29th January 2024

Ariel is having a word

In ‘the Tempest’ , Ariel is a kindly airy spirit who helps Prospero punish his enemies and then make peace. After that Ariel is set free.

We never really know what the spirit thinks but I imagine a slightly tougher Ariel, at some time in the future, watching what we have done to the world and not being very sympathetic. 

In the play, Ariel sings a beautiful song one in which something that seems bad can ‘sea change into something rich and strange’.  My Ariel sounds more like this:

I’ve been around before. We all have. Us, I mean, not you. I don’t know about you. You make such a mess, concrete and clay, mate. Concrete and clay. Ditches and dirt. Oil and spoil. And now the winds are here for good. Good for me. Not you. I’m on the wing, mate. Hither and thither. Fleet of wing, that’s me. Tucked inside the whirling piles of air, surfing the storms, blind in the cloud and then whooping down to see your floods  and your muddy halls and broken homes, your soggy tents and rag-bound legs and hollow eyes.

You had eyes, so you could have seen. You could have seen the storm coming. Tough. I was pinned in a pine and that was tough. No pine there anymore.

I sometimes think, should I help, offer a hand? Old times sake, maybe. But we just don’t care about the same sort of things. Not really. We, I and my fellow spirits, like fire and air. But the air is hard to breathe now, for you that is. We can sip from the  high and the clean, the deep blue above the clouds.

You’re stuck.

I do feel sorry. In my way, that is, because I don’t have your human feelings. But there are so many of you, all lost, but still pushing on, looking for a place where you’ll be safe. Where you can lie down and sleep and not be swept away.

I do feel sorry.

But  sorry’s not enough, not enough to mend your mess and anyhow, I’m off, on the wing, free. No chains on me, mate.

And, truth to tell, I was never your mate , was I?

Why?

Because you didn’t think.

You never do.

7th October 2022

What did Aunty Dil do?

The storm rattled and pulled at Dil’s old caravan. The rain drilled down, rattling at the window, and dancing in steel-tipped tap-shoes on the roof; it knocked and tugged; it slipped and ran in streams; it nuzzled at the cracks round the door; it seeped and nudged and eased; it did everything it could to find a way in. She could see drops like tears glistening under the letter box, and she pulled her skinny moon and star blanket up to her chin.

She hadn’t done anything wrong, had she?

As for the wind well it whistled and whined and it barged at the caravan, trying to shove it off its mooring. It was like a bad tempered giant, that wind was: bullnecked, with hands like hammers and legs thick as tree stumps. 

She held tight to the blanket, and watched the door as her home rocked and rattled like a tin boat on a fierce and high sea. Her little lamp swung to and fro and shadows flitted about the room like frightened dancers.

What had she done? What had she done?

13th June 2022

My house left me

The house just got up and walked

It was such a strange sight. Of course no one saw it but me. But it still happened. Scout’s honour. Last Tuesday, I was walking back down through the village with some milk and six fresh eggs when I saw my house sort of lift up its skirts and stand. There it was with two stumpy legs and two stumpy feet. No kidding. Have you seen a hedgehog when it wants to go for its evening run, the way it lifts itself  up and you see its little skinny legs, and then it’s going like the clappers. (I don’t know who the clappers are but they go fast) That was my house at 8 o’clock in the morning. Except it only had two legs, not four, so it was a miracle it didn’t tip over and fall flat on its front door.

It ran and I ran after it. I ran all day until the light began to fade. My feet were sore and my legs were sore and my throat was sore because I kept calling for the house to stop and so I sat down at the edge of the field I had been running across. That was it, I thought. House gone.

When I woke up, there was my house right in front of me: cheery red front door, a leggy rose stalking up to my study window, and the light on in the sitting room as if I was in there. I wasn’t in there; I was out here.

‘Ok,’ I said to myself. ‘If house wants to be here and not in the village, that’s alright. I’ll have breakfast without the milk and fresh eggs which I must have dropped, though I don’t remember where or when.

I walked up to the front door. But before I had taken four steps, house did exactly what it had done the day before. It heaved itself upright and ran off.

It hopped over a  hedge, which was unfair because houses shouldn’t hop and my legs are too short to hop over anything bigger than policeman’s helmet. The hedge was exceedingly prickly but I scrambled through and saw house disappearing into the distance.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ I said.

But it did. So, once again, I ran after it. Mile after mile I chased my house, until eventually we came to the coast. It stopped in the car park, and faced the beach, shifting its weight from one foot to the other as if it were trying to make up its mind what it wanted to do. Then it settled down next to an old camper van with surfboards stacked on the roof.  I didn’t even bother to try the front door in case it suddenly upped and ran off again. Instead, I kipped on a bench.

I woke early, stiff as a board. The house had gone. I thought it was so mean to make me run all the way across Devon without letting me once come inside. I mean it was my house. But still, what can you do? The car park was empty, even the ancient camper van had disappeared.  I really wanted a cup of tea and a piece of toast but nowhere was open so I went down to the beach.

And there was house! It was  right at the sea’s edge of the sea debating whether to have a paddle.  ‘Don’t go in!’ I shouted. ‘Houses can’t swim.’ The sea was flat as a pond, not a wrinkle and the sky tin bucket grey. The truth was I didn’t want to go in a for a swim because the water looked too cold.

Of course, House didn’t bother to answer me. It was looking out to sea where, on the horizon, was an extraordinary sight. loads and loads of little house shapes,  like the pieces you get in Monopoly. An armada of Monopoly pieces? Not, possible. Perhaps it was an invasion!

The Monopoly pieces grew larger and larger until I could see they weren’t little plastic house shaped things; they were actual houses, like mine. There were hundreds of them, all moving in towards the shore.

And as they moved closer my house hitched itself up and paddled out to meet them.

‘What are you doing?’ I called. ‘Please don’t go, house.’

House didn’t answer but then why would it. I have never known any house to utter a single word.

I gave up. Why bother, I thought, I shall live in a tent.

And that’s what I did.

5th January 2022

The Last Post

When you reach the post meridian

bend neither to the left

nor stray to the right

Keep your eyes to the horizon

and as the sun sinks behind you

do not be afraid

It will rise again

and it’s light will touch the hills and streams

the long and lovely strands

and the hearts of those you love.

2nd November 2021

Got to get a goat

That got my goat.

Coat?

Goat.

When did you have a goat?

Everybody’s got a goat.

I don’t.

Alright.

So who took your goat?

It wasn’t taken it was got.

That sounds bad.

It was.

I mean bad English.

The goat isn’t English.

Not an English goat.

No.

Euro-goat?

No I’m not.

11th October 2021

When the wind blows

There was no wind for sixty days, and then seventy. Not a puff. Trees forgot how to wave their branches; sailing clubs sulked; kites lay bundled in cupboards where raincoats are stuffed; smoke drifted straight up into a cold sky, grey skeins of wool – like someone, so far above us we couldn’t see who it was, was knitting a giant jumper for the world.

The Mary Celeste, the world’s most famous phantom ship, lay becalmed in a ghostly sea world, and the wind gods, puffed out their cheeks, and then unpuffed them. They couldn’t be bothered.

Rain fell.

 
We missed the wind.

Pip the poodle liked the wind in her ears. She liked to bounce through the heather on a stormy day as if she wanted the wind to carry her away.
We wanted to climb the hill and face the gale, lean into it, like we used to when we were small, feeling that at any second we might soar skyward and never fall, like Icarus, but rise and rise and feel our arms feather into wings.

Our voices calling to each other: I am here. I am here. I am always here.

23rd September 2021

Not that Dr Who, another one

Is a hospital a spaceship in disguise and are all those nice people who talk in very short sentences from another planet?
How can we tell?

‘I have a little camera,’ he, in the white coat, says.
‘Ok.’
‘Put your head down.’
I do.
‘To the left a little. Breathe. Keep breathing.’
I do.
‘Very good. Well done. Keep breathing. Swallow. Say: Eeeeh! Stick out your tongue.’
‘Eeeeh’.
It’s not much of a chat really.
If he has put a camera in my brain, he won’t see very much.
‘Well done,’ he says.
I am pleased to get a smiley badge for sticking out my tongue and I think that if this doctor is an alien, then he’s very nice and we should perhaps have many more aliens coming here to make us to say ‘Aaah.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
There is a momentary shimmer in the air and the doctor is teleported away.
I find myself on the first floor of a car park, but without my parking ticket.
Life is back to normal.

17th September 2021

Here’s a thing

There I was in County Mayo, right on the Atlantic coast and nothing between me and New York. But I had no wish to go travelling that far because I only had a bicycle.

I set off down the road but there was a fierce wind combing the heather, tumbling the sea, and stalling cyclists, like myself. Indeed I watched one old man on his sit up and beg bicycle, lose his hat and then get blown backwards. He spun all the way from Meadoran to Roy- there was only one bend, and he did it fine.

I saw him later in Mickey’s bar ordering two pints, one for himself and one for his cycle. ‘It was a great spin,’ he said.

I said: ‘I didn’t know Italians had invented a bicycle that could go backwards.’

‘Italian!’ said he. ‘What do they know about this part of the world.’

I didn’t know the answer to that.

18th June 2021

Crow

I watched a crow mattocking the soil

grubbing solo

Monkish crow

Nodding prayers

seeing me sideways with a winter dark eye.

Shoulder rolling crow

I could see him in a sawdust bar

droll

or high in an airy chapel

caw caw calling

then tumbling, free falling.

Or printed darkly to the sky

when light thickens

homing.

Beauty is strange.

Strangely beautiful is the crow.

6th April 2021

And when I go back to skool I hear

The clatter of feet on bare boards, painted black again over the summer, the shrill voices of boys in the dormitories with no furnishings, other than the rows of metal beds along the walls and the chairs on which our clothes had to be folded neatly and then inspected by Mrs Snell; and the smell: polish and disinfectant- that was upstairs – downstairs the classrooms smelt of old wooden desks and ink, spit, rubber, wood, dust, latin primers, pencil shavings… and the ‘far-awayness’ of home.

17th March 2021

The Menace

Many Happy Returns, Denis!

16th March 2021

Do March Hares Dream

I haven’t seen her yet. She’s too busy perhaps, or perhaps she’s just hunkered down in her form, letting the south-west wind whip over the bog and thread the heather while she, with her eyes closed, ears pressed to her head, waits for warmer days.

 
And perhaps she dreams of  that shadow-boxing lover bouncing and skipping from the shore, full of swagger and his hare-silent songs of  sweet grazing beyond this hill,  and beyond that  stream where the shingle beach is so fine for dancing…

 
And how the wind blows and blows, beyond and beyond all hare imagining.

25th January 2021

The oak tree’s dream

They moved up into the trees

where the air was cleaner.

They dreamed of sky and flight.

Their mouths hardened into beaks

and they pecked the hard bark

seeking the true story of what they had lost

and why.

They grew wings

feathered and fine

but never learned to fly.

Yet how they sang.

Oh how they sang

4th January 2021

It’s Rhyme Crime Time

Do not expect a sensible New Year greeting until the New Year behaves sensibly!

You can’t rhyme OWL with BOWL

but you can with BOWEL,

though it looks like a spelling mistake

or GROWL which owls don’t like

to do,

or even HOWL

which wolves do when they chat

to other wolves in the pack.

Most owls screech or HOOT

though I don’t know why

except they might be having  craic

which is Irish for wise-cracking banter

or having a laugh

or a HOOT

which we do

when we laugh

like a drain or a brainless clot

which, I firmly believe,

is a good thing to do

whether you are an owl

or not.

Believe it or not that word CRAIC is pronounced crack.

9th November 2020

Looking for a beginning

I’m looking for one.

Not a beginning,  but THE beginning.

It’s probably down there, along that street where the old antique shop is and where I can see there’s a weirdly dressed girl staring through the window and touching the glass with her finger tips, as if she hasn’t seen a window before, or glass, or a shop.

But anyway that’s where the girl is and it’s late, coming up to midnight. And there is another odd thing, there is a boy down at the cross roads and he’s just standing there. It reminds me of when I was sent down by our mad matron to stand in the classroom corridor for hours and hours and I could hear the headmaster and his family having their supper and the food they were scoffing looked a million times better than tinned tomatoes on water-logged toast that we had for tea. What is that boy doing there?

He’s noticed her but she hasn’t seen him.

A beginning? 

Not sure.

Possibly.

Who knows?

6th October 2020

Bear with me on this one

‘I’m not the right size!’

Who said that?

 
The letters that appeared on the screen when I began to type said that. 4 point that was the size they were and that is very small.  I could hardly see them. I made them bigger to make them happier and  started to type again, because there was something important I wanted to write about this morning.

 
But as soon as my fingers hit the keyboard.

 
BIP.

 
Back  went the letters  to 4 point again, and so there I was, hunched at my desk, squinting like a spy through a key hole. But then, when I finally got the type size right, I had completely forgotten what it was I wanted to write about and instead I started to think about not being the right size.

 
When I was small I could fit in a wicker basket and imagine it was a boat floating slowly down a river oozing with crocodiles.  But you know what?  That wasn’t good enough. I wanted to be bigger to deal with the crocodiles. But then when you are small  you sort of get bigger almost without realising it. When that happened to me, as of course it did, and  I could no longer fit in the basket, I was seriously disappointed. I no longer had my boat and I didn’t have the crocodiles either.

 
Now, I wouldn’t mind being smaller, not like the incredible shrinking man but just down a bit, you know, not size zero, because if you get to size zero you are  just about invisible.

 
Seriously?

 
Seriously.

 
Seriously invisible.

 
Seriously invisible has its advantages especially  if you are a thief, or a spy, or a watcher, or a stander-in-the-corner if you have been naughty, or a sitter- in-the back row of the classroom, over on the edge, by the window, looking out, the head down, collar up type. In fact, I reckon, most people, at some time feel the need to go off grid, be out of sight, or hide round the corner, just to be… safe.

 
Except round the corner isn’t always safe. When I was a little smaller than I am now, round the corner there were always the hungry bears who’d get you if you walked on the cracks in the pavement. It was always on the last leg of the journey back home that I’d remember the bears and I never knew whether to go slow and be careful or run and get back to Mum quickly, because inside my head there was a voice shouting:

 
DO NOT STEP ON THE CRACKS! YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE EATEN BY THE HUNGRY BEARS!

 
I lived in London. There were no hungry bears! But I still avoided standing on the cracks between the paving stones… because I rather hoped that perhaps, just by chance, or against the odd there was a bear hiding there; which  is confusing, I know, but that’s how it is.
So, this is what we have to put up with: a little bit of confusion and no bears in the city.

 
Foxes?

Plenty of foxes.

Rats?

Loads of rats. Bus loads of rats, laughing their heads off at us, but no bears, not in this neck of the woods.

 
Neck of the woods? What is that?

