THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WOODS

Deep, deep in the darkest of forests you are all alone. Silence falls, not a bird can be heard. Faraway, in the distance, is that a twig snapping? Is someone there? The silence is oppressive, it closes in, making your eardrums throb, desperately trying to seek out a sound to hear. If a tree falls in the forest, dos someone hear it scream? The silence is deafening, as if it has weight and substance, in envelopes you and you are suddenly drowning in its treacly grasp.

Shapes and shadows shift in the beams of weak light that filter through the green canopy far above your head. You spin around, and around again, but no one is there, but, something moved, something felt as if it was very close, so close that it could reach out and touch you, transform you and hold you here forever.

Faces and forms appear and disappear in the ever-shifting shadows. Is that a buzzard perched over there? Hunched over… Poised… Holding you in its unchanging gaze. Contemplating its next meal… Ready to strike, screech out its victory to all the other buzzards circling above the canopy, so that they too can dive in and join the fray, the orgy of consumption.

Could it be a waiting warrior? Frozen forever as he paused for a moment to take the breath that turned out to be his last. Forever on guard whilst taken off guard, his armour an ebullient mask to the frail figure within the carapace. Weapons halfway to being at an uneasy at ease, but a moment away from action and violence.

Or is it some more fantastic creature. A terrible lizard, or a sleeping behemoth, or maybe a monster from the darker corners of the imagination, lurking, plotting, waiting to strike…? It might be a creature of the purest instinct, a scavenger, a vicious killer that just wants to eat, its talons paused and waiting to strip your flesh from your bones and devour you. It’s waited an eternity now, and all you have to do is take one more little step…

No, I can see it now for what it is, for what she is. Sitting there, hunched over, frozen in time by her own wickedness when it was found out, her cold spindly fingers clutching at the stirring stock, her cloak wrapped around her against the cold and the rain and the eavesdropping villagers who just want to bind her up, drag her away to their pyre and burn her.

She is the wicked witch of the woods, a dark heart of brutal curses and the old magic, whose spells can turn day into night, light into shade and joy into sorrow and heartbreak. If you are lucky she’ll remain too engrossed in watching her cauldron boil to notice you as you stand there, frozen, not daring to breathe lest you get added to the evil mixture as it boils. She has maybe been there for a thousand years, and might remain for a thousand more until an opportunity comes along and she can gain her freedom once again.

Meanwhile, she waits and she waits and she waits.

For you.

You try to get by her without making a sound, your heartbeat now thudding in your ears which escalate its volume so that it blocks out everything else because they have no other sounds to divert them.

So loud, so loud.

Surely she will hear?

You manage to make just one slight and silent movement to the left, and then another and another. Soon you are running blindly on through the woods, the branches whipping at your face and hands, the thorns tearing at your clothes and flesh. You’ve simply got to get away, as far away as you can before she notices you. Behind you, already the dark powers are circling, forming into a whirlwind of sound and noise and fury. Got to keep running, faster, faster, through those bushes and into the light you can just see beyond.

Then you are back in the car park on an ordinary summer’s day. Families play with their children and eat their sandwiches and laugh with each other in a carefree way. A dozing Labrador idly glances your way as you burst out from the trees, but nobody pays you much attention as you regain your breath and your senses.

You breathe deeply, exhale a sigh of relief but then the wind catches just there merest hint of a distant cackle coming from somewhere behind you, and you find that you are shivering despite the sunshine.

ANECDOTES AND SMALL TALK

I do sometimes think that I live my life as was once said about the late, great Peter Cook, “at a slight angle to the universe”. In his case, of course, it meant that his observations and wit meant that he took our world, looked at it with a new understanding and made it seem even funnier than it already did, whereas my own skewed view of the world is more to do with not really understanding it at all and failing to keep up.

I was thinking about such things the other day in relation to these things I write. Writers of newspaper and magazine columns are usually able to put a witty spin on the events in their life and turn them into literary entertainment. I specifically recall the piece Douglas Adams once wrote about the packet of biscuits at the railway station, which was a moment of pure comedy extrapolated from a small event in his life, which I think lurks in “The Salmon of Doubt” which is well worth tracking down if you get the chance.

I then began to realise that nothing that funny ever happens to me. Lots of things happen which make me angry, or confused, or embarrassed, but they seldom get twisted around into humour. These burblings, which I continue to push reluctantly into the wide and uncaring world, are seldom about the absurdities of life looked at in a absurdly funny way, although I’ll admit to the odd dalliance with “funny peculiar” and the occasional attempt at something approaching “wit”.

Instead I churn out my confusion with the same deadly earnestness that used lead to people shuffling away from me at parties and going off to snog the bloke with the tattoos and the guitar. Ah yes, my friends, there’s another of life’s lessons learned at an early age. We all might say we admire a bit of intellectual conversation, but if the pseudo-intellectual who corners you is really deathly dull, so is the outcome of the evening likely to be. Guitars, however, are always cool…

“I should have learned to play the guitar… I should have learned to play them drums…”

But it’s not just the writers (or the guitarists) who are expert word wranglers. You only have to stand in a pub, park yourself on a bus or train, or sit in an office with inadequate sound-proofing where the room next door is being renovated to hear comedy gold being uttered all of the time. Everybody, it seems has something amusing happening to them all the time, either that or, with the slightest of twists, they can make the most mundane moments in their lives seem funny for the amusement of their audience.

