The Castle

Sally woke to find herself in a long curving corridor where large grey-stoned walls rose up on either side of her, right up to a high wooden-beamed ceiling that looked as though it could be the floor for a higher storey.

The floor was cold and hard, flagstones. She was naked, she realised, propelling her out of her feeling that this was some odd dream. She looked around, feeling her dread growing. The cold stone floor was bare, as were the walls, except for flaming torches in brackets every few yards which made the shadows twitch and tremble. There was a window not too far away, shuttered with heavy wooden shutters, fastened with a bar across them.

Sally got to her feet, noticing that her body was dirty, cold and stiff where she had lain on the floor. She was covered with a thick, dark, dust which was probably mostly ash from the smoky torches up on the walls. She searched around again, but there were no clothes and nothing that could be used as clothing. The corridor was quiet and still, something about it suggested night time, but she didn’t know what.

Sally shivered, feeling a chill that also suggested night. She made her way carefully on her bare feet across the cold hard stone to the window.

‘Someone,’ she whispered to herself, mainly just so she could hear the sound of her own voice. ‘…must have lit these torches and closed the window shutters.’ She wondered if whoever it was had seen her lying there, asleep and naked on the floor, and yet done nothing about her. She shivered again, this time not from the cold.

The bar over the shutters was too heavy for Sally to lift, but, by putting her eye to the slight gap between the shutters, she could see that it was night outside; a clearer cool night with stars above the distant vague shadowed outline of trees. She turned from the window, still no wiser. Hugging her arms around herself as she shivered, Sally, slowly and cautiously, made her way along the corridor and around its long slow curve… then stopped.

There - a few yards in front of Sally - was another young woman, also naked and asleep on the floor.

As Sally watched, the other woman began to stir, to wake.

Emergency Services Call-Out

It was not as if it was the first time she’d been caught doing that with a member of the emergency services, although this was the first time she’d been caught engaged in such an act at the top of a ladder.

Still, they rescued the cat in the end, and she was warned about making misleading calls to the fire service about needing a fireman to see to her pussy stuck up a tree.

It is easy to see, how the confusion arose, especially after the seventh fireman disappeared into the foliage, but still I suppose they see it as one of the perks of the job. Although, you do have to feel sorry for those women whose toes are too fat to get stuck in the bath tap. At least, that is, unless they get the urge to set fire to things to get attention from the fire service. All that smoke and flame does tend to subtract from the intended romantic atmosphere, especially if she is lying there coughing her lungs up instead of being draped provocatively across her bedroom while the fire has the decency to flicker seductively in the moonlight as the fireman’s strong manly arms rescue her from her moment of torment, or whatever her typical romantic fantasy scenario dictates.

Although, these days, with the move from romantic reading to the more explicit erotica women tend to read these days, you can only presume it is less about her fainting away in his strong manly grasp, with it more likely to be a case of the entire blue shift taking it in turns to give her a damn good seeing-to as the flames rage around them….

Probably.

Monday Poem: A Form of Silence

A Form of Silence

All these words are little more
than another form of silence.
The world takes our voices

and scatters them on the winds,
so all our words become
little more than soft breezes

rustling the leaves and grass
and billowing the curtains.
The words are lost on the winds,

taken by the breezes and spread
through the valleys around us,
lost in the dark-shadowed woods

and flowing along the streams
that flow rivers out into the sea.
We have spoken of many things

from universes to sand grains
and now our words are lost
while we are almost forgotten.

After the War

I remember her… even now. It was the end of the summer back in the days not long after the war, I forget which month. I was learning to walk again. The wound had kept me in hospital all through those long months of that winter, then the spring and early summer, after the war ended. Now, here I was down on the coast. An old friend, from those long-ago days before the war, had this cottage down on the coast. He let me borrow it ‘…for as long as you need’.

The cottage hadn’t been used since before the war, but I didn’t mind the neglect and dilapidation. In fact, I thought it made the cottage and me seem almost as though we belonged together. I’d had my far share of neglect and dilapidation too during the war.