18th June 2020

Bee Bumble and the Stingers

This bee, a humble bumble bee, made his home in the middle of the path I wander down every day in order to go to my studio at the bottom of the garden. It’s not a particularly safe or well chosen site but I have now marked the tiny hole with three bamboos so that I don’t tread on it and cause it to cave in.

I like seeing him squeezing himself out of the hole and then doing a little zig-zag dance before he heads off to the bee supermarket for his pollen; and then I like seeing him coming back, laden down with shopping bags stuffed to the brim, sqeezing himself fatly down into his bee-doir, bee-droom,  bee-spoke country home… …or maybe it’s just a Bee and Bee…

Enough of the bee!

18th June 2020

Closed for business

They shut the gate and only the air streamed through

They closed door and dug a ditch

They raised the bridge

And sealed the window

They rebuilt the old wall where it had scattered itself, fallen stone

They battened the hatch

And latched the skylight, to keep out the sky

They put up the blinds

And lowered the portcullis

They darkened the world

And peered through slit arrow windows

With crossbows tightened and notched

Their fingers triggered and ready

They narrowed their eyes

And when the doorbell jangled on the old sweetshop

And the door swung open

No one came in.

13th April 2020

A Batty Story

This was going to be a four part story but then it turned out to have five parts, which just goes to show you that stories don’t always do what you expect them to do. 

I wrote this for my grand children (4 and 6) and they were invited to answer the questions at the end of each episode. Their answers then helped to shape the story. 

PART ONE

‘Under my bed, is a bat.’

‘No, there is no bat under your bed, Dardo,’ Granny said.

Granny is usually right about everything. But she was not right about this, because under Dardo’s bed was a bat.

Of course the bat didn’t appear until Granny was asleep, which is a pity because he was a very polite bat. Dardo heard a little  cough: ‘Ahem!’ and then a : ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

Dardo was half a sleep but he opened one eye and said: ‘Not at all.’

Then there was a little scuffle and then a little tap tapping sound, and then from under Dardo’s bed appeared the bat. BUT  this was no ordinary bat. For a start he was dressed in a very smart suit, with a white bow tie, and marvellous cape lined with red silk, a shiny top hat and he also had a very smart cane, which he rapped on the floor as he walked across to the window.

‘Would you mind opening the window, Dardo?’ he said.

Not at all,’ Dardo said. Dardo very often says this when he is half asleep, even when he does mind. But he got up and crept across the room. He didn’t want to wake Granny. And then he opened the window. There was a shiny full moon.

The Bat hopped up onto the windowsill, took off his hat and gave a little bow.

‘Thank you so much,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back before breakfast.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Dardo. ‘What is your name and where are you going?’

Decisions Decisions!

What is the bat called.

Is he a good bat or a naughty bat

Is he going to visit:

      John and Verette

      A very bored Princess locked up in a tower

      A dog called Pobble

PART TWO

‘My name,’ said the bat, ‘is Count Von DiddlyBongDerBongDerOopsyVinkleVinkle.’

‘Oh,’ said Dardo. ‘That is a tricky name.’

‘I am a tricky bat,’ said the bat, and gave another little bow, ‘as you will find out. However, you may call me Flappy, because I don’t think you will remember my real name.’

‘I will,’ said Dardo, but I am afraid he was not telling the truth because he had already forgotten the Count’s real name.

The bat smiled. ‘And now I must fly off to see two friends of mine who need my help.’

‘I suppose they are called BonglewongleDiddlyRumpleWumple,’ said Dardo. He couldn’t help being rather silly sometimes.

‘No,’ said the bat. ‘They are called John and Verette. Do you know them?’

‘Yes,’ said Dardo. ‘I think I do. Are they in trouble?’

‘Yes. Pobble has disappeared. And so shall I,’ said the bat, ‘I told  you I was tricky and this is one of my tricks.’

He swirled his cape round and round and  Dardo’s eyes went round and round, and then, in a blink, the bat had disappeared.

‘Wouldn’t you like my help?’ called Dardo through the open window.

He saw a tiny dark bat shape flying on his flappy bat wings towards the shining moon and he thought he could hear the bat’s faint voice calling back to him:’ Certainly not. You would be no help at all.’

‘Oh,’ said Dardo, to himself.

‘Who are you talking to?’ asked a very sleepy Granny. ‘And why are you over by the open window?’

‘Ah,’ said Dardo, wondering whether he should actually tell her that he had been talking to a bat called Flappy.

Decision time!

Does Dardo tell Granny the truth?

Why has Pobble disappeared?

Will Flappy the bat find Pobble?

Does Flappy have any magic power?

PART THREE

‘I suppose you are going to tell me,’ mumbled Granny because she was still very sleepy, ‘that you were talking to a bat.’

‘How did you know that?’ said Dardo.

‘Because you always make up such silly stories,’ and Granny promptly went back to sleep.

Dardo climbed back into bed and then lay awake wondering how the very polite and extremely well dressed Count Von Flappy the Bat would ever find Pobble the dog.

Where could Pobble be? Had he fallen down a hole, or into a river, or been chased by a cow into the next village, or perhaps Pobble had got on a train and gone up to London, or gone in a train from London to Margate to play on the beach…. Because, thought Dardo, Pobble likes playing on a beach and so do John and Verette and…’

Dardo was getting rather muddled and snoozy, or snoozy and muddled and you won’t be at all surprised to hear that he was quite wrong. Pobble had not got on a train and gone to the beach at Margate.

No.

Pobble was in very, very, very serious trouble.

The most serious trouble he had ever been in. More serious than when he had taken Daddy’s special socks and chewed a big hole so that Daddy’s toe stuck out; more serious than when he had jumped up on to the table and taken a big bite out of Mummy’s special coffee and walnut birthday cake; and even more serious than when he had stolen a whole string of sausages from the butcher, and run all the way down Market Street with them, trailing the sausages behind him like a giant sausagie tail until he bumped into a policeman, who luckily only pretended to be cross and then brought him home, letting Pobble eat three of the sausages while the policeman took the other three sausages back to his home and then had them for his tea.

This time was very different to any of those adventures that Pobble had had, because this time Pobble had been caught by the BAD BADGERS and the bad badgers had gone: ‘HAR HAR!’ (Because bad badgers think they are being funny when they are not being funny) and they had squashed Pobble into a cage and dragged him to their dungeon, which was right at the very bottom of the bad badger’s underground castle, which was called DEEP AND SMELLY-HOLE CASTLE. And that castle was, as I’m sure you know, deep under the Lido in London Fields.

Pobble was not at all happy. He barked and he barked. And he howled and he howled. And the badgers laughed and they laughed because they knew that nobody could possibly hear Pobble’s barking.

But what the badgers didn’t know was that Count Von Flappy the Bat had the most extraordinary magic ears, more extraordinary and more magic than any other bat in the world and, even when he was under Dardo’s bed, he had heard Pobble’s barking for help, which was why, he was now flying, right at this moment, to Pobble’s rescue!

Decision time!

Why have the bad badgers captured Poddle?

What other naughty things do the bad badgers do?

Who is King or Queen of the bad badgers?

PART FOUR

Count Von Flappy the Bat flew up high in the night sky so that he was almost as high as the bright and shining moon. Then having made sure his top hat was firmly on, he stopped flapping his wings and instead glided along, with his cape flowing out behind him and his smart cane gripped tight, and, most importantly, his fantastic bat ears listening to the very far away sound of poor Pobble’s barking.

This way he glided and then, with a swoop and a dip, he glided back again, flying in a wider and wider circle and all the time listening, because, as I’m sure you know, Flappy’s ears weren’t just fantastic bat ears, they were MAGIC!

And right now, those magic ears told him, that Pobble was in the great city of London.

So, down and down and down he dived. He was going so fast, he almost lost his hat; he was going so fast his eyes were watering; he was going so fast his cape with its wonderful red silk lining made a terrific flapping noise.

But Flappy didn’t worry about any of that because he now knew exactly where Pobble was and he knew exactly why Pobble was where he was.

‘Badgers!’ he said to himself, and he landed on a tree in London Fields and hung upside for a moment, just to have quick rest and a quick think as to how he was going to sneak into King Pootie and Queen Lootie’s Deep and Smelly-Hole Castle.

A moment later he not only had thought up a cunning and very special Count Von Flappy plan but he also had everything he needed in order to rescue John and Verette’s dog, Pobble. So, without wasting anymore time, he walked straight towards the Lido and the entrance to the Bad Badger’s castle.

There were two huge dirty black and white badgers standing guard at the great gate down into Deep and Smelly-Hole Castle. ‘Oy, Oy,’ they both said when they saw Count Flappy walking towards them, twirling his cane in one hand and whistling to himself as if he didn’t have a care in the world. ‘Oy Oy,’’ they repeated. Bad badgers are not very smart and they are not very good at conversation, what they are good at, however, is eating and what both these dirty bad badgers were thinking was: ‘Is this bat in a top hat good to eat, or not?’

‘Good evening, my very fine badger friends,’ said Count Flappy, ‘and how are you both this evening?’

‘Hungry,’ said both badgers. Actually what they really said was : ‘Ungry.’ But we won’t worry about that because, before they could lunge forward and grab him with their huge and muscly badger jaws, Flappy swept off his cloak and twizzled it round in the air, which made the badgers’ eyes twizzle around, and then, when he’d stopped swirling his cape and the two badgers were leaning up against each other and un-twizzling their eyes,  he produced a plate with sandwiches stacked up so high the badgers couldn’t even see Count Flappy the Bat anymore, just the sandwiches.

‘Wha’s this?’ they both said (Do you notice that they always speak at the same time and say the same thing? That is exactly what bad badgers do).

‘Why,’ said Count Flappy, ‘your favourite, of course, squishy eyeball sandwiches.’

‘Eyeball sandwitchers!’ they both roared and dived at the plate knocking it out of Flappy’s hand. Then they both snapped and gobbled and swallowed and belched and swallowed and bit and snuffled and burped and when they had finished they looked around to see if that funny bat in a top hat had any more yumptious squishy eyeball sandwiches, but they couldn’t see him anywhere at all.

This was meant to be the end of the story but, oh no, it isn’t so……Decision time!

Were the sandwitchers really made from squishy eyeballs or were they made from something else disgusting?

Are Prince  Dudie and Princess Pudie as bad and naughty as their parents, the king and the queen of all bad badgers?

Will Pobble be eaten by the badgers before Flappy can find him?
PART FIVE

And the reason the bad badger guards couldn’t see Count Von Flappy the bat was because he had wrapped himself up in his cloak and now, gripping his black bag with important things in it, he   slipped, easy as a slippery shadow, through the great iron gates of Deep and Smelly-Hole Castle… and then ….he just had ….to stop ….and take a deep breath …. because in front of him was a dark and very pongy passage and the passage was pongy because Badgers stink of maggots and old socks and dirty pants, which is why the castle has the name that it has.

While Flappy was fumbling for his pale blue silk handkerchief and tying it over his nose, the two greedy badger guards were snuffling about looking, not for Count Flappy, they had already forgotten about him, but for more ‘delishers yumptcher sandwitchers ‘which they thought were made of the most more-ish eyeballs they had ever tasted; though of course they weren’t made from eyeballs at all but from something much more cunning and disgusting: orange slugs in jellied maggot and sprinkled with Flappy’s magic ingredient, naughty sugar.

‘Ave yer found one yet, Gummer,’ said the first guard.

‘Nar Nar Nar, I aven’t found nuffin at all, Scabwort,’ said the second guard. ‘I promise on my badger belly I ‘aven’t.’

And so they started to fight.

Why?

Because badgers never believe each other, especially when it comes to food, especially when it comes to delicious eyeball food, and especially when someone says: ‘Nar Nar Nar, I aven’t found nuffin at all’.

While the bad badgers biffed and boffed, Count Flappy, with his top hat wedged down tight on his head, his silk handkerchief over his nose, and his cape keeping him invisible,  dashed down the dark, and winding pongy passage, following the sound of Pobble’s desperate barking, which, if you speak ‘dog’ which of course Flappy did, was Pobble shouting: ‘Help! I’m here! I’m Pobble the dog and I am about to be a gobbled Pobble the dog, and that’s not funny!’ which of course it is not.

And what was also not funny was the sound of pots and pans being banged and clashed, and the horrible raspy sound of badger claws being sharpened and the even worse sound of twenty seven hungry badgers singing in their grunty and growly voices their special ‘We-are-about-to-eat-a-dog’ song’:

‘Dog! Dog!

Boiled and chopped

Bones and tail

We’ll eat the lot!

Get the pan!

Get the pot!

If it’s dog

We’ll eat it hot!’

And when they reached the last word ‘hot’ they roared even louder, and banged their pots and stamped their feet.

At that moment, Flappy reached the badgers’ big smoky hall and immediately flew up to a little sticky out ledge where he could see absolutely everything and where he could plan his next move.

There at the end was the badger king, King Pootie, the dreadful, and the badger queen, Queen Lootie, the also dreadful, and their two children, Prince Dudie and Princess Pudie. Flappy had never seen the prince and princess before but while he could instantly tell that Princess Pudie was as horrible and beastly as her parents, he wasn’t quite sure whether the Prince was the same. You cannot always tell with badgers because not all of them are quite as bad as these bad badgers.

In front of the badger throne, there was a big fire burning with a big black cooking pot hanging over it and twenty three badgers, wearing dirty aprons and tall dirty chef hats, all ranged round the fire stamping their feet and banging their pots. Over in the far corner was an iron cage and inside the iron cage was poor, frightened Pobble.

One very large badger lifted up a huge chopper. ‘Ready,’ he shouted, ‘Steady…’

But before he could shout ‘Go!’, Count Von Flappy the mysterious bat, using his ability to sound just like a badger, roared: ‘Let’s ave annuver song. Worrabout FROGS’.

‘FROGS!’ they all roared and started to sing almost exactly the same song as the one they had just finished but it went like this:

‘Frog! Frog!

Boiled and chopped

Legs and heads

We’ll eat the lot!

Get the pan

Get the pot

If it’s frog we’ll eat it hot!’

And just as before they stamped their feet and roared so loudly that Queen Lootie put her claws over her ears and King Pootie roared louder than all the badgers put together: ‘Silence you scurvy badgers! We haven’t got frog to eat; we’ve got dog!’

The badgers looked at each other and nodded. ‘True. That’s true. E’s clever fer a king, that one is’.

‘And you can boil the dog, and you can chop the dog, but who’s going ter eat the dog?’

‘We will!’ shouted all the badgers.

‘But we get the best bits,’ said King Pootie standing up and slapping himself on his hungry tummy.

‘Oh no you won’t,’ shouted Flappy, still using his best badger voice.

‘Oh yes we will,’ shouted the King and the Queen joined in.

And although Count Flappy knew that Badgers loved this ‘yes we will no you won’t’ business, he was now completely ready to put his plan into action. ‘Oh no you won’t,’ he shouted, ‘because what Badgers like better’n than dog, is yumptcher squirly snails with cruncher shells’ and from his black bag he dug out handfuls of yumptcher snails, dusted with more naughty sugar and scattered them down among the badgers.

