrements did turn out to be far more entertaining than some of the more pessimistic predictions suggested. Although, they were right about having a great deal to clean up afterwards, after having a perpetually-surprised – and somewhat already nervous – donkey in the living room, an attribute the makers seem to have surprisingly overlooked in the original game.
There is, they often say, no time like the present. Alison, though, said: ‘There is no present like time.’
It was my birthday, and Alison had quite a present for me. It was her, in her birthday suit, lying there on my bed when I got back home from the office. At the time, I didn’t wonder how she had managed to get into my flat, or any detail like that, because when Alison was there I forgot everything else, especially when she had also forgotten to wear anything.
‘What do you mean,’ I said later, when she gave me a chance to get my breath back. She had got up from the bed and was walking, still in her birthday suit, back towards it, out of the kitchen, with a birthday cake. The cake had a single candle on it, the flame flickering as she walked, humming the ‘Happy Birthday’ song under her breath.
‘What? When?’ she said, placing the cake down on the bed between us.
‘There is no present like time. What did that mean?’
‘Oh,’ she said, feeding me a slice of cake, then offering me her breast to lick where a dollop of soft icing had fell on its upper curve. ‘Time…. That is your present. When would you like to go?’
‘After the cake, or do you mean where would I like to go?’
‘No,’ she said, scooping up a large dollop of the cake cream on her one finger while with her other hand she pulled back the sheet and reached for me. She looked from my mouthed ‘yes’ to her cream-smothered finger and then to what she held in her other hand. Then she smiled that smile of hers and licked her lips.
I gulped as the cold cream touched me.
Alison said. ‘No, I do mean when do you want to go, not where.’ Then her mouth was too full to speak and I lost all interest in everything else for quite a while.
Skin like Honey
All my desires are for the dreams of flesh
all made of warm, alive and breathing skin.
I think of silver and I think of gold
I think of moments when and think of moments
where time becomes a place to move inside
and where a day is all we have to hold
so now we use it slowly, carefully
our time is like sweet honey, thick and gold
its slowness falling all around our lives.
My days all lie in piles around me now
I think of how it once was, when we had
such honey days and she had such soft skin
it seemed as though she was the summer, warm
unclouded with her eyes of understanding
she saw though to the centre, holding it
there, still and serene in the open palm
of her one hand. But now, I do not know
this person standing in my life and dreaming
my dreams and sorting through these memories
of long ago. It is not me or now.
Possessed, I’m haunted as I walk alone,
this ghost will move my hand to reach towards
the memory of her. If I could break
and twist away from this procession, back
away from times where anything beyond
is either haunting dream or memory,
each with less weight than any hand can hold,
as insubstantial now as every lie
she whispered. None of this can alter, change
the past or anything and none of this
will ever matter as we leave no words
or shadows carved into these rocks. We leave
behind us nothing of those times and soon
it will be gone and none of those lost times
remain as memories we shared between
us, like the steps in a familiar dance
as we went round and then around again.
She stood over by the window, looking out on a part of the world that she would probably never see again.
The time had come for leaving, but she felt reluctant. She had not, she felt, had a great childhood here in the Tower of her parents. It had been a cold, distant childhood. A time of nurses and tutors and seeing her parents only infrequently, then often only in their ceremonial robes at the end of some great hall where the family had to adopt formal manners and rigid poses as some interminable duty was performed. Often, she suspected, the rituals were as mysterious and unintelligible to everyone else present as it was to her, except, of course, the High Priests. Jemilah believed the High Priests were the only ones who understood the ancient texts and rituals, but only as a way of continuing their power and influence over the life of the Tower and its lands, rather than any great belief in the supposed gods and the divine rights and duties of her family.
Now, though, Jemilah could hear the marching step of her escort, their heavy measured tread echoing around the stone walls of the corridor that led to her room.
Sighing, she turned from the window and prepared herself for the rest of her life.
She waited for me to come to her. She knew I would come, that I would find her, even though the place she found herself in was no place she had ever known before. She did not know me, of course, just that I was possible. It was a world where such things were possible, even though she had not seen enough of it to know that.
