PARAGRAPH: THREE

Lost words…

Young Mr Git and his coffin-like cabinet of curiosities
"Would you like me to saw your wife in half, Sir...?"

One of the beauties of trying out this “paragraph” system (oh, why didn’t I think of it sooner?) is that it gives me an opportunity to re-examine all of those ideas, notions and half-formed thoughts that I’ve had over the past couple of years or so, scribbled down and then thought very little about since. As I trawl through the pages of Word® documents that clog up the hard drives of the various tappity-tapping devices that I beg and borrow (but – I must make this very clear - never steal) from those around me I find so many forlorn, orphaned and long-forgotten paragraphs and even more succinct strings of text, lurking beyond the page break, bursting full of excitement and untapped potential, but which I never then got around to actually returning to as a wave of other thoughts and events overwhelmed and drowned them in a sea of witterings, like so many lost verbal Atlantises. Take, for example, this random thought from about a year ago: “Magicians always come across as being insufferably smug.”  Now, apart from the obvious truth hardly buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the open moorland of that statement, what, do you imagine had prompted that idea and, furthermore, made me think that one day I might want to write about it at some length? I mean it’s hardly the most original of thoughts, and I don’t suppose someone far more eloquent hasn’t had it before, but there it sat, staring back at me, trying (and failing) to mesmorise me into thinking about it again. Then, of course, we find out that Paul Daniels has managed to accidentally lop off some bits of his fingers in the kind of ironic accident that can only really befall someone who might very well have spent part of his early career trying to persude other people to put their fingers inside a magical cigar guillotine. Now TwitWorld was full of “high comedy” when the news first broke with very few people appearing very sympathetic to how much pain he might actually have been in, because the suffering of another human being is always a good source of amusement when it’s someone in the public eye, it would appear. But magic is, of course, about things not being as they appear, so maybe we should give the guy a break, and I say this even after once being in a Green Room in Edinburgh when the smug little prestidigitator emerged from his own show that was playing the same venue and managed to irritate everyone present. Still, I hope that he gets better and that his ability to manipulate a pack of cards isn’t too much impaired. This has, at least, reminded me why that original thought did occur to me, however. There was a teenage magician on the local news around that time and he was still all fixed grin, crushed velour dinner suits, velvet bow ties and spangly sequins, but that wasn’t what was the annoying bit. No, that was down to the script. All those “Sirs” and “Madams” that speak of politeness and yet fail completely to conceal the contempt for the inferior minds being hoodwinked so easily by the simple tricks being performed. A whole host of smug little phrases that seem to be hard-wired into the “act” of any young table magician almost as if they buy the stock phrases as a kit when they sign up to join the Magic Circle, but which, when coming from the mouth of a callow, spotty youth, just seem to embody the whole ethos of “smug gittery”: “Hocus, Pocus”, “Sim-sal-a-bim”, “The hand is quicker than the eye”, and “Is that your card, Madam?” All perfectly (extra)ordinary phrases but which, in the practiced hands of a trained artiste, are transformed, as if by magic, into something far more annoying.

BLOG TAG (1) Para 11

Link to Paragraph Ten: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-10.html

Jeremy picked himself up from the cabin floor and looked around him for his little sister Jemima. In his eight years of life he’d experienced a lot of things out here in the desert plains, but the shock that had pummelled their tiny home was certainly a new one for him, and was much bigger than any quake - if that was what it was - that he’d ever felt before. That morning, their mother had told him to keep an eye on Jemima before she’d gone off to town for a lunchtime meeting with one or other of his many uncles, but he wasn’t sure whether she’d quite anticipated this happening. In fact, now he came to think about it, he wasn’t even sure whether mother would be coming back at all. In the past she’d been known to leave them to fend for themselves for perhaps a day or two at most, and usually she came home with stacks of candy bars and the sorts of toys you usually only saw for sale at gas stations, but if the “Big One” had finally hit, who was to say whether or not she would ever return? Jemima had scrambled for cover, just like they had told her to at the schoolhouse, and was now sitting curled up in a ball in the fireplace and covered from head to toe in soot. “Jem...?” he called across to her in an urgent stage whisper, as if the merest sound might bring the entire house collapsing down on top of them. On hearing his voice, she opened her eyes, blinking away the soot and tears, and looked right across at him. He smiled and scrambled over to her, and they held onto each other tightly, looking at the debris of their home and listening to the creaking of the old stone chimney stack above their heads. He whispered a few words of encouragement to her with a confidence that he didn’t really feel. Her entire body was still shaking with fear, but he thought for a moment and decided that what he really needed to do was persuade her to move, but when he tried to tell her this, she just shook her head and refused to budge, so he hugged her as tightly as he could and wondered quite what to do next. Up above their heads there was a sudden loud “Crack!” and, before he knew what was happening, Jemima had bolted across the room and thrown herself under the old kitchen table, which was still steadfastly standing upright on its solid oak legs despite the plaster and wood that had fallen onto it and scattered the breakfast things all over the floor. “Okay,” thought Jeremy, “One more dash and we ought to make it to the door...” He looked across at where the remains of the kitchen door still remarkably remained on its hinges and realised that he’d made a far better job of fixing it than even his mother thought him capable of. Wondering whether their luck would hold out, he briefly explained to Jemima about what they should do, but she stubbornly shook her head once more. Then she froze, a look of abject terror crossing her face, and pointed a tiny finger over his shoulder and back towards the door. Jeremy turned, and framed in the shattered glass fragments that were all that remained of the window was the most terrifying face that he had ever seen. Luckily, it didn’t seem to have spotted them yet as it was far too busy spitting the sand from its mouth. At precisely that moment, however, the creature seemed to notice them and locked its eyes on his, before growling angrily “Aaargh! Just when I thought I’d got myself ahead of the game...” Jeremy clung onto Jemima for all that he was worth and was rather amazed when the creature spoke again. “I don’t suppose you could spare me a glass of water, could you?”

