David Hadley's Blog, page 152

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

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She said to me: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

I couldn’t lie to her, not with how she was holding me. I’d seen her make a lemon meringue and watching her squeezing the lemons had made me nervous, even then. Now, with her holding my delicacies in he same way as she had held those lemons, all my thoughts of spinning her some story went out the window.

Which is a shame….

Because spinning the stories is what I’m good at. Give me anything, say: an elephant and a mandolin and I’ll have that elephant working as the best mandolin salesman the music shop has ever seen within a handful of paragraphs.

So, when she asked me where I got my ideas from, I told her.

I told her about the clearing in the woods.

I told her about the special night when the moon is just right.

I told her about the midnight hour and the chanting.

I made sure I told her all about the naked dancing under that almost-full moon at midnight in the clearing in the woods.

I told her about the special box you had to place in the dead centre of that clearing, and how you had to leave the lid open and walk away without looking back.

I told her all about those lonely hours sitting – still naked – with your back to the clearing until dawn.

I told her about how the dew-wet grass soaks your feet as you walk cautiously back to the clearing and peer through the undergrowth at the edge of the open space to see if the lid is back on the box.

Then I told her about creeping up to the box and opening the lid to find the box overflowing with ideas, more ideas than anyone could write in one lifetime.

Then she let me go….

I told her all about where I get my ideas from, and I’ll tell you this: it is well worth visiting that clearing in the middle of the woods next time it is almost-full moon, because the sight of her dancing naked around that open box is a sight you’ll never forget….

Who knows, maybe it will even give you an idea for a story too.

Monday Poem: Flying Free

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Flying Free

So, this silence falls down around us
As we let the bird fly free from open palms.
Watching it become a speck and then nothing

Before turning back to break free of that silence
Of a solemn and significant moment.

We wait for breathing to return to tense bodies
And life to flow back through us, before we step away
From this hillside and return to our lives.

We live down in the valley below
Where ordinary days pass in ordinary ways

And the only birds we ever see are those that fly
Too far above us for us ever to take one
Into our hands again, just to hold its freedom close.

The Rock Pool

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She found herself back on the beach, kneeling and staring into a rock pool. She did not know how she had got there. The Last thing Bella could remember was getting into bed and turning the light off, too tired to even read. She did remember, before she fell asleep, wondering what she was doing there at the holiday cottage on her own.

She had expected a troubled, disturbed night without the familiar presence of Richard in the bed beside her, but here she was with the whole night past and the dawn creeping up, turning the grey sky orange behind her.

Bella looked down at herself, glad to see she was dressed, but not knowing how she had managed it. She always slept naked. She did not know, either, how she had apparently opened the tricky cottage door that had given her so much trouble when she’d arrived the afternoon before. She felt the back pocket of her jeans and was reassured the cottage key was there. She could feel the hard outline of the big old-fashioned key, its solidity reassuring.

She looked up; the beach was deserted, the tide almost in… or on the way out, she was not sure which, with only a distant early morning solitary dog walker far over the other side of the beach.

Bella got to her feet, suddenly crying out in shock and pain, as she stood on her bare feet, one of which – the left – leaving a damp and bloody print on the rock where she’d tried to put her weight on it.

Just Another Rainy Day

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I remember the day, the ordinariness of it, just another rainy day in what had seemed like a long year of rain. Back then, I still believed in books and that they could make a difference; make a life richer, deeper.

I sat at the table by the café window, so I could look out on the rain-splattered street outside and those hurrying by. Back then, I thought I was a poet and I thought I needed to pay attention to the world, turn everything I saw, knew, felt or wondered about into words on the page; even though those words could never get close to what I wanted to say.

I opened the bag of books, from the town’s most famous bookshop: a maze of shelves and further rooms of more shelves that existed in an underground warren, a labyrinth of books and books and more books. It was a place I could spend the whole day exploring, sometimes.

Now, though, I had surfaced, come back to the world; the treasures I’d hunted down in that maze safe in the bag in front of me. I took a sip of my too-hot black coffee, savouring the moment before I examined my treasures.