Still, she said, she knew that I would come.
She said too, that when she managed a few hours of troubled sleep in that strange place she’d found herself, that she saw me in her dreams searching for her. She saw me wandering the dark twisting corridors with a flaming torch in my hands, as I searched for the woman who had come to me in my dreams.
She seemed to understand when I said I knew as little about the place we found ourselves in as she did. That I had managed to find a way out of my room, my cell, my prison, and I had walked the endless dark corridors for many days and nights looking for the woman that haunted my dreams and called out to me whenever I slept.
What she didn’t know, though, was that I was lying to her: I was no prisoner I was the gaoler.
It was not – as many of the people who later gave witness statements for the prosecution attested – as straightforward an event as it first seemed. This is especially true when you consider that the prosecution’s lead witness was not only unsighted for most of the time the alleged incident was taking place, this witness was also a grey squirrel; a species notorious for their willingness to attempt to subvert the course of justice in return for a handful of nuts and some tail-care beauty products.
Not only that, the CCTV was – as in so many cases of this nature - both ambiguous and of a quality so poor that even the TV news programmes preferred to use reconstructions of the alleged incident, rather than rely on footage that would only otherwise be suitable for use by a top-flight director for a prestige prize-winning drama series on late-night BBC4 with an audience numbered in the tens.
What is more, the accused when she appeared in the witness box, was – to the complete surprise of the jury – young, attractive (but not too attractive for the female jurors to take an instant dislike to her) and from a respectable family and post code. She was therefore – despite what the evidence said – obviously not guilty, and already had the incipient book-deal with a reputable publisher of celebrity biographies that would not only prove her innocence, but also expose corruption in the police investigation, the MPs involved in drafting the law she was alleged to have broken as well as the shady involvement of some rogue elements of the secret service of one of this country’s most trusted allies.
So, in the end it was no wonder the judge – after an hour-long meeting in his chamber with the accused that left him hot and sweaty under his wig and his robes strangely askew – acquitted her of all charges and allowed her to walk free from the court without a stain on her character, but with only a small one on her skirt.
Roads, Routes and Maps
This road, the distance, and you and I here
with all those roads we travelled, standing still
we do not know now all we need to know
to find which way to turn, and stumbling on
towards another crossroads up ahead.
It’s hard to tell, and hard to say just why
we both should not have taken this one route.
We stand apart now, here and either side
of our old half-torn map, both looking off
away down different new turning roads
that lead away from this last point we share.
And shall I stand and watch you walk away,
with half-torn map in hand, as you go down
that road, until it turns you out of sight?
Or, shall I strike off down another road?
My torn half-share of our outworn old map
held ever tighter in my clutching hand
as I go striding onward without pause
or turning to look back, to see a glimpse
of you, when changes in the landscape turn
our twisting routes towards each other’s path
to bring us one day back to meet again.
There was a fridge.
There was a spoon.
Fairly obviously a fridge will not – in the normal course of events – fit inside a spoon.
A spoon will, of course, fit easily into a fridge. However, that is not where we usually put them.
So, as I stood there, in front of the closed door of the fridge, I had to ask myself why I had just opened the fridge, put a spoon inside it and then shut its door again.
I had no answer to that question.
I opened the fridge door again and there was the spoon sitting – quite comfortably – on the shelf in front of me.
Why?
I thought. I must have come into the kitchen and picked up a spoon, intending to eat something from the fridge using that spoon.
I opened the door again. The fridge was empty, apart from the spoon. There was nothing in there at all.
I shut the fridge door again and looked at my watch.
The watch, amongst other things, told me it was Sunday. We usually did our shopping on Saturday, so the fridge should be full of stuff, lovely things all waiting there to be eaten.
So, I’d come into the kitchen, got a spoon and opened the fridge, expecting to eat something from it, probably involving the spoon. But the fridge was empty, so I’d put the spoon down in shock and shut the fridge, my mind blank and unable to process this startling information in a satisfactory manner.
I smiled. I had solved the problem.