To be continued...?

Link to Paragraph Twelve: Coming soon...?

Meanwhile... If it makes life simpler, the entire “Story so far” can now be found over on the “Writers’ Group” Blog which may very well end up being its natural home... Just click on this link: http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-part-1.html

BLOG TAG (1) Para 10

Link to Paragraph Nine: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-09.html

Max dreamt. He was suspended high above the ground in a glass box. He had no idea how long he’d been hanging there but it had been a while, his throat was sore, his back was aching. Two, maybe three months? Anyway, what did it matter this was somebody else’s reality, only a dream to him, but he knew that with the coming of the autumn storms the Band would be on the move again. Time for once was short. By late October sharp and perfectly fashioned tunes of experience would blow into the cities, towns and villages everywhere even the tiny settlements in the borderlands. Nowhere can escape the music and nowhere ever has. Not that he’d been to Nowhere for a while, although he thought he was about due another visit. Things happen in Nowhere; a cat gets run over by a truck, a young woman loses her engagement ring, cancer is diagnosed, a father slaps a child in anger, prayers go unanswered, the leaves fall and rot in gardens and graveyards and both big and small tunes play for suspecting and unsuspecting alike. Yes, the Band would be on the move again, forever and ever, Amen and the Band moves to so many tunes - Wagner, Berry, Godric, Chopin, Zappa, even Miller, tunes composed from strength and direction, places past, souls taken, nefarious needs, those lost things, a lot of hunger… and of course who and what are caught in the music as they play on - and on - and on. Damn this dream! It was making his mind all fuzzy, images popped into his head out of nowhere, words and thoughts losing their sense and meaning and with the Band there’s no choice at all. Both the innocent and the old must listen, young and male, good and black, white and guilty, the bad and female. It’s all musical chance when the Band comes to town and sometimes the bad things catch into the Slip and listen, resting for a while. They have a drink or two, find love, feed, take whatever they need; a cat gets run over by a truck, a young woman loses her engagement ring, cancer is diagnosed, a father slaps a child in anger, prayers go unanswered… and then the Slip catches them up and they are on and away again, (wake up) blowing away, the notes still echoing, (wake up) to the next place. If only it were all a dream and listen - the wind is howling, and beneath the wind that song… Riders on the Storm? (WAKE UP!). Max awoke, the taste of sand in his mouth and the scorch of sun on his skin. That bloody Mourning woman again. Max picked up his sunglasses and donned his snap brim fedora, well if it was good enough for Indiana Jones it was good enough for him. Better be quick and step into the Slip, the music was growing louder. It was time to shift.

To be continued...?

Link to Paragraph Eleven: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-11.html

DEAR ME (AGAIN)…

Dear Me,

I just thought that I’d pop by and check in again* and see how you were doing. I kind of get the impression that you've been feeling increasingly melancholic about this whole business of sharing your thoughts with the big wide world lately, as if somehow the actual doing of it diminishes the joy of it for you, which is, as you know only too well, a fairly ridiculous way of looking at things. None of us should really care what anyone else thinks when it comes to our own little creative outpourings. We should do them because we want to, or need to, and, so long as nobody else gets hurt, chucking out a few personal opinions and thoughts every now and again isn’t ever likely to be something to get yourself worked up about. After all, you’re supposed to be doing this for you, what does it matter what the rest of the world thinks...? Or doesn’t...? Whatever the case may be…

But then, you knew that already, didn’t you...? And yet it still gets you down because day after day, you sit there typing away, dredging your mind for a new thought or angle, wondering why you are doing so and knowing that you really should just stop doing it, and then finding that, despite the obvious drawbacks, you really can’t bring yourself to do that. This then leads to much introspection and mental self-examination and then you feel guilty about being so self-obsessed when there’s a bloody great big universe of wonders out there, in addition to a real life all of your very own, that you could be focusing your attentions upon.

Certainly I recognize that there was a trend just after the turn of the year for people to seem to take more interest in your words on the days when you chose not to submit any than on the days when you did, which is always something of a paradox and does very little for the self-esteem, but it’s hardly something to beat yourself up over. It’s just a coincidence, that’s all, not a reason to jack it all in and fritter away those sleepless hours on night-time TV or something even less productive.

No, I know you don’t really think of it as being “productive” per se, but it is, at least, something to stimulate the little grey cells and stop you from vegetating and wasting away as the creeping unknown that is the inevitable outcome of all those diminishing braincells starting upon their inevitable process of succumbing to the effects of entropy, whilst the aging process  wreaks havoc as it rips brutally through your once relatively passable body.

I know that you’ve tried to put yourself in the place of one or two of the minds that you once thought might have taken a slight interest in what you had to say or do and yet have palpably not done so. Why is this, do you think…? Is it really because, as you seem to believe, that they have no time for what you say...? Or perhaps because you believe that what you have to say is of no real interest to them, you choose to take that as meaning that they have no interest in you as a person either…?

