New Book Out Now: The Theory of Car Parks

The Theory of Car Parks

The title piece of this great new collection features an historical appreciation of the great car park theorist; Heinrich Von Rectangle, his life, work and tragic untimely end.

In over a hundred other essays, a wide variety of subjects of interest and fascination to the modern reader are also discussed:

Such as:

The latest the latest European Union Working Time Directives .and how they relate to the employment circumstances of the undead.

In science, the ramifications of the Biscuit Tin Event Horizon are explored in an attempt to aid our understanding of the physical forces that make biscuits, pies and other such foodstuffs irresistible.

There is also some very exciting research with throws new light on the development and history of the spoon.

This book also features a report on the new TV phenomenon taking the world by storm that is Live Celebrity Woodworking.

Along with:

An appreciation and celebration of the cult film: 2030: A Lingerie Odyssey which featured the world’s first lingerie-wearing supercomputer.

An essay celebrating the Victorian inventor who famously developed Spadgecock’s Wildfowl Distractor.

A look forward to what will undoubtedly be this year’s film of the year: The Penguin Always Eats Omelettes.

An appreciation of on of the forgotten classics of Romantic poetry in: Ode to a Stickleback and Romanticism.

A study of the role played by the British army’s use of camouflage pastry to bring about the end of the First World War.

Along with articles and pieces on other similar fascinating subjects, such as: Full-Frontal Cookery, The Great Cheese Conspiracies, International Celebrity Underwater Cheese Grating, The Sensual Arts of the Secret Accountancy Sect, The Unauthorised Use of a Banjo, Post-War Extreme Sports and much, much more.

Available here (UK) or here (US) for the Kindle.

Household Security Concerns

Obviously, if you are considering using one of the more rapacious predators as some form of additional household security, then you should always make sure they clean up all the bloodstains off your doormat when they have finished discouraging unwelcome callers, otherwise you could end up with scavengers, such as a flock of vultures perched on your guttering, thus reducing property values in the locality and – in the case of a well-fed flock of vultures – risk of some damage to your guttering.

This did actually, turn out to be the case in one cul-de-sac in Tewksbury recently visited by a group of utility salespeople hoping to convert the residents from their current utility supplier to the one represented by the sales team. Unfortunately, no-one told them about either the pride of lions at number 32, or – for that matter - number 17’s rather hungry leopard. Although, one of the more altruistic members of the sales team did manage to warn his colleagues about the piranhas in number 12’s garden pond with his final scream.

Unfortunately, however, as most of the residents of the cul-de-sac were at number 27 for a swinger’s party, none of the residents had time to clear up the remaining body parts left by the various guard animals. Consequently, a large flock of vultures descended on what had been – up until then (apart from the screams of the mortally-wounded, of course) a quiet residential street.

Later estimates put the damage to the guttering of the various residences at several thousand pounds, as well as considerable vulture-related damage to quite a few flowerbeds and a broken front garden gate, as well as a rather unwelcome visit from a local TV news team.

However, as luck would have it, by the time the TV crew arrived the leopard was starting to feel a bit peckish again.

Thursday Poem: Departure

Departure

I shall stand on top of the distant hill
and look down on these lands. I shall
walk away, letting these times go
like those warm fingers that rise up

to grasp out of a welcoming bed.
I go with weary reluctance
and I go slowly with regret.
I hope not to look back with longing.

Leaving is all we allow ourselves.
I have good enough reasons
and I see the stories that I can tell
about all I left behind and lost.

I shall stand on top of that hill
to see a new dawn’s sun rising
before I leave for a distant place
to learn the art of remembering.

50 Sheds of Grey

‘It is the inalienable right of every free—born Englishman to have a shed of his own.’ Such were the closing words of Winston Churchill’s victory speech at the end of the Second World War, when to the horror of the male populace, including many still in uniform overseas, the full awfulness of the German blitz’s destruction of British garden sheds was finally admitted by the UK government.