As I fished in the bag and pulled out the first of my prizes, she burst into the café in a flurry of wet hair, broken umbrella and rain-soaked coat.

She looked around the café, looking for a seat, noticing the spare one at my table, then looking further, before coming back to check which book I was holding.

‘May I?’ she said, taking hold of the back of the empty chair.

‘Yes, of course, please.’ I said in return as I drew my bag of treasures closer to me… and then my whole life changed.

Give my Compliments to the Chef

Of course, not everyone has the sangfroid to regard the arrival of the lemon meringue on their nakedness with equanimity; especially when it arrives straight from the fridge.

In many cases, though, that is how it is with new religions. Often people are attracted by the glamour, or the newness, or even the notoriety of a new religion and are eager to embrace it – at least, right up to the arrival of the Ceremonial Lemon Meringue.

However, as our Holy Cookbook so eloquently states:

we should all treat with awe and wonder all of the wondrous creations of the Great Chef in the Sky, for just as he marinaded us all into being we must accept all of the wonders of the myriad of recipes he – in his infinite wisdom – bestowed upon us mere mortals.

As I often say to the lay sisters as they prostrate themselves before my most holy jam roly-poly, they must accept all of his blessings into themselves wholly and completely, and that includes my special ceremonial custard.

Still, no matter how much those tired old religions try to call us heretics and blasphemers, how they attempt to poor scorn – like over-watery gravy – on the Supreme Chef, we – in our most holy way – know deep in our heart of hearts that we may not have all the answers to the questions of existence, but at least we can all come back for seconds.

Thursday Poem: The Light of another Dawn

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The Light of another Dawn

The elements of memory,
The barest traces left
In the rocks of time,
Geology heaps the present
Over times long past
Burying it in the layers
Of forgetfulness

We learn to dig much deeper
To uncover the traces
Discover who we once were,
Before it all fell down
Deep into the loss of history.

Still we do not know
What happened here.
We can only guess
How all these days ended
In smoke, flame and fear

As the walls came tumbling down
Around our heads
As we held the young ones close,
Fearing they would never see
The light of another dawn
And all our times would end too soon.

Shed-Based Cogitations

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Then there are three of them, which, if you’ve never been quietly engaged in philosophical speculation in your shed and been disturbed by She and her cronies then you are indeed fortunate.

However, like all those unused to philosophical speculation and contemplation, they were immediately curious as to why such deep pondering involves the use of so many pictorial representations of the naked female form. Of course, those of you familiar with Aristotle’s work will immediately see why such philosophical speculation in the calm and privacy of garden shed is so important to a man’s mental well-being.

Not only that, the use of beer as an aid to philosophical inquiry has been proved beyond doubt especially in the tavernas around the philosophical academies and symposia of ancient Greece, where it was not unusual to see a heap of insensate philosophers overpowered by their own philosophical ability and power of thought, all snoring peacefully next to the bin full of empties.

This is of course – as I pointed out to my trio of sceptics - why so much Greek art featured nudity. The ancient Greeks were – rightly – proud of their philosophers and wanted to do all they could to help them in their cogitations. Not something – I pointed out – that seems to have followed through to this day and age.

Suitably chastised, the three made a hasty exit when they saw the errors of their ways, although, why they accidentally seem to have locked me out of the house is hard to grasp, even with such a philosophically-acute mind such as mine… and why they left all my belongings in a heap on the back step is a matter I will have to ponder as soon as I can get more beer in.

Smuggler’s Cove

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The tide was out and the sun was shining. It was one of those summer days that seemed made for remembering. We made our way down from the costal path to a small deserted beach. The path itself was overgrown and almost invisible, as though no-one had used it for at least this summer. Kate held my hand as we made our way over some awkward bits. The cliff had eroded in places right up to the edge of the path and once or twice we thought about turning back, but there was something about the small, hidden, cove that drew us on.

Kate loved the water and she loved swimming, I’d called her a mermaid a few days before when she’d stayed out at sea for what seemed like hours while I sat on the shore and waited for her to come back to me. I’ve never liked swimming, not since that time almost fifteen years ago. Even all these years later, I still sometimes wake up from a dream of night and dark and storms and water, gasping for breath and flailing my way clear of the drowning weight of the bed sheets.