You can already hear their voices in your head sarcastically saying the same old judgmental things: “Same old you, always looking on the bright side!” and even you begin to wonder quite what there might be of any real interest to anyone else in these pages that you nevertheless still seem to keep churning out. I can read your thoughts, knowing that it’s hardly a feature film, or a soap opera, or a decent comedy. Not really the stuff that dreams are made of. The jokes that there sometimes are aren’t really all that funny, and certainly don’t appear often enough, and the observations you’re making are hardly the most original or all that entertaining. But at least, you suppose, you are making them and whilst you feel that they might lack any wit or charm or passion or originality, they serve that obscure and tantalizingly enigmatic function that sometimes seems to be just beyond the limits of your outstretched fingertips, somewhere beyond being on the tip of your mind that still seems, however, to give you the reason to carry on, whatever it might be.

Perhaps, after all is said and done, all of this wittering on for no real purpose really is purposeless, perhaps it truly does have no meaning other than what it is: An idle and mostly harmless pastime to while away those long, sleepless hours when the brain won’t rest and the thoughts keep on rolling in to keep you just on the wrong side of consciousness.

So, what did you expect? Did you hope to turn out great art? Did you really think that you’d change the world? After nearly half a century on this planet you’d think you would have learned by now that it’s not people like us who shape and change the world. That is work for heroes, people who believe in things and have a plan, people who have come to use their time wisely, not the likes of us, cautious cowards who are scared to cause offence and whose self-confidence was shattered before they even had chance to move on from short trousers.

I also know that matters closer to home have recently disappointed you. A sense, possibly unfounded, possibly not, that the vultures are once again circling, another generation perhaps attempting to play the same tired and familiar old games, trying to take advantage of the more vulnerable members of the tribe, playing upon their much concealed better nature to gain some kind of toehold into grabbing a slice of what they think of as their pie, smiling a villain’s smile despite the truth of what they say when not in earshot, being the polar opposite to what they say when their hand is outstretched. Perhaps you do them a disservice, perhaps you’ve read them incorrectly and you despise yourself for possibly leaping to all the wrong conclusions, but then you despise yourself further because there’s also the possibility that you might be right.

And I know you are becoming increasingly troubled about your professional status, that skills that you used to be so confident of having seem to be somehow ebbing away from you, that somehow, more and more often, things just seem to go wrong far too many times and, even though you know that quite often this is not your fault, and there really was nothing else you could have done, still you feel that frightening old feeling that somehow you’ll be blamed and held to account and found wanting.

It’s all too easy to become dispirited by your own shortcomings whilst forgetting those that everyone else also has. It’s far too easy to persuade yourself that everything you know or do is wrong and that everything everyone else is doing is fabulous and marvelous and done with the kind of creative zeal that you can barely hope to achieve yourself, forgetting that everyone else is wracked with their own guilts and fears and doubts and live inside very similar vulnerable human bodies.

But the possibility and actuality of illness is, you believe, corroding your soul, worrying you into a state of abject fear. Those aches and pains that seem to be increasing in number and hanging around for far longer than you’d like, and that daily dosing of a cocktail of pills, designed to keep you alive still seems to instead remind you more of your own mortality. That sense you get of those eyes of yours, upon which so much that you do, both professional and for what passes for “fun” in your world, being not quite so sharp as they once were, not quite so easy to focus, not quite so easy to keep open is a constant source of fear, even though you know that it is just the effects of time’s crucible, the one in which we all burn, catching up with you.

Even the telly you used to seem to enjoy doesn’t seem to divert you in quite the same way any more. Nowadays just slumping down in front of it, all passive and expectant, seems to be something of a waste of time you no longer feel you have to spare. Something to suck away the precious hours that you still know that otherwise you would squander anyway on other, even more frivolous pursuits, that serve just as little purpose as time continues to grind away at you.

So now I’m struggling. The last time I tried to talk to you like this, I managed to end on a positive note by trying to give you a few crumbs of comfort to help to lift you out of the general air of gloom and despair that you seemed to be surrounding yourself with, but all this talk of decay and time running out is making the zing of positivity so much harder to dig out from amongst the crevices. However, I am nothing if not persistent and I will try to remind you, even if it doesn’t really feel all that relevant or appropriate, and perhaps seems to make precious little difference to how you feel right now, that there are plenty of people in a damned sight worse position than you currently are and facing far more problems than you currently have to, even if, as you know only too well, the bigger picture really never comes into it when it’s your own pain that you’re trying to deal with.

So, whilst I know it’s not much, I hope it’s something to hang on to, at the very least.

Sincerely,

M.

(*See http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/dear-me.html)

BLOG TAG (1) Para 09

Link to Paragraph Eight: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-08.html