I was learning to walk again by taking ever-lengthening strolls down along the deserted beach. The beach too, seemed to be another case of dilapidation and neglect. The coastal defence emplacements along this part of the shore were already falling into disrepair with the wild plants taking over the concrete emplacements and defensive positions, while the sea battered and rusted the metal effigies that rose out of the sand like skeletal hands begging for mercy, much like the flame-seared hands that reached for me out of the endless battles of my nightmares, that would wake me either screaming or sweating and crying every night, even after all the months since I’d been in the war.

She was up there, by one of the concrete pillboxes one morning; the wind blew her hat tumbling towards me. I caught it with the end of my walking stick; pinning it down as the petulant wind tried to pull it free.

I tried to bend down to pick it up, but I’d already reached my limit for that day and my knees would not bend. She ran up to me, thanked me and knelt down in front of me to pick up her hat.

Then, when she looked up at me from her kneeling position and from under those long eyelashes, I knew that neither of us would be alone ever again.

I Could Weave Worlds

I could tell her so many stories. I could take her by the hand and lead her down so many roads to places she’d never seen before, where I could build for her great towers and cities; each full of people with so many tales of their own to tell.

I could make new worlds for her, worlds that could only exist inside the words I weaved around her. I could tell her about places that existed, places that never existed and times that were yet to be.

I could weave worlds and I could pull people fully-formed from the air as we sat each night in front of her fire.

I could tell her everything she wanted to hear.

Except….

I could not tell her of the lover she wanted to meet. I could not tell her how one day, one ordinary day; she would meet the one she longed for; the one who would take this broken world she lived in and make it whole for her. I could describe anything, real or unseen, for her and make it all seem so real.

I could tell her stories about everything, except her one true love because I knew from the way she looked at me, he was not me.

The Map of Other Places

‘Here,’ Sandy said, taking a small roll of cloth from under her pillow. Her naked breast stroked my cheek as she sat up beside me. I kissed her nipple as it brushed past my face. ‘This is where we’ll begin.’

Sandy unrolled the cloth, laying it out across my chest. She sat cross-legged and naked next to me. Her finger pressed down on the cloth. By craning my neck, I could see that she was pointing to a spot on what looked like a map, but it was not a normal map; with roads, rivers and towns, but a series of shapes overlaying each other with twisting trails between them. It looked, as I stared at it, as thought he shapes were shifting over each other, but I just put that down to the awkward position of my head and - maybe – the movement of my body underneath the map as I breathed.

‘Come on, Phil, let’s go,’ Sandy said, jumping up from the bed and pulling her clothes on with one hand, whilst throwing my scattered clothes at me.

‘Why now? Where?’ I said, pulling my trousers on and then shrugging myself into my shirt.

‘Now is a good time,’ Sandy said, rolling the map back up and tucking it into her bra under her shirt. She reached out a hand and I took it, expecting her to head for the door to her room. Instead she turned to face the wall opposite the door.

‘Where do you think you are going,’ I said.

‘Through here,’ she said, gesturing towards the wall with her free hand.

‘You’re going to walk through the wall.’ I laughed.

She turned to look at me in a way that stopped my laughter. ‘Yes, Phil, I’m going to walk through the wall.’

Then she did.

World Record Attempt

She didn’t know….

I didn’t know….

The badger, though, was looking decidedly nervous, even though the butler was dressed in the wet suit and was poised to put on the flippers once the structural engineer gave the go ahead.

Of course, fitting up the circus-style trapeze apparatus had not been that easy, but this was a world record attempt and so we needed to be sure.

Although, the original specification for the pool of flesh-eating piranhas had metamorphosed into a badger in a puddle when the health and safety inspector insisted that the butler be prepared to rescue the daring lady on he flying trapeze, should she lose her grip and fall.