“And then, do you know what he said…? He said…”

“…and, do you know, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing…”

All far better than being the dull person who nobody wants to listen to, droning on about their less than fascinating fascinations.

I was sitting on a bench on a headland a few months ago and there was a large family group centred on another of the benches further along and they were all screaming with merriment at the most banal rubbish that you would switch off if it turned up on your TV set, and when they weren’t howling with laughter at the thought of the young lad with them having to wear soggy shorts, or the other moments and incidents of their day at the beach, they were having very earnest conversations about the latest mobile phones or job opportunities in the HGV driving and warehouse management game that had the air of the wise old elders of the tribe passing on their knowledge to the young bucks about to head up the next hunting party.

All very earnest, and possibly a bit dull to anyone listening in, but then I suppose I shouldn’t really have been listening in, although it was almost impossible not to because, no matter how intimate, personal and confidential their topics of conversation might have been, they were also being very loud.

At the time I muttered to myself some nonsense about “empty vessels” but I’ve since come to realise that this is precisely what the majority of everyday family life is for the vast majority of people. Small little moments of dullness that are turned into entertainment, even though they might need occasionally enlivening a little by embellishment or by making reference to shared popular culture.

That said, there is still a modern tendency to have all of our most personal moments broadcast to whoever might be within earshot, possibly due to the shift from having to go into the “other room” or “down to the phone box” to make our personal calls. Nowadays you can know the details of someone’s most intimate private life simply by sitting too close to them on the bus as they make or receive that call on their mobile, and all of our boundaries seem to be shifting and crumbling. Unless, of course you happen to get caught inadvertently “earwigging”, and then it’s your fault.

I have claimed for many years that “I don’t know how to do small talk” because all those little things that I know that you’re supposed to say when other people make a happy or sad announcement seem to elude me, or my “congratulations” sound so insincere even to my own ears so they’re hardly likely to convince anybody else…

Are they?

Sometimes, I thought, it’s better to say nothing at all, when it turns out that saying something, anything, no matter how predictable it might seem, is the better option. I’m also so far out of the loop when it comes to popular popular culture, that nine times out of ten I don’t really know who it is that they are talking about anyway, so it’s probably best to keep my opinions on such things to myself. Luckily, in those circumstances, I usually don’t actually have an opinion one way or another anyway, so that’s pretty easily achieved.

Not that I’m generally short of something else to say, but about that, there’ll be more (I’m sure) tomorrow…

SELLING OUT

Oh, it doesn’t take much, does it? No matter how firmly held the beliefs and principles, it really doesn’t take much to cause you to wobble and fudge when the chips are down and the arm is being gently twisted. Scratch, as they say, the surface of any “bleeding heart” liberal, and you’ll find the fascist within.

I used to think that I was better than that. I used to believe that I would be capable of digging in my heels and saying  a resounding “No!” if the question was ever asked  of me. I used to be 100% (and absolutely no more – but that’s a rant for another day) certain that if the stormtroopers came a pounding on my door to take away my (obviously metaphorical) brother or my sister, then I would stand firmly by their side and resist any injustice because of what I believed was truly the “right” thing to do…

Principles.

Firmly held beliefs.

Absolutes.

There’s no room for a wobble. These things may not be fudged. We believe what we believe and we must be resolute in our defence of those beliefs because they are what make us who we are.

And then there’s a phone call…

“Can I do a favour…?”

And suddenly I’m sucked into working for the betterment of a whole world that I have steadfastly refused to support despite so many pressures over the last few years. One tiny phone call on behalf of a member of my extended and far distant family and I’m sucked into what I would otherwise refer to as a whole world of pain if that really wasn’t to over-egg the McMuffin.

For good or ill, in the far distant corners of this fair land of ours, live a few members of what you might be surprised to learn are known as blood relatives of my humble mashed potatoey self. They are even known to admit to the fact that they are related to me every once in a while, despite my best efforts to be the antisocial git that you have come to know and loathe through these dark passages.

One of the younger ones works for a fast food company of international reputation and I don’t really have a problem with that. It is, after all, work, and they do seem to look after her and nurture her career, and in this day and age that really is no bad thing. I mean, yes, you can rant and rail against corporate globalisation, after all I know I have, and you would, like I have, no doubt be making many fair and valid points, but the bottom line is that they are an employer and I am related, by whatever cosmic accidents have made it so, to one of their loyal employees.

The problem is that I’m really not a huge fan of theirs, and, over the years, I have not been backwards in coming forwards to say so. Personally, I choose not to eat there myself and am as resolute as it is possible to be about this, even though people have been known to sit near me eating their happy little lunches and allowing the tempting aromas to drift in my direction and specifically nosewards.

Sometimes it really does smell so good, but I’ll also tell you now that, whilst on an individual meal level these aromas can seem slightly tempting, on a larger outlet scale, the wafting stench of the fat and grease can still make me feel slightly nauseous and bring on an almost instant gag reflex.

You see…? Hard wired…

I’ve read the Naomi Klein book. I’ve read “Fast Food Nation”. I like to think that I know what’s going on and, despite years of just refusing to eat there, despite the endless arguments with colleagues who are also parents insisting that “You have to eat there if you’ve got kids…” (No… You don’t!), and, despite the fact that the occasional business meeting seems to inevitably happen in the nearest outlet to an industrial estate, I have resisted as best I can. After all, there’s not really much you can do when your boss plonks a hot bag of food down in front of you and says “I’ve bought you lunch” other than meekly eat it all up with as much in the way of thanks as you can muster, but as a general rule of thumb, this is not my preferred choice as to where I would personally choose to get my meals.

