David Hadley's Blog, page 138

MPs Call for Privacy Legislation

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Even though not many people are aware of just how often the Houses of Parliament have been bought to the point of actually doing something useful for this country, the UK’s MPs have decided that they need yet another new law. This law: The ‘Mind Your Own Sodding Business Regulatory Powers Act’ will enable the government and MPs to prevent the general public, those journalists yet to be given a knighthood, and other busybodies from poking their noses into things that don’t concern them.

MPs, even before the last election, have long felt that it is rather unhealthy in a mature democracy for anyone outside the tightly-knit and incestuous political world around Westminster to have any interest in what MPs and the government really do on the people’s behalf, rather than what they pretend to do, or claim to do whenever it is time for yet another tedious election.

Therefore, the government has had no alternative but to create a new criminal offence to prevent anyone, especially those tiresome bloggers and journalists who refuse to mind their own business, to find out what is really going on in government.

After all, as several MPS have pointed out, neither the government itself, nor the MPs in the Houses of Parliament has a clue as to what they are doing, and – so – it seems deeply unfair and contrary to the business of the House for anyone, especially outsiders, to attempt to find out.

Less than Dust

Less than Dust

You told me that you do not dream,
But I saw your eyelids closed
To hide the sudden movements behind.

You lie there with sheets thrown back
And beading sweat across your face
Like some endless rainfall spring

Of unquenchable tears for a life
You have never lived, but live
Through each night until the dawn

Rises up through dark, to snatch it
From your tight-clutching fingers
Trying to hold onto the fading night

As your dreams dissolve into less
Than dust and vague dissatisfactions
You cannot name or place, except to know

That somehow the shape of this world
Seems to have too many hard edges
And numberless sharp corners

You do not discover when you lie down
At night and everything about your weary day
Is lost in the soft pillow when you find yourself

Taking these twisting verdant pathways
Winding through familiar dreaming landscapes
Back to this place you know is home.

Next-day Delivery

It was not what we expected, even though the illustration on the box matched the description on the website, when it finally arrived, from whatever alternative dimension the Post Office route their parcel deliveries though, it was not what we ordered.

Further enquires led us to understand that this in not that an unusual problem. The necessity for the Post Office to use alternative dimensions other than the normal space-time continuum we are generally familiar with does – they say – sometimes lead to some subtle alterations in the constituent matter of the parcels whilst en-route, especially when it comes to the re-entry point into our own dimension. This has something to do with having to use black holes to route their delivery vans through, apparently. According to the mathematical formula currently used by the Post Office to calculate routes, this involves a re-entry point into our dimension somewhere near the edge of the solar system, which means there are some rather tricky gravitational problems to resolve around the orbit of Neptune.

However, the public relations spokesperson at the Post Office did insist that the time savings – especially through using black holes as a form of time machine – and the reduced fuel costs of not having to use the British motorway system of near permanent contra-flow means they can almost always guarantee next-day delivery.

The only draw back – as we discovered – is that you don't always end up receiving what you ordered. Still, the – still somewhat bewildered - Thompson's gazelle will be something of a surprise for the mother-in-law on her birthday, we just hope it is a suitable replacement for the boxed set of Catherine Cookson novels we originally ordered.

You’re the One

There she stood.

I waited.

Time passed.

Then there was the moment when I could see the decision she made. She put down her drink on a nearby table and came towards me. She moved slowly, casually, as if she was just strolling through the bar, weaving through the crowd. She glanced to her right and left as she came towards me, looking for some excuse, some encounter that would sidetrack her, maybe even turn her off her route towards me completely.

Meanwhile, I waited.

‘You’re the one,’ she said. It was not a question.

I turned back to look at her. She was everything they’d said she would be. True beauty goes deeper than the skin, and I don’t mean just bone structure. She had the intelligence, the wisdom that gives beauty its depth.

I smiled and nodded.

‘You don’t say much.’

‘No.’ I agreed. I put my empty glass down on the bar. ‘Are you ready?’

