The Day of the Battle

When the day came we were ready. Our forces were spread out on the hill overlooking the mist-shrouded valley. The air was cold, almost frosty. The grass was damp underfoot as we stood together, both wrapped in my heavy fur cloak.

We had spent the night together under that cloak; even then the cold metal of her charms and bracelets had felt cold against my naked skin as we moved together for what could so easily be the last time.

It is always the same on the edge of a battle like this, none of us knows what chance, mishap or even fate – for those who believe in such things – awaits us out there on the field. As the death of my father – the old king – showed, even victory does not necessarily mean survival. Torval, one of my oldest and –sometimes – wisest advisors was short of an arm from the same battle. A loss that cost him dear, far more than the agony of a lost sword arm. Still even now he looked haunted by the battlefields of his past, whether he wanted to return to them a whole man once more, or whether he wanted to flee I was not sure. Sometimes I doubted if Torval himself knew which he wanted. Still, though, he was loyal, as devoted to my service as he had been to my father when they rode into battles side-by-side and drank long into the night side-by-side too. I knew that without him I would not be here today, even though I did not want to be. But war is always inevitable, so we prepared for battle, all knowing it could be glory, or our last day.

Broken At Our Feet

Broken At Our Feet

Each step creates a universe around us
Where possibilities multiply like stars.
Each day falls back into history behind us
As each morning a new world is created.

All around us this new world grows
Out of what remains of the old life
We thought was the only one
We could ever want or need.

But it lies here broken at our feet
As we turn to walk away, apart.
Each heading off down new roads,
Each following the light of new stars,

And not looking back ever again
To face those memories that lie
Heaped up here waiting for history
To turn them into long forgotten times.

Life takes Time

It takes time. Life takes time and uses it, mostly when no-one is paying attention. One minute, you are young and there is a whole life waiting for you just around the corner, a life of possibility and opportunity. Then, one step around that corner and your life has somehow got behind you and you can feel that although you are not quite on the last mile, then its end draws ever closer, faster and faster.

Most of the time you do not notice you have stepped around that corner, you feel more or less the same; the world around you is more or less the same as it always has been. Then, when you turn to look at yesterday or the day before it stuns you to find it was thirty years ago. Those you knew then are now parents or grandparents themselves and your own children are now as old as you were then.

Back then, time to crept and crawled arthritically slowly. Even the summer seemed too far away, either just gone or coming up. Now, seasons flicker by like those calendars in old black-and-white films where each day is torn off by some howling gale and lost before you can even reach out a hand to grab it.

And now that last and final page of that calendar is getting ever closer and closer, you can feel it.

Day After Day

The alarm went off… again. This time, instead of hitting snooze I turned it off and glanced up at the closed curtains, seeing the morning light around their edges. Getting out of bed, I stubbed my toe on the book I’d dropped on the floor, just as I had the previous morning. Again, I reminded myself to clear all the junk off the bedside table so I didn’t have to keep dropping my book on the floor last thing at night and stubbing my toe on it again every morning.

I stumbled over to the closed curtains, opening them just wide enough to take a peek at what the world had in store for me. I saw it was raining, just like the day before. I noticed the woman from up the street passing by, again. I’d never learnt her name. She was walking head down in the rain, struggling with her umbrella, just like yesterday morning. It looked as though the wind had blown her umbrella inside out… again.

I turned from the window and found my way to the bathroom. As I was pulling the little tab of silver paper off the new tube of toothpaste, something struck me about the morning so far. But I couldn’t put my finger on what was troubling me.

Down in the kitchen, I put the kettle on to boil and switched on the radio. The news headlines didn’t change, the same stories as yesterday.

Then I remembered what had struck me as odd in the bathroom. I’d opened a new tube of toothpaste yesterday morning too.

Then the newsreader said something about the headlines for Wednesday 16^th March. Then, suddenly as the kettle boiled, I remembered he’d said exactly the same thing yesterday: the same day, the same date, just as the kettle had boiled.

Handbag Space

For a long time now physicists have been perturbed by the missing dark matter which is supposed to make up a large percentage of the matter in the universe. The main problem being that – up until now – no-one could find any trace of this matter anywhere in the universe.

However, thanks to a recent discovery this may all have now changed.

As physicist Perturbation Electronvolt explains:

As a colleague was about to perform an experiment, she realised she was a bit short of a couple of fundamental particles. I told her not to worry as I had a few quarks in my handbag – left over from a university physics department New Year party.

It was then, when I began to root about in the bottom of my handbag that I realised just where all the dark matter of the universe was.

Not only that, I found a bag of mint imperials I hadn’t seen for almost three years. Some of them were a bit fluffy, but they were still edible.

