David Hadley's Blog, page 157

Emergency Services Call-Out

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It was not as if it was the first time she’d been caught doing that with a member of the emergency services, although this was the first time she’d been caught engaged in such an act at the top of a ladder.

Still, they rescued the cat in the end, and she was warned about making misleading calls to the fire service about needing a fireman to see to her pussy stuck up a tree.

It is easy to see, how the confusion arose, especially after the seventh fireman disappeared into the foliage, but still I suppose they see it as one of the perks of the job. Although, you do have to feel sorry for those women whose toes are too fat to get stuck in the bath tap. At least, that is, unless they get the urge to set fire to things to get attention from the fire service. All that smoke and flame does tend to subtract from the intended romantic atmosphere, especially if she is lying there coughing her lungs up instead of being draped provocatively across her bedroom while the fire has the decency to flicker seductively in the moonlight as the fireman’s strong manly arms rescue her from her moment of torment, or whatever her typical romantic fantasy scenario dictates.

Although, these days, with the move from romantic reading to the more explicit erotica women tend to read these days, you can only presume it is less about her fainting away in his strong manly grasp, with it more likely to be a case of the entire blue shift taking it in turns to give her a damn good seeing-to as the flames rage around them….

Probably.

Monday Poem: A Form of Silence

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A Form of Silence

All these words are little more
than another form of silence.
The world takes our voices

and scatters them on the winds,
so all our words become
little more than soft breezes

rustling the leaves and grass
and billowing the curtains.
The words are lost on the winds,

taken by the breezes and spread
through the valleys around us,
lost in the dark-shadowed woods

and flowing along the streams
that flow rivers out into the sea.
We have spoken of many things

from universes to sand grains
and now our words are lost
while we are almost forgotten.

After the War

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I remember her… even now. It was the end of the summer back in the days not long after the war, I forget which month. I was learning to walk again. The wound had kept me in hospital all through those long months of that winter, then the spring and early summer, after the war ended. Now, here I was down on the coast. An old friend, from those long-ago days before the war, had this cottage down on the coast. He let me borrow it ‘…for as long as you need’.

The cottage hadn’t been used since before the war, but I didn’t mind the neglect and dilapidation. In fact, I thought it made the cottage and me seem almost as though we belonged together. I’d had my far share of neglect and dilapidation too during the war.

I was learning to walk again by taking ever-lengthening strolls down along the deserted beach. The beach too, seemed to be another case of dilapidation and neglect. The coastal defence emplacements along this part of the shore were already falling into disrepair with the wild plants taking over the concrete emplacements and defensive positions, while the sea battered and rusted the metal effigies that rose out of the sand like skeletal hands begging for mercy, much like the flame-seared hands that reached for me out of the endless battles of my nightmares, that would wake me either screaming or sweating and crying every night, even after all the months since I’d been in the war.

She was up there, by one of the concrete pillboxes one morning; the wind blew her hat tumbling towards me. I caught it with the end of my walking stick; pinning it down as the petulant wind tried to pull it free.

I tried to bend down to pick it up, but I’d already reached my limit for that day and my knees would not bend. She ran up to me, thanked me and knelt down in front of me to pick up her hat.

Then, when she looked up at me from her kneeling position and from under those long eyelashes, I knew that neither of us would be alone ever again.

I Could Weave Worlds

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I could tell her so many stories. I could take her by the hand and lead her down so many roads to places she’d never seen before, where I could build for her great towers and cities; each full of people with so many tales of their own to tell.

I could make new worlds for her, worlds that could only exist inside the words I weaved around her. I could tell her about places that existed, places that never existed and times that were yet to be.

I could weave worlds and I could pull people fully-formed from the air as we sat each night in front of her fire.

I could tell her everything she wanted to hear.

Except….

I could not tell her of the lover she wanted to meet. I could not tell her how one day, one ordinary day; she would meet the one she longed for; the one who would take this broken world she lived in and make it whole for her. I could describe anything, real or unseen, for her and make it all seem so real.

I could tell her stories about everything, except her one true love because I knew from the way she looked at me, he was not me.

The Map of Other Places

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‘Here,’ Sandy said, taking a small roll of cloth from under her pillow. Her naked breast stroked my cheek as she sat up beside me. I kissed her nipple as it brushed past my face. ‘This is where we’ll begin.’

Sandy unrolled the cloth, laying it out across my chest. She sat cross-legged and naked next to me. Her finger pressed down on the cloth. By craning my neck, I could see that she was pointing to a spot on what looked like a map, but it was not a normal map; with roads, rivers and towns, but a series of shapes overlaying each other with twisting trails between them. It looked, as I stared at it, as thought he shapes were shifting over each other, but I just put that down to the awkward position of my head and - maybe – the movement of my body underneath the map as I breathed.

‘Come on, Phil, let’s go,’ Sandy said, jumping up from the bed and pulling her clothes on with one hand, whilst throwing my scattered clothes at me.

‘Why now? Where?’ I said, pulling my trousers on and then shrugging myself into my shirt.

‘Now is a good time,’ Sandy said, rolling the map back up and tucking it into her bra under her shirt. She reached out a hand and I took it, expecting her to head for the door to her room. Instead she turned to face the wall opposite the door.

‘Where do you think you are going,’ I said.

‘Through here,’ she said, gesturing towards the wall with her free hand.

‘You’re going to walk through the wall.’ I laughed.

She turned to look at me in a way that stopped my laughter. ‘Yes, Phil, I’m going to walk through the wall.’

Then she did.

World Record Attempt

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She didn’t know….

I didn’t know….

The badger, though, was looking decidedly nervous, even though the butler was dressed in the wet suit and was poised to put on the flippers once the structural engineer gave the go ahead.