‘You’re not going to offer me a drink?’ she smiled, pretending it didn’t matter. Maybe it didn’t, I’m no mind-reader. ‘Try to get to know me… you know… small talk and all that?’

I looked into her eyes. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Do I need to know anything about you?’

‘I saw you from over there and I thought you looked interesting.’ She picked up her handbag; one of those that are too small to be any real use. ‘I thought you were the one….. Sorry, I made a mistake.’

‘No, you didn’t make a mistake. I am the one.’ I stood. ‘What is more, I’m the only one left.’ I took her by the arm and kissed her lips. ‘Are you ready to go?’

‘Yes.’ She said. ‘But only if you kiss me again, first.’

So I did.

I am Waiting

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There are secrets, sometimes, that only two can share. There are things kept to ourselves we take to the grave, leaving the one who shared our secret alone and lonely, living in a world that has now become incomplete.

‘I am waiting,’ Alice said and I knew it was her, even though I hadn’t heard her voice for nearly two years. She still lived inside me, though, commenting on things as I went about my day. This, though, in the deep dark heart of the night was different. This was not the ghost of memory keeping me company through my lonely days.

It was her. It was Alice.

There she was, back in the bed beside me. I could see her clearly, despite the darkness of the night. She was as she had been in life, as she was before the illness changed her from the woman I’d married into someone I’d hardly recognised and who no longer recognised me.

‘I’m waiting,’ Alice said again, smiling that smile of hers which had once made everything in my world seem worthwhile.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I whispered, but I don’t know why. There had been no-one else in the house since they’d taken her away at the beginning of those long dreary months it took her to die; the longest, cruellest winter of my life.

‘I’m waiting for you, of course,’ she said. ‘You know I’d always wait for you.’

I nodded, lifting my head from the pillow to look at her. ‘I knew you’d wait.’ I said. ‘I suppose I’ve been here, waiting too.’

‘Are you ready, then?’

‘I’ve been ready for months, for all the time since that illness stole you from me,’ I said. I could feel the sharpness in the corner of my eyes. It was not much of a world, this world Alice had left me in after she’d gone, but still it was harder than I thought to leave it all behind.

When I looked back, though, as we stood there hand in hand watching it all disappearing, I knew I had made the right decision. We kissed for the first time in far too long as our old life faded... and then was gone.

The Romantic Night Out

It was – once – well known that a small woodland mammal was a necessary addition to any young person's night out in some of the more remote rural areas of the UK. Any young lady out for a night on the village without her own weasel was regarded as someone suspicious (or as in some parts of Gloucestershire – a witch) and a young lad without a badger would – more often than not – refuse to go out of an evening – which, of course, led to the invention of the home computer; without which such cultural high-spots as Manic Miner, Elite, Lemmings and Populous would be unknown.

However, in the more urban areas of Britain such things never really caught on, especially with the general paucity of wildlife in built up areas and the lack of any real understanding of woodland lore, which would have made – for example – the provision of a squirrel to one's paramour somewhat problematical, especially if the squirrel hunt was undertaken partway through a night out - as was the original countryside custom. The urban night would then have resounded with the sound of inebriated young men falling out of trees all across the country, not really the ideal background ambience for a night of romance under the stars.

However, once the mobile phone was invented there was little call for taking woodland mammals on an evening out, especially when very few of those aforementioned calls would be for the woodland mammal itself and thus made transporting the mammals more of an encumbrance than a way to inveigle oneself into the affections of any putative paramour.

Some people would – of course – call it progress, and despite the manifold advantages of the mobile phone over a (sometimes very) wild animal about one's person in the evening's hostelries, some of us cannot help but believe that some of the romance of a night out has been lost, perhaps never to return.

Words Waiting to be Spoken

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There were words waiting to be spoken. There were things unsaid. There were so many words left unspoken. So many accusations left unmade and far too many unused denials left waiting.

Each of us charted our course through our lives around these things left unsaid as though we knew they were the reefs that would wreck us, each of us waiting for the other to flounder on the rocks that lay half-submerged under the shifting tides of the everyday.