Yet it only took one telephone call asking for a favour from a member of my family who works there, and I found that I was working – however obliquely - for “da man”.

And it was “da clown man” at dat…

Shudder…

Now I feel unclean, but let me try to explain.

Qualifications are being studied for that require a certain amount of marketing skill, but not everyone studying marketing necessarily has much in the way of design skills. They do, however, sometimes know someone who does and who might be able to suggest a few pointers in that direction and show them how such things might be achieved, and also, perhaps, make some more general observations about alternative ways of thinking about the same problem and how different sectors of the perceived customer base might perceive certain information that you wish to share with them.

This is how I found myself arranging a certain amount of McMarketing text material and various McPhotos into a vague example of a basic layout on a recent Monday evening in October, just as an example of how these things might be done. Just a couple of hours shifting text and logos and photographs around on a screen to try a few different ways of showing the same basic information couldn’t do any real harm, could it? In my defence, I tried very hard not to read the content too closely, and I did refuse to proof-read and correct the content (just my little act of rebellion), and I’m still crossing my fingers and hoping against all hope that “da man” won’t be able to profit from anything I might have suggested (although, who am I trying to kid…?), and now I really, really fancy…

A salad.

Maybe that will help me to cleanse my soul.

FILLING THOSE SHOES

I have to admit that I’ve become grumpier of late. Not that I imagine that anyone could actually tell, of course, as even I would have to admit that it’s probably my default setting. However, were it indeed possible for it to be so, even grumpier is what I have become.

I could put it all down to the drastic changes to my daily routine, or the fact that I’m feeling utterly exhausted, or juggling with one or two of my own personal demons, or I could even perhaps put it down to the turn of the year and the inevitable sense of the oncoming winter darkness and all that it entails, but, to be perfectly honest, all of that stuff is exactly the same kind of thing that pretty much affects everyone else just as much and it doesn’t generally transform many of them into melancholic old gits who struggle to see the silver lining to any endless banks of impenetrable cloud cover.

I am, however, beginning to wonder if I’ve finally worked out what the problem is.

I think it’s because of the shoes.

For the first time in a long while, I’m having to spend a lot more of my time actually wearing shoes throughout my working day instead of sitting at my desk in my bare feet, and, to be perfectly frank, it’s becoming a bit of a pain. Now I am perfectly aware that to many in the circles I move in, however tangentally, shoes and the acquisition of new ones are a huge part of their life and sense of self-worth and self-esteem. As society crumbles around us, perhaps we really are approaching Adams’ legendary “Shoe Event Horizon”. Certainly some of the closets around the world would indicate that this indicator of decline and fall of empires is imminently upon us. Equally, in many parts of the world, even the ownership of one good pair of shoes is an almost impossible dream, so I know that it is not a subject to be addressed lightly.

It’s just that my own relationship with shoes is a complex one full of a long history of mutual distrust with the additional factors of limited interest and budget-related thinking on my part to be taken into account. In other words, possibly to my eternal shame, I’ve never been all that interested in the stuff I wrap my feet in.

I can, of course, remember a phase in my life when my footwear used to cycle between “Green Flash” pumps (as my dad would call them) and the kind of zip sided boots that Mr. Spock might have thought a bit smart. I used to wear the pairs I had of these until they were pretty much falling off my feet, at which point I would go out and buy another pair that were exactly the same, and then spend another couple of years demolishing those. I can still recall that slight squishing feeling that you get in your socks when your boots leak on a rainy day, but I would still prefer that feeling, even though it could get quite cold sometimes, rather than having to break in a new and less comfortable pair.

Sadly the last pair of those boots let me down by not being quite so well made as previous versions, so that the nails in the heels ripped my ankles to shreds over a period of time and I started getting an almost Pavlovian pain response whenever I even contemplated putting the wretched things on. The boot of choice evolved briefly into a short phase of buying slip-on Dr Marten’s which was prompted by having to get something vaguely suitable to go with the suit I had to wear at a wedding I was required to officiate at, and some rather fine Tony Lama cowboy boots I bought in Seattle before being pretty much abandoned altogether in favour of cheap shoes from the supermarket.

Meanwhile, as the “Green Flash” option faded from my life, as they disintegrated around my fetid feet, my only other real experience of a “branded” product was with the black “Reeboks” that kind of served a dual purpose for quite a few years of looking a bit like boots, but also being a training shoe. I went through a whole string of those for a good few years before they suddenly became very hard to find, and the style got changed and it all got a bit disappointing. When I find a shoe type I like, I want to be able to buy it forever, but the shoe business really doesn’t think like that. I do currently lope around in some classic black Converse which I bought in Sonoma five years ago, so I suppose that my dalliance with branded footwear has tenuously continued, but I find that the flatness of the sole doesn’t do my posture, which was admittedly never all that brilliant, any favours.