Three months later she awoke, trapped inside a glass cube. She opened her eyes and the blazing lights surrounding the box caused her to slam them tightly shut again, then she spent ten minutes gradually opening and closing them, trying to adjust. Finally, just as she was able to open them fully, the lights went out. Oh yes, she reminded herself, fallen Avenging Angels might be utterly diabolical, but they’d still managed to learn a thing or two from these humans when it came to torturing their own kind for fun. Damn the wretched CIA! Damn them all! And of course, she had, time and again in another life. Cheap tricks like this weren’t ever going to get her to... She stopped. Instinctively she knew that three months had passed in the blink of one of these rather impressive eye things that her form now mimicked, but she suddenly realised that she couldn’t remember a thing about any of it. Not one second. She shuddered as she started to feel an unfamiliar feeling. She was scared! This was the first period of time in millennia which she couldn’t account for every single microsecond of. She tried to trawl back through her memories but there was nothing for her to remember at all. The alley, the beating, the circle of vengeful thugs, that face... her face... and those all-too familiar hooves, beating, pounding and then... the lights, this box and... and... As if tuned to her very thoughts, the lights blazed on again, and an infinite number of reflections of that hated face on top of that wretched body stared back at her. Just for a second before she had to clamp her eyes shut again, she noticed the chain that stretched up from the top of the box into the inky darkness far above her. Aha! The old man was slipping! He was obviously getting far too afraid to trust to his own powers of concentration to keep her dangling here. Or was that what he wanted her to think? She of all creatures knew very well the awful power that giving just the faintest glimmer of hope could bring over a victim. She paused, trying to think of a way out. In the stillness, beyond the buzz of the arc lights, on the tip of her senses, she thought that she heard the slightest hint of a jazz band playing somewhere just beyond the edges of her perception. “Great!” she thought, “As if I haven’t been punished enough...” But then an idea came to her and she only hoped that the lungs of this long-suffering body were up to what she needed them to do. She tried to remember. Would three months off the fags be enough to clear them? She sang out a perfect top “C” for as loud and as long as she could. Around her the glass box shattered into atoms and she plummeted at the speed of light a million miles back down to Earth, hitting the Nevada desert like an A-Bomb test just five seconds later.

To be continued...?

Link to Paragraph Ten: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-10.html

BLOG TAG (1) Para 08

Link to Paragraph Seven: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-07.html

Tamara Mourning stared down at the white, open-toed, high-heeled shoes that encased her dainty, painted toes. She loved the dress, adored the hair, and there was no doubt that this was a great body; if a little overly feminine. The shoes though… Her feet were killing her, and she longed for a pair of boots, a good pair of kicking boots with a long steel-bladed knife nestling deep inside them somewhere. In normal circumstance this would not have been a problem. She’d simply have stepped into the Slip for a moment and made the shift. In normal circumstances she could have any type of footwear she chose; body too. She thought back to the ship and Max; remembering his face when she’d burst through the door, slightly dishevelled and a little unkempt but apart from that his exact double. It was a game they’d been playing for years, centuries even. The aim was to catch the other unawares, get them to react in some way: “Max! Whatever you do, you’ve got to get off this ship!” she’d said. He hadn’t though, he didn’t need to. Instead he’d spat at her like he always did and then flew off in a huff. What was it? Surely he didn’t think that she had any part in that silly, chain-smoking girl’s death? He should know her better than that by now. Armageddon… yes; but a pointless killing here, a little murder there – well, like these damned shoes, it wasn’t really her style. No, that had all been down to Frankie, it was just his style. For a crooner, he never really had much imagination; and as for that violin player boyfriend of his… well. How they had ever been tolerated in the Band was beyond her, they were strictly second rate. Tin Pan Alley hound-dog players, not even good for the borderlands. Now Max – well, Max was altogether a different proposition. He could play the blood from your veins, the sweat from your pores and the sex from the more intimate parts of your body. When Max played everyone listened. Max played and everything was possible. God, she needed to lose these shoes, and this body wasn’t right for whatever beating she knew was coming. Conversation? She didn’t think so. Frankie didn’t do conversation. Frankie really only spoke with his fists and prick – and then in grunts - the rest was just empty words. They were all around her now; Frankie and his band of filthy, sycophantic tulpa-forms. They’d made a circle and were closing in. She who would be the One shivered; just how had he taken the Slip from her? Tamara strained her pearl-buttoned ears. Damn these shoes, damn Frankie, but most of all damn that damn, damned Max. Far in the distance the drumming of hooves… and they were getting louder by the moment.

Thanks again go to akh there.

Link to Paragraph Nine: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-09.html

PARAGRAPH: TWO

The Mighty Tom…

When I was about ten, I thought that my best friend in the world ever was a tall, white-haired bloke with a blue box who fought monsters every week, so much so that when the big spiders finally did for him, I had to watch it through the doorway from a strategic position halfway up the stairs. We didn’t have a sofa in the living room in those days, just some rather alarming swivel armchairs. I was still a few years away from being told I needed glasses then (although it could just have been the tears I was stoically trying to blink away) but when he lay down on the ground and changed his appearance I was convinced he had turned into someone who looked like the puppet Lord Charles (complete with monocle). A few months later, the trailers started for the new series and who should come stepping out of the smoke left after the recent explosion of some landmines but a bizarre figure with a beaming smile, a ridiculous scarf and a floppy hat who looked nothing like Lord Charles at all. To say I was confused was an understatement, but when we cautiously sat down as a family on one dark Saturday evening a few weeks later, we were totally hooked by a mesmerising performance that managed to fixate me onto a television programme that I’m still as keen on today. That show was “Coronation Street”. No, of course it wasn’t, but the geekish credentials I wear with occasional pride to this day are probably due to the performance of that tall actor with the tombstone toothed grin and the biggest eyes this side of Marty Feldman, a certain ex-monk known as Mr Tom Baker. I once went to a viewing of the surviving two episodes of “The Quatermass Experiment” which was hosted by the writer Stephen Gallagher and who also presented a video of a ghost story read by that very same actor and who he described that evening, because he knew him, as being “As mad as a box of snakes” and somehow that might have been an insult to anyone but the person I choose to refer to as “The Mighty Tom”. I rather suspect that, if he had been there, he might have regarded it as being a bit of a compliment. He had a birthday last week and is now 77 years old, not bad for someone who seems to have had his gravestone ready and waiting with his name and the first date already carved for at least twenty years. In interviews he once said that on melancholy days he would go and chalk in the second date, which shows me, at least, that behind the wild and eccentric persona is a very deep human being. I have only met him once, at a book signing for his bizarre, mad-as-a-box-of-snakes children’s book “The Boy Who Kicked Pigs” and all that I really remember about it now is that I was dying for the loo, after having had too many pre-event pints of beer, and so the queuing up process was rather a painful blur and I can’t remember all that much about it, but he did sign both that book and his autobiography, so I don’t suppose I was too annoying. Another memory, also sadly drink related, is that it was entirely due to reading about his misadventures during his days as a crony of Jeffrey Bernard that I had a bit of a mind-bleaching dabble with the concoction known as “White Wine and Vodka” for a few, mostly forgotten, liver-knackering months, so maybe perhaps that is the most appropriate memory to have of that night and reminds me that we shouldn’t ever try to emulate or be influenced too much by the lives of those whom we admire. Sadly, when I mentioned that it was the Mighty Tom’s birthday at work the other day, they thought I was referring to Sir Tom Jones, which made me a little bit sad, but at least they still knew who it was I was talking about and I am rather grateful that they didn’t assume that I was referring to Tom Cruise.