Neither of us wanted to be the one left shipwrecked and alone, while the other sailed off into deeper, clearer waters, left to construct some crude facsimile of a life out of the flotsam and wreckage left behind.

There was just too much to avoid, times when it seemed easier to sail blind into disaster rather than spending all the time and effort changing course and plotting a safe route through to the calmer safe waters in the harbour of night time. A safe berth where both of us would lie together at anchor in the bed, listening to the waves of the other’s breathing lapping against the hours of darkness.

Then, the day came when she no longer came home. She had gone, sailing off without me to new found lands across oceans too deep for me to follow and I was left behind on these now-empty shores waiting for another ship to come sailing by.

Holy Book Desecration

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Riots continued for the twenty-seventh day in a row yesterday in the strict Uttabollux country of Alfiesgoatstain, caused by the rumour that someone had desecrated the Uttabollux holy book – The Madeupstuff.

Rioting broke out in the holy city of Tourhisttrhap when a rumour spread through the fundamentalist Uttabollux city that someone had inadvertently read a few pages of the Uttabollux holy book.

Uttabolluxers regard The Madeupstuff as far too holy for anyone – including their religious leaders, known as the Dhaftghits, or any religious scholars - to actually read, especially ordinary lay Uttabolluxers. A religious scholar is only able to become a Dhaftghit if he can guess correctly what the other Dhaftghits before him have guessed about what The Madeupstuff contains, especially the forbidden verses about the goats.

A man was arrested in Tourhisttrhap, twenty-six days ago, and the religious police took the precaution of stoning him to death just in case he had managed to read a few pages of The Madeupstuff. As the first stones hit the blasphemer, he supposedly confessed to reading several pages of The Madeupstuff under the impression that it was the latest thriller from Dan Brown. However, the Dhaftghit of Tourhisttrhap pronounced a fatghit (religious condemnation) on him anyway.

Every Uttabolluxer must have a copy of The Madeupstuff, which they must only ever look at seventeen times a day while thinking about what it may contain, but must not – ever – take even a peak inside the covers on penalty of death.

Those Beyond The High Wall

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It lies out there, beyond the edge of this world. Of course, everyone knows the legends; we are told them while still young children in our cots. Stories of those beyond the wide river, those beyond the High Wall: the creatures that come, take and destroy.

Even up until recently - just beyond living memory, it is said by those old enough to know - there were soldiers, guards patrolling the high walls, but since the last Winter Sickness there have not even been enough of us to guard the villages against wolves and the other predators that can sense our current weakness.

There are the Far Tribes too, but no-one knows whether they suffer from the Winter Sickness or not, some say they are immune to the illnesses that ravage the villages, especially here in the cold north where living is hard at the best of times.

All of us, though, must spend a few seasons here in the North as the price we pay for reaping the rewards of our lands. There are some even who seem to enjoy living up here on the edge of the known world, who seem to relish the challenge the climate and other dangers bring. They have scorn for those they call the Soft Southerners, who they treat with disdain and derision.

I came here many, many, seasons ago and now the people of the North treat me more like one of them than the Soft Southerner I used to be, back when I lived my other life.

I am here now though, and as each day goes by I become more and more convinced that those myths, legends and stories we were all told so long ago were not just stories at all, now I begin to think they are all true and something waits beyond the High Wall and it knows its time will come soon.

A Princess’s Disdain

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A Princess’s Disdain

I’ve travelled all those far distant lands
Hiding inside your secret dreams.

I’ve seen all you ever denied wanting
Spread out on exotic rugs before you

As you watch with a princess’s disdain
While courtiers dance upon your every whim

And your failed lovers haunt these corridors
Of your fantastic palace, searching

For that one special moment that will allow
Them to spend even one more minute

In your presence, just to saviour the delicious hurt
Of seeing what they will never touch again

Before once again they are tossed aside                                                                 
Grateful to have been forgotten

And fearing you’ll remember why
They proved so unworthy to you

And how you can dispose
With a wave of one indifferent hand

All the hurts of this other world
You are condemned to live through.