David Hadley's Blog, page 140

Two Worlds Apart

Then the time came and we were no longer alone together. The rest of the world came back into our small quiet life and drove us apart again.

We had been living quietly, away from the crowds and the cities. We were living where no-one knew our real names, or had any idea what we had done, back in that life we’d left behind.

We knew it was a vain hope, but still we tried to make ourselves believe that the two different worlds of then and now could never intersect; hoping we’d left the old world far behind and it would soon forge about us.

That old world though, never forgets. That it is its role, its function. It exists to gather data and then act on that data. Our files had no last pages in them, with no resolution tying up the ends of the data. Our data were still loose and untied. The old world does not like loose ends. It is terrified that someone, someone from outside of it will see those loose ends flailing in the breeze and will take hold of one of them and tug on it, bringing that whole secret dangerous world tumbling down on those who live inside it.

Jane and I, though, thought we’d left enough tangles in the threads of our old lives to give the illusion they had been tied off and that there was no more data, no loose ends. Realistically, we’d hoped we would have longer, but that early morning - as we lay together in those small hours neither of us could ever sleep through - we heard the cars arriving; engines off, lights off, coasting down the lane to the cottage.

We did not speak, didn’t even glance at each other. We were off the bed, dressed with our escape packs ready before the cars had even stopped moving. By the time the car doors had crept open and then closed quietly we were in the woods behind the house, running… again….

The Handsome Princess

Once upon a time there was a handsome princess, not the usual course of affairs in a magical kingdom it is true, but they had been having a few problems with the magic in that kingdom and the wizards had still not quite managed to get it working properly again.

The handsome princess, though, was not that bothered. She had always had a strong dislike of dragons and the way they flew about setting fire to all and sundry, so she was rather pleased that the general dragon-killing responsibilities in the kingdom now – it seemed – came under her remit.

So did rescuing any virgin princes, which – she discovered – was a bit of a problem, because event he most inept and socially maladroit of princes did not stay a virgin for long.

There was - apparently and much to the surprise of the handsome princess – something about princes that other women found rather attractive. The handsome princess thought maybe it must be the fact that it was well-known that princes had huge... tracts of land and therefore any women with her head screwed on – and seeing the limited career opportunities in being a witch – would do her best to snag herself a prince.

However, not that many people seemed to be interested in snagging themselves a handsome princess, no matter how many dragons she killed or virgin(-ish) princes she rescued from imprisonment in high towers (it had been discovered that the only way to keep a prince virgin long enough to see him married off to the progeny of a nearby kingdom was to lock him in a high tower).

Still, the handsome princess thought, one day she would live happily ever after, after all it was in the contract, and even if the wizards couldn't get the magic working properly, the lawyers could always make sure the contracts were honoured and that she could – therefore rest assured that one day her prince would come – hopefully while she was – at least – in the same room as him.

The Problems of Domesticity

There she stood - in all her naked glory – holding the cauliflower in a rather provocative manner.

Of course, by then, I was more than a little eager for the delights of vegetable curry, but that had to be put on hold for a while, while we did the sex thing. So, afterwards, as you well know, there was little else the cauliflower was good for.

Apart from that, obviously.

It is strange how, just because of the mere fact of someone's nudity or otherwise provocative behaviour can call a halt – brief or otherwise – to many worthwhile domestic activities, like putting all the tinned goods in the cupboard into alphabetical order, or rearranging the domestic cleaning items into a more aesthetically pleasing manner.

Maybe it is Western society's obsession with sex in all its manifest forms, or maybe it is just that naked dance she does with the dusters and a tin of Pledge, but whatever it is it seems that the housework is often neglected.

It also tends to make any sudden unexpected visitors somewhat nervous when they see us eventually come to the door, hastily-donned clothing in disarray and sweating profusely whilst claiming we were only engaged in a spot of light housework.

Luckily, none of them has accidentally come across the post-coital remains of the cauliflower, hastily secreted behind the sofa at the sound of the doorbell, otherwise there would be much talk in the neighbourhood.

The End of the Golden Age

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We were born at the end of the Golden Age. All of our childhood and our youth were spent teetering on the edge of chaos. There were the wars, the terrorist attacks, the strikes and other forms of strife both within our civilisation and against our civilisation, where its enemies tried to tear it all down.

Somehow, though, for all those long years we were growing up: our world, our civilisation, our country, managed to carry on. Things fell apart: there were political, social, economic and all manner of other crises and disasters, but somehow we managed to have a home, our parents had jobs – most of the time - and we managed to survive it all, until we were grown up ourselves.

It was then it all fell apart.

There had been a long war, far away mostly, lasting for most of my childhood and teenage years. It was fought far away; in desert lands inhospitable and remote, where the alliances between tribes and warlords seemed to shift like the sands and the homelands of these mostly nomadic peoples.

Our soldiers, our boys, were caught up in the middle of all those shifting alliances and shifting sands, lost in a shifting landscape where this morning’s allies became this evening’s enemies and yesterday’s brave warriors today’s forces of evil.

Mostly, though, the war did not touch us. There were, though, sporadic terrorist outrages and this led to suspicion and fear.

The foreign was no longer a land of romance and mystery, a place of possibility. Now, the foreign was a land of death and those that we came across in our daily lies were regarded with suspicion and fear as everything we’d ever known and taken for granted fell apart around us.

Monday Poem: Beginning Again

Beginning Again

Out of the dark you came to me
to show me the way through,
out to the other side of darkness.

I held your hand as the rain
slowed to a stop and the sun
peered out from behind the clouds.