As other physicists around the world repeated her experiment it became clear that Electronvolt had indeed stumbled on the solution to the mystery of dark matter and where it all is, as well as helping reconcile Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity with the nature of mint imperials. This of course, has many ramifications for physics and reformulates our understanding of reality. As everyone knows, handbag space is more or less infinite, with every handbag capable of holding many times what its volume would lead us to believe. This is mainly due to the fact that each handbag is a portal to the many other dimensions – posited by string–theory – which make up our physical universe. We are not normally aware of these other dimensions, except when asked to retrieve an item from a woman’s handbag, where we discover the bag will contain almost everything, usually on top of the item we need.

Some physicists believe that once handbag space is better understood, it may be possible to explore the area further, and – finally - solve the riddle of dark matter once and for all.

That is if they can find a physicist brave enough to enter this strange new dimension.

Into the Shadowlands

In the end there were too many secrets. There was too much that was beyond control. Secrets generate secrets until they take over everything and what was once real becomes like a shadow reality; where a parallel life goes on in a parallel world.

All of which does seem a bit odd. It was as if what was once real has become shadow and what was once shadow was real; not only that, it was because of the shadow worlds that her life of secrets had become so unmanageable.

Once it was simple for Helen. There was the world and there was everything else that she knew didn’t exist, except in her mind and in those dreams that left her feeling so strange in the mornings. Dreams that made her feel as though she had slipped through some barrier into a world that lay at an odd angle to this one. It was a strange dreaming place, but to her it had more of a feel of where she belonged than this world she lived in, or, rather, merely existed in.

Then came the days she thought of as the time of transition, when more and more of that world from her dreams began seeping into what she had once seen clearly as reality. Reality itself grew soft around the edges, amorphous, as the other world took over, creating corners where there were none and bringing new worlds out of the shadows and quiet places.

More and more, Helen found herself drawn to these corners where the worlds intersected. Drawn to the shadows and quiet places where her other world waited for her, until that one day she took a deep breath, clenched her hands and stepped through into the Shadowlands.

The Valley

The Valley

I remember that valley
lost inside dense tangles
humid, damp, but soft
yielding inner secrets
to a gentle finger
or a soft tongue
probing possibilities
moist, glistening, warm
like a home to return to.

When it Changed

There is a point where everything changes, when what went before belongs to an old life and what comes after belongs to a new life. It is like taking a turning on a crossroads, where the new road takes you off at an angle from the old road. You were on that old road and now, because of that moment of choice at the crossroads, you are on a new road.

It was that moment when it changed.

I looked down at him, moments before he had been alive, and now his blood was draining from his lifeless body into the dust at my feet. I looked down at the sword in my hand, feeling the sudden weight of it. Moments before, when the body at my feet still lived, that sword had felt light, almost non-existent, an extension of my arm that was itself an extension of my intention, just as I'd been taught.

I felt the weight of a heavy hand on my shoulder and I turned.

'You did well,' Yondrel spoke softly.

'Y... you taught me well.' My voice came from some new place, as though in that moment between my opponent’s life and his death I'd moved sideways into some new world. When I'd dodged to avoid his blow, and instinctively responded with my own blow, something changed inside me. That blow, my instinctive response, killed him. His blood dripped off my blade as I held it up to see the bright spring sunlight glint off the blade.

'It is always strange... the first one.' Yondrel took the sword from my hand, knelt down to the body and wiped the blade clean on a loose scrap of the soldier's tunic. He sighed as he stood up and handed me back my sword. I could see the age in him.

'Does it get any easier?' My mouth felt dry as though I was the one who'd lost all the moisture from my body.

Yondrel shook his head and led me away, back to where our horses waited, sunning themselves in the sudden spring sun and tasting the sweet new grass.

The Possibilities of Stories

She had those secret moments that turned her inside herself and away from the world she lived in. It was as if her interior world, the world of dreams and possibilities, became more real to her than this grey shadow we trudge through going about our daily lives.

Her world was full of colour and roads that led to all kinds of wonders. It was a place where the possibilities of stories came true. It was a place where myth and legend became as real as the pulse of blood through her veins and beating in her heart. It was the place where she was truly alive.

All the people who knew her: her friends, work colleagues, even those she met on a daily basis, all knew she held some secret deep within her that no-one else could ever discover. The assistant at the coffee shop always had her order ready for her as he looked forward to her arrival each morning. Even though he tried to delay her leaving, he could never find a way through to her secret world. Some thought she had the deep tragedy of a long-lost love she could not forget, others though of some overwhelming personal tragedy she could not move on from.

None of them, not one of them, no-one knew what it was that kept her distant from them, what it was that kept her apart. She was the woman of mysterious deep secrets, at least until the day the stranger came along and shattered her world apart.

The Uses of Democracy

Anyway, not that we expected that much to be different. We at least expected there would be at least some, if only cosmetic, differences between the political tribes. That there would be choices between the candidates put up for our perusal when we are allowed to pretend that electing one over the others will somehow make any meaningful difference to what we like to call our lives.