‘It’s bloomy rainin squirly snails!’ shouted a baffled badger.

And it was.

‘Bloomin lishers!’ shouted another badger, having scoffed three in one mouthful.

‘Here we go,’ said Count Flappy to himself. And as soon as the feeding frenzy started, with badgers barging and shoving and diving for the snails and even biffing Princess Poodie on the nose, and King Pootie being knocked backwards so he burnt his bum on the boiling pot, so there was even more yelling and roaring, Flappy swooped down to the iron cage where poor Pobble was cowering. ‘Sorry for being a little on the late side,’ said Flappy, taking out his set of pick locks (little poky things a buglar might have for opening locked doors and which Count Flappy always carried in his black bag), he set to work.

‘Ere,’ said a voice, startling Flappy, ‘them snails are almost gobbled. Use this.” And there was Prince Dudie, the dude, offering Flappy the iron key to the cage. ‘Urry up now little matey mate,’ he said, ‘if you an’ dog wanner gerrout of ere in one mumbly,’ and with those strange words he dived back into the snail scrum.

‘Now!’ said Flappy. ‘Jump!’ and he stretched out his batwing arms and Pobble jumped and Flappy caught him and wrapped his cloak around them both and then before you can say twizzle the wizzle, they were speeding up the pongy passage, through the great iron gate and out into the fresh air of London Fields, and high up towards the shining moon and then with a ‘whoops’ they swooped down so fast that Pobble’s tummy lurched and he thought he was going to burp but he didn’t, he just went ‘woof!’ instead, which of course means ‘thank you very much!’ and Count Von Flappy because he was going so fast and his cloak was flapping so loudly, shouted ‘You are most welcome. Any chum of Verette and John’s is a chum of mine,’ and with that he landed on the balcony of number 35 Wilton Estate, put Pobble down, and then rapped on the window until a sleepy Mummy pulled back the curtain and peered out.

‘Pobble! What are you doing out there!’

Pobble, having said goodbye to the elegant bat in a top hat, wagged his tail.

As  for Count Flappy, he flew back to Wanstrow and tapped on the window and a sleepy Dardo got up and let him in. ‘Where have you been?’ asked Dardo. 

‘Oh here and there,’ said Count Flappy, sweeping off his top hat and folding his cloak over his batwing arm, ‘I’m a trifle sleepy so if you don’t mind…’ and he walked over to the bed and disappeared underneath.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me about your adventure?’ said Dardo.

‘Tomorrow,’ came the sleepy reply.

‘Oh,’ muttered Granny,’who are you talking to now, Dardo?’

‘The bat,’ said Dardo, climbing back to bed.

‘Of course. Why don’t you make me a hot lemon and honey,’ she murmured and went back to sleep.

But Dardo didn’t make hot lemon and honey, he went back to sleep too.

But what none of the grown ups, and  not even Count Von Flappy, the most Mysterious Bat in the Universe, knew was … where were John and Verette, because they were NOT in their beds and they were NOT asleep….

This is the end of Part Five of The Batty Story in Four Parts … so what has happened to your maths you muddle wumpsters?

3rd April 2020

The Sideways Tree

Here are some lines for this strange time.

Everything is up

Until, of course, it’s down

With the exception of my tree

Which leans casually

At ease

Tipping south by south west

As if on course to set sail

On a close haul to a far away place

Though it is anchored here

At rest

Leaning on a limb

Pressed into the ground

Perhaps waiting

For Spring

Or a rising tide

And a gentle gale

To bring us all home.

25th November 2019

Remembering

When the autumn mist rolled away, there were the fields and hedgerows almost as they always had been: this one with a slight rise, then falling away to a slow, surprisingly small but well known river, still called The Somme; over there, the land still green, dew fresh, perhaps with cattle grazing. Everywhere were fields ploughed and ready for late autumn sowing. Nothing remarkable.

Nobody saw the soil on the ploughed field shifting. Just a tiny ripple, or shrug, and where before there had only been soil there was now the toe of a boot; then, unmistakably, a hand and wrist, and over there, a face, pale against the soil, eyes closed.

Moments later and there was a young man in khaki, sitting bolt upright, looking around, buttoning his jacket, rolling his shoulder to ease some long ago ache. He levered himself upright, brushed the soil from his trousers, frowned down at his boots, then lifted his head, and breathed in the autumn sky. 

He seemed unaware that all around him, others like him or not so like him, were waking from the earth, pulling the top soil back as if throwing off a blanket, rising to their feet; and then, like him, breathing in the world before slowly walking up the rise and out of sight.

Over in the field’s corner, pressed back and away from this birthing ground, were the cattle, their solemn eyes watching.

And perhaps in broken lands, where the streets have fallen in on themselves and there is little left of what might have been a city but scorched rubble, and iron, and oil staining the dirt, and the air hot and bitter, perhaps there, there is also a peeling back of the surface: men and women and children rising from the rubbled ground, shaking dust from their hair, lifting their faces to the sky, and perhaps around them the towers and tenements pour upwards into what they had been.

 Not so far away ghost cities and villages shimmer in the heat, freeze in the cold. Unseen, unremarked…

Can you hear the startled shriek of a crow as it reels away, desert bound, its shadow a flicker against the hard light?

26th October 2019

Owlé! I’m moon bound!

I tell you it hurt!

All these feathers were pricking out of my shoulders and down my arms and while you’d think feathers would tickle, they did not!  Each one of the blighters has a bony stem to start with, a stem which you could sharpen into a nib, what you’d call a quill back in the olden days before fountain pens, but fountain pens are olden days now so what am I gabbing on about?

This! This is what I’m telling you, that with one of these feathers you could, if you felt like it, write yourself a letter.

Except since you feel like you’re turning into a pin cushion you don’t fancy writing a letter to anyone.

But then along each stem the feathers emerged.

‘I’m turning into a bloody angel!’ I said.  ‘That’s a laugh!’

‘More an owl than an angel ,’ she said. ‘I’d quite fancy an angel; and you’re no angel because they don’t wear stupid, round, trendy glasses.’

Nor do owls.

But I didn’t say that. What I did say was: ‘Girls don’t make passes at angels with glasses.’

She wasn’t listening; she was looking at the feathers knitting along my arm, thickening, zipping into place.

‘You got wings, Mikey!’

Wings! Me! Who’d have thought. Not me. …

Now I touch church spires and towers, flit tree tops, skim hedge rows, beetle cliffs, the sea mirroring sky and me between, moon bound.

2nd September 2019

Crabbed

I thought my dad was crabby when he hurt his back, crabbing along with a stick in his hand. Cross and crabby he was. But then I went crabbing…

My face wavering in the glassy water, where I can see a shadow world of weeds and stones and the string I’m holding bending a little in the current, the tide easing up to full, and the bait trundling a few inches this way and then back again; and over there, two black dot eyes, stalked up, watching; a claw waving, legs scuttling out and then back, out, and then back, sidling, crabwise, shell like a bronze age shield. I’d call him Ajax but he might be a girl crab. I’ll call the crab Ajax anyway. Why not? Shy as a crab, there’s a thought.

I jiggle the bait. A little lump of fatty bacon.

Here she comes, bold and shy, dancing in the sand-light current, slipping through copper-coloured weed. Six steps this way, six steps that. Claws open and ready…

A swift tug on the line. Bait gripped tight. She’ll never let go, even if I hauled in the line, she’d hang on till I plopped her in bucket. Then I could watch her suddenly all alone in a bare, bright yellow world… Perhaps she’d be crabby like my dad then.  Yanked away from home, I wouldn’t blame her.

I let go.

The string drifts slow and snakey down to the sea floor, and Ajax hurries her catch back into the weed forest, to her shadowy under-rock home, where she’ll be

guarding,

guarding,

guarding,

eyes on stalks,

armour plated.

Safe.

I’ll tell dad to get a shield for his back.

25th July 2019

Mad Hattery

How

many

of these

can fit

into Number 10,

Downing Street?

24th July 2019

Needs Must

I tip my hat to  Michael Rosen, because not only is he that great thing, a poet, but he is also Mr Total Common Sense when it comes to writing about schools and the bumbling of some politicians who, when put in charge of the Department of Education would prefer to do … not very much at all.

Michael’s open letter in yesterday’s paper was, (think battle ships for a moment), a shot across the bows of our Minister for Education. He rumbled against the minister who, when confronted by a crisis, ‘pootled’ (my word) by only offering ‘a fresh look’ at funding for students with special needs. That’s just like offering them fresh air!

So, this politician is ‘pootling’ because special needs doesn’t need ‘a fresh look’! Schools don’t have the money to pay for the support their students need …. because it has been taken away from them!

‘Children with ‘special needs’ are not a separate category,’ Michael writes. ‘They aren’t a problem…. They aren’t even ‘they’. They are us.’

They are indeed.

So, Mr Education Minister, whoever you are, (because their might be a new by the time I have finished writing this), ‘reason not the need’ and just get on with putting back what you and your predecessors have taken away.

All children need appropriate support and there’s an end of it.

Now you can go on a Bear Hunt!

22nd July 2019

If the world was flat

If the earth was flat, would it be like Copenhagen,
with loads of bicycles and baskets bulging with  pastries?

Would the horizon be so far away you could see to the edge?
Would the oceans disappear down a hole or pour into space?
Would spaceships get wet coming back into the earth’s atmosphere because they would sizzle through a constant curtain of salty water?

Would every posh person live at the top of a super-tall tower, like the one in Qatar or wherever it is they feel the need to build very tall towers, even though the world isn’t flat?

And if the world was flat, when all the ice melted and the sea level continued to rise, would all the world disappear?

Would we have to walk around in waders and grow long curved beaks like curlews? Would we whistle for our lost world? Would we take to the air and fly and fly until we could fly no more?

Or would we grow gills and become fish again, and all the people we thought were rather like sharks in the way they behaved would be eaten by the real sharks …

if the world was flat.

18th July 2019

What’s a watch?

We wore them on our wrists to tell the time.

Really? Tell the time what?

No, you eejit! Tell the time, like telling you the time.

So, this little fellah on your wrist had a voice? Like having a parrot on your shoulder, except not on your shoulder and I suppose it didn’t have feathers either?

No! It did not. And when I say ‘Tell’, I mean like the bells ringing in a church.

Oh come on! That can’t be right, at all! To my ears now, telling is a lot different to ringing, though I did have a teacher of mathematics with a completely bald head and who was mad as a maggot.

Mr Coates?

That’s him. He told great stories but he was the one who gave me a right telling off one time and then slapped my head. Or maybe it was the other way round, I can’t remember. But I do remember I had a sort of ringing in my ears then. So you could say there is a case of having ringing and telling sort of yoked together.

I don’t think I’d say that at all. Why did he give you the slap?

I was not so good at the times tables that I had been trying to recite. But  you wouldn’t know about times tables and all that because now the only fellahs who know how to count play darts, and that’s not much help to anyone because they do their counting backwards; and what’s more the people who play darts are so big they can’t ever move from the dartboard. They are like stuck to the floor.

Is that because they are, generally speaking, too heavy.

They are, generally speaking, too heavy.

Maybe then what I am saying is that it is not so much that church bells ‘tell’ as ‘toll.’ You know, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

That is a very different kettle of fish.

It is a different kettle of fish because, as you know, church bells toll when there is a death.

Like I toll you so?

Exactly.

So your watch, that you wear now on your wrist is, in effect, telling you you’ve just about clocked off, almost stopped the old ticker ticking , or worst of all gasped out your last order for a pint.

In a way.

That’s grim thing to carry around, if you ask me.

Well, in a way it isn’t that at all.

Jasus! How can something so small be so confusing!

That’s time for you.

Like the landlord calling out the last orders.

In a way.

Will you have another pint then, then?

Of course.

21st March 2019

Hobbing

A hob, as I’m sure you know, is  from another time. But, if you are lucky, you may have one in your house.

Dancing on a sixpence,

spinning on a pin,

whirling with the dust motes

in a shaft of ironed light;

whispering in the eaves,

in the narrow cracks,

in between the floorboards,

groaning with the pipes;

up on the rooftop,

shaking up the jacks.

Sleeping in the attic,

or behind the stack of logs;

or nesting in the chimney

and hobbing in your silence,

hobbing through the long night,

hobbing off the witches

when they snitch us

into fright.

15th March 2019

Christchurch, New Zealand

Another horror, another day to remember, another name to add to the list.

‘The worst are full of passionate intensity’  WB Yeats

(sadly, I seem  to quote this too often now)

BUT

against this, children around the world are trying to shake sense into politicians and world leaders, who often seem to be too self important or too busy or too careless, or too full of denial (Mr Trump) to think about the world they will leave behind when they step (or fall) off the stage.

There is something wonderful and moving when the young, sometimes the very young,  bravely speak  truth to power.

23rd February 2019

when the snow came

And when the snow came , it was a thousand dibbling fingers flickering into the car’s headlights, rushing towards them, blinding, layering onto the road, whitening the night, all hurry, and silence; and then slowness and anxiety as the car, possessed by snow, slithered and slipped on corners and dips; and then at the journey’s end, snow tipping nose, eyes, ears pinched; cuffs cold as manacles; and pure silence made deeper by the sweet squeaking crunch of their footsteps.

And in the morning a curious sunless brightness. A new world suddenly made where anything can happen: the strangeness of magic, of startled blackbirds carrying warning; of seduction and secrets and poor Mr Tumnus.

And, in another time, animal skinned hunters threading the wood like mist; a cave dark in the belly of the hill, of smoke and fire, and a horse, a bull, a deer, growing from the artists hand, glowing on the rock…

31st January 2019

The Call

He was surprised to see the red telephone box, not that you never saw them anymore but he hadn’t seen one with a telephone in it, only those with teetering piles of old paperbacks which he suspected nobody borrowed and sometimes he’d noticed that a parish council had invested in a defibrillator, because that was, apparently handy if you were having a heart attack, though he wasn’t quite sure how, if you were having a heart attack you would be able to hurry along to the telephone box, remember the code to unlock the case and then go back home where you were having your heart attack and defibrillate yourself. He had never had a heart attack and he wasn’t really thinking about that when he saw the old telephone box on the corner of the country road he was walking along.

The red of the box was faded and tussocky grass had grown up around it but the glass, a bit grubby, hadn’t been broken and when he came close he saw that the phone was intact. He went in and lifted the receiver and heard that … How would you describe it? Not quite a hum and not quite a buzz  but something in between that told you that the line was alive and when he heard that he knew that the one person he wanted to call right at that moment was his mum.

Change? He had change. When he had called home from school it was shillings and coppers clattering into the tin box and pressing the right silver coloured button for the call to go through or the other button to get your coppers back. This box wasn’t that old, of course, the others were all gone. It was fifty pence or twenty or a pound. He had a couple of fifties. He was all set or so he thought but then he found himself staring at the digit buttons trying to remember her number. It was stupid! He could remember their phone number in London when he was a child: Flaxman 9634 but what was her number now? He looked out through the grey glass at bare hedgerows, the winter field, the copse up on the far side of the field. A crow beating away from the wood across a dull sky. What was it, her number?