Still, I seem to be getting a preference for “proper” shoes once again as I get older. Perhaps an awareness of the crumbling of the faculties means that I feel that I need all the help I can get, but it’s taken me a while to come to this conclusion after the many failed attempts at footwear respectability over the decades have usually ended in painful disaster. Nevertheless, now that I am having to adapt to a new way of thinking and living my life in all sorts of ways, I suspect that the almost permanent imposition of compulsory footwear wearing is definitely a massive source of my own “Grump Factor”. Once more I find myself pondering upon the laws of “cause and effect” and wondering which came first, the grumpiness or the shoes...?

I’m not trying to say that the shoes themselves are painful or anything like that. In a lot of ways, the shoes I’m mostly choosing to wear are the most comfortable I’ve owned in many a long year. It’s just the having to spend all day encased in the things that is becoming something of a surprising chore, as if in enclosing my feet, somehow I’m enclosing my mind, but yet I would never, ever, want to impose the sight of my own barenaked extremities upon the retinas of my innocent colleagues.

I’m not that cruel.

And I suspect that it would be a very good excuse for a disciplinary hearing, and I really wouldn’t want to give anyone the excuse… after all, the grumpiness is bad enough as it is.

ARCTIC CHILL

The prospect of another quiet night in looms large. I arrived home whilst there was still light in the sky, a luxury that will soon slip away with the changing of the clocks and the shortening of the days as the final vestiges of summer fade into memory. Next door I hear the pounding of hammers and the screeching of electric drills as another day of apparent home improvement seems to come to its conclusion, but it is almost drowned out by the continued drumming of the raindrops on the slates.

Will this rain never stop? Will the endless thudding ever fade away? Obviously it will, eventually, I suppose, because it must, but not for some time it would seem. Instead it batters away, distracting the thoughts and stopping the restful sleep with its incessant chatter, ceaselessly tap-tap-tapping beyond the boundaries of my home, hopefully staying without and not finding a way to seep in and ruin everything.

Yet come the spring, there will still be tales of water shortages and hosepipe bans and reservoirs half full, reminding me of faraway days and Stuart Hall and acres of cracked baked mud. Torrents of water will pour and flood where they are not wanted, and streams will rush down roads and pathways and high streets and wash away our human constructs as if they had never been because the water is unstoppable, irresistible and totally unforgiving.

But sometime it will stop, as it must, to be replaced with the bitterest thickest ice to freeze locks and burst pipes and turn our pavements into ice rinks and lethal traps. Then the snow, loved and loathed in equal measure, will fall and fall and fall again, and the bitter coldness will cut us to the bone, shards of ice ripping flesh as the gales blow hard and sting our faces and turn our frozen fingers to burning pain as we toast ourselves in front of warm coals and glowing bars and much needed cups of soup and tea and coffee.

It never ceases to astonish me how quickly winter comes. They’d promised it, of course, those predictive wizards from the meteorological office, but in the absence of a suitable replacement for that much-missed lovely eccentrically enthusiastic figure of Mr. Dan Corbett telling me that I might need a warm coat or an extra jumper if I was going outdoors today, it kind of hadn’t sunk in and so it still came as a bit of a shock to stick my nose outside the door to see if the milk had arrived only to have it bitten by the first frost and instead of a comforting autumnal dawn of warm rain, to feel the first icy needles of that arctic chill, the first whispers of winter coming, rather ironically, so very so very hot on the heels of that last burst of unexpected late summer heat.

And so, once again, I am spending an evening alone as that other bitter chill called isolation also bites deep down to the bone. Not for me the dubious fun and frolics of professional engagements, celebrations of arrivals and departures, or any of the other social necessities that come from working in an environment crammed with so many people with so many places to go and people to see. In our little empire, we three chug away at our daily toils and then vanish like thieves into our various separate nights, with our own demands tugging at our free time. Instead, I wend my weary way back home to the prospect of “a bit of telly” and a ready meal that has reached its “use by” date, and await the call to rescue my beloved from the harsh grip of a thunderously atrocious filthy old night, and the dubious pleasures of traveling upon our late night rail network.

But, as ever, whenever I am alone it is the words that call to me and I find myself drawn once more towards the keyboard and my own incessant tap-tap-tapping, pouring out another deluge of words with no meaning, sentences with no structure and paragraphs with no purpose, all in the pursuit of some unfathomable truth or perhaps just to stave off a far deeper horror, the prospect of being alone with myself and wondering whether I’ll enjoy the company.

Would I be able to entertain myself and find enough things to do to make those prospective long hours be spent doing something worthwhile and fulfilling so that I can look back upon them and feel satisfied that I passed the time well…? Or, as is more likely, will they instead just have ticked away in idle pursuits of little achievement and fretting and worrying about how little I seem to actually get done and how much time I waste on doing nothing much at all…?

Otherwise, spend too much time on my own and the mind goes into overdrive and all of the suspicions, doubts and fears start to resurface again. Old memories, bad memories, of a time when it all went wrong and fell apart. Is it happening again? This time I have some trust, some belief, but then I remember it’s still the same old me with all the failings, all the lack of enthusiasm and drive remains after all these years. I drive people away, and everyone I touch ends up suffering somehow. The Judas kiss, the antithesis of the Midas touch…

Because there’s a longer, colder emptiness looming at the end of it all, truly the deepest of cold spells, and one with no prospect of warmth at the end of it, and whilst we all try to fend it off by whatever means we can, it still awaits us, and whilst I am aware of this, I still let the sand slip away and the relentless ticking of the clocks tick by and fritter my hours away doing not very much at all, and waiting for the bell to ring that marks the end of time and a summons to depart and battle my way out again into the whirling maelstrom once more and meet that train and greet my companion and return to whence I came and sleep once more.