Kate, though, as soon as we reached the beach, was already undressing, not bothering with her swimsuit as soon as she’d seen the tiny beach was deserted. I’d laughed to see her run as though she was dying of some kind of thirst and she wanted to drink the sea, as though, she was some beached aquatic creature that needed the sea to give her life.

I sat down and gathered up her discarded clothes before pulling out my notebook and pen, glancing up every now and then to catch a glimpse of Kate as she made her way far out to sea.

Later, much later, she came back to lie on her towel, her half-dried hair spread out across my leg as she lay, still naked, with her head in my lap, sand and salt sparkling on her dark brown skin.

Then, after she’d slept as I read from my book, she slipped on her shoes and summer dress and we’d set off to explore what there was of this small beach, ending up at the sea-cave eroded into the cliff.

‘Look at this,’ Kate called, as usual far off in front of me.

‘It must have been a smuggler’s tunnel,’ I said when I met up with her, standing in front of the ancient wooden door set into the back wall of the cave.

‘Come on, let’s see where it goes!’ Before I could stop her, Kate was gone thought the door and up the carved stone steps deep into the dark heart of the cliff.

Sighing, I set off after wondering where we would end up this time.

There Was A Time

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There was a time, you could tell because it was on all the clocks and calendars, when she was the woman to whom every man - who had one - wanted to demonstrate the full extent of his stamp collection. Back in those long-ago days, before home computers, before mobile phones, when there were only two TV channels - and rumours of a third being in colour – there was little a man could do to impress a woman with his technological prowess.

Even the men who did it – for example – then knew that train spotting was not the sort of thing that would get a woman draping herself languidly against your anorak be-coated chest as she sensuously unscrewed the lid from your thermos. Few men too, thought it was the way to a woman’s heart to invite her to an early morning session of twitching in the bushes in the nearest local park or recreational gardens.

Stamp collecting, though, was different with its sensuous use of tongue and fingertip and the echoes of romantic far away places only ever witnessed in James Bond films and Soviet travelogues. The intimacy of the album and the awe with which a woman would want to touch, stroke, fondle, your First Day Covers, though. That was the stuff of true romance, of erotica.

Those were the days when access to pornography beyond the basic nudie book necessitated the purchase of a long brown mac and a visit to that shady part of town where rampant Estate Agent offices preyed on the unwary.

Back then, yes, it was a different time and to get a sultry young woman to lick your stamp hinges was the height of sexual stimulation. Nowadays, people say romance is dead. We scoff, of course, but we also look back on those times and remember….

Political Infections

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Anyway, there we were, standing next to the politician, despite the danger.

Some of us were, of course, rather nervous despite having the necessary anti-politics inoculations and all of us – for Health and Safety reasons well outside the reinforced anti-politics cage.

Everyone knows just how infectious politics can be. Many people have heard of, or even know, some one who has – often though no fault of their own – become infected with this debilitating disease. Perfectly ordinary people going about their normal business often have – in the past – suddenly come down with a very bad case of politics.

In the past, it was assumed that there were two strains of politics: known popularly as Left-wing and Right-wing, and a popular folk cure in those days was to counter a sudden outbreak of Left-wing politics with a good dose of the Right-wing ‘alternative’. However, recent research has conclusively proved that there is little or no actual difference between the two strains except for a few trivial side-effects. Both are equally deadly to the thought-processes of those infected and merely offering a counter-dose of the opposite strain more often than not increases the amount of political infection in the patient, often to the complete despair of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of the infected person when the politics breaks out in the victim. This is often where infection spreads; hence the invention of both the anti-politics vaccination program and the development of a political infection-proof coating for various places where politicians are known to gather.

Recently, though, there have been some encouraging signs with the number of people getting infected with either strain of political infection on the decline, probably through the use of the counter-measures outlined above. There is even talk of the entire world becoming – at some point in the near future – completely politics-free, something that even a few years ago would have been dismissed as a naïve utopian fantasy, but now looks almost achievable.