There was a hollow place in his remembering where the number was and try as he might he couldn’t reach down to it.

She would have liked to have heard from him, heard his voice. How strange to have found this telephone box, in the middle of nowhere too. God knows why he had decided to walk that way, never having been that way before.

He felt a hollow in his heart. A dull feeling. Dull as the day. He stepped outside and slowly climbed the style that led to the field with the copse on the far side.

How could he have forgotten that his mum was no longer there in that house down near the coast and he hadn’t heard her voice, or she his for almost twenty-nine years.

31st December 2018

Joy without limit

At once a voice arose among
    The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
    Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
    In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
    Upon the growing gloom.

Thank you Mr Hardy for your ‘Darkling Thrush’. I don’t care that the aged thrush you heard was probably just saying: ‘It’s me over here!’ or ‘This is my bit of territory!’ Because its song really does sound like pure joy poured into the air.

But there are so few of them now.

Listen! There!

Perhaps in the stillness of a winter evening you might hear one too.

31st December 2018

That was Solstice and this is Dyllis

Dyllis was a witch. That was a fact. A proper fact, and witches were supposed to be wicked. ‘Right wicked,’ she muttered to herself while she was doing her washing up in her caravan. ‘From toe to tip.’ She used the back of her wrist to wipe a soap-sud off her nose.

She hadn’t ever felt like being wicked, not really, really wicked, which is why she didn’t do much witching and anyway there was no need. But here is the thing, if you don’t do any witching, you lose the art. It’s as if the magic goes off, gets rusty. Use it or lose it. That was what Terence Thomas had on the post office door, and now the little post office was gone and Mr Thomas and his bad tempered wife had moved away. Dylis had no intention of moving away.

But if you’re a witch, people should know you’re a witch, and children should certainly be a bit frightened of you. That’s only reasonable. On the whole, though, Dylis didn’t have much time for children. She hadn’t much liked being a child herself; all that running around, and skipping, and getting into a tangle of shouty arguments and everyone being horrible on the internet (though she was a bit shaky on things to do with smarty-pant phones, not having a computer or knowing diddly squat about Facebookies, Snapple-chat or Instagranny or any of those oddly bits of whiskery nonsense).

‘So,’ she said to herself and wiped the steam off the window behind the sink. It was getting dark outside and she could see her frowning reflection in the window, and behind that she could see Wyck wood, and the last rooks flying in. ‘So, I better do some wickeding tomorrow. I’ll see what grabs me. Nothing fancy.’

‘No, nothing too bad,’ she murmured a little bit later on when she was in bed and pulling her duvet up to her chin. ‘Just something. Maybe I’ll give Mr Biggins a stir.’ She smiled. She didn’t like Biggins the butcher. Not many people did.

6th December 2018

The sword she found

There was a story in the papers, back in the summer, about a girl finding a Viking sword in a lake. I can’t remember where… Sweden, I think. 

It was a sword, though it didn’t look like it could even slice a loaf of bread it was so blobby with mud and rust. But here was the hilt and the stumpy guard… She’d known what it was the moment she’d tugged it free from the muddy bottom of  the pool at the bend of the river where the boys had challenged her to swim.

Snow drifted down, dusting the bare branches of the trees that crowded the bank where the boys stood, collars up, faces pinched, hands in pockets, ready to jeer, hardly believing she’d taken the dare.

She held it up for them to see, her hands shaking with the cold, but she didn’t care about that, she didn’t care that the river wanted to bury its icy teeth into her bones. She had the sword itself and these boys knew nothing of that, nothing of the time she was from.

Jinker was the only one to call out. Mean as a streak of spit, he was. Typical. He’d never give credit to anyone who dared do something he wouldn’t do.

‘What’s that, you got, eh? Bit of old rubbish, is it? ’

In truth, they’d all been ready to jeer and sneer but not now, the river water dripping down her face, the snow drifting into the pool, and her holding up what she’d found for them all to see.

‘What is it, Gwen?’

‘You coming out or what?’

‘She’s mad.’

No, she wasn’t. Most of them didn’t know anything about old stories, legends and that, but one of them, Jessop’s boy, the one they called Dart, he did.  She was right up there, he thought, a proper legend, like someone from an old story. He wondered if she might be a legend herself, her hair the exact same blood red as a hawthorne berry, and her eyes, greener than Meggie’s cat and she’d more guts in her than any of them. ‘I reckon that’s an old sword,’ he said.

‘Then by rights,’ Jinker said, ‘it’s mine, isn’ it?’

What was he on about? Just because the river cut through his dad’s land, he thought he was the lord of the bloody manor and there wasn’t even a manor, not anymore.

‘Shut it, Jinks. You got nothing.’

Dart shrugged off his coat and held it out for her. ‘You can have this if you want. You got to come out.’

She didn’t seem him to hear him, or any of them. She held the sword in both hands gazing down at the rust eaten blade as if she were reading something written along the blade. After a moment she looked up at the bank where they all stood. ‘Mine,’ she said in her strange voice. She lifted it higher. ‘Mine!’

They nodded. Fair play to her. It was hers alright. No one else’s.

17th August 2018

Respect

When a great voice leaves the world, the silence is like deep space, dark and infinite.

But then, perhaps a little bit oddly, I thought of a stone tower, square shouldered, and tall, as tall as you can imagine, and right up at the very tip of the tower, so high you wouldn’t be able to tilt your head back far enough to see it, a giant bell.

All around the tower stretches a wide sea of black sand, its dunes rolling like waves to the horizon. Above, the dark sky is half swallowed by a giant planet, gleaming blue and green. The planet looks so close you’d think that if you could climb the tower and reach out you would be able to touch it. But you couldn’t.

A shooting star scratches a line of silver against the night and the tower’s giant bell tolls and if we listen carefully we can hear it, even here, on our world. It tells of passion, righteous and fierce, and it tells of joy.

7th July 2018

Bunkered

Take two leaders out to play: one a dictator, the other a Trumpotato.

Check egos are fully inflated. (You can tell when because when their egos are  pumped up properly, they look like balloons and then their eyes go all squinty.)

Put them in a bunker and give them pretend buttons to play with. (Note: they only like red buttons).

Close the bunker door.

Put your ear to the door and listen very carefully. When you hear them going: ‘Boom. Boom’ and then laughing, walk away from the bunker.

Do not look back.

8th June 2018

In the corner

You are sent to the corner. Naughty. You can’t remember what it was that was naughty but you know the teacher is right because teachers always tell you they are.

The corner is interesting to start with because you know everyone is looking at you …and then they aren’t.

Then the corner changes. I mean it is still a corner but you start to stare at it: the scratches on the green paint are little bits of white. When you get scratches they are red and then they go brown. Blood. Perhaps walls bleed.

You look over your shoulder to see if anyone else has ever had that thought but the teacher tells you to turn round or you’ll be sent out.

You turn round. You don’t want to be sent out. You can listen to the lesson, except it’s the subject that you don’t like so you don’t listen. You just hear the teacher’s voice which sounds all murmury and you think about the sea and beaches. If you tilt your head there’s a map with loads of drawing pin holes in it and lots of sea. The sea is blue on the map but the sea is almost never blue; it’s usually the colour of metal or steel, like a knight’s armour.

You could be a knight in shining armour standing guard, defending the class from ogres, and bears and the dark wizard who traps children in his castle and fills their heads with numbers so they can’t think for themselves anymore. It’s time you did something about that.

You straighten your shoulders; you stiffen your sinews, because you read that in a poem once, and you turn round to face the dark wizard and then the bell goes…. If you were a boxer you would come out of the corner and into the ring.

If you were a knight, you wouldn’t stand in a corner; you would step forth… or fifth. You’re not sure which. In the story, it was forth and it never made sense. Stories should make sense and so should lessons with numbers.

Knights make sense just by being knights, though if they had anything to say you probably wouldn’t hear them on account of the huge helmets they wear.

17th April 2018

Rooted

I thought of the tree’s roots, as I bunched them together and posted them down into the letter box slit of claggy soil, as a message to the earth’s core.

Or as a slow signal from the future tree’s top up to some travelling star.

Or back, through curtains of time, to a gnarly-handed Neanderthal kneeling in the dirt, pushing a seed into the soil.

And perhaps that Neanderthal is thinking forward, just as I am thinking back.

1st April 2018

Grief is a thief

Grief is a thief who dances sideways, stealing laughter and breath; kicking hard just there, in the place that hurts when you thought time had healed.

4th March 2018

Listen to the corbies calling

Corbies, that’s an old word for ravens and crows.

Those are ravens in the picture, hunkered down against the cold, though it’s the darkness of crows I think when the world is covered in snow.

No ravens in my garden today, nor sign of a crow but a pair of blackbirds came flitting out from the holly I’ve rooted from the ground and which I have been meaning to clear. Holly is old even when it’s young and green, and streams with magic… so no wonder it was good shelter for the birds. There was a robin, of course, and fine tantalising tracks in the snow…

I was looking for a worried half man, half goat – a faun- wearing a scarf and offering shelter, Mr Tumnus (from the other side of the wardrobe), but you should know better than to trust creatures in the snow that don’t hide from you,  but instead invite you in.

Listen to the corbies sing:

As I was walking all alane, 
I heard twa corbies making a mane; 
The tane unto the t’other say, 
‘Where sall we gang and dine to-day?’

‘In behint yon auld fail dyke, 
I wot there lies a new slain knight; 
And naebody kens that he lies there, 
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

‘His hound is to the hunting gane, 
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, 
His lady’s ta’en another mate, 
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane, 
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een; 
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair 
We’ll, theek our nest when it grows bare.

‘Mony a one for him makes mane, 
But nane sall ken where he is gane; 
Oer his white banes, when they we bare, 
The wind sall blaw for evermair.’

 This is an old Scottish ballad: The Twa Corbies. It’s very wintry and grim, but I love it.
twa=two
corbies=crows (or ravens)
fail dyke=wall or or bank of turf
wot=know
kens=knows
hause-bane=neck bone
een=eye
theek=thatch

17th January 2018

Nowhere Bin

That’s Oscar up there. Of course. He lives in a bin down on Sesame Street. I’m a bin without an Oscar living in me and I live down another street. He sings sweet songs. I don’t. This is what I sing.

‘Oh Lord, I’m so sick of your bags.

No more plastic bags!

I got an old sock, and a busted clock,

a cotton bud in a butter tub.

a dinosaur and a one-eyed seal

a burnt pan, a bent bike wheel….

But what makes me sick is your plastic bags.

I’m chock–full

shock-full

belly-full of bags.

So no more plastic bags!’

That’s what I’d sing.

And because in the summer I seriously pong. I’d sing a pong song. A bad, sad, pong song.

And when the lights go down and I’m sitting on the kerb, I’d dream about all those bags slipping down to the sea, where a hundred-year-old sea turtle can’t see because he’s got a black plastic bag stuck on his head and a great white shark is streaming shreds of plastic from between his teeth… He needs a shark dentist.

As for me. I’ve had enough of the stuff you don’t want.

So don’t have stuff that you don’t want. Don’t stuff stuff that you don’t want into me.

Give me a break. Give me a treat. Give me a wheel deal to the Wheel Bin Festival, where we slam our lids and the Bin  Band sings: ‘Where’s your bin?’

I bin nowhere. Where’s you bin?

14th November 2017

Face it

Face.

What an ‘over-and-done-with’ word that is. It sounds like slipping on ice and falling on your bum.

Look at this one, dreamed up by the great automata artist, Robert Race. Does he look jaunty with that angled moustache and matching gold rimmed dark glasses? Or mysterious? What would he say if he had a mouth instead of that shadow? Is that a smile or does he look sad? And his bowler hat… though I know that of course a bowler hat is not strictly a part of one’s face but in this case, who is to argue with me? I say that the hat is there to stop him floating off into space…

Or it’s a lid to keep his thoughts in, hidden behind the hidden eyes.

Do you prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet?

Don’t bother. Yours is fine.

28th September 2017

Have you been worded today?

Dialect.

Sounds like a part from a bike, or from Dr Who. Stranger than that… to a stranger; common enough if it’s yours, and if it’s yours, this dialect, make sure you use it.

Don’t let these kindly words slip  over the edge, or be lost out beyond the marshland or self corrected out of existence by your iphone, or spellcheck.

That would be nesh or mardarse. Maybe beazled or lost in a gunnel or jitty. Clemmed, or famished with cold. Perhas even Rawnish. Who knows?

Surely these are words so good you could almost eat them. Better than the words on that tree anyhow.

17th May 2017

Smiling in the teeth of a gale

Here’s to all these astonishingly fearless young women who refuse to be bullied by the screamers and ranters and black-jacket monsters; who don’t duck when the air is thick with violence; who smile in the teeth of unreason.

There’s courage for you.

13th May 2017

Shadow me this

Shadow. Shadow me.

I do.

I walk beside, or glide before, or trail behind you. I’m not blind, just obscured by you, darkened, silenced. Do you hear my warnings?

Slow down! Look!

Do you see or feel my companionship, because I am here with you, even when the skies are grey and I fade to a ghost of myself?

Perhaps you think I am untrustworthy, that because I shrink and stretch according to the sun and that, as light bends in the heat of the desert, my affections waver. Perhaps you think I resent you because you block me from the sun and without you I would be free.

Without you I would be lost.

I am constant, as real as night and day, light and dark. You are my angler. You cast me.

And as the sun sinks, I lean further and further ahead of you, leading the way, until night falls.

17th March 2017

Tumbling words

It’s bad news, Mister

A twister of a day

With clouds like Kim Jong’s bunkers

And hail down on the shore

And the geese are screaming thunder

in skeins across the sky-

A storm net to snag your dreaming

And haul you back to die.

It’s bad news, Mister

A twister of a day

You’d be wise to get the jist, sir

Of what I’m trying here to say.

28th January 2017

I think of you sometimes

I think of you sometimes, in the early days out there, eighteen years old, trying to look older than you were, your boots and gaiters damp to the bone.

You hadn’t thought about bone and flesh before, though your school was brutal enough, the priests as mad as hell.

But that was alright, you just got on with it.

Here too you just got on with it, knowing that your ‘men’, older, harder, tireder, looked at you as you went by, with your ‘too-young’ moustache and narrow shoulders, and briefly wondered how long you’d live.

Six weeks for a second lieutenant straight from school and keen as mustard.

Were you?

Yes, sir.

Mustard. There were rumours of the gas and what it could do.

Was the wind ice cold on your days at the front, rattling the tins on the wire. Did the rain slick the duckboards, and the mud everywhere…

Could you ever put your head above the parapet?

Who ever thought…

Perhaps you did, sometimes, to take your mind off the bloody noise or that single snip of a sniper’s bullet . I can imagine you estimating the arc of a shell, elevation, distance.