BLOG TAG (1) Para 07

Link to Paragraph Six: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-06.html

She reappeared in a different, much darker and dingier alley, if that were actually possible. This time it was raining and the rain was forming into puddles on the uneven paving slabs beneath her feet, their surfaces dancing and distorting from the raindrops that glistened and glinted in the one beam of weak light that obliterated her view of anything beyond it, plunging it into a great, unknowable blackness. “Odd”, she thought. She hadn’t expected that, and, if there was one thing Tamara really didn’t like, apart from the scumbags she dealt with every day, it was unexpected things happening. She closed her eyes and tried to move again, but when she opened them she was still in the same, stinking alley. “Very odd”, she thought again, “Still, never mind. Different alley, same old sh...” She looked down again at her feet, encased inside the kind of footwear she really wouldn’t ever choose to be seen dead in, assuming, of course, that she could have actually died, and then at her ridiculously soft hands as she stretched them out in front of her. “Never mind” she thought, “Soon change that” and she blinked a slow, deliberate blink, but nothing happened. She looked at her hands. They were the same as they’d been just a second ago. “That’s not right” she found herself saying out loud, but the voice seemed husky and weak to her, not the kind of voice she usually preferred to have at all. “Who’s that? Who’s there?” a voice shot out of the darkness, responding to her cry. She quickly tried to duck back into the shadows and, as she did so, caught sight of her latest reflection in one of the muddy pools of water, and found an all-too familiar face staring back at her. “Oh no, no, no, no NO!” she bellowed angrily, “Don’t you dare try that one on me!” just as the first blow hit her clean across the back of the head, and a voice whispered in the darkness “You didn’t really think you were going to get away, did you?” before shouting out to draw the attention of the baying mob that she could hear approaching. Various blurred images of faces and fists swam across her vision as she fought to remain conscious, knowing that the crowd that had found her were never likely to show any mercy to the person that they thought they had caught. Just as the merciful oblivion started to swallow her up she thought she heard a familiar sounding voice saying, in a slightly mocking way, “Well, if we are going to have our little chat, Miss Mourning, I’d prefer to have you completely under my control when we do...”

To be continued...?


Incidentally, there used to be another version of the Paragraph Game we used to play where the next person in the chain only saw the very last line of the previous contribution and, as the saying goes, much hilarity ensued. I've not, however managed to find a way of making that work yet so that the text remains set in stone whilst obscured so that no cheating might occur... So there's still much to think about again...


Link to Paragraph Eight: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-08.html

BLOG TAG (1) Para 06

Link to Paragraph Five: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-05.html


Tamara rolled the dice. They flew across the dirty concrete of the alley, hit the grimy wall and bounced and tumbled until they came to rest; a perfect double six. “Mine I think.” she said, allowing the smoke from her cigar to float up into the bright blue Cuban sky. She’d come a long way to get these two, stepping into the slip then out again at just the right moment. She’d known exactly where to find them; the same broken down hotel where they’d raped her repeatedly all those years ago. If only they’d known what she really was and had cared a little more for their pathetic souls and a little less for their even more pathetic dicks. It wasn’t the sex that had annoyed her, it was the way they’d rifled her purse when they’d finished, throwing a few coins onto the bed where she lay huddled and feigning terror. They’d left laughing, slapping each other on the back and tossing her purse back into the room. Well, they wouldn’t be laughing much longer. ‘Time to pay up,’ she said as she shifted; and the short fat Cuban who was Tamara, the one with the cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, began to smoke gently, small flames bursting into life across the surface of his grubby white suit. WHOOSH! And Tamara stepped out of the pillar of fire reaching for her rapists. “Mine I think.” She repeated as she walked towards them, her soft platinum hair moving in the still air as if it were alive. She puckered her lips and blew them a kiss, the skirt of her flowing white dress floating up as if caused by a subway grill beneath it. “Remember me boys? Yes, I thought so… and I remember you, I remember you both very well”. Walking towards them, her hands tuning to balls of flame, she reached out. “Time to pay your dues,” she snarled: “happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday Mr. President…” They turned to run, but she was on them before they’d taken a single step. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” She said, crossing herself for effect… and then they were. All that remained were two piles of soft white ash where the rapists had been standing only a spit-second earlier. Tamara turned towards the wall, reaching down she picked up the dice; she always liked to bring something back from her travels and these would make a nice addition to her collection. Oh well, on to the next job, there was still so much chaos to cause and she didn’t want to be late for her meeting with the others; horsemen could get so impatient. Stepping forward, she felt the slip as it enclosed and entered her and then she was simply gone leaving only a giggle behind.