No, I hadn’t.
Why was the fridge empty? Empty on a Sunday?
I looked around the kitchen, looking for an answer.
It was only then I realised that the kitchen wasn’t there, either.
Turning back from the moment, moving away from the solidity of the ground, moving into a form of space that knows no up nor down. This is a place that is no place and a nowhere that is somewhere and a here that is now only. Still, we turn around to look back, attempting to discover how we came to be here, in this now and nowhere, here and now.
You and I make gestures towards each other, turning the possible over in our hands as though it is some strange gift given to us we do not know how to use, as though we cannot create a new world, a new way of living from these materials around us.
We have all the possibilities of a life together in reach, but we do not know how to take them, how to shape them, to create a new world around this instant of time that holds us trapped like insects in amber, like two people caught in a photograph hung on a wall, unable to break free of the frame that holds us in this pose, poised between a world we have left behind and a world that waits, yet to be.
‘Never let it be said, by anyone, that this once-great country of ours does not fully understand the art of the cheese sandwich!’ Noble words, I’m sure you both (and your special friend) agree. In was in the darkest hour of WWII that the then Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, uttered this unforgettable call to arms after a Luftwaffe raid which destroyed one of London’s most famous sandwich shops.
Of course, as everyone knows, the cheese sandwich – with or without pickle - has always been a vital part of the British people’s ability to cope with adversity. As one infantry private rescued from Dunkirk bitterly remarked: ‘Bloody French baguettes! As soon as you try to take a bite, the bloody cheese falls out of the other end… and don’t talk to me about that useless French cheese. No wonder they’re going to lose.’ Wise and prophetic words, as subsequent events proved.
Of course, the Germans did expend a great deal of time, money and energy trying to develop super weapons such as the V1 and V2, the Me262 and other such wonders of the age, however, they never really developed a battlefield-ready cheese sandwich, and – for many historians of the time – that is probably why they ultimately lost the war.
The Chain
Stars are like everything thrown across
an infinite nowhere and left forgotten.
Names are everywhere, pining us down,
taking lives and holding them still.
Each name a form of chain holding us
tight against the background of this world.
Unable to break free of the chain of a name
we twist and turn against its pull
that roots us to this here and this now
at least until we break free of this world
and float off into the sky of forgetfulness
where our names become just more air,
more lost sounds floating on the breeze
that flows across the fields of history
until we are forgotten forever.
There were only the possibilities of some new land hidden beyond the curve of this world, some distant place Valerie thought she could discover where she would find she belonged. This was no land for her; this was no place for her. The people here, in this narrow world, seemed cold, spiteful, too uninterested in the possibilities of existence for her.
Valerie wanted more, more than this thin cold life of stunted possibility. She wanted more than this, but what she wanted she could not say. She did not want the foolish, stumbling boys or the heavy-handed men who turned to stare as she hurried past on some essential errand. She wanted someone who had eyes that could see further than the narrow open ground that lay between the village and the forest. Someone who wondered what it was like beyond the mist-shrouded hills and snow-capped mountains. Someone who could see as far as seeing goes.
The only thing Valerie did know, and know for sure, was that she would not find someone like that here in her village.
So, when the travelling storyteller came to town carrying his heavy bag of tales, poems and possibilities, Valerie was ready, waiting for him, ready to follow him to the end of all his stories.
[Novella – 17, 500 words approx]
The day John Russell became a Have a Go Hero, for accidentally foiling an armed bank robbery, was the day his life changed forever, and all he’d wanted was a nice cup of tea.
Extract:
[…]
‘Can I have some money too, Daddy?’ Beth said.
John smiled down at her. ‘I suppose so. How much do you want?’
‘A million pounds.’
John was too stunned to reply for a moment. He looked down at Beth who seemed to be waiting patiently for her more than reasonable request to be granted. ‘What do you want with a millio.... What the f…!’
Suddenly, the doors burst open and two armed men rushed into the bank, both wearing ski masks, ex-army style clothing and leather gloves.
