David Hadley's Blog, page 162

Invasion Earth… Nearly

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It is not as if she didn’t know what to do with the table-tennis bat, at least not after last time. There are just only so many things you can do with a table tennis bat when an entire herd of… whatever they were are bearing down on you, seemingly intent on enslaving the entire human race as some kind of planetary… erm… well, we were not entirely sure what.

After all, there were apparently millions of the… the alien creatures and thousands of their craft in orbit around the Earth. Some assumed they wanted to wipe out the population of the Earth and then colonise it, some said they wanted to enslave the population and do… well… do alien things to us all: possibly involving some sort of intimate probing.

She, though, said: ‘well, that’s just aliens for you, always turning up to invade the planet just when you fancied spending a nice quiet afternoon engaged in a few games of naked table tennis before moving on to explore each other’s erotic potential in a variety of other scenarios, some - maybe – including the sensual use of mayonnaise.’

However, the alien invasion put an end to all that, which was probably why she was prepared to go into battle against them all armed only with her table tennis bat.

After all, as they say: hell hath no fury like a woman left un-satiated.

The Day of the Donkey

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Not that the donkey was too perturbed. There is usually a certain amount of equanimity in the donkey’s general outlook most of the time, so the sight of her approaching in what could – with a certain amount of leeway – be described as a bikini was not too disconcerting to the aforementioned donkey.

In the donkey’s opinion, and it was one it often put forth with some conviction that belied its usual equanimity, that adults were better than ‘sodding kids’ any time, even if they did tend to be heavier. At least they didn’t leave sticky hand marks all over your coat which attracted that other regular denizen of the summer beach, the wasp.

The donkey hated wasps. After all if you have long ears you definitely do not want some buzzing little sod with a bastard of a sting buzzing about in them searching for some sticky residue left over from a child’s pawings.

Although, this one looked heavy even for an adult, with the bikini – what there was of it – struggling to contain its contents.

It was lucky, the donkey speculated, that she was physically incapable of running because that flimsy bikini would not be able to cope with the stresses and strains and well… there would undoubtedly be casualties buried under the escaping heaps of runaway flesh, left to die a slow, agonising and – seemingly - a rather sweaty death.

Still, the donkey thought, there were worse ways of making a living, although, for the life of it, it couldn’t think if one right at that moment, as it caught - out of the corner of its eye – the sight of a thigh the size of North Wales itself being raised to sit astride the donkey’s back, and it looked like the bikini top was about to give up under the strain….

Then everything went black.

A Place of Special Scientific Interest

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Ah, but back in those days we were young and free, or – if not free - then willing to offer a generous discount to certain selected individuals. It seemed, back in those days that the summer would last forever… well, until the day after, when it started raining again.

She was young and firm in all the interesting places and soft and welcoming in all the very interesting places and rather rude in one particular place of Special Scientific Interest, enough to shock a protected species of newt anyway. Still, it was one of our more explicit adventures and thus would be little interest to anyone without an interest in such matters, or in the study of easily-embarrassed newts.

Still, though, the thing she did with the mayonnaise and the cheese salad baguette will stay with me for the rest of my life… although, sadly, not for one particular newt who became so embarrassed he dived into a nearby pond to cool his blushes and was swiftly eaten by a pike.

Then, as the long summer afternoon slowly seeped into the evening, she finished off the bottle of wine and then did that thing that – if they had not all gone into hiding at the bottom of another pike-free pond - would have caused several of the remaining newts to write stern letters of disapproval to the editor of the local newspaper about the moral laxity of the youth of today.

Although, I must say my lower back hasn’t been the same since.

Still, though, as summer afternoons go, it easily beat watching yet more bloody tennis.

The Waters of the Earth

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When he first took the wrapping off, it didn’t look all that impressive. Still, the adverts had been very good at grabbing his attention and all the reviews he’d seen, suggested that it was one of the best models on the market.

He’d still had a few reservations though, especially when he first saw the demonstration model, set up in the shop.

‘Does it really need that much sea?’ he’d asked the assistant.

‘Well, that depends,’ the assistant said. ‘Are you thinking about introducing life to it?’

‘Well, yes, I don’t really see the point otherwise.’

‘Very true,’ the assistant agreed. ‘Although, barren worlds are becoming more and more popular, especially with the larger solar systems.