Thanks again go to akh there.

Link to Paragraph Seven: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-07.html

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLACK SCARF

I got a scarf for Christmas. In fact I got two. One of them was a perfectly nice one, from British Home Stores or Marks and Spencer or somewhere like that, made from a thin material with a pattern in shades of grey which suits me terribly well and has been used rather a lot in recent weeks and I am rather fond of it. The greyness suits me. It matches my world view, it matches my clothes, and increasingly, it matches my hair. However, I must report that it was not my favourite of the two scarves that I received.

That honour really must go to the other scarf.

The other was hand-made for me by my beloved and is truly a magnificent thing, but so far I’ve been too frightened to wear it in case I spoil it. This is the problem with the things you truly adore. Sometimes you can simply adore them far too much to risk losing them or spoiling them. Philosophically and emotionally, this is probably deeply significant and no doubt speaks volumes about my eccentric personality traits and my deeper displays of angst that you will already be well aware of if you’ve spent any time exploring these pages over the past few months.

It is a wide and lengthy woollen creation in deepest, darkest, softest black. At the moment it remains tassel-free and as to whether it is going to become a tasselled thing is still a hot topic of debate in Blogfordshire Towers, and might also explain why it has not yet adorned my person in the great outdoors.

I fear uneven fading, even in the weak sun of an English winter.

That and, of course, that the weather has yet to cause the thermometer to plummet down towards the levels where such extreme clothing as it and my underused parka become the obvious clothing choices. Strangely, because the scarf itself remained a “work in progress” for some considerable amount of time due in no small part, I suppose, to the monotony of its lack of patterning, and the fact that other, brighter, more exciting projects tended to leap ahead of it in the “stuff to do” list, the last two bleak mid-winters passed without it being able to fulfil its true purpose, but that doesn’t really matter.

Now it can.

Now we are prepared for anything the weather feels like throwing at us.

The story of how this scarf came to be I suppose that you could call it “commissioned” is, I hope, mildly interesting. A couple of years ago I bought a box set of “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” starring Jeremy Brett on shiny disc, and, as it the nature of such things, over the course of a few months, we worked our way through it watching them all, and pretty wonderful it was too, thank you for asking.

After a few episodes, Jeremy Brett started to wear a long, perhaps eccentrically long, black scarf in his outdoor guise and I thought that it looked rather impressive. Much like Alistair Sim’s infamous weighted greatcoat, it added a dynamic to his movements and an interesting aspect to his silhouette. Not to put too fine a point on it, I thought it looked rather “cool!” Now, given that anything that I find “cool!” automatically becomes far less so, and additionally accepting the basic principle that something so “lo-tech” and “retro” is bound not to appeal to anyone else all that much, I thought to myself “I should like a scarf like that!” and thought little more of it.

That is, not until knitting became one of the more regular pastimes in our little abode, but once it became the practical delight it came to be (for various reasons far too complicated and convoluted even for me to go into here), the suggestion that such a thing might be a nice thing to have was tentatively made, and eventually, the wool was bought and the needles started to happily click. Practical skills seem to be something of a joy to learn when older but “da kidz” seem not to be interested in these things when there are video games to be played, so the timing of such desires can be pretty crucial if you want a successful outcome, as indeed I now do.

So now I do have my very own Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes style scarf, and it is something I really feel pleased to have, because sometimes I do have to invoke the spirit of Great Uncle Sherlock in my day-to-day life. Oh, I’ll admit that the “cleverness” gene has failed to make its way down the generations from my fictional ancestor, but, just occasionally, I have to try thinking “outside the box” in my own pale imitation of his genius.

I will arrive at the humble abode of the matriarch of the remains of the Holmes clan and she will exclaim a woeful lament as to the loss of her lifeline to the great outdoors, by explaining to me that she has somehow mislaid the remote manipulation device for her televisualisor. I will investigate every nook and cranny, surface and receptacle of the living room in her simple dwelling and ask her to try and reenact the last time she remembers using it before using my deductive powers of reasoning to place my hand down into the gap between the cushion and the armchair and retrieve it.

“Holmes, you astound me! How did you know it was there?”

“Elementary, my dear mother...”

“Do you think you might be able to find my missing bracelet...?”

Once again, the recreation of her recent movements will be talked through, only to discover that a heavy topcoat was required for her most recent visit to a house of worship, opium den, or gin palace, and there it will lie, twinkling upon the floor of the wardrobe, invisible to none but the most practiced (or younger) eye, and another miraculous restoration of lost property is achieved, and my reputation is maintained.

Sadly my powers failed me as I strolled along the local cycle trail one day about a year ago. A poster had been pinned up, asking if anyone had found a missing wedding ring, lost, it would appear, along that very track a few days earlier. I thought that this was probably a hopeless gesture at retrieving this valuable trinket, and I was in far too much of a hurry to engage in a probably futile search that day, but, with the gears of my mind grinding into action, I did wonder whether the unfortunate woman had been wearing gloves and whether, perhaps, the missing ring might indeed be found nestling inside the finger when she next put them on.

Of course, I shall never really know, but it is rather a cold day, so I may very well have to go hunting for this treasure later on, even if it is the very epitome of “long lost”, which means that I have the perfect excuse to try out my lovely new scarf...