One - armed with a sawn-off shotgun - herded the stunned customers, including Debbie and Stan, up against the wall.
The other, armed with an automatic pistol, forced a large bag under the counter screen. ‘Fill it! Quick! My mate - Mr Blue - over there has a very nervous trigger finger. If you don't want to spend the rest of the day wiping your customers off the walls of this nice little bank of yours, you'll hurry up. And keep well away from that alarm button under the counter.’ He looked across at the other three members of staff cowering behind the counter. ‘The rest of you come out here and join your customers over by the wall where Mr Blue can look after you properly.’
The man with the shotgun turned to face the one at the counter. ‘Hang on! I'm Mr Green this time. We agreed - remember?’
‘What? Oh, right… whatever you say Chri… Mr Bl… Mr Green.’
Once the three members of staff had hurried to join the customers standing against the wall, Mr Green turned back and stood where all the staff and customers could see him clearly. ‘Hey, everyone! Just to make it clear, so that no-one is confused. I'm Mr Gree… Mr Blue, and To… he is Mr Green. Everyone understand?’ He looked around carefully, his finger stroking the trigger of his shotgun. ‘Well, do you?’
The assembled customers and staff stared back at him.
‘What? Oh, hang on…. No. I'm Mr Green.’ He pointed across towards his accomplice with his shotgun. ‘He is Mr….’
‘Hey Chris! Er… Mr Green, careful where you are pointing that!’
‘Sorry To… Mr Blue.’ He turned back to face the bewildered group. ‘Right, for the last time… I'm Mr Green and Tom…. He is Mr Blue. Right?’
There was a general muttering of assent from the assembled customers and staff.
‘Right, that's that sorted. Let's get on with it, Mr Bl… Green… Blue,’ said the bank robber at the counter.
‘Green!’ Mr Green yelled without turning to look at him.
‘Mr Green, right.’
‘Right! All of you - back against the wall and keep still. Put your hands on your heads!’ Mr Green pointed the shotgun at each of the adults in the queue until they complied.
Beth was too bewildered to move; looking from the bank robber to John and back again as tears formed in her eyes and her lips trembled.
‘Move little girl. Move!’ Mr Green yelled, pointing his shotgun at Beth, then trying to push her back with its barrel.
Beth stood still and burst into tears.
There was sudden anger on John's face. He stepped forward. Debbie tried to pull him back, but John shrugged her off.
He stood a few inches from the gunman. ‘Don't point that thing at my daughter you pathetic bastard!’ He grabbed the gun barrel and twisted it away from Beth and up towards the ceiling.
Mr Green was too stunned to react at first. But the sudden jerk of his gun made him pull the trigger. The gun fired up at the ceiling.
John and Mr Green were showered with shredded ceiling tiles, falling around them like feathers. Mr Green stood with his mouth as wide-open as the ski-mask would allow, staring up at the massive hole his gun had blown in the ceiling while snow flakes of former ceiling slowly fell down over and around him.
John stepped forward, forcing the gun butt back into Mr Green's stomach with some force. The villain doubled over in pain as John struggled with him. John tightened his grip on the gun, trying to twist it out of the hands of the villain. He jerked it upwards, making the gun butt hit Mr Green in the face.
The bank robber groaned and crumpled to the floor. He let go of the gun, letting it fall to the floor. The shotgun slid across the polished tiles and underneath a table.
Over by the counter, Mr Blue saw his accomplice was down. He glanced at the teller, who dropped the half-filled bag on the floor on her side of the counter and pressed the alarm. He tried to point his pistol at the teller, but his panic made the gun wave around so he couldn't aim it properly. The teller pressed a button and a steel shutter slammed down over the front of the counter.
Mr Blue turned and pointed his gun at John, in his nervousness he fumbled with his gun. The pistol was waving around erratically as he tried to pull the trigger, but the safety catch was still on. Mr Blue frantically tried to release the safety catch, but pressed the wrong switch, accidentally ejecting the magazine instead.
The magazine fell out of the gun and dropped onto his foot, causing the bullets to eject and scatter all over the floor.