‘Really?’ he was surprised. ‘Takes all sorts, I suppose.’

‘So,’ the assistant continued’…the large seas enable a large variety of life to evolve, and….’

‘Evolve?’

‘Yes.’ The assistant stare at him. ‘You weren’t y’know… thinking of doing it all yourself were you?’

‘Well, I thought….’ He stood up a little straighter. ‘I thought that was how it was done.’

‘Oh, no… not these days. All that fiddling about. Do you know how many different species of beetles you’ll need for a stable eco-system? All those fiddly little legs…?’

‘Ah, but y’know being immortal and all that, I thought it would be a way of filling in the time.’ He smiled at the thought of all those happy hours he could spend fiddling with insects in his shed… away from the wife and her constant nagging about him finding something in the business for the boy to do.

Now he’d got it home though, he wasn’t sure if he could be bothered. Sighing, he opened up his universe on his workbench and sorted through the solar systems until he found one that looked a little sparse. Deftly he moved the orbits around and slipped the new planet in-between a red one and another rather dull little yellow one he’d picked up cheap second-hand.

He stood back and had to admit it didn’t look too bad. In a way it seemed a shame to spoil it by introducing life to it, but he’d promised the wife that he would find something for the boy to do in the family business, and this planet was going to be it… eventually.

Just Walking Away

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It happened suddenly. The music was loud and the hot summer night made the club feel oppressive to me. I was standing there, on the edge of the dance floor when I realised – quite suddenly and out of the blue - that I did not want to be there.

I realised with something approaching shock, or dismay, that I did not liker the music; especially not the thudding volume of it. I did not like dancing; although for quite a while I’d been slowly coming to that particular conclusion. I did not like the club and I didn’t like the people I spent my evenings here with… most of them, anyway.

I realised with a kind of sudden jolt, almost akin to an electric shock - that I still recall, even now, all these years later - made my whole body shudder with the realisation that not only could I just walk out of there: but that was exactly what I wanted to do.

So, I turned, walked out into the foyer, out through the doors that turned the pounding beat into a low throb behind me.

I was out by the cloakroom - almost empty, because of the summer heat no-one had brought a coat - when I heard her voice.

‘Dan?’

I turned. Sylvia was standing in the doorway. I could see the darkness, the throbbing disco lights behind her and the shadowed shapes of the moving dancers, looking from the outside like some ancient mystical pagan ritual.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

‘I want… I need….’ I pointed to the door and the summer evening, still light, but fading slowly into the greys of twilight, outside.

‘Wait,’ she said, letting the door to the disco shut behind her, cutting off the thudding beat.

We walked out of the club together, Sylvia holding on to my one arm with both of hers. Instead of turning back towards the town, I turned left and took the path down towards the canal.

We walked in silence for a few minutes, leaving the club behind; past the cemetery I turned and started to walk up the hill, away from the town. The summer grass was long on both sides of the path. It felt as though we were walking through jungle, or some shoulder-high crop. All we could see was the green of the grass and the still empty blue sky. It was more or less silent, apart from occasional insect noises and the cries of a few birds as they made their way towards their roosting places.

Up near the top of the hill where the grass was a little shorter I turned and Sylvia looked up at me, wrapping her arms around me.

‘Yes, Now I understand,’ she said as together we slowly lowered ourselves into the grass, kissing all the way down.

Artificial Intelligence and its Limitations

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Well, I suppose you had to be there, or - at least - in fairly close proximity, otherwise it would probably have made no sense to you at all. At least, that is if you hadn’t seen one of them before and the way it can totally reconfigure your conception of what it means to be a person with an average interest in a decent portion of fish and chips.

Of course, the early experiments with artificial intelligence had not been all that successful. After all, despite all the millions of years of evolution we still have trouble sorting out natural intelligence, let alone wiring up the artificial type. I mean, there are still people out there who believe in all sorts of nonsense up to and including a belief – despite the evidence to the contrary - that Britain’s Got Talent.

Still anyway, as robots go it did have some sort of rudimentary intelligence, even if that was only limited to going to the shops for its owner. Expecting it to negotiate the tricky business of getting 3 portions of fish and chips and a fresh roe and chips, though, was perhaps – at this stage of development – a step too far, as was – quite probably – arming it with military-grade lasers.