“The game’s afoot!”

BLOG TAG (1) Para 05

Link to Paragraph Four: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-04.html

He shook his head, trying to erase the memory, but there were so many of them now and it never really worked. Pamela was replaced with Darren was replaced with Keith was replaced with Ariadne and so it went on, back through time. Pamela, of course, had been too easy. The old “flame from the end of the finger to light her cigarette” routine and she was damned forever. Too easy... Far too easy. Sometimes he wondered how far down these humans, of whom His “Merciful” Highness still seemed to have far too high an opinion if you asked Max, would allow themselves to descend before they just decided to pull the plug once and for all and decided to let the cockroaches have a turn at the top of the food chain. Max shook his head, and the pain from his burns momentarily erased Pamela’s face from his mind. “That works!”, he thought, but this brighter moment was swiftly extinguished by more pain from his vague attempt at a smile. He decided to dive deep, hoping that despite the salt, the water would be comparatively soothing, and plunged below the choppy surface. Visions of the future and the inevitable apocalypse filled his mind, and he tried to shake them away. There was no way he was going to let that happen. Despite all their many faults, he thought that this human form was pretty damned comfortable and he was damned if he was going to spend a couple of million years in the form of a cockroach. Mind you, he reminded himself, he was pretty much damned already. Then, just for a moment, he thought he heard Tamara’s voice calling out to him. “No”, he thought, “I must be imagining things...” But then he thought that he heard her again. “Damn!” It was his own fault, of course. Just thinking about the apocalypse was enough to get her juices flowing. Tamara and her faction had always been trying to bring about that little bundle of fun. He thought back to Cuba and to what he’d had to do to get that little situation to calm itself down. Then he remembered the price he’d made them pay for it. Still, after Marilyn had paid for the election, it had only seemed fair, to be perfectly honest. Things, he felt, were getting out of hand. Tamara would know what to do, he decided, she always did, unfortunately. He’d better try and track her down, just so long as he could persuade her not to just bring down the end of civilisation as he knew it just to spite him.

The saga continues...?


Link to Paragraph Six: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-06.html

BLOG TAG (1) Para 04

Link to Paragraph Three: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-03.html

When Max awoke he realised that it wasn’t over. That was the problem; it would never be over. Eternal life was a damnation. It wasn’t even as if he’d asked for it; he was just in the wrong place and the wrong time and had witnessed something that there could be no escaping from ever - and ever, as it had turned out, was a long time. He lay there bobbing up and down in the water, the sun beating down on his scorched skin. Not to worry, it’d heal within the hour, his wings would grow back in a day or two and then he’d continue. He would always continue. Far away in the distance the ship sailed on. If Max listened carefully he could hear the party music and the whoops of the passengers as the New Year was welcomed in. ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind’? Max listened; one acquaintance could never be forgotten, a single voice hummed deep in the melee of voices, a voice that Max recognised, one that would ever be brought to Max’s mind. It carried across the water like an assassin’s whisper, a promise of pain and death in every daggered word. Turning in the water, the salt stinging at the twin gashes where his wings would soon return, he struck out for the distant horizon. As he swam steadily away from the ship he thought about the girl he’d left behind, the one he’d found broken and shattered, roped to a feed pipe, deep in the engine room. As he’d swung her around, in the forlorn hope that she might be still breathing, he saw the mark hidden in the spider’s web of wafer thin gashes, some so deep that bone was visible through the blood. Damn him. He always left his mark. Double damn him. It was so easy for him to trick them. They just never seemed to realise that just because he had the face and wings of an angel that didn’t make him an angel. Her name had been Pamela, she came from Wisconsin, she was twenty-two and a smoker. Max swam on wondering what brand she used to smoke.

With thanks (again) to akh.


Link to Paragraph Five: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-05.html

BLOG TAG (1) Para 03

Link to Paragraph Two: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-02.html

As he soared upwards, higher and higher he felt the tiny shards of ice bursting against his face as he crashed through the clouds and he found it both beautiful and exhilarating after the confinement of that floating metal coffin. “Surely”, he thought, “Surely I’ve done enough now...?” Still climbing, he burst through into the blazing sunlight, convincing himself that this time he was going to make it back to the heavens, but then he caught that familiar sulphurous smell as first the tips of his wings began to smoulder and then his entire body burst into flame. Max had just started forming the thought “Oh...” when he immediately began to plummet to earth in much the same way as a carelessly dropped sledgehammer would fall from a skyscraper, with little care as to whom it might land upon, and, as he fell, the very same shards of ice he had enjoyed on the way up failed completely to soothe or comfort him as he plunged back down through the clouds. Far, far below him the ship chugged inexorably onwards towards damnation, the passengers and crew already oblivious to his absence, adjusting once more to the lack of him almost as quickly as they had to his arrival amongst them. Only one dishevelled figure noticed as the distant fireball plunged into the icy waters and threw up a momentary plume of white steam, and he was the only one who heard the faint echoing anguished howl of “Nooooooooooo!” that came from within it, and, as the rest of the passengers ran to the rail exclaiming their Oohs and Aahs at what they thought had been a falling star, he smiled to himself and thought “No, not that way, Max, Not that way. You don’t get away from me that easily...” before taking a sip from his champagne flute and disappearing.

And back to you again, as the experiment continues...


Link to Paragraph Four: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-04.html

BLOG TAG (1) Para 02

Well, that’s rather thrown me... Having expected no response at all and decided that I would be able to quite happily slink away and lick my wounds in the sure knowledge that nobody was interested in what I do, up popped this response, so now, I suppose I’ve got to go ahead and act upon it...