Mr Blue looked around in panic before dropping to his knees and scrabbling around - trying to put the bullets back into the magazine - but his gloved hands made it impossible to pick up the bullets from the highly-polished floor. He looked up as he heard distant sirens and decided to run.
John turned - still stunned and covered in shredded roof tiles - to see Mr Blue bearing down on him. The bank robber swung his pistol at John's head as he tried to get past, catching John on the temple. Mr Blue glanced back as he got to the door and saw John slowly sinking to the floor, unconscious.
The customers and staff in the bank stood against the wall with their hands half in the air, not knowing what to do as they stared at the slowly-closing bank door. Debbie was on her knees comforting Beth and Stan. The old woman was feebly dragging her unwilling son towards the stunned Mr Green, still lying on the floor and moaning softly, less than a foot from the unconscious John.
Mr Green was slowly recovering. He blinked twice then shook his head, but all he could see was the face of old woman gradually coming into focus as she leant over him.
‘Mother?’ he said with a tentative smile behind the ski mask.
The old woman's face screwed up in anger. ‘You b… bas…! You basta….you… you…!’ She was still supported on one side by her son and the walking stick on the other, as she drew her leg back and delivered a powerful kick to the ribs of the prostrate Mr Green.
Mr Green writhed across the floor, trying to escape the old woman's kicking. ‘Ow! Stop. Get her off me!’
The customers and staff, still against the wall with their hands up, began to smile and relax, slowly lowering their hands, as they watched the old woman.
Mr Green was scampering around the floor on all fours, trying to hide behind tables, chairs, plants and anything else he could find. The old woman, still supported on her son's arm, tottered after him, trying to hit him with her walking stick.
‘Keep still!’ she yelled at him. ‘I'm going to give you the damn good thrashing you so obviously deserve… you… you… you…!’
‘Help! Get her off me! Stoppit. Ow, Christ! No. Help! Help!’ Mr Green yelled back.
[….]
Have a Go: A novella - by David Hadley:
‘It makes sense, of course, to always make sure the golden-hamster droppings come to a slow boil before simmering for 176.235 seconds. Then drain them and allowing them to dry on the naked stomach of a Peruvian supermodel, before attempting to grate them over the nearest available member of your home-grown herd of antelope as they migrate across the wild open savannah of your kitchen.’
Obviously, for the rest of us, who occupy normal space and time, such recipes are far beyond what we have available in our more modest kitchens. For not only do these celebrity chefs presume that we – in the ordinary and mundane planes of existence – have easy access to organic peasant-reared hand-dried golden hamster droppings, or whatever this season’s trendiest ingredient is, they also seem to assume that we can afford to buy such things, even if we are lucky enough to find a shop that sells them… or – for that matter – has even heard of them.
Not only that, they seem to have a kitchen the size of several football pitches filled with all manner of devices, technology, equipment and peripherals that make our bent rolling pin and rusty apple-corer look more than inadequate as they chop, slice, whiz, drizzle and do all manner of arcane culinary manipulations to their pile of golden hamster droppings that would cost ordinary folks the best part of a month’s wages; let alone enable us to afford the rest of the ingredients.
So we sigh, turn off the telly, head off into a kitchen half the size of the box the celebrity chef gets her golden hamster droppings delivered to her door in, and we make a salt ‘n’ vinegar crisp sandwich using the best supermarket own-brand sliced white we can afford, spread liberally with a butter substitute that has the taste, consistency and spreadability of decade-old axle grease, drizzled almost liberally with value-brand salt ’n’ vinegar proto-crisps that may once have has a nodding acquaintance with a real potato , but that was so long ago that they no longer have any memory of it.
Then, satisfied, replete and in awe of our own culinary skills we return to the TV to see if there is anything better on now.
Walking into Walls
Only knowledge lifts us up
from this slow fading dream
to a world we can walk through
stepping away, through these ghosts
and walking into walls that hold us
apart from those sudden moments
that make us wonder what is real
and how each day can fall around us
leaving nothing but memory and loss,
when distance grows longer as time
takes us away from all we once
thought so certain and so right.