Unless the bloody weather keeps me awake half the night again.

SAT ON A PARK BENCH LIKE BOOKENDS

When I was a lot younger than I am now, I used to have the rather romantic notion that many of the hours of my twilight years might be spent sitting on a park bench with old friends in comfortable companionship, quietly reminiscing about the old days and watching the world drift by whilst amiably and implicitly passing my world onto younger, more worthy and deserving minds for them to nurture and care for as we quietly and unprotestingly slipped away into uselessness. We would quietly chat and remember our good old days with perhaps just a soupçon of regret and the merest hint of a mischievous twinkle playing about our fading eyes, and just enjoy each other’s company as the day slipped into evening, the mist started to gather, the sun set, and we mutually decided that it was a good time to slope off to the pub for a swift pint or two.

I thought, or maybe just hoped, that it would all be terribly civilised and not just a little moving as those wise old heads remembered the good times, and, as the movie camera showing us their lives pulled backwards and further back still, and the soundtrack of their lives faded, it would all be somehow both terribly moving yet also uplifting as the music swelled and we got a sense of their quiet stoic dignity in the face of massive cosmic indifference.

Nowadays, of course, I know that it’s going to be nothing like that at all. Not only is it terribly unlikely that I’ll live long enough to enjoy such a lifestyle, but I’m starting to believe that there’ll be nobody left to give a rat’s kidney, plus I’m starting to imagine that all of my contemporaries are more  likely to be trying so very hard to cling on to their own youth that they won’t want to be up to such passive pastimes but, instead, are more likely to be jumping out of aeroplanes and running marathons than wanting to feed the ducks and listen to the soft clunk of the bowls on the green.

I can’t imagine there’ll be all that many bowling greens left by then anyway, as the councils and corporations will probably have sold them off to build flats for us to lock ourselves into with our own little virtual worlds to explore instead.

If I carry on the way that I am, I can’t imagine that there’ll be too many friends to accompany me, either, but that’s for me to deal with, at least with the ones that manage to survive that is. The ones that are daft enough to throw themselves out of aeroplanes or feel the burn as they hit the wall when they’ve got to an age when they really ought to know better, well, I hope that you make it, I really do, but if you don’t, well… don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As to those who have already gone to a better place, I can’t ever see the air fares ever making many regular trips to sit in your local parks all that likely, especially with all the pension pots going into meltdown like they seem to be, although maybe by then everything will be so interactive that the technology will make it seem like we are able to share our virtual bench, even if we’re half a world away from each other. That might be fun, and would certainly cut down on the required effort to be inputted by a reluctant socialiser like myself, but just in case it never happens, well I’ll be thinking of all of you as I sit wherever I end up sitting, all alone in the darkness waiting for the answers that I suspect are really unlikely to ever actually come.

Mind you, if all of our retirement dates keep getting pushed further and further back, like they seem to be, maybe even that day will never come.

Still, if you’re still out there, we have an appointment on a park bench at some point in the not too distant – or possibly ever so far distant - future. Come that glorious time, I hope that we’ll regularly get the chance to sit down, chew the fat and put the world to rights whilst remembering our adventures from our own less than reckless youth. The strange thing is that right now, we still have the time to add to those future memories if we don’t all get too wrapped up in what we haven’t done, what we used to do, what we really should be doing and what we wish we had – or hadn’t – done.

If we’re not careful, we’ll be sitting there saying “All gone now, all gone…” and we won’t be able to work out quite how it was that we got to there from here. Sometimes I think that it’s already too late, but then I tell myself that I’m just being daft, although, alarmingly, one day I’ll wake up (or not…) and I’ll be right.

I suppose that I’d better get a move on before it’s too late…

Only…

ABSOLUTE POWERLESSNESS

General Oxymoron, the last Supreme Benevolent Dictator of the Universe, jumped as he heard the distant crash of a door slamming. His more-than-a-tad-nervous system once more started pumping adrenaline around his system yet again and, despite the lateness of the hour, he found that he couldn’t sleep. Every single noise he heard these days made him think that the end was nigh and he sometimes found that his whole body was trembling just because someone, somewhere dropped a glass.

He looked across at the cup of still cooling TranquoSnooze® sitting untouched at his bedside. One of his allegedly loyal minions had delivered it at the appointed hour of his evening’s retirement and had then scuttled swiftly away without so much as stopping for a chat. He wondered briefly whether it was the same minion who had slammed the door which had disturbed him and toyed with the idea of having him summarily executed just in case, but decided that this was just the kind of thing that made them all seem so nervous all the time and decided to let it pass.

He smiled a rare smile to himself as he allowed himself to wonder whether he was, after all, mellowing with age, but then the thought that the mob might even at this moment be pouring through the splintered remains of the doors to his Palace and surging through the corridors towards the Imperial Bedchamber soon focussed his thoughts again.

“Was this a good day to die?” he wondered.

He had so many things that he still wanted to do, so many plans, none of which would ever happen if everything came to a sudden stop at this particular moment, but, he supposed that there never really was a convenient moment. If you kept on waiting until you’d got everything done, well, you’d have to live forever and, whilst the Slave Labs had been working on precisely that problem for more than a decade now, they were no nearer a breakthrough today than they ever had been, and didn’t look like being for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps if he didn’t keep insisting on testing their newest batches of elixir on whichever of his chief research scientists presented it to him, things would have progressed more quickly, but they would never learn anything that way, would they?