Shown below is the reply received to the first paragraph of the blog tag.

Link to Paragraph One: http://bit.ly/w9lOKr

But of course Max didn’t. He didn’t need to. His blackened wings unfurled from beneath his stiff white shirt as he cried: “Ah, if only it were as simple as that!” Rising above the doomed ship below Max beckoned to the violin player - the show must go on, after all wasn’t this the show of all shows, the show that even the fallen Tamara had been waiting for all of these long, sweet years? Max spat - and as his spittle hit the spray-swept deck he heard a voice crackling from the speakers high up on the quarterdeck: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Max turned his wings and flew.

Thanks akh, credits, I suppose, should reside in the comments section of the previous post. I don’t know, I’ll have to give that some thought. Still, as trials go, it’s kind of got off to an okay start, so I guess that it’s my turn again...


Link to Paragraph Three: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-03.html

SMOKING IN FILMS

There’s been a move recently to reclassify any and all films that contain scenes of smoking because they apparently persuade youngsters to take up the filthy, disgusting and (allegedly) potentially lethal habit by somehow convincing the malleable young mind that smoking is somehow a “cool”, “grown up” or “sensible” thing to do if it appears in a movie.

I’m not really sure that this is true. After all, I may very well “believe a man can fly” whilst watching him in a cinema, but I’m hardly likely to jump off the roof afterwards, and whilst I can enjoy watching Bruce Willis demolish half of Los Angeles with little more than a merry quip, a smirk and a stolen truck, I think it’s highly unlikely that I would be likely to try anything similar with my own car on the way home.

That, I suppose is to rather miss the point, because this kind of imagery is more subtly persuasive I suppose, and the influence is probably more by osmosis than anything else. If you see someone you respect and admire as a role model, you are, if you are so minded, likely to want to try to emulate them, and small children have been known to believe they can fly, usually with less than fortunate consequences.

But then again, there’s not really all that much smoking to be seen in mainstream popcorn cinema that’s aimed at that demographic anyway, and if it is, it is usually the sole domain of those considered to be the villains of the piece. The films containing scenes where smoking is seen in a more “realistic” way tend to be made for a more “adult” audience and also tend to be more “drama” or “real life” based, aimed at a more “mature” mind, or are possibly much more obscure and intended for the “arthouse” set.

Still, anything that discourages the practice is, I suppose, to be applauded, although I do sometimes despair of this constant re-imagining of the past from a modern perspective, and pretending that things didn’t happen because we would prefer, because of our modern perspective and sensibilities, them not to have done so. I wonder whether whatever media moguls are running the show in fifty years time will think of all those characters running around with brain cancer-inducing boxes clamped to their ears that are currently cluttering our films and TV. Will they laugh and point and say “Dear, oh dear! What were they thinking?” (or possibly “D-O-D! Wt wr u thnkng?” or some other derivative) or just accept it as the historical folly they know it to be.

After all, despite all that we have learned over the past half century or so, what would a Bogie and Bacall movie be without smoking? Or a Ridley Scott movie for that matter? Where would Uncle Sherlock be without his pipes? Masters of the art of lighting for film know just how evocative those curling wisps dancing in the beams of light can be, and it’s got nothing at all to do with anything other than atmosphere, and it’s tough to fake that. Connery’s Bond always had a gasper to hand, Moore had his cigars, but more recent actors have ditched the fags to embrace some new idea of masculinity that involves strange and dark new arts like moisturiser, body-sculpting and waxing, which does rather dismiss the fast-living self-destructive tendencies of the literary character, although I fully expect someone to announce that the books are to be “updated” to excise all signs of the less noble vices sometime soon.

I don’t know really. Sometimes I can see their point, and other times I wish that they’d just butt the hell out of these things. I mean it’s very laudable that we do live in a time where  such things as gender and racial equality can be firmly addressed in our entertainments, but I do get rather tired when characters of gender or race are written into movies and TV programmes that are supposed to be set in history and take no account whatsoever of what real life was actually like for people who lived during those times.

It’s very commendable to try to increase the profile of such characters, and it’s good for anyone who falls into any subset of society to have positive role models to inspire them, of course, but to rewrite history just because modern twenty-first century life is thought to be much more fair and cosmopolitan is to dismiss the genuine struggles and sacrifices that were made to achieve those very equalities that we admire nowadays.

Although it is not to condone them, in the interests of historical accuracy, race and gender issues really should be addressed in the context that they actually existed, and to admit, however awkward it might seem to us now, that those prejudices existed, and were part of the society we lived in and grew out of. So a strong black and/or female character living during those times should be shown having to face the daily hardships that they might have actually had to face during those times because otherwise modern viewers might start to forget how hard-won those rights were.

Yes, it is truly dreadful that within the span my own relatively short lifetime, a family belonging to a so-called “minority group” moving into a street could become a cause for concern and conflict within a community, but we should never forget that these things happened. Nor should we forget that parts of the “Land of the free and the home of the brave” were just as segregated as the international pariah that was South Africa remained until just over half a century ago.

To pretend it never happened, or to try to rewrite history from a modern standpoint so that characters are much better treated than their real-life counterparts would ever have been, is not only disrespectful, but it’s just plain wrong, and to pretend it never happened is just as ill-educated as denying other dreadful acts of our collective histories. If we try to sweep these things under the carpet, we will never remember what intolerance was like, and when it begins to surface again, we would be ill-prepared to deal with it.