The rest of us – especially the structural engineer – were somewhat more concerned for the integrity of the apparatus as our star performer had a tendency to overeat when she got nervous and only informed us of her badger-phobia when the rest of us had to accept that the piranhas would not be delivered in time and the man from the Guinness Books of Records refused to alter his diary to accommodate any delay. He did however, reassure us that there was – as yet – no world record for performing a trapeze act above a rather perturbed badger sitting in a puddle, or otherwise, so her attempt at stardom would be assured, providing that is, the equipment held up for the duration of her performance.

Which it didn’t… unfortunately….

Unfortunately for the badger, that is. Our star performer came away with only a bruised elbow and a slightly flattened steak and ale pie which she - unwisely to my mind – attempted to consume in mid-performance, thus slipping from the trapeze when her gravy-covered hands failed to maintain a grip.

Still, the government inspector did say they were looking for more humane ways of culling wild TB-infected badgers and that, although it would need some refinements, our method did seem rather successful. So our performer may not have got into the record books in the way she would have desired, at least now she has a steady job… until this country runs out of badgers, that is.

Lost Homeland

There were times before this became a story. There were times when this journey had not become the tale of itself. Back in those early days we did not know this journey would never end, that it would become a story we told each other as we gathered around the fire at the end of another weary day of always moving on.

We had a homeland once, but that too has become another story, twisting and growing with each day’s travel that takes us further and further away from it. There are those amongst us, the younger ones, who cannot remember the homeland and those even younger for whom the homeland will ever only be a story. It is for them we sit and tell each other the stories of this journey, where we are and where it began, who we are and why we left the homeland as it burnt down behind us.

Even now some of us still wake suddenly in the night; hearing the screams of those that we lost, back in the homeland when the strangers came and took our world from us, leaving us only with these endless days of travel and all these stories we tell ourselves as we trudge always onward.

The Marmalade of Romance

Here is the very lupin (now dried and preserved) that was first used by Charles II in order to get Nell Gwynne to do that thing she did so well with just a pair of oranges and a smile. Now, many men are aware that freely-proffered flowers are often a way to a lady’s heart, and sometimes to some of her just-as-interesting other bits as well.

Strangely, however, despite everything, the same cannot be said for marmalade, the collected Haynes Workshop Manuals for every production Ford car of the 1970s, or - even - a signed photograph of Jimmy Hill.

Just why this is, is a subject for someone with a more academic set of leather elbow patches than any of us gathered here possess, but no doubt, that will not prevent plenty of wild and ill-informed speculation. After all, this is the internet: the natural home of blind guesswork and prejudice masquerading as informed understanding, as well as being the world repository for many millions of pictures of underdressed young ladies going about their lives in the presence of an unnoticed and unexplained cameraman….

However… where was I?

The Accordion Incident

Now, well I didn’t want to mention it, but certain recent events have now made it inevitable. It now seems that, despite all over fervent attempts to forestall it, soon it will be possible – under immanent EU legislation - for anyone to walk around the streets, roads and byways of this once-great land whilst freely wielding an accordion with intent to cause seriously bodily harm to any pure innocent tune they take in into their minds to subject to the full horror of that dread instrument.

Now, it has long been a tradition on the continent to continue with cruel and harmful sports that we in the British Isles have long-since forsworn, such as: bullfighting in Spain, wearing a beret in France and the German proclivity for foisting sauerkraut on the unsuspecting.

It was after the scandal of Royal Navy cabin boys being exposed to the full horrors of the unleashed accordion was presented to a shocked populace by the Victorian newspapers that the British government was forced to take action and ban the user of accordions – except between consenting adults over the age of 21 – in public places, especially with the intent to inflict it on any nearby tune.

Since then, of course, the British tabloid press (especially that bastion of the moral panic – the Daily Mail) have all devoted themselves to exposing the menace of the accordion whenever and wherever it has been discovered.

Now, though, with this EU ruling about to be implemented no-one – except, of course, the tabloids who are all shrilly and gleefully proclaiming the end of the British way of life as we know it – knows where it will all end.

Clamouring for Attention

Well, it wasn’t that obvious, especially if you weren’t really paying attention at the time. With all the proliferation of the old media and all the social media and so forth all clamouring for our attention, it is rather easy to let things slip by without not really noticing them.

