David Hadley's Blog, page 163

The Secrets of Hats

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It involved a hat, after all this time I can’t really remember all the details. We were young, though, and we knew little of the secrets of the universe, the secrets of hats in particular.

When you are young like that, and as involved with yourself and those around you of the same age, you tend not to really notice the rest of the world. It is just there, a background against which the high dramas of your young lives are played out in all their tragic-comic intensity.

And… well… hats are just hats.

Or, at least we thought so.

Some hats are special… we know that now.

After all, no magician is really a magician unless he has the hat to pull things from, no wizard is a wizard without the hat that denotes his status and we all know about witches and their hats.

Natalie’s family invited me on holiday with them. I was surprised; I thought they didn’t like me. After all, what parents ever really likes their daughter’s boyfriend; especially in the teenage years when to them she is still their baby girl?

They had a house down by the coast. There was some entangled family tale of just how they had ended up owning this house that I listened to them telling each other without taking much of it in.

Anyway, this was supposed to be half-holiday, half sorting this house out, getting it ready for some locals to do it up over the following winter, ready for it to be hired out as a summer holiday place from the next summer onward.

So, one day while the rest of the family were out, Natalie and I were exploring the house, stopping every now and then to explore each other in that typical frantic teenage way whenever we could.

Then we were in a gloomy attic, lit only by a dusty skylight and Natalie was naked, motes of dust dancing around her body as she found this hat and put it on, turning to pose for me to admire her….

Then, everything changed.

On the Use of Camouflage Pastry

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It was the subtle use of camouflage pastry on their battlefield steak and Kidney pies which allowed the King’s Own Queens regiment to get within 50 yards of the German trenches during one of the decisive battles of WWI.

Up until then, with their camouflaged sauerkraut, the German forces had an inherent battlefield advantage over the allied troops, especially over the French army battlefield baguette, which had a tendency to leave a trail of crumbs that any German spotter plane could follow, enabling it to discover precisely where the French troops were massing for a pre-battle dejeuner. Often too, the number of corks left behind, as well as the piles of empty wine bottles, were very useful clues to any German spies operating behind the French lines, eager to learn more vital tactical details of the French battlefield menus.

As the First World War progressed, the British army became very cunning in their use of cardboard breakfasts and inflatable sausages which they used to fool the enemy as to the true intentions of the Allies. Once, a regiment managed to fool the Germans into calling off an attack by pretending to order several hundred bottles of brown sauce in time for a pre-offensive breakfast, knowing that the Germans would intercept the signal. The Germans knew that brown sauce was a vital component of the British infantry bacon sandwich and therefore calculated they were facing far more enemy troops than they actually were.

Originally, the invention of the tank was seen as a way of quickly getting hot food to the front-line troops. Initially envisaged as a mobile snack van, armoured against enemy fire (and also against a possible explosion of the famously volatile British battlefield gravy), the tank was intended to bring hot food right up to the front line while under fire.

However, because of the limited visibility, and the heavy steam build-up inside the tank as they prepared some fresh custard for the troops, the tanks missed their stopping places on the British trenches and went on to overrun the German positions with the British troops running behind them with their dishes, all eager for some fresh custard on their battlefield apple crumble.

Obviously, for the final push which won WWI, the British battle-ready Cornish Pasties were essential. Unfortunately, the Germans had – at that point in the war – perfected the anti-pasty sniper, capable of blowing the crust off a hot pasty from the relative safety of the German trenches and thus totally demoralising the British troops as they were about to ‘go over the top’ with the pasty. Therefore the British high command eventually realised that some sort of camouflage pastry would be essential. However, for the subterfuge to work, the precise placement of the pasty was all-important when matters of camouflage and deception were involved, so that the camouflage pastry of the pasty blended into its surroundings.

Fortunately, however, the British front-line chefs had run short of flour and other ingredients necessary for making the pastry for the pasties and had resorted to using mud which, luckily, made the Cornish pasties blend in perfectly with their surroundings as the trenches at that time consisted of various defensive arrangements of mud.

Thus were the British able to camouflage their frontline battlefield pasties ready for the final push, after the German army’s severe sausage shortage led to the failure of the Ludendorff Offensive to achieve any of its strategic goals, so then when faced with the overwhelming Allied advantage in battle-ready Cornish pasties the Germans had no choice but to surrender, thus bringing about the end of the First World War.