Mathematics.

You should have been an engineer. Paper with little squares. Equal signs. Reason. Rules. You always had a pencil in your pocket along with the pack of Woodbines.

When you turned round to go, down at the bend in the trench where the sides had fallen in, squeezing past the mess of dirt and stone and twisted corrugated iron, was the company runner bringing letters from home, his face a blob in the exhausted light.

There had been a letter from your mother, hoping you were well and keeping warm and to think of it all as an adventure. I expect you shivered and wrote back: ‘Yes, mother,’ and pulled your great coat tight.

When you saw the flares that night perhaps you thought of spotlights along the stage, and the curtain going up.

In fact I think my dad might have been seventeen when he joined up. He was wounded and spent three days out on no man’s land before he was found and brought back by one of the soldiers in his company. For much of the rest of his life, he was closely involved in the theatre.

18th November 2016

Be serious, will you!

I read about it one time.

You did not..

I did so. And it happened to me.

Did it.

It did.

In the whatchyoucall supermarket?

Yes.

Go on then.

Alright. I had the tins: the tomatoes. I buy six. And I  was going for the chocolate.

Good man.

Almost had it in the basket.

Alright. I can picture it. Just so.

It wasn’t a basket though. It was that other yoke.

The trolley?

That’s it.

On wheels?

That’s how they build them.

A mighty miracle of science, the shopping trolley. A pure delight to push one of them down the aisles.

Miracle is right. Your caveman would have had an easier life bringing back the mammoth in a shopping trolley now, wouldn’t he?

You think a mammoth would fit in one of them trolleys.

The big ones. IKEA, you know. It might.

It’s a thought.

It is. And anyhows, coming at me out of the trolley itself, there was this voice. “Put it back,’ it said, bold and clear as the priest himself.

It wasn’t the priest, Father O’Dolan?

It was not. A priest in my shopping trolley! Are you daft, or what?

Who then?

One of them purple bears, they had in that film.

Toy Story.

That’s the one.

It was purple was it?

Purple, yes it was, or blue maybe, only a few quid and I put it in my trolley. A gift like. And there it is telling me to put back the chocolate.

The purple bear did not like chocolate!

It did not.

Are you sure it was the bear talking?

Who else could it have been.

One of them elfs.

You get them in the supermarket?

A supermarket elf? Of course you do.

I’ll watch out from now on.

Do that. And did you put the chocolate back?

I did not. I’m not listening to purple bears.

Nor elfs.

Elves.

Nor them either.

7th November 2016

Excuse me, where did that childhood go?

‘You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.’ Anthony Doerr

31st October 2016

Do giants lie beneath our hills?

Just a thought for Halloween

What is that on the edge of the hill, down below the rounded, tree-less brow, stark against the green and the heather? There! Two stones, like giant’s teeth; as if ‘he’ is there just beneath the surface, his face puckered black leather, his eyes open and blind with mud, his huge nostrils clagged, his mouth agape, and those two white stones, his dog teeth, biting up to the sky.

Was he buried kindly, the hill piled over him by a last remaining child of his kind?

Or was he dragged down and butchered by a swarm of giant-hating, giant-fearing men and women who then, believing his decay would poison the air and the streams, buried him in the hard ground beneath this hill.

Perhaps it wasn’t either of those.

Perhaps he just  grew old and tired and laid  himself down to sleep. Then , as the long years passed, the hill, foot by hand, by leg, by chest slowly swallowed him into itself.

Perhaps one day, on a day like this All Hallow’s Eve, the hills will tear themselves open and all those creatures lost in the half dark of our knowledge and learning will come rumbling and tumbling back into the world: witch and giant, hob and goblin, talking hares and fishtailed men from the rocky shore and they’ll dance the twilight to the tunes of our fear and our delight.

And a good night will follow the hallowed eve.

5th October 2016

Ghost Words

Do you ever see them, up high out of the corner of your eye, when you’re waiting for a bus or feeling a drop of rain on your neck and you look up?

Look again, high up on that wall! Old as ghosts, words and names seeping out of stone whispering some wonder:

Dr Mackie’s Golden

Walnut and Jasper’s

Emporium of

Rusper’s Rustic

Ghost words peering in from another world, hoping to be seen. Or, perhaps they are just waiting for the rain  and hard air to wear them away, or for the gable to fall or the wall to be torn down.

Listen, can you hear them whisper a wonder?

And why is it they make me think of refugees…

.

5th September 2016

Hello Emilia!

Thank you for your lovely letter.

You would like to write a play of THE GEEK THE GREEK AND THE PIMPERNEL? That’s amazing!

And it will be even more amazing if I can give you some advice about how to write a play… Well, I’ll try but please don’t come and hit me over the head with a soggy haddock if the advice turns out not to be very helpful.

Keep it short and keep your scenes short. Have a max of tens scenes (and probably a minimum of five)and make sure you know what you want to happen in each scene.

Never have people talking unless what they say adds to the action, so you keep pushing the story on all the time.

Don’t feel you have to tell the whole story; select what you want to use and skip anything that’s too tricky. It might be fun just to try to use the mystery of who is the Pimpernel as the thing that drives your version of the story.

Remember it is your play so you can do what you want.

And most importantly…

Have fun!

4th September 2016

From the August country

August!

What happened to August?

It got swept up in a storm and tumbled down somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, and me with it, in Mayo, to be precise… which I rarely am (precise, that is, not Mayo. I am often in Mayo… oh, forget it!)

To be even more needle-in-a-haystack precise (which, I believe, is a contradiction) this is the Barony of Erris.

I keep looking for the Baron but he’s nowhere to be seen at all, just like the month itself, which was last seen heading for the door to that curious other universe where all past months go.

No, not to school, they don’t go there. But you do, do you? Is that a good thing? I couldn’t say, though I went there once.

For now, I think I’ll stick around in the August country for as long as I can.

29th July 2016

News from Nice

and this is not a jolly post…

WHO WOKE THE MINOTAUR?

There’s nothing wrong with being angry. We all get angry, sometimes for a good reason, sometimes for no reason at all, but the anger usually, hopefully fades, like a sea storm and there’s calm.

But rage is something different. We seem to live in a time of rage. And rage makes me think of that monster, imprisoned deep inside a labyrinth, with an unquenchable appetite for killing. The Minotaur.

I remember my cousin, Patrick Daly, writing a poem about him more than ten years ago. It was terrifying and timely.

But it feels like the monster’s woken again… He stalks Syria and Iraq. His footprints are in Turkey along the North coast of Africa and in Europe.

So who woke the minotaur this time? Who guided him blind from the labyrinth and let him stumble righteously angry into the light?

Who led him up the church steps?

Who whispered to him ‘the old lie’, that his rage was godly?

29th June 2016

Meet one angry chicken

Ok so it’s not ground-breaking news (and anyway why should news break ground, like one of those noisy hammer drills they are using right now out on the street, gouging the tarmac…) but I met a chicken in Turkey who joined me each morning for breakfast so I named her Chicken’n’chips. This is what she said:  

Don’t call me

Chicken and chips!

Don’t call me

Chicken and chips!

I’m a chicken with hips

I’m no hick from the sticks

I can groove I can mix

I can strut and I can sing

I can fly. I got wings

I can flip and I can roll

Do my Chicken rock n roll

Don’t call me chicken and chips!

Don’t call me chicken and chips!

23rd June 2016

Here’s a horrid sounding word

Of course you may not agree but Brexit is not a good word.

It sounds like an execution to me, the sharp blade of an axe. Off with his head. The Red Queen in Alice knew all about that; she would Brexit, till there was no one left to Brexit.

But it also sounds like  something you might buy in a packet, buy it from Screwfix  mix it up, like grout, feed it to rats.

Maybe it’s a new cereal, like Weetabix, but even more tasteless (sorry Weetabix) and with hard bits that you could break your teeth on. It does make me think of teeth, teeth like an iron trap that could snap round your ankle and that would be that.

That will be that.

Or teeth that shine under tv lights and smile and smile and murder while they smile. Brexit a new toothpaste, to paste over over all the untruths, and empty words.

Putin doesn’t smile, but he will if we Brexit and so will all those who want to chip a little bit more off the world, making it smaller and smaller until it is just a tiny rock in space with room for only a sign that reads:  ‘No Aliens here, thank you very much.’

2nd June 2016

Swimsong

This hasn’t quite climbed up the ladder into being a story… but I think I like it as it is. It’s really for all short-sighted swimmers or anyone prone to embarrassing accidents.

‘A collision with another swimmer is not unusual,’ she said, ‘except  when the beach is about two miles long and there are only two people swimming in the sea.  That is unusual – even surprising.’

‘She was doing back crawl,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘ You were not doing back crawl, and she was considerably younger than you.’

‘Age has absolutely nothing to do with a swimming collision.’

She rolled her eyes.  ‘Collision makes it sound as if you were speeding along, like one of those Olympic swimmers. You don’t swim nearly as fast as one of them- nor do you have the shoulders, nor’, she said, glancing critically at his stomach, ‘ the narrow waist. Bumped is a better way of describing what you did. You bumped into the only young female swimmer in this entire stretch of the ocean.’

She made it sound quite shameful.

‘I was doing the crawl,’ he said.

‘You still don’t swim very fast even when you are doing the crawl,’ she said. ‘Your crawl is like… crawling- a sort of two year-old’s speed.’

‘I don’t look where I’m going when I am doing the crawl and she didn’t look where she was going when she was doing the back stroke.’ He was going to tell her that the young woman had laughed when they had collided but he didn’t think that that would help the situation. ‘An innocent collision,’ he said. ‘You’re making a meal out of nothing.’

‘There is no such thing…’ she paused to apply her lip balm and said, with what he thought was an entirely unjustified air of triumph .’… absolutely no such thing,’ and here she snapped her lip balm shut, ‘ as an innocent bump… in or out of the ocean.’

2nd May 2016

Somewhere right behind you, the giants of England

‘Gog. And who else?

‘Magog.’

‘You’re kidding me!’

‘I’m not. ‘

‘Giants?’

‘Of course. Giants of England. In fact giants of London, or London giants. I’m not sure which.’

‘With names like that?’

‘They weren’t good at names in those days.’

‘Why not?’

There weren’t many around.’

‘Names?’

‘No, giants.’

‘You think maybe ‘Gog’ was a thing and one giant said, ‘Look that’s a Gog. And the other giant said: ‘No, that’s my Gog!’ Except he spoke funny, I expect giants probably did, on account of being giants, and said, ‘No, it’s ma Gog.’’

‘And then they had a fight about it?’

‘Or a laugh. What do you reckon the Gog was?’

‘A toy maybe.’

‘Do giants play with toys?’

‘When they’re little, maybe they did. Gog could have been a spoon.’

‘Or a rock.’

‘Exactly.’

‘When they were little, they weren’t giants.’

‘Course, they were. Just little giants.’

‘You don’t know much, do you?’

‘I know a bit. I know they’re still around.’

‘What! Gog and Magog?’

‘Yes, Gog and Magog.’

‘You don’t have to repeat me.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Where are they, then, these two giants?’

‘And all the giants of England?’

‘Yes, them too.’

‘Right behind you.’

‘You’re kidding me!’

‘Not.’

28th April 2016

Do you hear me, Major Tom, there’s a Major Tim out there too?

Up there tread-milling through space, headphones clamped to his head … who’d have thought, Major Tom becomes Major Tim, not lost in space, like him, not lost in wonder, like him, but in the marathon down here, virtually running around the pavements and bridges of London.

Good for him.

Maybe one day we’ll have spacecraft powered by treadmills so we can run to Mars, or a host of tiny silver spaceships shaped like airstream cycle-helmets, and we’ll pedal out to the Milky Way. Just a thought… though Leonardo Da Vinci probably thought of it first.

And here we are in the sharp cold of April with breath puffed out white and frosty, as it would if we were all already lost in space.

21st March 2016

Goose chase

If you want to chase the goose or go on a wild goose chase, you’ll have to dip into Story Bag because that’s where this story seemed to belong; but I left the picture here because I liked it.

Anyway, who doesn’t want to walk on water?

7th March 2016

The Neverendeedum Tea Party

‘IN. IN. IN.’

‘OUT. OUT. OUT.’

They were all wearing suits and waving their tea spoons. They looked rather horrid.

‘Who would like tea?’ Alice said.  No one answered. The men sitting on either side of the table were too busy shouting at each other. ‘I do hope you’ll behave.’ They didn’t of course. They looked smart, at least they had looked smart before the tea party had begun, now their very expensive ties were slightly askew. That’s a good word, she thought. I think people are generally askew. The end of George’s tie dipped into his cup but he was too busy looking down at the end of his nose to notice

‘You’re rubbish and you smell!’

‘No, you’re bigger rubbish!’

Alice wished the Mad Hatter and the March Hare were there; they were so much more grown up and made so much more sense than these people from Parliament. Even the Doormouse, who barely ever woke up to say anything at all, was more interesting.

One of the men, a chap with a podgy face and a thatch of blonde hair was thumping the table and growling: ‘I AM interesting! I AM the most interesting person here! I love me. I love ME!’

Beside him, a little fellow with a squeaky voice kept trying to make himself heard. ‘We’ll all get locked up if we’re naughty,’ he said and looked as if he were about to stand up, but he didn’t. Instead he bowed his head and stirred his tea. ‘I am quite naughty,’ he said. ‘I am.’

At the far end of the table was a hefty chap who Alice thought looked rather fierce. He didn’t have much hair but what he had was cropped short and he wore a very tight suit buttoned up to his chin. Rather surprisingly though, he was crying and large shiny, tears were rolling down his cheeks and plopping onto his suit. ‘You are so mean!’ he kept shouting. ‘You are just saying THINGS that I don’t want to hear.’

Meanwhile the blue-suited men on the other side of the table were waving their arms and looking, Alice thought, a little like crabs. ‘Pinch you!’ they shouted. ‘We are going to pinch you! And we’ll have more money than you ever will.’

‘You are all very stupid,’ Alice said in her bossiest voice. ‘I can’t think why anyone would ever want to invite you to their party ever again. ‘You’, she said to the ones who had been chanting ‘OUT’ and waving their spoons,  ‘just want to hide under a pillow and stick your bottoms in the air.’ Bottoms was rude, of course, but no one was listening to her. ‘And you,’ she said to the ones on the other side of the table, who were now pulling faces and sticking out their tongues and tugging their ears, which Alice thought was a very silly thing to do because ears were ugly enough anyway without making them even longer, ‘you are not very good at your job.’

She was right; they weren’t listening.

Really, she thought, they should have left it all to me.

‘And to me as well, of course,’ said the Mad Hatter popping out of nowhere and taking her arm.

‘And me,’ said the March Hare popping out of the other side of nowhere and taking her other arm.

‘And me,’ said the dormouse, emerging from the teapot and hurrying after them. ‘And can we have joined-up thinking for tea?’