Back in the old Soviet days, the Western media and political circus used to like to sneer at those one party states where the leader would be elected with a huge percentage of the popular vote. The leader would then go on blithely ignoring those (nominal) voters and go about doing whatever he and his cronies could get away with. Of course this is very different from our own – and they like to tell us much better system – where the leader gets chosen by the largest minority of those who can be arsed to vote. The winner of the election then going on to do whatever he and his cronies can get away with.

This, political analysts claim, proves the inherent superiority of our political system over all the others.

There are two main problems with democracy, of course, those being:

1./ The voters.

and

2./ Who they get to vote for.

Both aspects lead to us getting the sort of politicials that are the least offensive to the greatest number. We have only a ‘choice’ between bland cloned automatons that know nothing of the world beyond the incestuous and cosy political world and are barely human on any normal scale of measurement.

Still, could be worse. At least this way we are spared from rule by the deadliest of all political animals, those who believe in something. For those that believe in something are – so often - prepared to see so many others suffer and die as they march us on though these deserts towards their vision of a promised land.

The Unreal Ones

'She's almost like a real person.' Martin had that look in his eyes again as we hurried to grab a table, sipping our full pints as we weaved through the crowd.

'What?' I said as we sat at the table.

'She's almost... almost, mind... like a real person.'

I put my beer down on the table. 'She is a real person.'

'No.' Martin shook his head.

'No?'

'No.'

Sometimes I wonder about Martin. My mother always said there was something not quite right about people she called too clever for their own good. Although, she never met Martin, I'm sure she would hold him up as the perfect example of the type.

I looked up to see him sitting back, arms folded, looking smug. 'All right,' I said. 'Explain.'

'You and me are real people.' Martin looked around the bar.

'Me... I know I am. You... well' I sipped my beer.

Martin edged forward in his seat, leaning over the table towards me. He waved me towards him. We both leant forward over the table like co-conspirators.

'You, me... everyone in this bar, in this pub... we are real people.'

'Right.'

'People like her: Surianne Jameson, they are not real.'

'What you mean celebrities?'

'Amongst others.'

'Well, I can see that they... well, some of them at least live lives completely different from the way most of us lea....'

'No. You don't understand.' Martin shook his head. 'That is just the point; they don't lead lives at all. They are not real. They do not exist. Not here, anyway.'

I looked at him. Martin was capable of spectacular wind-ups at times. This was not one of them. At least, I thought so. 'You're not winding me up, taking the piss are you.'

Martin shook his head. 'I'll prove it.' He sipped his beer. 'Listen....'

So I did.

Waiting for Her

Waiting for Her

The words are hiding, and I cannot think.
The page sits empty, gloating, clean and smug.
It knows when I have trouble, and the words

will not behave, all playing endless games
of hide and seek. They hide behind as I turn
to look out through the window, see a day

go slipping past me, while I wait for she
who brings the words to come here back from where
she goes whenever she feels I don't pay

her the great respect and the attention
she obviously craves and so deserves.

Warning: False Weasels!

Well! Now here is the thing. You see those over there?

Well, they are NOT real ones!

Yes, it is true. They are false - imitation - weasels.

Is nothing sacred any more? Why, back in my day, there would have been a massive outcry, front-page stories in the press, TV and radio newsflashes and extensive in-depth coverage. As well as questions in Parliament, apoplectic letters to the editor, arguments in the pubs, and - quite possibly - even comments made in the cake shops.

Quite simply - we would not have stood for it.

But, these days, these days, well….

It seems - these days - that just anyone can walk around with any number of imitation small mammals without provoking even a murmur of disquiet or discontent. False weasels, imitation voles, counterfeit badgers, bogus field mice, invalid foxes, fictitious stoats, you name it. It seems anything goes in this day and age.

Well… I suppose it only goes to show. Times change and all that bollocks.

Still, if you ask me (and I'll still tell you, even if you don't) it will all end in tears. It is all well and good having all these imitations, but what will happen, for example, when you next need an authentic ferret for your next Ceremonial Immolation of the Estate Agent?

What then, eh?

What then?

Deserving

The sea whispered to the beach as though it knew some great secret it was eager to impart. We were together, side by side: me lying down, Julie sitting up with a book resting on her thigh. I was looking up at the sky, a slow cloud made its way across the blue as though it was lost and looking for somewhere it could call home.

Julie’s hand lay on my thigh, except for a few moments every thirty seconds or so, when she turned the page of the book she was reading. Then after a gap where I began to notice the absence of her hand, it was back, stroking the hair on my thigh before resting, proprietorial on my body again. My skin felt salty, hot, and Julie’s hand felt cool, soft, against me.

‘What?’ she said, turning to look down at me over the tops of her sunglasses.

‘Nothing,’ I said, not meeting her glance.

She sighed and closed her book, turning towards me. ‘There’s something,’ she said. ‘I know.’

‘This,’ I said, lifting myself up on my elbows so our faces were only a few inches apart.

‘What about it?’

‘Do we deserve it?’