Not to mention giving it a rather sketchy algorithm for detecting queue-jumping in other patrons.

Sending it out after the pubs had just shut was probably a mistake too.

An accident waiting to happen, someone said with all the usual post-event wisdom we’ve come to expect from news media talking-heads.

Although, as someone else with a more literal cast of mind who witnessed the actual event, did say, somewhat more accurately ‘it was an absolute bloody massacre.’

Still when it got back the chips were still nice and warm, and it remembered about the salt and vinegar - so it is too early to write it all off as a total disaster, despite the rather high final casualty count.

Thursday Poem: Empty Stone

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Empty Stone

Sweep up the dust of those prayers
whispered up to echo through empty stone.
Dancing like dust, dancing
like angels on the heads of a pin

in the rainbow-flecked sunlight
pouring through stained-glass windows
hiding a real world, outside the empty stone,
where life goes on and time passes.

While, inside the stone tomb,
dust settles on dust and whispers
fade away without ever reaching
any ear that could ever offer a hand

to lead someone away from this
and out into that sunlight where birds
fly free and sing in treetops
not huddle in cages singing songs to no-one.

Annoying the Pandas

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Well, not that she’d every given it very much consideration. After all, very few of them do, just so long as they can get their hands on an accordion, very few of them bother to stop to think of the consequences, especially in relation to the pandas.

After all, with pandas being as rare as they are, and their well-known disinclination to get down and dirty with each other leading to a general consensus that their numbers will continue to be limited, the last thing you want is some young know-it-all with a sense of entitlement, and an accordion, coming around and annoying the poor things, especially when there is bamboo to be chewed… and – more likely as not – the female panda already has an headache.

Still, that is not the only instance of wild animal-related musical disquieting going on in the modern world. After all, who amongst us has been so hard of heart as to not reach into our pocket when confronted with one of those adverts for a donkey sanctuary. The only place a donkey cane feel safe from the otherwise ever-present menace of bongos.

Many of us have also selflessly made donations for a bagpipe-free enclosure at the Edinburgh zoo for the zebras and for an anti-xylophone fence to be built across the Serengeti to keep the elephants safe.

No doubt there are many of us too that hope that a world free from lions plagued by clarinets will – one day - no longer be an impossible dream.

Eyes Holding Worlds

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I had no stories left to tell her. There were no more secrets of this, or of any other world, I could reveal to her. I had told her all my stories and taught her all I knew.

I’d stayed with her far longer than any of the others. I had travelled many lands, always on the move from my own land, far to the North, where the winters last for such a long time we do not know if the world remembers how to make a summer. Each new year I had moved on: leaving lands I’d come to know, leaving the women I’d come to love, to search for something I still could not name, despite all the stories I told, beside all the wonders of this world I had seen. There was still something out there, beyond me that I wanted, needed to grasp, to take into my hand and learn its secrets.

She, with the dark skin and the long black hair and the eyes that seemed to hold worlds inside them; worlds I could no touch or reach, held me here, here in this strange land where only the distant mountaintops seem to feel the winter. She listened to my stories and asked the questions I knew the answers to, about the world that lay beyond those mountains that brood over her lands like the homes of watchful gods.

She took everything I could offer her, but never asked for more, always satisfied with what I could give her, and so the years passed and we had children that grew, and a life like the others who scrape their living in the shadows of those mountains.

Many times I made plans for leaving, but instead would turn to travel into those countries in her eyes as her practiced elegant fingers retraced familiar routes across the maps of my body.

Each day that passes takes me further from those lands I have not seen, those people I have not met and all the wonders that lie beyond this land, but each night I return from our fields eager only to wander, lost, in the landscapes of her eyes.

Monday Poem: Lying Together

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Lying Together

We are here and there is there
and we do not know what to say.
The words are there, between us
tentative, hesitant and unsure.

We are here and the space
grows wider between us,
no matter how close we lie.

We lie together and we lie
about when we are apart
and not lying alone.

We make promises
about not lying any more,
knowing it is another lie.

It does not matter though,
here and now, because here
and now is all there is, now

and promises can be made here
so easily when there is no past
and there is no future,
just lying here, lying together.