He sighed.

Nobody had the time for him any more it seemed. Every single minute of every single day seemed to be fully scheduled and accounted for in his diary, but no-one (other than his chief surgical officer) ever managed to find the time to ask how he was, or what he thought of something so simple as what the weather was doing. Instead they usually just cowered in terror and stammered a few meaningless words of some oath of fealty or other, before getting gratefully away as fast as their legs could carry them. Had that been a conspiratorial glint he’d spotted in his downcast eyes as he’d fled, the General wondered?

He’d never wanted to become a dictator in the first place, if the truth were to be told. After the final stages of the last glorious battle on the Weeping Plains of Amethyst, when millions had fought in the name of their ridiculous cause only to have been swept needlessly away by his very own Third Battalion of the Noble Order of Combatant Horsemen, when the dust had settled he had found himself, rather unluckily, to be the last man standing, not least because, during the very moment that the final obliteration surge began its final push, he’d just popped into the field commode tent to relieve himself as a surge of his own had just started after a particularly dubious looking fish ration had decided to pick that very moment to play havoc with his digestive system.

He’d emerged into the dense smoke to find millions of the glorious dead strewn all about the fields of combat and, to his immense surprise, that he was now the highest ranking officer in an army that had won what had been later dubbed the First Great Battle for the Universe but which, in real terms, meant three planets, half a dozen moons and a couple of hundred asteroid colonies in a solar system that had never amounted to anything much more than a grotty backwater.

That suddenly didn’t seem to add up to much of a legacy for a life long lived. He wondered, briefly, about how he would be remembered by history, but then he remembered many of the rebel NewsNet broadcasts he’d seem lately and thought that it was unlikely that he would be thought of fondly, and that suddenly seemed most unfair. He had, after all, tried his very best to give the people what they had needed, even if it hadn’t been what they had wanted. All of the palaces and the slush funds and the kickbacks that they kept going on about, well, he’d never really wanted any of them, but, somehow he’d thought that they were kind of expected for a supreme being in his position.

He looked once more at the cup at his bedside and tentatively reached out his fingers towards it. They were trembling. No, far worse, they were actually, physically shaking. He realised that the ordinary people really didn’t have the slightest clue what it was like living in this position of absolute authority. Oh, they might very well envy his power and his life of apparent luxury, but they never seemed to talk about all the responsibility that came with it.

Or the terror.

Oh yes, people might talk about living in fear, but they really don’t know what it’s like. Sixteen and a half years of dreading the knock at the door, trusting no-one… Every night he would lie awake next to one of his 6012 concubines, before sending her away unsatisfied, back to be locked inside the now rather towering edifice they called the Concubine Wing of the Palace so that she could not talk to any outsiders about his lack of sexual prowess.

He’d been allowed – or rather he had ordered it and it had been made to happen - one new concubine to be allocated to him for every day of his reign, but he no longer enjoyed, (nor did he have the stamina for) the novelty any more. Perhaps, if it wouldn’t be seen as a sign of weakness, he should have rescinded the order, because the whole routine of getting to know them and having to have them thoroughly searched for all the latest hi-tech tools that even the most lowly of assassins carried these days tended to make it a bit of a long evening, which he’d rather have spent alone with wife number 2, watching the perpetual cycle of old reruns of his speeches on Presidential Holochannel 01, from back in the days when the people still loved him.

Or at least he’d thought they had.

From what he was reading across the NewsNet he was really beginning to doubt that they ever had, despite the pictures in every home and the statues on every street. The rebels seemed to be gaining popularity these days, despite his best efforts, and more and more people seemed to be calling for his head, even some of the so-called Liberals.

Oh, of course, they could justify his execution with all their beliefs if they chose to. It all depended upon who you were. Take one leading political leader out and it’s all lamentation and woe ands wailing and gnashing of teeth and asking “Why???” but take out another, whose style of leadership you just happen to disagree with and suddenly it’s all jubilation and rejoicing.

Hypocritical bastards! Well, he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

He took a deep breath, steadied his hand and reached for the cup…

1 RAT, 1 PROPHYLACTIC AND 2 BARGES

It’s a funny old thing this going out to the office mularkey. It’s really not like staying at home at all. You see so many sights, so many different things to amuse you and divert you. Suddenly I find myself interacting with the world again instead of shutting myself away from it, and I am starting to find it a bizarre and bewildering place.

Our tiny little office houses the three of us and is but a stone’s throw from a water treatment works which, as we only moved into the place after the “heat” of our last summer had finally ebbed away, has yet to expose us to the fullest extent of any stench that it may (or may not) produce.

I can see the water treatment works every morning as I park my car. It’s just on the other side of the canal which runs alongside the car park. Oh yes, there’s a canal, and if that doesn’t paint you a picture of our rural idyll, then I don’t know what will, and there are plenty of sights for the three of us to see and remark upon as we put the world to rights during our coffee breaks.

So far the office tally is two barges and one rather healthy looking rat.

Oh yes, those and the discarded prophylactic I found lying on the markings of the space where I park my car when I arrived one recent morning.

A used prophylactic.

In a car park.

In an industrial estate.