After all, there is usually someone on the news every day claiming the end of the world is nigh in one way or another. After a while, you stop paying attention. The TV news itself in its increasing clamour for attention - somewhat paradoxically – makes everything that it shouts and screams about seem less and less important… and as for those breathless pieced to camera by reporters on the scene where nothing is happening: even if something has already happened there, or - increasingly these days - where something is assumed to be about to happen…. well, they just become background noise. The only thing we seem to remember from the TV news these days is what the presenter was wearing… and our wondering why.

So, when the invasion came… most people didn’t notice at first.

Many people just thought it was some new SF series, after all the Daleks invade the Earth every Doctor Who Christmas special, or thought it was some sort of ‘edgy’ advert for a new mobile phone or lager or something like that.

The aliens themselves though, didn’t do much to help. There were no massive ships in the sky slaughtering panicked mobs, no destruction of the world’s most famous landmarks, not even – to the regret of many of us – the sucking out and eating of the American president’s brain live on worldwide TV.

Many said later, that the aliens should have employed a PR agency, or an advertising agency who could have told them how to make an entrance that the Earth’s population would notice.

But they didn’t….

So we didn’t.

A Bit of a Pickle

Still, she had brought the Jar of pickling vinegar and as I stood there clutching my shallots, she smiled, so I knew it was going to be all right. Except, of course, she could not get the lid off the jar so I had to let her keep a tight grasp on my shallots as I prised it off for her.

She showed her gratitude in the usual way, which left me with a slight limp for the rest of the week, but on the whole the situation passed with very little further upset. Although, I did feel she was somewhat rougher than really necessary in the way she jammed my shallots into the pickling jar with little or no sense of the ceremony of the occasion.

I’m sure that there are many men amongst (both of) you gathered here who feel that a woman’s touch on their shallots as something they look forward to, only to be somewhat disappointed by the rather perfunctory way she actually handles them when the time comes.

Still, as the old saying goes: ‘you can’t pickle onions without at least having some onions, a jar and something to pickle them in.’ A bit literal when compared with many old maxims, saws and sayings, but I feel you will get the gist.

Sandwiches in Peril

Obviously… or not… there was not much she could do about the incipient danger of an attack by zombies, not without imperilling the integrity of her egg mayonnaise sandwich, anyway.

This is a problem so often overlooked by makers of sandwiches, both those that make the sandwiches themselves at home, and those made commercially for sale in sandwich shops and other such retail outlets.

Surely, it is about time that the UK government - or failing that, the EU – looked into the whole matter of sandwich robustness, especially when facing some out of the ordinary peril such as zombie attack, alien invasion or someone being accosted as they go about their business by some person paid to annoy, pester and/or irritate other people for commercial or other such purposes.

Keeping, say, a salad sandwich from losing all its tomato, or having the aforementioned egg mayonnaise oozing out of the back of the sandwich can be a traumatic experience, even in the calm of a local park or civic garden, let alone at the workplace desk during the normal working lunch hour or whilst going about one’s business on a busy thoroughfare.

So, when you risk dropping the cucumber from your sandwich as you flee the rapid fire lasers shooting from the fleet of an invading alien horde, it is bound to call into question the whole concept of a sandwich-based lunchtime economy and is one a growing number of us feel ought to be addressed by some governmental agency, or even some supra-governmental agency or institution, perhaps by sponsoring scientific research into increasing the robustness and long-term integrity of the sandwich and its filling, before we are faced with that – surely immanent – zombie apocalypse and/or alien invasion for which our current sandwich technology is - so obviously - woefully unsuited.

Thursday Poem: A Summer Beach

A Summer Beach

If all of this were no more than the grains
of sand you trickled through your fingers that
particular long summer afternoon,

while staring out at that distant far tanker
on the horizon, seeing gulls go turning
on scraps of breeze, before you turn to me

while smiling that one smile of yours that says
it will all be all right, I think it would
be quite enough for me to turn to face

the rest of my day knowing you are there
beside me, waiting for whatever the day
will bring. Not letting either fall or stumble

while making our way back, away from here
returning from the shore to that small cottage
which now encloses all our lives around

each other every morning as we lie
together in its far too narrow bed.