Julie took her sunglasses off, screwing her eyes up at the sudden brightness. ‘Of course we deserve it.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘But….’ I said. ‘We got this…’ I made a gesture that encompassed the beach, the bluest sea I’d ever seen, the almost cloudless sky and the hotel that lay just at the edge of the beach. ‘…by killing people.’

Julie sighed and picked up her book with one hand whilst putting her sunglasses back on with the other. ‘But, they deserved to die,’ she said.

A Scent of Shampoo

Her head was – for a short while – pressed against my chest. By lowering my head, I could bury my nose in her hair. It smelt of some sort of flowers, some brand of shampoo, I suppose. For just a moment, though, I could imagine us lying together in some meadow somewhere on a day in the long summer school holiday.

Together, as I'd always thought the two of us should be.

Then, a moment or two later, she sniffed and snuffled and eased herself away from me. My arms, that had just been holding her, as I'd always wanted to hold her, fell to my sides. She turned away from me without looking up at me, wiping her eyes and nose with a tissue.

I felt I should say something, but I've never known what to say, or what to do, in such situations. It had even been Claire herself who had stumbled into my embrace as I stood there, powerless and embarrassed by her tears.

I thought, helplessly, of the moment at that party when if only I'd leant forward and given Claire that kiss she was – I now realised – waiting for, then she would not be here now crying over some other boy. Instead we'd be together, perhaps in that summer meadow, because I knew I would never make her cry.

The Naked and the Dead

I looked down at myself. I was naked. This was strange. As far as I could remember I’d just reached over to turn the light on, so I could finish my book. Then I must have fallen back asleep or something, because it was - it seemed – long past dawn and it was already light outside.

I must have slept all night in my chair, but this didn’t explain how I was here, standing up across the other side of the room… and naked.

I wondered if I’d gone insane and this was some manifestation of a loss of lucidity.

Then I looked around and saw myself, still fully dressed, sitting in my chair behind me.

I looked down at my naked self, then at myself in the chair, just sitting there.

Just sitting there… and dead.

I was dead.

‘I am dead,’ I said, surprised to hear my own voice. ‘Dead and naked.’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ a voice said.

I turned.

She was young… well, younger than me anyway, and she was naked too.

She saw me not looking and laughed. ‘Like I said: you’ll get used to it. After all, why should your clothes die too?’

‘I am dead, then?’ I repeated it too myself too. ‘Naked and dead.’ I was so bewildered by it all, it didn’t occur to me to ask what she was doing there, in my house, there at my death.

It wasn’t until much later that I learnt it had been her house too, and – unlike mine – her death had been no accident with a faulty-wired reading lamp, she had been murdered.

At least, so she said.

Slight-Incline Theory

These days Toblerone Stoatrevolver is widely regarded as the instigator of what later become known as Slight-Incline Theory. Initially, it was a theory which went some way towards explaining almost nothing of any great interest. Yet it could be called upon by any journalist in desperate need of an article to fill the spaces between the adverts. The journalist could use it to pad out an article on anything from the mating habits of small woodland mammals right up to the mating habits of Hollywood celebrities. Not that – as was later discovered – there was all that much difference between the mating habits of both sets of creatures, as was originally assumed. Especially so when the Hollywood celebrities had a habit of creeping off into the undergrowth with each other at various inopportune times – much to the squirrels’ consternation.

Stoatrevolver's Slight-Incline Theory, like many other briefly fashionable pseudo-mathematical theories, was – in fact – not so much a theory more a way of getting media attention for a rather neglected university academic in an unfashionable area of study. Much as with other such theories which grab the attention of the media, Slight-Incline Theory was not so much famous for what it did explain, which was almost nothing. Its worth lay in what other newsworthy articles a journalist could shoe-horned it into. Mainly to give those aforesaid media pieces a thin veneer of academic respectability, even if – on further perusal that academic rigour was almost – or completely – non-existent. It is for this reason alone that Toblerone Stoatrevolver and his Slight-Incline Theory will be remembered, but only for a short while.

Exploring the Wilderness

Even so, it was something of a surprise to find it where we did. After all, the expedition had been underway for little over a month. It had been hard, difficult, making our way through the unmapped wilderness. We considered ourselves fortunate that we'd only lost one of our party who'd gone back to the kitchen, so she said, 'to make us all a cup of tea' and hadn't been seen since. However, from our - admittedly somewhat sketchy – understanding of the arcane mysteries of the TV schedules, we had some idea of where she'd gone. About the fate of that promised cup of tea, its whereabouts is unknown to this day.

For those of us still in the bewildering complexity of the exploration, though, we had no alternative, but to carry on deeper and deeper into the unknown.

It was getting late now and that small square of light that still remanded however distant it grew as we moved deeper into the darkness and the unknown. It reminded us of a calm, rational and ordered world that lay beyond this unexplored hell-hole. The light back there was fading fast and we knew that if we did not find the promised treasure soon, it would be turning as dark out there as it was in here and none of us wanted that.