Of course, fitting up the circus-style trapeze apparatus had not been that easy, but this was a world record attempt and so we needed to be sure.

Although, the original specification for the pool of flesh-eating piranhas had metamorphosed into a badger in a puddle when the health and safety inspector insisted that the butler be prepared to rescue the daring lady on he flying trapeze, should she lose her grip and fall.

The rest of us – especially the structural engineer – were somewhat more concerned for the integrity of the apparatus as our star performer had a tendency to overeat when she got nervous and only informed us of her badger-phobia when the rest of us had to accept that the piranhas would not be delivered in time and the man from the Guinness Books of Records refused to alter his diary to accommodate any delay. He did however, reassure us that there was – as yet – no world record for performing a trapeze act above a rather perturbed badger sitting in a puddle, or otherwise, so her attempt at stardom would be assured, providing that is, the equipment held up for the duration of her performance.

Which it didn’t… unfortunately….

Unfortunately for the badger, that is. Our star performer came away with only a bruised elbow and a slightly flattened steak and ale pie which she - unwisely to my mind – attempted to consume in mid-performance, thus slipping from the trapeze when her gravy-covered hands failed to maintain a grip.

Still, the government inspector did say they were looking for more humane ways of culling wild TB-infected badgers and that, although it would need some refinements, our method did seem rather successful. So our performer may not have got into the record books in the way she would have desired, at least now she has a steady job… until this country runs out of badgers, that is.

Lost Homeland

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There were times before this became a story. There were times when this journey had not become the tale of itself. Back in those early days we did not know this journey would never end, that it would become a story we told each other as we gathered around the fire at the end of another weary day of always moving on.

We had a homeland once, but that too has become another story, twisting and growing with each day’s travel that takes us further and further away from it. There are those amongst us, the younger ones, who cannot remember the homeland and those even younger for whom the homeland will ever only be a story. It is for them we sit and tell each other the stories of this journey, where we are and where it began, who we are and why we left the homeland as it burnt down behind us.

Even now some of us still wake suddenly in the night; hearing the screams of those that we lost, back in the homeland when the strangers came and took our world from us, leaving us only with these endless days of travel and all these stories we tell ourselves as we trudge always onward.

The Marmalade of Romance

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Here is the very lupin (now dried and preserved) that was first used by Charles II in order to get Nell Gwynne to do that thing she did so well with just a pair of oranges and a smile. Now, many men are aware that freely-proffered flowers are often a way to a lady’s heart, and sometimes to some of her just-as-interesting other bits as well.

Strangely, however, despite everything, the same cannot be said for marmalade, the collected Haynes Workshop Manuals for every production Ford car of the 1970s, or - even - a signed photograph of Jimmy Hill.

Just why this is, is a subject for someone with a more academic set of leather elbow patches than any of us gathered here possess, but no doubt, that will not prevent plenty of wild and ill-informed speculation. After all, this is the internet: the natural home of blind guesswork and prejudice masquerading as informed understanding, as well as being the world repository for many millions of pictures of underdressed young ladies going about their lives in the presence of an unnoticed and unexplained cameraman….

However… where was I?

The Accordion Incident

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Now, well I didn’t want to mention it, but certain recent events have now made it inevitable. It now seems that, despite all over fervent attempts to forestall it, soon it will be possible – under immanent EU legislation - for anyone to walk around the streets, roads and byways of this once-great land whilst freely wielding an accordion with intent to cause seriously bodily harm to any pure innocent tune they take in into their minds to subject to the full horror of that dread instrument.

Now, it has long been a tradition on the continent to continue with cruel and harmful sports that we in the British Isles have long-since forsworn, such as: bullfighting in Spain, wearing a beret in France and the German proclivity for foisting sauerkraut on the unsuspecting.

It was after the scandal of Royal Navy cabin boys being exposed to the full horrors of the unleashed accordion was presented to a shocked populace by the Victorian newspapers that the British government was forced to take action and ban the user of accordions – except between consenting adults over the age of 21 – in public places, especially with the intent to inflict it on any nearby tune.

Since then, of course, the British tabloid press (especially that bastion of the moral panic – the Daily Mail) have all devoted themselves to exposing the menace of the accordion whenever and wherever it has been discovered.

Now, though, with this EU ruling about to be implemented no-one – except, of course, the tabloids who are all shrilly and gleefully proclaiming the end of the British way of life as we know it – knows where it will all end.

Clamouring for Attention

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Well, it wasn’t that obvious, especially if you weren’t really paying attention at the time. With all the proliferation of the old media and all the social media and so forth all clamouring for our attention, it is rather easy to let things slip by without not really noticing them.

After all, there is usually someone on the news every day claiming the end of the world is nigh in one way or another. After a while, you stop paying attention. The TV news itself in its increasing clamour for attention - somewhat paradoxically – makes everything that it shouts and screams about seem less and less important… and as for those breathless pieced to camera by reporters on the scene where nothing is happening: even if something has already happened there, or - increasingly these days - where something is assumed to be about to happen…. well, they just become background noise. The only thing we seem to remember from the TV news these days is what the presenter was wearing… and our wondering why.

So, when the invasion came… most people didn’t notice at first.

Many people just thought it was some new SF series, after all the Daleks invade the Earth every Doctor Who Christmas special, or thought it was some sort of ‘edgy’ advert for a new mobile phone or lager or something like that.

The aliens themselves though, didn’t do much to help. There were no massive ships in the sky slaughtering panicked mobs, no destruction of the world’s most famous landmarks, not even – to the regret of many of us – the sucking out and eating of the American president’s brain live on worldwide TV.

Many said later, that the aliens should have employed a PR agency, or an advertising agency who could have told them how to make an entrance that the Earth’s population would notice.

But they didn’t….

So we didn’t.