All the Tea in China

‘No, not for all the tea in China,’ she said with a certain amount of finality. Although, just why she would want that amount of tea, even with her legendary thirst, was not something she bothered to clarify. Not only that, there is also the matter of the storage.

Admittedly, she does have a lock-up down the back of the estate, but I doubt she would get much in the way of the tea from even a small Chinese province in there. Not that I know much about the average annual tea production statistics for China… or anywhere else for that matter. But I do presume they would be considerable. After all saying: ‘No, not for all the tea in China.’ does presuppose there will be a not inconsiderable amount of the aforesaid product in the aforesaid country. After all, it is not that impressive if that ‘All the tea in China.’ is only enough to make one weak cupful, is it?

Well, not only that, we have to be a bit careful these days with China becoming the economic superpower it has become. After all, it could be that its current industrial might has been bought about through a downgrading of its tea-producing sector, what with all the agricultural workers migrating to the cities seeking new jobs and so on. It could be that nowadays there is hardly any tea in China at all.

Anyway, after I’d pointed all this out to her, she hit me.

Then, after studying the effect that had on me, she hit me again… just to be sure.

Overly Dexterous Manipulation

Obviously, any overly dexterous manipulation of your instrument will make any onlooker at least regard you with some suspicion, if not trepidation, as all forms of ability above and beyond the merely functional now get looked upon with something approaching disdain.

It does not do these days to be too good at something, lest others look askance upon your audacity to be talented beyond the acceptable limits of the mediocre. It makes others suspicious, for if you can be beyond average at any one thing, then there is a fear that you could be beyond average in other ways, especially ways that may turn out to be financially, or – concomitantly – sexually, beneficial to you in a way that puts you beyond the common herd.

That is not allowed, especially if you have – up until your secret was discovered – been masquerading as an ordinary individual – and if you can lie to those around you by having a hidden talent – then what else could you also be lying about? Perhaps you are not even human, which – considering the usual crowds you hang around with – would not be that remarkable as most of them seem to have been given up on by evolution not long after their ancestors accidentally fell out of the trees.

Anyway, where was I?

Ah, yes…. To put it another way: Perhaps – after all - the bagpipes are not really your ideal instrument, certainly not when attempting to play them in what – until now – has been rather an unconventional manner, even when – as you point out – the kilt does aid your rather… unorthodox – and to my mind, rather unsanitary - technique.

Monday Poem: To Shape a Secret

To Shape a Secret

We search for signs
and give the power
of names to all
we see and all we hold,

keeping special secret names
for all we know,
but cannot see
and could never dare to touch.

Your hand moves
through the air to shape
a secret between us both
neither of us will speak of

outside these bare walls
holding us close
to each other, never more
than half a bed apart

as we both try to deny
wanting these times
to spread out through
all our future days

until there is no space
between our coming together
and all our long lonely days
and too inevitable partings.

Weaving Worlds from Nothing

I don’t know when I grew old, but it happened so slowly, too slowly for me to notice. There was a time when one of the women would follow me away from the great halls at night, or wait for me out in the cold stone corridors, and come to my room for the night.

I always saw it as a form of magic; creating these people, places, and various deeds and doings both heroic and base, populating the long evenings with wonders for the audience. It was a form of magic the women always found fascinating. Where men would be held in wonder by those who could seemingly manipulate the world: do tricks, create illusions do magic, the women always seemed more fascinated by the way I could weave these stories out of nothing, how I could take them by the hand and lead the through a world of imagination and possibility with only the sound of my voice and the limits of my imagination.

They seemed to like the worlds I built for them when we were alone together too, those times I took them to whatever bed I’d been given for my stay. Women had taught me well when I was young, and I had always been a keen pupil in their schools. Later, I put all I’d learnt back into the stories I told those ladies under the sheets and blankets until they could take no more.