2nd March 2016

Jack Dawn

Jackdaws

five of them

in the bare branches

Black winter baubles in the Rowan tree

Hunger and grey skies

Cold air to scrape your face

And bite your eyes

Pliars grip the tips of your fingers and toes

And the cold nips and tugs

wanting to find a way in

and catch hold

of your heart.

17th February 2016

Being New

Starting a new school after half term can’t be easy. This is a scene I wrote this morning  for a story I’m working on. So it’s new too…

 Clarence didn’t seem to mind being new. He was old at being new. He just walked in ahead of her and, while he waited for the teacher to introduce him, he looked around at the boys and girls in the class who were all looking at him. He had a half a smile on his face and when the teacher, Mrs Naffin, pointed out his desk, he nodded, went over and sat down.

And that left Clara on her own up there. Her throat was so tight she could hardly get a word out and when she did it emerged as a whisper. One of the girls smiled encouragingly and that made it worse. She scowled and didn’t look at anyone, not even Clarence; though when she did glance at him, as she was heading for her desk,  he was still fiddling with his pens, straightening out his exercise book and then writing his name on the cover. She bet he wrote neatly.

She felt a light tap on her shoulder and nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned round. It was mad-boy Douglas from the estate. She hadn’t even noticed him when she came in. He didn’t smile. She hadn’t seen him smile yet, not once but he mouthed something at her. She frowned and then realised he was asking if she was alright.

She nodded. She wasn’t but she would be. The lesson started and she stopped thinking about herself and her tight throat and her heart beating so hard it was like a policeman hammering on a door in Eastenders.

3rd February 2016

Hot Stuff

This  government promised a further £1.3 billion in tax breaks for the giant oil companies, while they have stopped helping smaller, pioneering businesses develop renewable energy. Hmm. Think drilling and fracking versus wind, wave and sun. With enough solar panels in the Sahara we could power the world….

They said there was a field where nothing grows, where the land is dry as old bones; where there’s dirt and sand and a hot wind that can rasp the hide off a rhino. This field was a half a continent wide and half a continent deep; and once, more than a thousand years ago, it had been green and its springs ran clear; but now it’s a field where nothing grows, not even a shadow because there are no trees. And in the sky there’s not a cloud; just a hard, white sun pouring down onto the sand.

They said if we mirror this land with glass, and tilt it all towards the sun, row on row on row, like bathers on the beaches of Cannes or St Tropez we’ll harvest enough light to warm the world; and this field of dirt and grit and stone, and long rolling waves of sand will be worth more than all the oil and coal that still lies buried miles beneath the sea, and all the great forests of the world.

And if we did that, they said, it might well save the world; and then they went back to drilling holes down through the ice and the ocean floor; they built nuclear reactors and promised they wouldn’t leak or explode; and they tore down the forests, and they fracked for gas; and they spilled oil into the ocean and turned the ice black.

And the sun shone down on the desert sand and warmed the dunes.

5th January 2016

Through the Dragon’s mouth

I’m not sure why but I was thinking about exercises like Pilates or Yoga, when you pull yourself into sometimes rather strange shapes, and that led into one of those through the wardrobe moments and a character I have always liked called Mr Tumnus.

Kneel down. First put both hands on the ground. Then you dip your right shoulder and thread your right arm under your left shoulder, as if it were a keyhole, or a dragon’s mouth. Now, pull yourself through.

Pfft.

A world of snow and ice. A forest heavy with snow. A faraway sky pricked with strange stars and down here the not-quite-full- darkness of night because of all of this white spilling out through the trees, deep and crisp, banked up here and scooped into a hollow there.  Man-size shapes frozen in white; one like a bear, up on its back legs; and leading right to where you stand, a line of holes, like black coins in the snow. Hoof prints?

Yours?

You have crooked legs, scratchy sweet-smelling fur, and your feet have the hard, neat horns of a goat. Feel your head, your face. A human head. A human face. Alright. And your hands. Alright. At least you are half what you once were.

But your body is cold. The air moves slow and cold through the forest.

You should be home, Mr T.

Wrap your long woollen scarf around your neck and hurry towards the light.

What world was it that you left behind? You don’t know anymore.

Whom did you betray this time?

18th December 2015

It’s a family affair

‘It just keeps happening and no one knows what to do about it.’

‘And your man does the same thing every time?’

‘He does. Right in the middle of the game.

‘Scuppers it right and blinking proper, every time, and the rest of them standing about like a bloody field of grazing dawks. If you know what I mean?’

‘I know exactly. Of course. And this one… ‘

‘This one! Did I tell you he’s Italian? Well, if I could get my hands round his neck, I’d give him a right and proper choking, I’m not kidding. But he’s up in the air, isn’t he? Up in the bloody air shouting this name that sounds like a pope! Can you imagine? Or like a bloody Roman Emperor!’

‘You’re not serious!’

‘I am.’

‘What’s this name he’s shouting?’

‘Agostino.’

‘Is that it?’

‘It is.’

‘It sounds like a beer, man.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Peroni.’

‘Peroni? That doesn’t sound like a pope, does it? It doesn’t end in O.’

‘Name me a pope, then. One with an O at the end of his name.’

‘Name me one that doesn’t.’

‘I’m struggling. Name me one that does.’

‘Double or quits?’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Pope Yoko Ono. Is that enough for you?’

‘Italian is he, this Yoko Macono?’

‘As pasta.’

‘Alright.’

‘Will I tell you what happened then?’

‘Go on.’

‘This Italian fella appeared out of nowhere, right in the middle of the game. There he was whizzing about in a bright green shirt and … and he’s suddenly up in the air and kicking the ball… from about twenty foot up in the bloody sky like a helicopter!’

‘It wasn’t the James Bond fella, was it? He has a thing about the helicopter. I’ve seen it in a new film , Septico.’

‘I don’t know about that but this fella’s a helicopter-man, that’s for sure. And wait… the goalie’s got a mouth wide as his bloody goal posts and your man, the flying shouter, he pops it in. La deed dah. And then he’s down again, running about like some stupid ostrich, arms out, flapping them up and down. And why would he do that when he can jump up in the air, no problem?’

‘He’s excitable.’

‘He is. I’d say they all are where he comes from. And absolutely no one’s moving, just him, and the people up in the stands just watching aren’t saying a thing either. You could have heard a mouse squeaking on the other side of the Severn Bridge because it was as if the world had gone as blank as bloody stone sheep. Not him, though, running about and making these little jumps. Even did a handstand!’

‘Why don’t you give him the boot, then? Kick him off the team?’

‘Oh, yes. Great thinking, Sherlock. Never occurred to me. Kick him off the team. Genius…. He’s not on the team, is he! And if he was, how do you kick someone off the team when they are always up in the bloody air? Tell me that. Up in the bloody air, like a bloody seagull!’

‘Or a parrot?’

‘Or an angel who likes football.’

‘That’s stupid; angels don’t play football. They play the harp.’

‘I know. Like lager.’

‘A stupid angel, then?’

‘Or just Italian.’

‘Agostino.’

‘That’s the one.’

(John Agostino, born on Wednesday, 18th November 2015)

30th November 2015

30th November 2015

The War Garden

Ashe is in the safe country. Bakr is in the garden. The garden grows metal, in rows as neat as the olive picture we keep in the well. The well is the round silver disk that we thought could be a shield but  it is difficult to hold with one hand  so we left it lying flat on the ground and it became the well. Bakr says it came from a car.

We can hear cars sometimes. They have horns that honk. Mostly we hear voices from the other side of the world. Sometimes we hear the hate. Then the sky burns orange and black.

We are safe if we go  into the safe country. Our parents told us this.

The broken brick is desert, which we must cross to reach the garden, and the safe country has steps that lead down into the  dark where the air is old and thick. Only Ashe likes to stay in the safe country. He stays there all the time. He says it is better there because the hate is further away.

I like the desert when the sky is hot and I must dance on the stone. It makes Bakr laugh.

19th October 2015

19th October 2015

Gone Fishing

If I could fish

off the edge of the world

I would catch

Space trout

the size of America

silver as stars

glittered with dust

a zillion years old

jumping and running and

swiping their tails

diving and turning

behind Jupiter’s moons

burying deep in the dark depth of space.

And if I ever reeled one in

to the world’s steep shore

I’d rest it so quiet

till its heart beat steady

then with its nose tipped to the current

I’d let it go

down that long wide river

to the edge of all things

and I’d follow it there

and know.. and know… and know.

4th October 2015

4th October 2015

Losing Heart

They lost their hearts in the eye of that storm, the one that howled round Piccadilly Circus, ripped  six hundred and seventy-two hats, nineteen umbrellas, one thousand and one mobile phones, four scarves, a newspaper, a watch, seventeen bicycles, along with their cyclists, up into the air. All of the cyclists kept madly pedalling though they no longer had a road to pedal along.  One of them was upside-down and then the right way up; and then came to a stop on the top of a quivering red bus, called Boris.

That cyclist wasn’t the one who lost his heart; it was another man and, as it happens, another woman. She was there, near the statue, when the storm arrived.

The sky in that circle above all the tall buildings was one moment blue and the next a tumbling, seething mountain of black and flickering clouds; and then the air suddenly went still, like an in-drawn breath. Then, just as suddenly, the wind whipped down and everything took flight: the hats and scarves and umbrellas, the watch and the newspaper, a pink Financial Times that peeled itself into separate sheets; and then as if racing after all these whipped-away things were the cyclists, one after another, soaring spiralling up into the crackling sky.

She saw all this through blurred eyes. She saw how the wind pinched and squashed faces, pulled away frowns and scowls and smiles and tossed them away so that all those  faces looked like puzzled puddings. Then the wind caught her and spun her around, her arms out straight, her hair shivering and electric, right there by the statue; her high heels skittering sometimes on the pavement, sometimes in the air.

And he, the other man, the one who also lost his heart, having stepped out from the underground into the gasp of in-drawn breath that was the moment before the storm, was bounced between Japanese tourists, who clung to each other as if they were on a raft; then he was ripped free. He tried to go back down the stairs into the underground, where a sea of white, frightened faces stared up at the storm, but he was yanked back and he too, just like the woman, started to spin.

He caught a hat, and a scarf and an open umbrella, which he clutched with both hands, and was scooped up, twirling and lurching through a blizzard of smart phones, past one bearded, airborne cyclist clutching a New Statesman; and then he was dropped down with a crack onto his knees, just by the statue where the spinning lady span. And he saw her poor face, pinched and pulled by the wind; and he felt a terrible pain in his chest as his heart disappeared.

The wind died. The hats and scarves and umbrellas were draped around Eros, so he looked like an old man dancing on one leg. And before anyone moved, or breathed, or realised they were still alive there was a pattering rain of mobile phones hitting the pavements and shattering one after the other, spilling their little heart batteries out across the stone. Then everyone breathed again and the cyclists, still cycling, bounced down onto the street and weaved through the stationary buses and taxis and vans; and people gingerly picked themselves up, and motors started and traffic began to move in its slow, stop-start way when the lights turned green.

But the man and the woman who had lost their hearts didn’t move. He was still on his knees, and she was facing him, her arms still outstretched because she felt if she brought them down to her side she would lose her balance and fall.

Some tourists, thinking they were street performers in a puzzling play, stopped and took pictures and then went on their way; while the man and the woman just looked at each other and both of them, at the same time, tried to speak. They wanted to say what had happened, and how if this were a film that they were in they would now smile at each other and laugh and perhaps fall in love. But because their hearts were gone, they couldn’t smile or laugh or fall in love.

She helped him to his feet and asked if he would be alright and he held on to her hand and wished he still had his heart, and he said he would be fine. But he wouldn’t, and he asked her if she would be alright and she said, very sadly, that she would be fine, once she had found her heart. He nodded and said that was the same for him; and then they turned away from each other and walked off into the crowds of people, who hurried and shopped as if nothing had happened.

And maybe they came back the next day or the day after that and found their hearts lodged somewhere in among the coats and bags still tangled up and hanging off the old statue; and maybe they even looked for each other once they had their hearts back, right there by the statue; and maybe they found each other, and maybe they didn’t. I didn’t see that part of the story so I can’t say, one way or the other.

3rd September 2015

3rd September 2015

I got me an owl moot and a stealth bomber and it happened like this…

There are half a dozen owls bunched on a branch and one of them is saying: ‘What’s the point of seeing in the dark if your average field mouse or weasel can hear the swoosh of your wings as you go for a grab?’

A shuffle of claws and a fair bit of owl blinking.

‘No point.’

‘No point at all, mate. They’re off down the nearest hole in the wall and you’re lucky if you just get your claws onto the tip of a not-so-tasty tail. Know what I mean?’

‘We need better wings.’

‘Better wings? I like my wings!’

‘Of course you do. Best in the wood. Alright? But if we fix the air flow, cut down on the whistle and woosh, we will have ‘stealth’.’

There’s a low and meaningful hoot of appreciation at this and a fair bit of owl heads ducking down into owl shoulders.

‘And it’s real stealth I’m talking about. Not like the day mob, your kestrels and hawks and such like; the jammy, jaw-drop, dive bombing show-offs.’

‘And they’re not that good.’

‘And, as you say, they’re not that good at all.’

‘Miss more often than not.’

‘Miss pigeons!’

‘Miss sparrows!’

‘Ha ha! Miss sparrows! Would miss a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder!’

‘Would miss a one-legged pirate, an’ all!’

‘Alright.’

‘Alright.’

There’s more nodding, shifting claws on the branch and blinking, and then one says: ‘What is stealth?’

‘Arial creeping, but like fast creeping, know what I mean?’

‘So dinner can’t hear us.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Deadly?’

‘The stuff of nightmares, mate. We’ll be like the dark blade-runner.’

‘And they’ll copy us won’t they?’

‘Humans? ‘Course they will. Haven’t got an original idea in their heads.’

‘Will they go after our weasels and mice?’

‘Have to wait and see.’

11th August 2015

11th August 2015

Who’s a Selfish Giant then?

Walls. I know I said ‘giant’ but it’s walls that set me thinking. We were always good at walls. Not as good as the Chinese, of course. They built one so long you can see it from Mars, if you happen to be going there. But generally, over here, we’re good at them, not the wattle and daub variety for holding up a thatched roof full of mice and spiders but the stone ones.

In my view they were an import from Europe, though, technically speaking, I don’t suppose we should call William the Conqueror a European; he was a Norman with a rubbish haircut. But he and his chainmail-crew were big into walls, great big castle walls to be precise. They splattered them all over the country to keep those Anglo-Saxons, that’s us, out. It must have been pretty scary having one of those castles suddenly looming up over the little town you lived in all your life.

I don’t think that idea – the great wall to keep ‘them’ out and us in – has really ever gone away. You can even, if you fancy, have a posh wall now with an electric gate.

Most countries have a wall around them, not made of stone, but the wall is there all the same and you can’t get in, even if there are wolves biting at your heels, unless you have a magic pass that will let you through the door, in other words, a passport.