There were rumours there was still someone trapped up here from the last expedition into the attic. Somewhere amongst all these mysterious boxes, chests, suitcases and other containers with their unknown and mystifying contents, my long-lost father was up here somewhere, still trying to fix a TV aerial that had long superseded by modern technology.

We were glad that we did not find him, because if he discovered that England had not won the World Cup since 1966, and that all his efforts had been in vain... well, sometimes it just isn't worth carrying on.

However, she did eventually turn up with the promised cup of tea... and some biscuits, so it wasn't all in vain after all, even though by then we'd all long forgotten what we came up here to look for.

The Sea’s Dominion

The Sea’s Dominion

Down along the shoreline the tide
Makes edgy progress, advancing
Like some timid army into unsure ground.

But still the walls of the castles crumble
Under its unwavering assault
Until all the free land is swallowed

Into the sea’s new dominion,
And is lost beneath the waves
Falling over each other as they race

Each eager to throw itself hard against
The resisting rocks, until that cliff falls too

Leaving the land bitten off; chewed
And digested until everything, once more,
Returns to the sea we once escaped from.

Undocumented Features

Well, there you have it. Not much of one, I'm afraid, but with the amount of money you are prepared to pay, that's just about the best you are going to get.

Be careful with it though, because this model has an undocumented feature where if you use it as intended, following the manufacturer’s usage guide, the end falls off.

Still, it was designed by a Designer – for what that's worth – and not, as first impressions suggest, a blind woodland mammal who suffered some loss of dexterity in its front paws due to some rural accident, possibly involving an over-zealous poacher and an inhumane method of trapping.

Still, though it was plenty of functions – some of which some people may find very occasionally useful. That is if they can discover how those functions work and can get them to work without those functions constantly trying to update themselves, download intrusive and unwelcome advertising and offering to broadcast you geographical location to every violent mugger, indignant fundamentalist and recently-released sex criminal in a twenty-mile radius. Besides that, most of them will also attempt to update your significant other's Facebook and Twitter status with what exactly you and that person of undisclosed gender were up to down on the canal tow-path at around midnight last Thursday, when you claimed you were out visiting elderly relatives.

Still, though, it only takes slightly less than three weeks for the batteries to recharge enough to give you nearly 12 seconds of usability, so it is a vast improvement on the last model.

Overall rating: 8.33333 out of 10.

The Warrens

The corridor was damp and dark, twisting around the base of the towers. It joined with steps up and down and various other irregularities made with the additions and subtractions of the centuries as bits were added, taken away or changed in the fabric of the great building itself.

At one point, it had been a castle with a small hamlet, spilling out from inside it that became a village and then a town. Then, for various reasons lost to memory, defences were extended around the village, then the town. As the castle grew into a large and ungainly building, houses, workshops, inns and other buildings merged into the fabric of the castle itself until it became this bewildering maze of tunnels, corridors, passageways and buildings within buildings.

It was said, by those who could be bothered to talk of such things, that there was no-one still alive who knew their way around anything but a small part of the sprawl. It was also said that whole families, whole dynasties could grow thrive and then dwindle away in parts of the great stone conurbation completely unknown to other such similar families but a few corridors, streets, passageways, away.

It was even said that in some of the more outlying satellite suburbs and warrens that the people there had no knowledge of the king and his court. Some claimed those outlying zones paid their taxes only to local lords and barons who ruled a segment of corridors patrolled at the borders by their own soldiers.

The old king had spent the final decades and years of his rule himself confined to a few narrow corridors and a few halls around his throne room and royal bedchambers. This meant some of the more outrageous stories about the disintegrating sprawl from castle to fiefdoms beyond the control of the king, could be true. But no-one knew, at least until the old king died.

His queen, once she had disposed of her rivals and their princely progeny after her husband’s death, decided she would like to have a cohesive and thriving kingdom to hand down to whichever of her sons – eventually – deposed her. So, she began preparing for the changes to come as soon as her husband departed his sprawling kingdom for the final time.

Growing Respectability

It seems that it is now possible - for those that find it necessary - to have all their personal small rotating devices attached to the small furry mammal of their choice by fully-trained professionals in the comfort and safety of their own home.

This is quite an improvement over earlier times where such tasks were often only performed by small trades-people who seemed - almost exclusively - to locate their professional premises in the most salubrious parts of the local commercial district. The kind of place where tattoo parlours, second-hand goods shops, pawn shops, porn emporia, lawyer offices, estate agents and other such enterprises of dubious legality and questionable ethical standards gathered together. Huddled together in worn-down, half-forgotten areas where only the brave or reckless would dare to venture after darkness fell. Places where streetlights, law and order, or even a nice cake shop, were little more than distant memories, met with cynical laughter tinged with regret.

So, now, as articles and features in fashion and style magazines featuring celebrity endorsement after celebrity endorsement raise its profile, it seems that having one's personal small rotating devices attached to the small furry mammal of one's choice is - at long last - escaping the dank ghetto of the dark and seedy and becoming respectable at long last.