Here we are now, and waiting
for those ghosts of memory
to slip through these solid walls
and reach out across the years
with hands we will never hold
and voices we no longer hear.
Quite obviously, back in those distant times, the people were quite aware that they were living in historical times and were therefore quite resigned to their lack of modern technology. This is why there is – to the modern reader – a rather puzzling lack of mention of things like mobile phones, computers and other wonders of the modern era - as well as the curses of our age like television - in the historical record. Because the people in those times, now known to modern historians as The Olden Days, knew some things had not yet been invented they – very wisely – did not mention those things at all.
Even though, for example, Victorian TV was some of the best the world has ever known, with some of the finest examples of the reality genre – such as Scullery Maid Factor, Know Your Place and other such jewels of the genre, the Victorians knew better than to make any mention of them in the historical record, less we – their descendants – come to realise we are not quite the know-it-all smart-arses we think we are.
This also explains why the Victorians also managed to keep their massive country-wide motorway network so secret from future generations by cunningly disguising it as a canal network, something they had learnt from the clever way the Stone Age people of this country had shrewdly disguised a Neolithic multi-story car park as Stonehenge many, many, centuries before.
As is so often the case, when she arrives at your front door naked under her coat and – this time - carrying an accordion and a grapefruit, you know you are in for another evening of her latest How to Improve Your Sex-Life sexual technique hastily cribbed from whatever some magazine or website contributor has re-imagined some ‘scientific’ research, hastily cobbled together by some cosmetic company’s bogus ‘laboratory’ or by the PR department of a former polytechnic eager to boost its media profile.
Still, however, the one last week – apparently from the leading article in one of those women’s magazines that likes to point out we are all doing sex wrong – which involved the tin of anchovies, Val Doonican’s back catalogue and a pedalo, did turn out to be much more rewarding than I’d originally anticipated, when she arrived half an hour late. Mainly because acquiring a pedalo at this time of year is not all that easy to obtain, even for hire, especially with us living so far from the seaside.
It was worth it though, just to see the looks on the neighbour’s faces as they watched us trying to launch a pedalo on our garden fish pond whilst trying to remember enough of the lyrics of Paddy McGintys Goat for us to achieve a simultaneous orgasm without spilling the contents of the tin of anchovies overboard and further upsetting some already rather perturbed koi carp.
Still, though, as I remarked later in our mutual post-coital glow, I do enjoy having anchovies on my pizza… not only that, there was a not inconsiderable discount on the out of season pedalo hire too… so a successful evening all round, I think.
It was that sort of place… the kind of place where you kept a tight grip on your ladle and laughed scornfully at those who flaunted their desert spoons openly. Back in those days the Wild West Midlands was a lawless and – yes – a wild place. Everyone, of course, knows about the faggots and a few even witnessed the mushy peas, but there were other dangers for the unwary to fall into as they ventures into this wild, untamed wilderness in search of the fabled pork scratching, especially as it was so easy to fall out of a pub and into a canal.
Those were dark, damp, days, but being as this was Britain, it was all perfectly normal, except that the typical British drizzle fell with an unusual menace as the dwellers of the Black Country emerged from their dwelling hovels and strode manfully and/or womanfully from home to pub and back again, often spending equal amounts of time in both and often spending those equal amounts of time equally passed out on the floor as the darts players stepped over them in their haste to get hold of a precious bag of scratchings before the unholy wail of ‘Last orders’ terrified them all into fleeing for the sanctuary of their hovels where the mysterious faggots awaited their return.
If only I’d known at the time, which – with time these days being the way it is these days – was certainly possible, if not likely. However, with the new modern hand-held time machine taking over as the gadget of choice, supplanting the mere smartphone, we can see more and more of the problems it was intended to solve actually getting worse and worse. People are spending so much time leaping backwards and forwards in time, mostly to remind themselves to do things they forgot to do first time, or sometimes to stop themselves from what they did first time, that they have hardly any time left for the present.