I’ve never been to Israel so I don’t know how you get through their wall. You can see that one alright. It snakes through the country, no windows or doors and so tall there is no peeking over it either. It makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant story, ‘The Selfish Giant’.

Maybe our politicians should read it. Who knows, they might even learn something.

14th July 2015

13th July 2015

A Butter Dish Tale

When something is made for you, made carefully – planned, the design drawn out in pencil and then maybe coloured in; and then the clay  bought and shaped, hours getting the corners right, the little knob on the lid; and then it’s painted and glazed and baked and cooled- it becomes more than just a thing, an object, a cup, a mug, a desk, a toy…

Or, in this case, a butter dish. The Queen of butter dishes, if butter dishes have kings and queens, and they might. Why not? You can see it there in the picture, with its dish and lid, its cross-hatch of blues and greys; and all of it hand-shaped, so there are curves on the sides of the lid and everything slides away from symmetry, which makes it the only one of its kind in the entire world. Perfect.

And then it’s broken, knocked from the work surface onto the tiled floor. There’s an almighty crash and the pieces shatter and scatter…

It is somehow so much more than an ordinary breaking, a casual accident.

It was given, and now, you fear, it will be unforgiven.

So the pieces are gathered and laid on the table. This goes here and that there. This must be the lid and that a corner of the dish. Glue. Elastic bands. And slowly, one piece is fixed to the next and the lid and dish begin to take shape again; a little more crooked, the cracks like old scars, visible but somehow grown into the design. But it is whole again, and back in use.

And the love, with which it was made, is still there

1st July 2015

1st July 2015

It’s a teacher thing

Raptor training? Just keep an eye on your teachers. You can bet they’ll be doing the husky voice, the finger click and the stare, with knees bent, just a little, like they’re trying to glide on a skateboard. Be kind and don’t mind them.

All you have to do is practise the raptor hiss, the scuttle and the jump.

Easy.

21st June 2015

21st June 2015

I saw two knights come riding by

In the cool side chapel of a honey-pot cathedral you can sit and wait, while in ones and twos people drift by. Some, like you, linger but most drift on, looking at plaques, staring up at the ceiling, the columns, the light, the altar… You too are looking up, but at a clock: a mechanical dream, a wheel with wheels and more wheels, all turning and ticking, edging past the sun, the moon and the stars…

You want the quarter hour to strike because then, above the crawling dial with its different types of time, on a platform of their own, two jousting knights will suddenly wheel out and pass each other, once and then again: Bam! And one is whacked backwards. Then around they come again.

Every fifteen minutes they fight this joust and the same knight, pink cheeked and silver armoured, topples the dark knight. Shouldn’t the maker of the clock and the rich and holy benefactors have noticed that there is no defeat, no absolute victory? No matter how many times he falls, the dark knight comes riding back.

And one day, one day somewhere on the tip of time, the white knight with his pink cheeks will be surprised to find his lance breaking and the dark knight sweeping past him. He might hear the whistle of the blade that slices off his head and, undead, he might hear the tinkle of his own helmet hitting the stony chapel floor and the gasps of those sitting there, waiting for some miracle to happen.

And that was it: the dark knight, after a million million jousts, won the fight. That was the miracle. Not quite what was expected, but maybe that’s the way with miracles.

P.S. You probably know I’m writing about the famous ‘jouster’ clock in Wells Cathedral. If you haven’t seen it go and have a look.

P.P.S. Simon Armitage has written a great poem about it.

25th May 2015

Another Guitar is Gone

The guitar is the shape of desire

a longing for song

for soul

a bending of strings

to wrench out the blues

and hammer and sing

all the hopes that have been

and the fear

and the fear and the doubt

and the hope

a ripple of notes that hang in the air

bird-winged in the heat of the day

the sweat of the night.

Only sing from the heart

for the guitar is the shape of desire

and this is the hour

and this is the hour.

For BB King

25th May 2015

29th March 2015

A murmur of starlings; a kindness of crows

That sounds a bit Game of Thrones to me but there’s not a Stark in sight, nor a great wall , nor a wildling, just an old dog.

This is it.

The old dog lowered himself on a patch of warm, sunlit ground on the green road, a lane-way down to the sea. The day was still. A small bird chat chatted from the gorse and then darted up into the air flighting down the lane a little way, landing on a post. The dog heard his name being called but his bones felt heavy and he stayed where he was.

Overhead, there was a shifting pattern of darkness, wavering, breaking apart, coming together, coming down, lower and lower, as if to fold over him, like the blanket that was sometimes laid over him these nights. He could hear a rushing of wind through feather and a different scent on the salt and heather air. His eyes, still clear, looked up, watching as the starlings sky-danced for him.

A bee sounded. Zig-zagged in front of his nose, touching the gorse and back, nuzzling the heather bank.

And then a large black crow landed, bouncing a little.  (Aren’t crows always large and black? But then maybe this one was a little larger than other crows and with a dash of night in his black feathers). It hunched its shoulders, as if shrugging, tipped its head sideways and eyed the old dog. Its eyes black and bright. They looked at each other like that for a moment and then the crow hopped forward. The dog’s old ribs heaved up and down. The ground pulled at him. Something like a sigh escaped from his closed mouth. He felt the bird’s no weight on his back and its muttered croak, that sounded like a question; and then hazed in among all the other sounds, them calling his name again. His eyes closed.

18th March 2015

A Deeper Well

18th March 2015

Do you ever feel you need to go to the well, the deeper well? To scour it and scrub it until its stone sides are shiny-wet? Do you then drop the bucket and jig it down there in the cold black? Brim it until it’s slosh-full of ideas? Haul it back up, hand over hand?

But if that’s no good, lower a ladder right down into the dark. Not metal, no. Something homemade with wobbly wooden struts, rope tied, that’s what you want. I don’t know why.

Down you go. Mining.

Now, call out and hear those words you thought you could not find. They are rolling around you, aren’t they? Bouncing off the stone, spiralling up and into the circle of light. Raven-black, winged words taking flight.

Let them go, and keep looking. Don’t mind the candle. Don’t mind the light. Use your eyes in the dark.

2nd March 2015

2nd March 2015

Human Beans In Space

Suited and booted, zipped, strapped, mapped and routed. A bean in the can. A human bean. Yes, sir, a human being, named and trained, and sharp as pencil ready to write, ready to go. Read-steady-go all the way to Mars.

There’s hope. There’s a dream. Dreams by the bucket load. How many packed in the space tin and hurled through the wide black? For how long and how long and how long will they glide through the emptiness of space? Will there be a window from which they can look back and wonder if they made the right decision; a window to peer ahead to their future?

And their future is a dark-red thumb print on the star map.

The Red Planet.

How will they live? What will they do? Make a house, a home, a hut or a cave burrowed into Martian stone? A shelter from the storm… if there are storms on Mars. It held water once. Maybe life. I don’t think they will be packing umbrellas for the trip.

Mission to Mars. A colony on the Red Planet. Not in a thousand years but round the corner, only a step or two down the road. 2025. And I heard you on the radio, Hannah Earnshaw, 23, one of the hopefuls. Here’s to you and your hopefuls, we hope for you too.

May the flame from your rocket burn new writing across the sky.

Why do I think of you as we say goodbye to the real Mr Spock.

Live long and prosper.

12th February 2015

What’s this!

It’s not quite what you think it is. So, read the post below.

9th February 2015

They Shovel Dreams, Don’t they

Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I think they do. Not all of them, of course and it’s hard to tell who are honest and decent workmen and just doing their job of mixing up concrete and who are the ones doing something so mean they’d make the white witch seem like an ice cream fairy.

And it’s the same with the machines. Most concrete mixers do exactly what it says on the tin. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Here and there, out on the street, in a drive, or a yard, lumpy with muck, scabs of orange coming through the dirt, and with a big round mouth all ready to swallow sand and stone and cement and rumble and grumble it round and round till it’s ready to pour?

But all the same it’s best to steer clear because there are some that are a little bit more than they seem. These ones grind out a particularly ugly song which sounds something like this: ‘Grumble and groan, shuffle and stone, and bones and bones and bones.’ If you  chance to hear that and you see that the man with the shovel  and stonky boots spattered with cement is giving you a hard look, then you had better run a mile. He’s not what he seems. He’s as different from Bob the builder as a witch is from a watch.

His eyes are dull and grey as concrete and what he does is shovel up dreams he can glean from the street he’s working on and throw them in the mouth of his ordinary but not so ordinary mixer. He shovels in all the gold and the bright, all the silver and hope; he shovels in the green valley and the rainbow sky, he shovels it all  down to a hard, grey slop. Then he porridges it out and lets it set hard as algebra and then he moves on; and the street he leaves behind is a little more drab, a little more dull, and the faces of the children are gaunt and worried; and it’s going to be a bad day.

They shovel away dreams,  these not-quite-ordinary men and their not-quite-ordinary mixers, and no one knows why they do. They just shovel and mix and pour the slop down onto the ground and let it go hard so  no dreams can grow , and everything bright is turned grey.

They leave the dreams buried deep.

24th January 2015

24th January 2015

At The Bridge Called Albert

It’s as pretty as an old fashioned ice-cream shop, and they don’t exist anymore on my side of town, or anywhere I’ve been for a while now; but here it is on the north side of the bridge, shaped like a twenty pence piece, except it has eight sides and that stupid coin has seven. Pale blue columns at each corner. Elegant like a little temple. Magic. If Dr Who designed a theatre, it might be like this.

Step inside through the criss-cross, white and grey door and who knows what you will find: a blast-away control desk with glowing valves and blinking lights; a vast hall filled with shiny-domed men and women wearing orange cloaks, earnestly planning the future of the universe. Or maybe just a monkey. Who knows?

The booth sits on a black plinth. That’s a giveaway: sure as a bridge is a bridge there are stumpy little rockets set behind that neatly painted, wooden base. Yes, sir.

I can hear the countdown; I can see the white glow, the slow lift, the orange flame and cloud billowing out like a ball gown from around the base. Its pointed hat is sky bound. There it goes.

And now there is nothing left ; just melted tarmacadam and a deep red and white sigh: ‘All troops must break step when marching over this bridge.’

I’m not surprised.

10th January 2015

Mark this

Mark was my god son. He would have been thirty on Sunday. This is the pin I wear sometimes, my Mark pin. And below that a poem for him.

Mark this
Badge, brooch or pin
It’s on my lapel
A silver flash
Jagged, like a piece of lightning
Snapped off from the tip
Of that fork in the sky

Silent
of course
No thunder
But ariel –
I think of that character too
‘Who flamed amazement’
And
So much more than I ever say
When asked about
This badge, brooch or pin

Remarkable
Yes

8th January 2015

I heard the news today, Oh boy

That’s the first line of a song by the Beatles.

I wish I had one for the twelve men and women who were murdered yesterday, in their Paris office, because they produced a magazine with jokes in it. The killers didn’t like the jokes. They didn’t like the cartoons. They shouted ‘God is great’ while they did their killing.

Three of those who died were cartoonists. The job of a cartoonist is to surprise, shock, delight and entertain; to hold up a mirror and stick it in front of leaders and shouters and haters and make us smile while making us think.

Those killers didn’t want anyone to think differently to them.

A poet called Yeats wrote this:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Nothing wrong with passion. Nothing wrong with intensity either. But when the two come together so there’s room for nothing else, no one else’s ideas but your own, and all that passionate intensity comes spilling out of the top of your head, you can become, what we call, a fanatic. Fanatics can’t smile.

Don’t forget to smile, folks.

14th December 2014

Bag End

Bags, boxes, sacks and chests. Things for putting things in. Things for taking things out of. All those names: hand bag, shoulder bag, rattle bag, duffle bag, sea chest, gunny sack, haversack, knapsack, shopping bag, feed bag,rag bag, and trunk. That’s like a full stop.

Trunk and chest. You can’t carry them, not in your hand. You have to shoulder a chest and if it’s a sea chest, you would have to shoulder it up the gangplank because that’s what sailors did. Except it was probably the skipper who had the sea chest because he had a decent cabin; your ordinary sailor, hanging in a hammock, with no room to swing a cat, might just have a ditty bag or a ditty box. That’s the one I like best; it sounds like something you might keep a song inside; or a carved seal tooth, or a button, a needle, waxed thread and a pair of dice.

But second best is gunny sack. What is that! Not something you keep a gun in because that would be duller than a dish of spelling tests. I heard that name, gunny sack, in Johnny B Goode, a song by Chuck Berry, and I think that’s what he carried his guitar in. That’s very good, almost as good as the ditty box, which wouldn’t fit the guitar.

Up in our attic we had something we called a rummel kist, which I have never heard of since but that’s probably because I have spelt it wrongly. Kist is an old Scottish word for chest but rummel… who knows where that comes from? It should be rummage for rummaging in. We had old bits and pieces and clothes for dressing up in our rummel kist. Perhaps it was really a rommel kist. Rommel, the Desert Fox, the famous German general. Perhaps he was in there but I never noticed.

Or maybe there was an actual desert fox in there, like this one.

25th November 2014

Did you see the poppies?

Did you see the glass-red poppies running round the Tower of London?

Did you see the thousands of people leaning over  and peering down, staring and staring as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing?

Did you wonder whether it should stay there for all time but growing poppy by poppy, each time there was a terrible war, so the Tower turned red?

And when the Tower turned red should we drift them into space, glass-red, porcelain poppies circling the world like a great, crimson sea so that travellers from distant stars should know what we do and beware?

3rd November 2014

The Albatross Boss

Albatross?

Is it a heavy weight, something you hang round your neck? A huge bird that spends its days hunting a sailor with a crossbow (its the sailor who has the crossbow)? A crazy cartoon creature with massive wings, a flying helmet and goggles. Just like this.

Yes! This is the one I like! The funny image is sort of true: a young albatross needs a runway to take off from and I imagine they try loads of times to get airborne, lumbering along, like some stitched together early plane, all struts and wires and cloth and wood, tilting this way and that, the feet paddling on the ground, skipping, catching air in those ungainly stretched out wings; sometimes beaking (that’s not a spelling mistake) down, belly skidding, losing dignity… And then sudden, soaring flight way over the long valleying waves of the ocean… So be it.

It makes me think of writing.

Of course, they really look like this:

Wow! Look at that beak! It looks like it’s made from beaten gold; and its ghost-white head is so smooth and has fine pencil streaks- I guess those are special feathers tiny and sleek to let it cut through gales and tempests- and its eye is deep and dark as the ocean it flies over. And this is why it’s the boss.

OK enough about albatrosses.

8th October 2014

What? No Fish!

OK, enough with the fish. I know, I know  but the river I like to wander along doesn’t have so many salmon swimming up it anymore  and that is such a bad thing that if I could, like the mighty Doctor, go back in time I would put back that wee fish in that net  that you can just about see in the picture below…

Well, I might.