The Wizard's Robes

'I'm a wizard,' I said.

'Oh, really?' She didn't look that impressed. 'I suppose those are your wizard's robes, then?'

'Yes.'

'What's that?' she pointed.

'That's my wizard's staff.'

'Yeah, right.'

'Really.'

'So, if you are a wizard, then, where is your pointed hat.'

'It's a metaphor.'

'What?'

'The pointed hat, and the staff – they're euphemisms.'

'What, you mean?' she pointed.

'I nodded.

'Show me.'

'Pardon?'

'Show me.'

'Are you sure... I mean we hardly know each other.'

'You say you are a wizard, and you know what I am. It's not as if I haven't seen one before, whatever name you give it, or what you claim it is a metaphor for.... Although, in my experience they are more magic wand than wizard's staff.'

I pulled the robe over my head and let it float to the floor.

'Now....'

I could see she was impressed.

'Now, that is a staff, definitely not a wand.'

'I know spells.' I grinned.

'If my boyfriend had one like that he wouldn’t now be my ex-boyfriend.' She smiled at me.

'Your turn,' I said.

'Prepare yourself,' she smiled as she took a few steps towards me. 'I know some real magic.'

The Alien Artefact

There it was, resplendent in front of us; as big and as purple as the biggest – and purplest – thing in the known universe... and Luton. Of course, it amazed us all – shocked and amazed us – but that didn't stop us walking up to it.

There were some amongst the crowd who wanted to touch it. In fact, I suppose, deep down we all wanted to touch it. There is, it seems, some deep instinct within all humanity to want to touch something so big and so purple, especially when it throbs... throbs with some need, some desire, for someone to touch it.

It was purple.

Purple is such a purple colour too.

And it was big....

And throbbing....

I know what you are thinking....

Yes, it was.

Right away the world's governments realised they had no options and couldn’t wiggle their way out of their primary duty of protecting their citizens, not this time. This meant the question on everyone's mind was: what kind of alien civilisation would need a marital aid, a sex aid, a vibrator, this size?

And what would they do to us when they – as they surely must – come... arrive?

Those that had actually read Gulliver's Travels and, especially that bit with Gulliver and the giant women, were either very worried or... in some cases, very excited... at the prospect of these giant women with their obviously oversized appetites landing on our planet.

The environmentalists, of course, worried about the size of the batteries it needed and where they would be dumped when exhausted. Others wondered whether the Earth had enough generating capacity if it needed rechargeable batteries, while others – mainly those concerned with flood defences – wondered just how orgasmic these alien beings could be.

Others hoped it was just some sort of alien advertising stunt that had gone wrong.

While the rest of us just watched the skies and waited....

Social Media and Society

Yesterday, social media darling Cleverly Pointless called for a 24–hour boycott of the social media site TwatFace, claiming that some of the users of the site are not as totally in awe of her genius, good looks and amazing sexual technique as she thinks they should be. Pointless called for the boycott as she claims the people who follow (known as ArseKissers) her messages (known as Ramblings because each one must be a minimum of 2000 words long) on the site have not been as obsequiously fawning over her as much as she feels is her right.

As Pointless Rambled:

[…]Some people just don’t seem to realise just what a modern media genius I am. After all, I have already published several books about me and my wonderful lifestyle and amazing sexual technique, which absolutely everyone should be completely jealous of. Yet, only 2000 of my regular ArseKissers have Repoked my recent Ramblings. I’m beginning to think that none of them deserve to be on the same Internet as me. Therefore, I have no choice but to stop Rambling for 24 hours to make them see the error of their ways.[….]

Asked to comment the creator of TwatFace, Scratch Buggerberk said:

These people just don’t seem to understand that I created TwatFace just to enable us all to fling abuse at random strangers. I first came up with the idea for TwatFace when driving my car and I was cut-up by a knob-end at a roundabout. After all, we all stand at the supermarket checkout or in the Post Office queue muttering under our breath at the idiocies of other customers and the uselessness of the staff. And we all make comments to our friends and families about the dress-sense of random strangers on the street. Also, we all love to shout at the twats on the telly, don’t we? So I created TwatFace to enable people to fling those insults out at the world in general, and all those self-important attention-whores in particular.

However, many social media celebrities such as Cleverly Pointless are taking part in the 24 hour boycott of TwatFace, demanding that there be special exemption from abuse rules for those who regard themselves as somehow above the mere proles. However, they also demand that they - the social media celebrities – must still be free to disparage the hoi-polloi as and when they see column-inches in jumping aboard the latest media-invented moral panic bandwagon.

Coming Back from the War

It was new. We thought we were both too old for anything new in our lives. We had long given up on anything coming along, bringing change, to make our lives new again. We had both grown older, living different lives, far away from each other, neither of us knowing what had happened to the other.

I could remember the time when I had taken the train out of her life, leaving her behind on that station.