Now, though, I grow old and the corridors I walk to my bed seem longer, colder and far damper than they used to be. These days, the women no longer follow me or wait for me. All I have when I get to my lonely room is some wine, if I’m lucky, and a fire to ease the chill from these old bones. Still, though, as I stare into those flames, as I sit wrapped in blankets, sipping my wine I can tell myself the stories of all those women I used to know.

Spontaneous Ejaculations

‘Ah…!’ you may say, especially if you are the kind of person who often has spontaneous ejaculations. Then, after you’ve apologised – especially to the vicar and his special companion – and wiped up all the evidence, we can proceed on to what you were about to say, whilst – of course – all standing at a safe distance in case of any existential repeat of your outpouring.

Still, as they say Rome wasn’t built in a day, especially considering all the various people who needed bribing to get the planning permission for the Colosseum, let alone the provision of adequate chariot parking facilities.

So, as you were – no doubt about to say – there is not much happening today out in that slough of despond that certain vested interests like to pretend is the real world. So, let us go then, you and I, now the evening is spread out against the sky out to where the fields are green, the setting sun is shinning and the sheep are open to suggestion, instead of wasting our time sitting here waiting for yet another strangely disappointing website to load despite it promising all manner of earthly delights only to be – in the end – somewhat underwhelming.

Underwear Lapses

Even if the popular female celebrity had not done that with the mandolin and the llama, a very large number of people would be more than a little concerned about the fact that apparently she had forgotten to put on any underwear before setting out on her quest.

Luckily, though, for those thus concerned an alert tabloid photographer was on hand to record her mistake, so those that were worried about either her lack of underwear, or her lack of available brain power to enable her to remember how to get dressed properly, could hie themselves to a website where they could see the evidence first-hand and then express their various concerns in the comments section of the page helpfully provided by the site’s owners for just such a purpose.

The tabloid in question later – though a spokeswoman (herself suitably underweared) – said they regarded it as a public duty for the newspaper to inform any such celebrity - who happens to venture out unsuitably underclothed for the occasion - of their error and that by bringing such celebrity underwear lapses to the attention of the general public, they thus enabled those ordinary people to feel comfortable about their own underwear lapses and even to send pictorial evidence of those lapses by themselves or anyone else they managed to capture on camera to a new website set up for the purpose where a weekly prize of several hundred pounds would be given to the best such photo of the week – as voted on by visitors to the page. Everyone agreed that this would be a boon to the public debate on the urgent and growing problem of underwear omission that seems to be now plaguing this once-great country.

Not Much to Say

There wasn’t much to say afterwards… or, at least, I thought so. She, though, had other ideas and so she told me all she could say about it…. This took some time.

Since we were – as far as I could tell – stranded there, there wasn’t much else to do, at least until the shock wore off, so I just sat there and listened to it all.

As far as she could see, it was – obviously – all someone else’s fault, but for the moment she couldn’t quite see who deserved the most blame.

As she went on… and on… and on, I looked around. As desert islands go, suppose it was more or less typical. However, I’m no expert and all I know about such places is what I’ve seen in films and various TV programmes. There was one I remembered from when I was young, very young, back in the days of black and white TV, when there had been a TV series about Robinson Crusoe. All I remembered from it was a long sandy beach with footprints and – possibly – a parrot that just said ‘poor, poor Robinson’ all the time.

Personally, I would have strangled that parrot after a few weeks. I looked over at her, still muttering away about suing the travel company, the boat owners and all and sundry and wondered if I would be able to stop myself from strangling her, if we were still stranded here after a few weeks of just the two of us.

I got up and wandered away from her, hoping I could find some way of getting us off the island before the visions of my hands tight around her neck got too strong to resist. I was hoping she would not follow me, but then as this shipwreck shows, I’ve never been that lucky.

Monday Poem: A Slow Falling Down

A Slow Falling Down

A slow falling down to winter.
It is there, held in the hand,
a dream dripping slowly on
through the fingers and then

lost forever, like that handful
of melted snow turning to water
as you watch it slip away
through your closed fingers

to fall down onto the frozen ground
then left behind as you walk away
on towards the spring you know
will now one day rise from that ground.