But the real thing is what if there were no fish? What would have happened to Jonah when he was tossed over board and was swallowed by the whale! (Do not correct me! I know, scientifically speaking a whale is not a fish but in the story that whale is called a fish and that is good enough for me.) Would Jonah have to be rescued by a giant turtle? I can just imagine that: there he is,with his long wet beard, the wind and waves giving him a right battering and he’s clinging on to the edge of the giant turtle’s shell and God says: “Jonah! What do you think you are doing?”

Jonah says: ‘Clinging on, God, that’s what I’m doing. Why couldn’t you invent some large animal, call it a fish, or a whale if you like, and it could swallow me whole and I could live inside that giant fish and I wouldn’t have to cling on to this poor old turtle.”

To which God would say: “That’s something I’ll think about. Meanwhile, mind you look after that giant turtle. She needs a clean beach without sun beds on it…’

‘Sun!’ says Jonah. ‘What sun? I am in the middle of a storm here…’

Ah, well, leave him there but I think there will be a different kind of Jonah in the story I’m working on. He comes from somewhere the other side of the universe, across the big void and the other side of the Edge.

15th September 2014

15th September 2014

Write Fish Wrong Fish

If a man appears scrambling up from the river looking a bit pleased with himself the chances are this man has been fishing and he’s caught a fish. Yes! I see a not very big fish in the net. Size doesn’t count (of course it does). BUT, the thing is, what does this have to do with writing stories?

Easy – ask me another- standing on a river bank staring at the water, looking and looking and looking for a stir, a swirl, a hint of a rising fish is not unlike staring at the page looking and looking for the hint of a tale, or a twist in the tail or an end to the tale.

And if you hook that fish, that beautiful flash of silver, that leaping dream of far-away seas, you are in for a fight; and if you hook your story, your character, your place, your plot, you will be in for a fight too. Unless you’re lucky. We all get lucky sometimes but you can’t rely on luck because she (I don’t know why she’s a she but she is) will twist away from you when you need her most, so keep looking. Looking is the thing. Looking closely. Seeing what is out there, just beneath the surface…

And what if that man crossing the river wasn’t smiling and didn’t have a net with a fish in it? What if he had just seen something up the river, round the bend, above the fast water, caught on the ford…

2nd September 2014

Rip the Van me Winkle!

Yes, nonsense, rubbish, worse than slimy Big Mac packaging and that’s just my mangled headline up there, but, tell me,  who would really want to sleep for a hundred years?

Well, maybe…  if there was school for a hundred years and not a day off but other than that, absolutely other than that, no. No, Sir! Not me. That gap between my last post and this one… an illusion. There, that’s sorted.

So, this is it, what would you do if you were just about in charge of everything and an alien turns up, uninvited, on a space station, one of those floating rooms up there somewhere where the crew all come from different countries, so,it’s not like there is a lot of chat. Anyhow,  in comes this perfectly nice somebody from some other corner of the great black and wide yonder.

What are your instructions?

Just wondering.

17th January 2014

WINTER SWIMMING ANYONE?

Not me! But a little while back I saw a tiny and very, very, very old miniature ivory carving of a sea otter and its cub, tucked against the mother’s tummy and I wrote this. I’m not really sure why I did, but I did and so here it is.

SEA OTTER (mother and cub)

The kiss of cold wet

that sleeks face fur

Eyes washed with salt

Cub tucked close

A rush of sound

Bird calls

Scratch, like my claws, at the air

The tumble and roar and white of the waves

And down

Wheel, turn, bubble-drift

And fly

Through silence

In a green depth of turning and twisting

And touching tails of weed

And shadow

A silver flash

The twist and bite

Flesh, bone and bite

Salt-warm in the mouth

And up to the light

Air and sound

And down and

A grey ghost from the dark

Stone eye

Black hole mouth

Needle teeth and teeth and teeth

and the fear-rush of pain

Cub tight in my coil of life

Slick to my fur

Swift through surf and stone

Earth-safe

Mother and cub.

5th July 2013

New Call Down Thunder illustration

Illustration by Tom Smith: smithopolis.tumblr.com

14th March 2013

READING RIOT!

Well, not quite but Book Week was a buzz and I am sure loads of authors felt the same.

Thank you to the year 8 students of Clapton Girls’ Academy who have been reading CALL DOWN THUNDER and who made a fantastic giant card and wrote a seriously cool poem about the story.

A whole class writing a poem! How do you do that? Magic fingers and magic minds? Must be.

And another thank you to the students of Bethnal Green who also gave me a great reception on the Tuesday of Book Week. There seemed to be loads of budding (and actual) authors in the group and I wish we had had more time to hear more of the ideas you were so busily scribbling down. Excellent  questions too. There should have been a prize for the best one. Next time…

In Clapton I was Daniel and two days before I was Will, no wonder I was in a spin. Here’s the poem I was talking about:

In the village of Rinconda,

Where the fish swim in the sea,

Lies a mystery yet uncovered

By the two kids, Reve and Mi.

Reve was Jackfish fishing,

While Mi sat in the car,

Reve spied a red headed figure,

Like his sister, from afar.

Mi thought it was a sign,

To find their long lost mum.

They’d journeyed to the city,

And leave behind their slum.

They arranged to meet at day break

And catch a passing truck.

They’d journey to the city

And wish for lots of luck.

They arrived early at the market;

They didn’t like the crowd.

They’d journeyed to the city;

They now found it too loud.

They came across two good thieves,

They thought of them as scum.

They offered Reve their service,

But will they find their mum?

23rd February 2013

Book Day’s A Comin’ Along

Hello Clapton Girls School, or maybe just hello to year eight, or maybe just hello to one very special class in year eight. Yes, that’s better.

Ok Special Class, make sure you have some impossibly, devilshly clever questions to ask me because then I will absolutely NOT  be able to answer them.

See you on the 7th… unless I get lost, and Daniel Finn gets lost quite a lot….

23rd February 2013

Who Nose

What larks, eh!

The Cheltenham workshop was fun and I hope the talented young writers who spun some pretty sparkly tales had fun too, and maybe even learned something. Daniel Finn learned that if you put up a silly picture of yourself you’re likely to get a shadow finger up your nose!

Live and learn.

24th September 2012

Hello Cheltenham Literary MacFestival

If you are one of the cunning and hardy souls who have booked into my writing workshop, a double hello to you. I hope you have fun. I hope I have fun too! And who knows maybe we’ll all learn something useful about getting those stories down and making them as real as the mud… but a bit more interesting. Let me know afterwards what you think. I’ll be there to chat and sign a copy or two of ‘Call Down Thunder’ and ‘Two Good Thieves’. See you there.

7th July 2012

A Load of Old Finn

What’s it like to teach your own book, in your own school, to your own students? I tell you, it’s the bit before you begin that’s a bit nerve-wracking. I wrote a little piece about it that’s in The Times Saturday Review today. If you would like to have a read, click here. (If you’re not a Times subscriber, you can pay £1 for 30 days’ access.)

And the new book, CALL DOWN THUNDER, is launched! Hurrah! There it goes sailing off to reader-land…

3rd July 2012

‘Thar she blows!’ crows Daniel Finn ‘cause Meg likes his book

Which is what the lookouts on whaling ships shouted when they spotted a whale erupting from the deep. This has not much to do with anything except my new book, CALL DOWN THUNDER, has also just emerged from the deep and is to be launched this Thursday on the 5^th of July, so I hope it doesn’t bump into a whale.

I have nothing against whales. In fact, I like them very much and would rather that excitable hunters wouldn’t try to pin-cushion them with harpoons. However, a whale would swamp my book and that wouldn’t be any good at all. What would be really good would be if  the book were swamped by  readers with hungry eyes and grabby hands each one of them snatching a copy from a real or virtual bookshelf and settling down to what I hope is a rattling good yarn.

What’s it about, this CALL DOWN THUNDER? You’ll have to check it out on the My Books page

But hear this: MEG ROSOFF says it is ‘Sharp as a blade and … electrifying!’

So, how about that? I am as puffed up as a triple puffed puffin from Puffin Island.

3rd July 2012

Will the Pimpernel Pimpernel again? And Will says:

A very nice reader asked me if there was going to be another Pimpernel book after ‘Rip Runner’ and I said…. ‘I don’t think so.’ Which is a bit of a shame, since there are queues of horrible people out there dipping their greedy fingers into the lives of ordinary folk like you and me, who the Geek, the Greek and the Pimpernel would just love to tip into a bowl of sludgery stew. But this is it, my friends, for the time being anyhow.

Will will have to devise something fiendishly new when his other half, Daniel Finn, takes a break. Until then… stay disguised and don’t be smart!

19th March 2012

The walls of the city

It looks shabby now; it didn't look shabby then

I went to Istanbul looking for the old city of Constantinople, the great apple  of the ancient world. (Sorry about that, Babylon. Forget about it, Rome. ) This is it. Right on the edge, surrounded on three sides by water: the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorous, the Golden Horn. And these walls, still standing. What a place for a story!  It steams in the summer and shivers in the winter. Imagine those stinking Crusaders at the gates and the soldiers on the wall looking down at them; imagine treacherous emperors plotting against their own families, chucking their nephews into the dungeons, raiding the treasury and running away. Imagine a small lad who thinks he knows it all and his dad turns out to be….

6th February 2012

NEW BOOK ON THE HORIZON

July the 5th. That is the date. Stamp it on your cranium and remember that July means school is nearly over and the holidays have nearly begun and that is just the time to find a good read. And this had better be a good read or your cranium will look foolish!

5th December 2011

All Along The Watchtower

‘All along the watch tower the princes kept their view…’

If you haven’t heard Jimi Hendrix playing that Bob Dylan song (Yes, of course I am ancient!) you are missing out… Big time. Well, I think so. And that line is the beginning of the last verse, which ends with a rider approaching and the wind kicking up into a howling storm. You never know exactly why there are so many princes stuck up on the watch tower but you can bet that rider is bringing some important news. I always hope it’s going to make them happy but I know deep down that it won’t. (Cue in thundery, gloomy doomy  music at this point).

And so I have to have a watch tower in my next story,  but I don’t have much time for loads of princes (What have they ever done for me?) so they are definitely not going to be up there standing around watching. Instead, I see a young lad, curly black hair, and he’s sharp as a Jamie Oliver kitchen knife. He’s peering out over these massive walls- Imagine Hadrian’s Wall and then go; ‘Pah! They’re just squiffy small compared with the ones that guard the city in Daniel Finn’s story.’- And he sees something coming his way. It has a thousand stinking feet and a thousand bloodshot eyes and a thousand bellies that ache with hunger….

It sounds grim.

Believe me, I hadn’t thought of this at all before I just started writing a moment ago. So, whatever happens, remember this: IT IS YOUR FAULT!

Happy Christmas from me, Daniel and him, Will.

2nd September 2011

A Whole Year!

I don’t know where it went. I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve looked under every single stone on Doolough beach (that’s in County Mayo, Ireland for those of you who want to know) but I still couldn’t find it. Mind you, a smart guy could say that all that looking and peeking and peering probably took a year and so that’s exactly where the year went. Enough! Who wants smart guys telling you things you don’t want to know?

Daniel Finn has been working away on his follow up to TWO GOOD THIEVES  (or  SHE THIEF depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be standing) and it is called CALL DOWN THUNDER. It’s not a sequel but it does sort of connect with  TWO GOOD THIEVES. And yes, it is pretty stormy. It should be out next summer. So there is another year gone, just like that.

As for the other me, Will Gatti, him of geeks and Greeks and that sort of thing, he seems to have done a real Rip Van Winkle. I’ll have to give him a shake, rattle and roll. It’s time he did something wizzy, funny and odd, like a pair of left footed boots.

I’ll go and wake him.

5th July 2010

Hello American Reader

I hope that when you finally stumbled onto this site you weren’t confused by these cunning publishing people, because, yes, SHE THIEF is really TWO GOOD THIEVES.  In fact SHE THIEF was my original title for the story so I am very glad you guys have reclaimed it for me. I must now stir myself to get an image of the jacket up on this site because way back in 1967 when hip talk was hip it would have been called Dead cool. So that’s where we are….

…Almost, because now I need to say

HELLO TO ANY DUTCH AND GERMAN  READERS

who have popped into the site for a spot of confusion. Yes, your cunning publishers decided not to call me Daniel Finn but … Will Gatti! What larks, eh! (Old fashioned English for ‘fun’, in case you were wondering.)

Never mind. I promise (and yes, I always break my promises) I won’t leave it for so long before adding a bit more chat.

15th November 2009

Long Beach Long List

Should I be excited? Perhaps I should.

I got back from a wonderful holiday where I spent a great deal of time padding up and down a beach called Turtle Beach looking for turtles but the turtles were obviously on holiday. They were probably sitting at my desk writing my new book. I am not complaining. I expect turtles are really good at writing my stories…

I didn’t mean to mention turtles. What I meant to say was that the news I got when I came home was that ‘Two Good Thieves’ is on the long list for the Carnegie Award. I think that is pretty cheerful making but I do wonder if the long list is as long as Turtle Beach, because that is a very long beach.

Note to me: Find picture of beach. It looks a lot better than the photograph below.

12th October 2009

12th October 2009

A strange man, claiming to be the author, Will Gatti, was spotted in Hoxton Square last Friday holding a knockabout question and answer and funny voices session with Year 6 students from Whitmore School. The real Will Gatti claimed he could never look as daft as the man in this photograph and anyway, last Friday, he was in Mexico. Then he said maybe it wasn’t Mexico but somewhere like that.  We stopped talking to him because he suddenly ran off down the street to buy an almond croissant.

17th September 2009

And after The Two Good Thieves

I’ve spent the summer padding up and down wet and windy beaches on the west of Ireland trying to peer over to the other side of the Atlantic and see this little, scruffy fishing village, just down the coast from the city where Baz and Demi did all their running. It seemed to me that there was a story in that village, maybe one that tells us a little bit about where Fay came from, before she became the mother of thieves…

So that’s what Daniel is up to. The other one, Will, he’s pitching up to a festival in Hackney. It’s called the Starlit festival. Maybe he’ll see you there. I’m not sure if you’ll recognise him though because he says, he’ll be the one in disguise. It’s that Pimpernel thing again, isn’t it; everyone pretending to be someone else. It’s so confusing!

13th July 2009

Hello

Welcome to my website. Come in and have a snuffle around.

My new book Two Good Thieves has just been published. It always seems like an age between the time I have finished writing a story and when it finally emerges clad in its crisp, shiny jacket. My first signing session for the book was in Harrods which was good fun, especially since I was only about twenty paces from the pet department where I saw a puppy called a ‘cairnoodle’. What a name…

I am now in the west of Ireland writing a prequel to Two Good Thieves. In fact I am not sure that strictly speaking it is a prequel – more like a first cousin, but there you are, I am not so good at the technical terms. Anyway, thank God for the summer holidays – even if it is lashing with rain right now …