Whoever he (or – let’s not make any assumptions here - she) is, they sure know how to show someone a good time, and takes them to all the best places, too. After all, what with the canal and all, it might be quite romantic in the moonlight…

I was almost tempted to immortalise this unexpected discovery in verse. Something along the lines of  “Ode to a used prophylactic I found in the car park one autumnal morning” but I decided against it.

It was hard to make it scan and all the rhymes were rather tricky, that and the fact that the subject was rather icky…

Of course, my find did raise some rather interesting questions. After all, there was no real reason to assume that our lonely car park had been selected as the trysting point for some daring young things from the surrounding area. There is always the intriguing possibility that our little office block is actually a nest containing a raging mass of hormones, and might possibly be in all actuality somewhere that could be described as a hotbed of shenanigans...

I mean, present company aside, it’s not that unfeasible to imagine that someone (or, more likely, I imagine sometwo) is, as the more colloquially minded amongst us might put it “at it.”

I mean it’s not totally impossible, is it…? Well, present company excluded, obviously. I try not to be too judgmental, of course, after all, are these urges so very strong that someone can’t even be bothered waiting until they get home? Anyway, it has all led to me giving one or two of the strangers who walk up and down the corridors the odd funny look as they move about the place.

“Was it you…? Or you? Or maybe you…?”

It’s led to one or two sticky moments in the kitchen, I can tell you.

After all, in the past, I have worked in places where people were (apparently) “at it like rabbits” (as the saying goes) and yet I have always been blissfully unaware of such goings and, er… comings…

(Cheap laugh… Sorry…)

I mean, I guess it’s none of my business as long a they keep themselves to themselves and don’t break the photocopier, is it? All I have to do is tread carefully as I tiptoe my way around the car park as it gets dark and slippery (oo-er!) on these coming winter mornings, and, well, it’s not as if it will be there forever. Rubber is, of course, a naturally occurring substance and so I’m sure that it will biodegrade eventually.

Biodegrade… now there’s a word to conjure with… Perhaps that poem might still be on the cards after all, if I get lucky…

(Oops, there I go again…)

Anyway, I hope that it does biodegrade because I’m definitely not picking it up. After all, I don’t know where it’s been and you really should be careful what you pick up in car parks.

YELLOW SKY

Sunday morning, October the 2nd 2011. Yes, I realise that it’s quite a while ago now, but sometimes it takes me a while to process these thoughts, and at other times, other events and thoughts just get in the way, or have a slightly higher priority in my arbitrary list of  the order of what even now I’m hesitating to refer to as “importance” when it comes to matters that I consider sharing with the world in general via these unhallowed portals I still insist on referring to as “Lesser Blogfordshire” long after the intended whimsy ceased to have any real originality to it.

Anyway, a few Sundays ago, I woke up and the sky was a very strange colour…

Actually, I’m lying to you already. Not deliberately, you understand, but a lie of omission remains a lie, no matter how you choose to dress it up.

Let’s start again.

As usual, I got up in the pitch darkness of a Sunday morning…

Nope. That won’t do either. Despite the fact that I do generally get up ridiculously early on the average Sunday morning, when any reasonable and sane human being would be taking advantage of not having to get up and go to work and be, quite reasonably, taking the opportunity to catch up on some much needed sleep, it would not be right to say that it is usually pitch dark because it patently isn’t. Sometimes, despite the earliness of the hour, it is already light when I arise and start the various potterings that dot the wee small hours of my typical Sunday morning.

Phew!

I’m glad we got that straightened out. Trust, you will hopefully have already realised, plays a big part in our dealings in Lesser B. After all, if you can’t trust me, how on earth could you possibly believe a word that I write? Without trust, surely our relationship, however tenuous and (mostly) anonymous it might be, is useless…?

So, on that particular Sunday morning, I woke up early and it was still dark so, despite one half of my mind trying to persuade me to try and get back to sleep, the other part of me knew that this was a useless ambition and I might as well get up and make a start upon the various small tasks that I had already set for myself as I’d been lying there wide awake anyway.

After various little chores had been accomplished like, for example, the daily pill popping ritual, I meandered up towards the keyboard with my cup of coffee in one hand and set about trying to formulate some of my thoughts for the coming week’s episodes of this little world we share. You see? Despite the fact that there’s only the four of us taking part in this less-than-merry little dance, or perhaps danse macabre, there’s still a great deal of time and thought getting put into it for the tiniest morsel of happiness it pours (or rather drips) into my soul.

Anyway, as I focused my attentions to the screen in front of me, outside the day began its, er, daily ritual of dawning, and I eventually came to notice that, through my window, the light seemed very odd that morning, odd enough, eventually, to distract me from my screen and actually notice it. It had a kind of unreal quality, as if the whole world was bathed in an eerie yellow hue and seemed a little, well, off-colour.

I grabbed my camera and reeled off a couple of snaps to try and capture some of this strangeness, knowing full well that I’d better write about it there and then (or at least fairly soon afterwards) otherwise the pictures would just get filed away and I would end up wondering, some months down the line, quite why it was that I felt it was necessary to take some fairly dull pictures of the sky on one forgotten October morning.

It really gave the whole morning a rather dream-like feeling for a while until the sun got stronger and the light regained a more “normal” blu-ish hue. For a while there, I began to kind of hope that I had actually managed that rarest of occurrences and managed to actually sleep late on a Sunday morning, and that this dream-like feeling was because I was actually dreaming, but this, of course, was sadly not the case.