When you do have the time to go out, you find everyone standing around – gadget in hand – searching for that point in their personal time stream where they can go back and change whatever it was they did wrong that enabled them to end up here and – more often than not – getting in your way as you yourself scroll back through this morning looking for the point where you can jump back to a point where you won’t be late for work because you spent most of the time, since getting out of bed, trying to find that point in last night’s argument that you spent the whole of the night sleeplessly thinking up some devastating put-down for.
Although, the last time you were late for work you found no-one there as they’d all gone back to the previous evening’s TV schedule to re-watch a crucial scene from the latest reality time-travel drama they’d all missed because they’d spent too long in the pub after work yesterday.
All-in-all, then it was not a bad holiday, although touring a small caravan through some of the world’s most dangerous post-conflict minefields is not everybody’s idea of a relaxing fortnight. However, the occasional loud bang and rocking motion of the caravan does help to dispel that too-common holiday torpor that so often descends on holidaymakers on less fraught two-week breaks.
There is, also, something to be said for the intensity of the mine-detecting experience, especially when you are increasingly aware that the tour company has palmed you off with a dodgy mine-detector that has trouble detecting anything less than a loudly-ticking thermonuclear device, or – for some reason – any nearby Rottweiler bitch that is in season.
Anyway, the caravan cutlery draw did have a couple of serviceable desert spoons which did help in locating the mines much better than the supplied mine- detector, to be fair, though, it has to be admitted that the spoons were hopeless at detecting any dogs, let alone Rottweilers – in season or not.
The wife did say, though, that she had not paid all that money to crawl through war-ravaged scrubland on her stomach. Although, I did point out to her that the exercise – should she survive - would do wonders for her body-mass index. A remark that she seemed to find less reassuring and confidence-building than I’d hoped.
Still – after all is said and done – it was still better than a week in Blackpool with the wife and her mother. So – maybe – next year we’ll be back again – that is assuming we did manage to find all the bits of the caravan - after we’d taken that wrong turning on the last day - and we can get them all to fit back together before next year’s holiday season begins.
Well, it is sometimes like that, although most of the time it isn’t. After all, something standing proud like that can be a bit awkward when trying to effortlessly manoeuvre one’s shopping trolley around the supermarket without inconveniencing too many other shoppers.
Although, it must be said that having the wife naked in the shopping trolley with her legs hanging out each side, does tend to attract more than the usual amount of attention, and not because of the special offer on the over-ready self-basting turkey crown she is clutching to her naked bosom as we career down the tinned goods aisle at a speed not normally associated with the weekly shopping trip.
The self-help books, though, do advise trying to come up with a few novel ideas to keep a long-term sex life from becoming dull and routine, and though it may – admittedly – veer towards the more unconventional, especially with the propensity for shopping trolleys to insists in going in every direction but the one you want them to so a bit of veering off-course is somewhat inevitable, we do believe we have – at last – discovered the ideal way to put the spark back into our love-life, especially when we use the cranberry sauce in a way not specifically shown in the ‘serving suggestion’ illustration on the label.
As they say: ‘Fine words butter no sexual-experimentalist’, but that doesn’t apply in this case… as we used natural yogurt instead of the butter.
However, a word of caution to anyone else considering experimenting in this fashion: steer well clear of the unnatural yogurt, unless – of course – your particular kink, fetish or political leanings are that way inclined and your actions are not going to case undue distress to the rest of the post office queue.
Of course, you will need a large paintbrush to apply the yogurt, although a smaller one may become necessary for all the crevices, creases and other places of interest, especially those around Ludlow… and the fold of the elbow. For those with a greater than average interest in pies, maybe some sort of automatic yogurt-spraying device may prove more useful for the increased surface area such an enthusiastic diet often brings about, especially if there is a chance of you missing something interesting on the telly. Although my experience of paint-spraying technology indicates that you are unlikely to miss anything in the vicinity of the operation.
Still, we did decide – in the end – that all the effort, expense and yogurt was well worth the effort, for – as she so wisely pointed out – the remainder of the natural yogurt does come in handy for the traditional post-coital kebab.