I had made her promise not to wait for me. Both of us knew the war meant many of us would not be coming back. For those of us who did return, though, what we returned to would not be the same as we’d left behind.

The world after the war was a very different place. When we returned, what remained of what we’d marched off to defend was ruined and broken. The people we’d marched off to defend were ruined and broken too. All with the lines of war in their faces, just as our faces betrayed the ghosts of the battlefields that haunted us, even long after the war was over.

I did not come back for a long time. For many months – over a year – I patrolled the corridors of the hospital learning how to be alive again. Always seeing the faces of those I’d left behind in my dreams and in the shadows, filling the silences with their screams and telling me the stories of how they’d died, twisting in agony and fear.

The old home town was a shattered shell when I found my way back there. It was all ruins and wreckage, amongst which the ruins and wreckage of those we’d left behind created a kind of life for themselves. They were more akin to rats and scavengers than the proud people who had waved us off to war.

All things end eventually, even the war had ended, much to the surprise of those of us looking around in wonder that we’d survived. Eventually too, some prosperity returned as new towns grew out of the wreckage and the people became less feral and slowly turned human again.

Then, one day, walking down the reinvigorated High Street, I saw her once again. It was as if the long war years and the post-war decades had never been as I looked into those eyes that had held only tears of goodbye when last we’d kissed. It was like something new, like a flower found blooming on the bomb-sites, as if the tired, ruined, world we lived in had found a way to begin again.

UK's Newest TV Talent Show

There we have it, probably one of the least interesting things ever placed in front of a live audience at a televised Talent show, but viewing figures for this – the latest TV early Evening extravaganza have been higher than the actual UK population level, something which has delighted TV executive's but rather disappointed those mathematicians who like to believe in such numbers having a vague correspondence to reality.

However, despite the surreal viewing figures, this episode had proved conclusively that Britain's Got Pebbles is the television success story of this decade, easy out performing both Celebrity Rock Salt on Ice and The Brick, thus becoming the UK's most popular geology-based talent show.

Critics were at first sceptical that the viewing public would find talent shows featuring stones, rocks, pebbles and even house-bricks compelling entertainment. However, with the evidence gathered from other such programmes, it became increasingly clear that the viewing public would watch any old dross providing it was on in the early evening, it was fronted by a superannuated TV has been from the golden age of TV drivel assisted by a blonde with a cleavage and that the viewers could vote for or against something or other.

Thus was the success of Britain's Got Pebbles almost assured. Only time will tell however, if the format will go on to success in other countries and thus ensure that it continues to make money for its creators and therefore continues to appear on our screens for the next few foreseeable centuries.

A Real Bargain

Perhaps it was not meant to be utilised in such a manner, especially by one with such a cavalier attitude towards instructions manuals. Still, in the end, it did all work out for the best – more or less. Despite still constantly questioning whether it should be worn off the shoulder as she has it set up at the moment, she does think that – on the whole – it was quite a bargain, reduced as it was by 75% to clear.

However, bargain or not, we still aren't totally certain what it actually is... or how it should be used. As I've intimated, although it did come with the box, USB lead, a grommet and a barometer, there were no actual instructions as such with the device. It had just a badly-printed sheet of flimsy paper featuring several diagrams which display – as far as we are able to discern – someone trying to wallpaper a large mammal; possibly a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros, but definitely not a water buffalo, despite what the wife's sister says.

Still, once we'd worked out how to open the battery compartment and thumped it on the table a few times, it did buzz – somewhat desultorily into life... briefly, before changing the TV channel and emitted an ultrasonic signal that made the dog hide behind the sofa.

However, once we do – eventually – work out what it is, what it should be used for and why it seems to attract so many low flying aircraft - and feral cats - we are sure that it will turn out to be the bargain we hoped for when we bought it.

In God’s Name

We all wore the disguises as we mingled around the party. No-one there knew me, although there were many guesses made about the identity of each of the people there, no-one could know, not for certain.

This was lucky for me. I was not invited, not asked to come, even though the party was – ostensibly – in my name.

I have learnt over the years I’ve been coming to these parties that even the priests who act and – supposedly – serve in my name no longer believe in me, if they ever did. As far as I can tell, too, most of them apparently assumed I never existed either.

To them I am just some abstract principle that they use to give authority to their pronouncements and proclamations.

To the ordinary people, who I walk amongst, down in the streets and the markets my name often is taken in vain: a curse against the arbitrary iniquities and calamites an indifferent world forces upon them.

I never wanted to be a god, never particularly wanted to be immortal. Although, omnipotence interested me: even though being all-knowing is not as good as it sounds. It gets a bit dull to be honest. I did think being all-seeing would be good, back in my youthful naivety – now I have seen all I no longer want to look. If I really did all I’m blamed for, then I think the people have a right to curse me and use my name as a curse.

Expertise in the Field

Well, there she was, holding it with all the well-trained dexterity of the expert, even though, up until then very few of us had been aware that she had any expertise in the field, or the garden – come to that.