I was briefly reminded of an old television serial from the late 1970s. If this had been like “Quatermass,” the version with Sir John Mills in it, I could have said that the sky was the colour of vomit as the air was full of the leftovers as an alien light from the sky had harvested the planet’s youth, but, because I know that this is as close to something we like to think of as reality as we can get, I can be pretty certain that this was not what had happened.

Instead we had had a bout of unseasonably hot weather and nature was getting a bit confused so the sun was lower in the sky, the air was full of too many pollutants and rather fewer clouds than would normally have been expected, and so, I think that we can safely assume that the sky probably isn’t falling.

Yet.

A SHOUTY MAN

Yesterday I got home from work only to find that I had to become a shouty man for a while. This was because I went to open the mail and found this letter addressed to me from a company whose name really doesn’t seem to pull any punches: “UNIVERSAL DEBT COLLECTION”. It was not a particularly nice letter to get and, more importantly, I really had no idea why I had received it. I was particularly offended by the phrase “You have chosen to ignore repeated reminders from our client in respect of the above debt” mostly because, firstly, I have no debts with anyone who might reasonably considered to be the aforementioned client and, secondly, I had not received any reminders about that non-existent debt from anybody at all, ever.

Obviously, this was rather a troubling development for a time so late in my working day, and, with BOLD CAPS informing me that my future credit or mortgage applications might be in peril, not to mention the thought of big, burly bailiffs turning up on my doorstep and insisting upon entry to my innocent little homestead, I thought that I’d better try and clear up what was obviously some misunderstanding. After all, if they had my address to send me this freaking letter, surely it wouldn’t have been beyond their wit to send me any previous reminders to the same address in the past, would it?

So, instead of idly mellowing into my hard-earned weekend, instead I found myself stomping around the house and having to make a telephone call to the number that I’ve so helpfully deleted from the image, just in case you feel like ringing them up and getting all ranty on my behalf.

I decided to save them from that. Do you see what a nice, reasonable man I’m becoming these days?

Anyway, I rang the number and spoke to a nice enough sounding young lady who asked for my reference number. I felt that I’d rather not recognise the fact that I needed to have a reference number and told her so, and that I seemed to have received a letter by mistake.

She still needed the reference number, so I conceded that point, and then grumpily told her what it was.

Once we had established that I was indeed who the letter thought I was, I explained that I had not got either of the telephone accounts with whatever company she told me it was that she seemed convinced that I had agreed to, and I didn’t even know where the retail park I had allegedly signed the agreement at even was (Later on, I checked my diaries, and it turns out that I didn’t even leave the house that day. I know... sad in so many different ways). She told me that she would pass me on to another department and the line went quiet.

This was the moment in which I decided two things. The first thing was that this was probably going to go on for quite some time, and, after all, I did have a train to meet. The second was more troubling. Was this, perhaps, some kind of a scam designed to keep me on the telephone for quite some considerable time and bleed me dry at vastly inflated rates? I had heard about those sorts of things, and they didn’t sound pleasant, and I had gone in with all guns blazing, and not much in the way of forethought, after all.

“Matthew” came on the line for a while and we discussed the situation. No I hadn’t taken out the whatever it was, etc., etc. He went off to “check” and the line went quiet again.

“£10, £20, £30…” went my mind…

“Matthew” then returned to tell me that there had been some kind of inadequate search and that a standard letter had been sent out and that it was all a mistake and, yes, I could ignore the letter. I asked him to confirm this and he said yes indeed, they would have to resume whatever searches they were doing and I could definitely ignore the letter, and so I thanked him… (I know!!!) and hung up the phone and went to meet the train.

But it still troubles me, which is why I am, through no fault of my own,  awake so late and writing these words instead of sleeping the night blissfully away like I ought to be.

After all, some random computer may very well have now blacklisted me (which is, incidentally why I’m choosing to name names here…), and I really have no guarantee that this incident is over, or that the big, burly bailiffs still won’t turn up on my doorstep at some point and make demands upon my financial goodwill, and, to be absolutely honest, I’m not really sure quite what the situation might be if they did.

A long time ago, when I lived in the urban jungle of the teeming metropolis, someone broke into my mailbox whilst I was away on holiday and went on a right old spree with my utility bills being used to verify “his” identity and allow him to leave retail outlets all over the countryside with all manner of electrical goods tucked under his thieving arms, and that took me absolutely months to sort out back then. I never really understood why the late lamented Cellnet never seemed to question the fact that someone buying three separate mobile telephones in three different shops during the same lunchbreak might just seem to be exhibiting slightly suspicious behaviour. Instead I just kept on getting a few of those “congratulations of opening your new account” letters every day for about a month. I do kind of understand now why Cellnet no longer seems to exist as a cellphone company if they couldn’t even make that particular connection.

On the plus side, I did get to be on very good first name terms with some of the people in their fraud department, but, even so, I really, really don’t want to have to go through all that again, and so, just to make it perfectly clear, and to have it on the record… You’ve got the wrong guy!!!

Do you reckon that’ll help?

Mind you, of course, it still might have been a big fat con (after all the internet - that fount of all accurate information - seems to claim that it is), which is why I’m telling you this tale of woe this morning…

“Keep ’em peeled!”