Since that time though, the erotic lives of British men have improved immeasurably with it now common for nearly all home-owning adult males in the British Isles to have a shed of their own to use for their own personal erotic purposes.

Of course, it has long been understood that for the male the shed plays the role that the boudoir, Hollywood film stars, romantic and erotic writing, chocolate and the intimate personal massager play for a women; especially if the man has a set of tools in his shed that he can use, fondle or – even – display or demonstrate to other men upon whom he bestows the honour of allowing into his personal shed space.

Until the advent of the e-reader, however, this use of the shed for male erotic purposes had been a rather quiet, surreptitious and suburban pastime. However, since the release of E.B.G Henry’s 50 Sheds of Grey, first as an e-book now as a traditionally published book, all that has changed as Sheddism has now – at long last - become mainstream.

Capturing Her Youth

There are times when the day crystallises around a moment, a moment when time becomes solid, a permanence in an otherwise fleeting world. It is as if time carves certain moments from the transient, giving them permanent form in the mind. Times I will always turn to when I remember… especially when I remember her.

She was long ago and it was spring, spring on the turn into summer. I was young, of course, but she was not. All I had was still unformed, verging on the possible. She was stumbling towards that time where life becomes a time of less looking forward and more about looking back.

She said, once, and only half-joking that she ‘wanted to recapture my youth,’ she smiled as she turned to me, running a finger down my chest. ’…and you are that youth I’ve captured.’ Then she kissed down the path her finger had traced, as I turned and lay back letting her hand, her tongue, her mouth capture all my youth.

She had a life, of course, husband and children, even though the children were mostly grown, and – at times – I felt myself replacing both husband and children in her otherwise slowly-emptying life. As she said, some other time, as we lay together down by the river: ‘My husband left me years ago. The trouble is he never actually got around to moving out. We live our lives like two trains on parallel tracks, sometimes passing each other on our routes to different places… occasional sometimes even meeting for a few moments in a station or train yard, but other than that….’ She turned away to lie on her back and watch the clouds, and that was the moment that crystallised, became an unforgettable memory, as I realised that we would both be one of those passing clouds in each other’s lives, there and then gone.

Monday Poem: Here is the Place

Here is the Place

Here is the place we stood
to see the world begin.
Here is the time we took
to get to know the world.

Now all that is gone and lost
and the days begin without us.
We do not need the ceremonies
of morning. We know the sun

will rise without us. We do not
need to be there to witness
its rebirth from the distant horizon,
coming over the hillsides

and out of the morning mists
and shadows to meet us.
These days we do not need
a shadow to touch the earth

or to let hot sacrificial blood
seep deep into the ground,
even though too much blood
still gets wasted in the dust.

The Dark Forest Path

The path led off into the trees, deep into the shadowed darkness of the dense wood. She knew, she had been told enough times, what happened to girls who walked off into the woods, but she was – she thought – no longer a girl. She was a woman, especially since that evening after the village barn dance when the woodman’s son had taken her by the hand and led her out, away from the dancing, and they had laughed and fallen together into the hay where he had stopped laughing and become urgent, hot, insistent.

No, she was no longer a girl.

Anyway, there was a path, and those old stories only ever told of the bad things happened to those girls who strayed from the path. So she set off with determination in her step, a determination that faltered somewhat as the darkness under the trees seemed to rob the air of some quality it had out in the open.

It seemed as though the trees were arching over her head to steal the light of the sun away, that the soft green darkness was a blanket the forest threw over her as she stepped further and further away from that dwindling area of bright sunlight and on into the woods.

She shivered, not knowing what to expect, telling herself that those old stories were… well, just old stories. She didn’t believe in stories anyway, stories were just for children and old women sitting around the fire in the dark.

No, stories were for the others, not for her.

Then, some new story rose suddenly out of the dark shadows. A dark and terrible story grabbed her, pulling her down into the undergrowth, taking her far, far away from the world she knew. Grasping her tight in its claws, the story took her into the deep and the dark; far into a dark, ancient, story she had never heard before and would never hear again.