In My Own World

Once there was a time I grew out of these heavy mists of nowhere to create a world I could live in. It was a place of peace and of quiet. A slow lazy river wove its way through lands of green and the air was alive with bird song.

It was a bright and living world I populated with many different animals and plants. I wanted a living world that grew and changed and where each day was something new for me.

It was my world and I was alone in it, walking through it; watching each new day and the changes it brought with it. I created seasons to see how the world and the living beat of it changed over time.

I had all I needed and I was alone there, with no-one to interrupt my thoughts as I walked, watching the days passing all around me. I thought I would be lonely, but I’ve never been lonely with myself. Crowds made me lonely; by myself I had all the company I needed.

Then, one night, she came to me in my dreams and took me by the hand to a world she had created inside my dreams; taking me down a long winding path to a house she’d built just for us.

The next day, out in my world, walking and watching the changes I realised I wanted her there with me, so I could show her my world as she had shown me hers.

Those Days When the Rains Came

Then there were all those days when the rains came. Those days when she sat staring out of her window feeling that all the days of her life were pouring down the gutter of the years like those raindrops. She would sigh and dream of a life beyond the view from her window in the high tower. A life beyond the thick forest that grew out on the edge of the open land between the castle where she watched her life washing away, beyond the distant mountains even that were, more often than not, lost deep inside the mists and clouds.

She would watch the people of the village and the castle hurrying about their lives, down below her tower, heads bowed under the relentless grey downpours that seemed to turn the whole world narrow, cold and damp.

One day, she thought, she would find her way through the maze of corridors, sneak past the sentries stationed there to bar her way, and find a way out of the castle and then across the moat and out beyond the village into that world. Perhaps, she thought, even finding a place – like those she had read about – where the rain didn’t always fall and where there would be someone who would want her for herself and not for her name and her status.

One day, she decided once more watching the endless rain, one day she would find the strength and the courage and break free from her tower and go find this new world she knew was out there, just waiting for her to find it.

In the Blue Skies of Her Eyes

There was a world I could see deep in the blue of her eyes. A world I could not reach, a land where the possible became the real and the real grew wings to fly across skies of the bluest of whatever could be.

Alison would sit on the window ledge, with the window in summer open in front of her and look out across the meadow at the back of the house, not really seeing the meadow, but letting her thoughts run across it until they took to the air in those blue skies of her eyes.

I sat there in the room behind her, sometimes watching her daydreaming eyes, sometimes looking down at the writing pad where I tried to capture a handful of dreams of my own.

My doodling, though, could never capture anything like the thoughts that kept Alison sitting on that window ledge watching a world of her own creation unfold its stories only for her.

Most days I struggled to make the words dance on the page. Mostly, a few words would stumble around the page, never really going anywhere, not doing anything.

Then I would look up to that window ledge with the open window and the summer behind it and I would imagine a woman sitting there with a strange world deep within the blue of her eyes. Then I wondered what that woman saw when she stared out through those world-filled eyes and then - after I’d named her Alison – then, I wrote it all down.

Newsflash!

Anyway, there she was with the crumpet almost in the ‘ready’ position and with the otter looking somewhat perturbed. Just then a Newsflash broke into one of those soap opera programmes she likes to watch whilst preparing the crumpets and getting the otter into position. I don’t know which soap opera it was, they all consist of over-loud stroppy women screaming either at each other or at some hapless bloke (in a female-driven world – such as soap opera - all blokes have to be hapless – it is a law) about some matter of overwhelming triviality.

Anyway, the newscaster was looking suitably grave, so we assumed that something of great import had happened….

Which it had….

Anyway, it was something of great import happening far away and so consequently there was little for us to do but to gawp at the endlessly repeating images of nothing much happening now that the matter of great import was over, meanwhile the news studio wheeled in expert after expert to give us their essential suppositions and speculations whilst some junior researcher deep in the heart of the newsroom rang around a contact list trying to find out what was really happening… if anything.