Still, it is rare that one does come across an archaeological find of this magnitude in a typical (possibly) domestic garden. After all, there is usually little in a garden that has not already been dug up – and - occasionally – hastily reburied, especially under the patio – at least if contemporary murder mysteries are to believed.

This, however, was nothing so macabre. Hence the children's complete lack of interest in it when the great historical significance of the item was pointed out to them. But that's the way with kids, if it can't be used to dismember someone in inventive and very cruel ways, they'd much rather return to their games console, or torturing insects – and - sometimes – both.

Still, as my darling wife held the item in her hands, I could not but be overcome with awe, wonder and surprise. Especially as it's near pristine condition, despite the conditions in what we sometimes call our 'garden'.

Yes, the garden fork we had both presumed lost for ever was discovered by my own dear wife lost in the depths of the undergrowth. On discovering it she pounced on it with a glee not often seen outside some of the more unusual bargains in the January sales, as she uncovered it and brought it back to me, claiming that not only had she found the long-lost garden implement, but that – miracles of miracles – it was still very much usable.

So, after admiring it and wondering at her finding it in such good – and usable – condition, she sent me off to the back of the garden to use it.

Next time, though, I promised myself, I'd hide it where she would never find it.

Awaiting his Pleasure

Toni waited.

She was used to waiting.

She was – after all – there for him, waiting for him. It was a warm summer day, but the sun had shifted, turning where she stood – still waiting – from sunlight to shade. She shivered and her nipples hardened. She looked down at them, from one to the other. He liked her nipples – so he’d said, once. The way their darkness contrasted with the light skin of his fingers. The way the nipples grew under his touch as though he brought them to life.

There were many other parts of Toni that his touch brought to life, brought to life in a way that no other man ever had, or ever could. That was why Toni waited for him, waited patiently for him. That was why she stood there naked in the centre of the room awaiting his return.

Just the thought of him coming back, coming into the room and being there naked in front of him, open to him, available to him and his whims, made her wet. She shivered and her nipples hardened even more. Toni had an urge to stroke just one finger down her stomach, down further into the warm and wet, but she knew she could not do it the same way he could. His fingers were magic; they could weave spells over her body, enthral and enrapture her with his single touch.

So she was prepared to wait. Prepared to await his pleasure, because she knew that his pleasure lay entwined with her pleasure in such a way as to make it almost impossible to tell where her pleasure ended and his began, or where his ended and Toni’s began.

So Toni waited, shifting from foot to foot as the warm and the wet grew between her thighs into an anticipation that made every fluttering of the breeze outside into a foretelling of his step in the hallway beyond the closed door of the room where she waited for him.

The Pork Pie and Society

Of course, once you have the pork pie firmly grasped in the right hand, all manner of things become possible that were not possible beforehand. - The Pork Pie and Society. It was – probably – those very opening words from his seminal masterpiece, that made Ordinance Quimtrimmer the most famous philosopher of his age. Up until then, academic philosophy had been dominated by the Logical-sandwichists, who – famously – believed that all philosophical problems could be solved by a decent sandwich – although there were several competing schools of though who argued over which of the many varieties of sandwiches was the ideal sandwich – an idea that can be traced back to Plato's idea of Forms. Although, it wasn't until the scientific age that a true philosophical understanding of the nature of sauces, chutneys and relishes – up to and including sweet pickle - was put on a much more rigorous philosophical footing, thus enabling the sandwich to take its place at what the logico-sandwichists claimed was the heart of philosophical eating.

However, when Quimtrimmer came along, claiming that it was the pork pie, not the sandwich, that was the true philosophical lunch, chaos broke out in the normally staid world of the academic philosophy departments of the Western world. Thus bringing about the significant revolution in lunch and snack-based eating habits that has transformed the post-war Western world, most would say to the greater benefit of civilisation as a whole.

Others, though, point to the Pot Noodle and despair.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Of course, there are times when it seems the whole world is arrayed against us. Such times when the very car park of possibility seems as o'er brimmed as a summer afternoon's rain gauge, but still we soldier on, mainly because there is bugger all else to do. The world is against us, we ought to know that because there is no way of winning, we will run out before time does and - even in the unlikely event that the world ends before we do, we'll still be buggered because we need the world more than it needs us.

Still, there is no need to be disheartened – well, there is, but we won't go into that – as this world is stuff full of so many splendid things, up to and including some rather wonderful cheeses and the possibility of getting our hands on a halfway decent pint. Add to that the slim chance that there may even – in the not too distant future – something almost worth watching on the telly, then the world begins to look not all that bad and life almost worth living – at least compared to the alternative.

Not only that, we should also bear in mind that there is a good chance that one day very soon a politician is going to do something so unbelievably stupid that it will be enough to keep the entire population amused for weeks into the future until that politician is - eventually – forced to resign. Then we can all wake up the next morning with the knowledge that – at least for now – there is one less of the bastards screwing it all up for the rest of us.