The world turned from grey
to green again, as we walked away
together to find some new place

where we could build a new life
out of the remains left behind
by so many wasted days I spent

waiting for life to begin again
when all I needed was someone

to take my hand and show me how
to begin all over again.

Not Needed

Even then, though, there were moments when it seemed as though something could happen, at least when she moved slowly through the morning to come back to me as though she needed me.

I pretended to need her too. We both pretended that we had found something new, something with each other we’d – neither of us – found before. We, of course, were lying to each other. Sometimes, now, I think we were even lying to ourselves too.

She did not want or need me and I did not want or need her. We just wanted – for ourselves – something to fill a gap, some way of not being alone that would do until something better came along.

She, unlike me, had never got used to being alone. She came from a large family; she always had people around her, back when she was young and growing up. She had never known silence, quiet and solitude until she ended up here, and she ran from it – right into my bed.

Me, though… I have always been a loner, if not alone. I never seemed to find out what it was that I needed; which key it would take to unlock the secret of how to get along with others. Other people to me have always seemed alien, strange; unknowable and incomprehensible. I have learnt over the years how to be alone.

I thought I would stay alone until that day she fell into my arms, slipping and tumbling on the ice, all alone until I caught her and we fell into each other’s loneliness, like solitary explorers bursting into a treasure-filled tomb that has been lost and closed for centuries.

The Rescue

When the time came, it seemed as though we’d been waiting for far too long. Some had given up hope; others – of course – had died long before the day they’d lived and hoped for ever arrived.

We, the survivors, well… at first we thought we were the lucky ones. We could not believe the sails on the horizon were real; just another optical illusion where the sea and the sky met, just more clouds that resembled the white billowing sails of a ship at sea.

We had, for years before, kept someone on watch on the high cliffs along the beach and ready at the signal fire we patiently rebuilt after every storm washed it into the bay far below.

Eventually, though, the watch had become spasmodic with no-one noticing it had stopped, until that day when Jake came tumbling out of the water, his fishing nets forgotten behind him, yelling, screaming and pointing. At first, most of us thought it was another attack by a shark and we rushed for spears, bows and the few muskets that still had shot and powder.

Then we realised what he was yelling, saw what he was pointing at, then – as one – we turned to look back up at the cliff, the deserted look-out spot and the signal fire that had not been replenished, or remade, for such a long time.

The ship, though, had seen our island. They needed fresh water and food, so they sent a boat out. We stood, all of us, there on the beach watching that boat rowing towards us, thinking that – at last – here was our rescue.

It didn’t take long, though, after that for us to discover our apparent rescue was nothing of the sort.

Talent Contests and their Pitfalls

She had all the necessary items inventoried and prepared for the great day, up to and including the ukulele and the badminton racquets. I, of course, was more than prepared with the bee-keeper's hat, and the shin-pads polished to a lustre that had already dazzled several airline pilots and caused a certain amount of consternation to some orbiting astronauts.

Still, however, there was the matter of the cheese to resolve. She – as is her wont – had implied that the day would not go entirely to my satisfaction if she was presented with anything other than a decent segment of Cheshire, whilst I had – up until the moment she revealed the contents of the penalty clauses - had my heart set on a tasty wedge of Red Leicester.

However, that was all to come. First we had to get through the preliminary rounds. These local contests have come on apace since the days when an error-free waltz or a jar of home made chutney was enough to scoop the prize. These days, in these times of celebrity-driven culture and a seeming unending obsession by the viewing public and the TV channels to inundate us with more and more talent shows, it all means that the bar these days is set so much higher.

So, therefore, our re-enactment of the Battle of Crecy, featuring our home-made scones, a trained performing politician and a (admittedly somewhat historically-dubious) man-eating tiger, had spent several weeks in rehearsal and there was now a danger of us running out of politicians, or having the tiger die from a diet consisting mainly of prospective candidates for local party selection, before it even managed to get its jaws around the cabinet minister we had managed to lure down to his own constituency, on the day of the contest, with the promise of several plain brown envelopes and an eventual elevation to the peerage.

However, due to a mistake by the - apparently - rather short-sighted tiger, we were disqualified in the semi-finals. The final too had to be abandoned until a replacement judge could be found. They did not – though – blame the tiger, just wished it could have got to the MP first, before it satiated its appetite on the competition judge.

Thursday Poem: Out of Touch

Out of Touch

Your hands could carve the shape of her
from empty air and memory
and take her back with you
to all those remembered places
to unmake all those mistakes you made.

She could grow from within this emptiness
into solidity, and you could walk together again.
Time and memory would no longer
hold you prisoner for another hollow day.

She would never take that path,
that journey away, you would never see
that train disappearing around that curve
away from your shared lives, going out,
far from your world to a new land
you cannot reach, you can never touch.

That Inevitable Banjo

Still, I suppose it had to happen. That is the thing with the banjo, it entails a certain amount of inevitability, even when there is not the threat of a pomegranate in the immediate vicinity. Having said that, though, it does tend to add that extra frisson of excitement to the rather jaded prospect of another game of Strip Risk. The tactical variations by the threat of banjo-related mayhem alone is enough to make even the removal of an outer garment by one's opponents seem well worth the effort of deploying another few armies across a disputed border.

As for the pomegranate, as avid readers of the many Strip Risk playing forums on the interwebnets will enthusiastically attest, it had done more to enliven the game since the introduction of tactical baby oil back in the late 1970s.

Still, to my mind, when you are down to your underpants and your last three armies in Mongolia and are surrounded by opposition players who are still in their donkey jackets and wellies, there is much to be said for the surprise use of the castanets, but that – I'm afraid – is for advanced players of the game only and, thus, beyond the scope of this particular article.