It was only then, ten minutes later, we realised that the otter – seeing us distracted by the TV - had grabbed the crumpet and made its escape and was now ensconced under the sideboard hastily licking up the last of the crumpet crumbs with what could only have been a triumphant grin on its be-whiskered face.

Sometimes, I think the very gods themselves conspire against me.

Keeping the Old Traditions Alive

Still, not that it mattered much once everything else had been put to one side… next to the scones, if you must know.

No, the other scones, the special scones kept fresh in an airtight container for erotic purposes.

Although, the erotic porpoises are rather partial to a fresh scone, providing it doesn’t get too waterlogged, or if there is seawater in the strawberry jam.

Then, once she was satisfied, which did make my jaw ache, especially in that position… and – well, at my age – the kitchen floor can be rather hard on the knees as well. However, having her satisfied is well worth the extra effort, because she can get a bit grumpy if left un-satiated for more than a few hours and – also – she is quite a dab hand at rolling pin wielding.

The latter being a form of hand-to-hand combat seemingly handed down the female line of her family for generations. After all, it was only a minor administrative error that prevented her great-grandmother from going to the front in WWI in 1914 with a regiment of like-minded ladies all armed with the deadliest rolling pins the military science of the time could provide. If they had gone, as the majority of historians now agree, then it really would have been all over by Christmas.

Still, though, we are lucky in that the rolling pin was not outlawed as a weapon of war – as it surely would have been had the Queen’s Own First Harridans – been let loose on the Boche… in which case, we wouldn’t even have the scones and then where would we be?

All out at sea with the porpoises, probably….

A Rather Nifty Hat

Anyway, there you are: one of the finest examples of a… well, one of those… er… things it has ever been my pleasu… that I’ve seen, certainly in this life, anyway.

Although, there was a time when I was in another life (much like this one, but with a wider choice of possible socks and a rather nifty hat… oh, and a rather splendid selection of cheeses) and , instead of messing around with… well, with things like that - whatever it turns out to be – I engaged in some rather unusual sexual activities with a couple of very nice young ladies who felt their horizons needed a certain amount of broadening in that area and – thenceforth – selected me as being the ideal gentleman to help them in their quest.

However, I’m reasonably certain you didn’t come here for talk of such matters, after all there are many disreputable places on these Interwebnets where such things occur, but I’m sure you would not be one to immediately head off there, rather than stay here patiently waiting for me to remember what it was – if anything – I was going to write about today. That is if I can stop thinking about that previous life and its rather remarkable cheese… and the nifty hat.

So, anyway….

Oh, you’ve already gone.

Two by Two

Well, obviously I did my best to put them out of the way and I made sure that neither of us mentioned them to any visitors to our house. Although, to be honest most people do – eventually – tend to notice that we seem to have a pair of giraffes wandering around in the back garden….

Eventually….

Even though most visitors are too polite to mention it first, there are some who find it difficult to hide their incredulity as normal good manners would usually dictate.

‘Fuck me! Is that a giraffe…? Bloody hell! There are two of them!’ Such comments do – quite often result in a conversational hiatus, especially if it is a warm day and, with the window open, one of the giraffes pops its head through the window to help itself to a cake or biscuit.

It can be awkward, especially if the guest or visitor spills their tea everywhere in the haste to get away from a giraffe seemingly insistent on poking its nose into all and sundry… especially the cakes.

Of course, then we have to explain why we have a pair of giraffes in our back garden and consequently we have to mention all the recent rain, Mr Noah from three doors down building his rather large boat in his back garden, and – therefore – having not enough room for the giraffes as well….

And… well, I presume you get the picture.

As do our visitors… eventually. Usually in the few seconds before remembering they have an urgent appointment elsewhere.

We – as we wave them away - just hope that urgent appointment isn’t with the Jones family just up the road, because their visitors do tend to be more than a little surprised when they first glimpse the pair of crocodiles wallowing in the bath.