Thursday Poem: Without Walls

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Without Walls

The darkness grows around her life
she reaches out with stretched taut fingers
hoping for the reassurance
that walls can give to her. She lingers

behind the shadows, lost and still
afraid to fall into the light
and movement while her safety turns
between the open space and fright.

A step away from walls is far
from the security she needs
into falling down for ever more.
In silence she bargains and pleads

for walls to keep her safe from harm
while stepping out, away from them
into the open possible
and unconstrained that will condemn

her, taking all refuge away
to leave her falling through the air
into empty space, to fall into
a freedom leaving her nowhere.

Unexpected Visitors

It happens….

Well, usually, a lot of things happen, often one after another, which is a useful and handy feature of this whole time business. After all, chaos is bound to ensue if everything happens all at once, especially if you are not suitably dressed for it. A bit like getting rather interestingly rude with a lady-friend when some close relatives turn up, inviting themselves round to your place of habitation without a moment’s thought as to what other events you and the aforesaid lady-friend had planned, especially when she is standing there dressed in only a pair of riding boots and holding a melon in what can only be regarded as a rather provocative manner….

I imagine….

Still, there was some boiled ham in the fridge so eventually we could offer them some sandwiches, whilst – of course – making sure we didn’t mention to any of them what we’d planned to do later in the evening with that selfsame boiled ham.

Some people can be funny about things like that.

They all declined the melon though, which does – I feel – say something about our rather un-relaxed attitudes towards anything slightly out of the ordinary in sexual matters in this country, even in this day and age.

Still, I couldn’t help laughing later when the lady-friend and I had said our good-byes to the last of them and they were all still complimenting us on the surprisingly excellent taste of the cucumber.

When She is Almost There

Sometimes… sometimes….

There are days when she is almost there. There are days when he can reach out and feel her under his hand. Days when he turns to her and begins to tell her of his thoughts; only to see that the chair he turned to, the space in the kitchen where she stood, her side of the bed, is empty.

There are nights when he, half-asleep, rolls over in that big bed to wrap his arms around her, feel the warmth of her sleeping form against him… and finds only emptiness.

She was here… and now she is gone.

He walks down by the river each morning, leaving a space for her at his side, stepping back with the gate open in his hand for her to walk through. There is only him though and now the paths seem empty, the winter made harsher by her absence.

The wind is colder, the leafless trees more desolate, the mornings darker and the evenings lost in shadows of regret now that she is gone and he will never touch her again. That is unless he is wrong and there is another life that comes where he will see her again, when he too is dead.

Monday Poem: The Fragility of Life

The Fragility of Life

Reaching out a tentative
and hesitating finger
touching pulsing undulation

and there feeling the warmth
feel the heat of living flesh
both so solid

and too fragile
underneath the pressure
of a single finger.

As the hand touches
and the life moves underneath
towards the sudden realisation

of the fragility of life
how tentative is the grip
on this living world,

and how easily this world
lets us go, to fall to the ground,
leaving us becoming the forgotten.

Visitation

It was not really that obvious, not at first anyway. The dark was deep and seemed almost heavy as though the night had dropped some heavy black blanket over the room, letting its folds fall into the corners to create a thicker darkness.

I could sense something was wrong though, how I do not know. Maybe it was some old pre-civilisation preservation instinct.

‘Shit!’ It is funny how, in the quiet heart of the night a whisper can be as loud as a shout.

Now my eyes widened and I could see movement. I had thought maybe a burglar or some other miscreant when I first awoke feeling as though there was someone in my bedroom, but that had been a woman’s voice.

There was a rattle as she knocked something over, obviously not expecting there to be a pile of books in the middle of the bedroom floor. The books clattered across the bare floorboards.

I turned the light on.

There was no-one there.

There wasn’t much in the room, after all I’d only moved into the cottage that morning and most of the furniture had not arrived yet due to some bugger-up at the removals firm, but there was a wardrobe, the bed and piles of books on the floor.

I got out of bed, feeling the cool air on my naked body. I pulled open the wardrobe doors.

It was empty, except for the suit and the shirts of course.

I looked around the room. The pile of books had been kicked over, I had not imagined it.

Also there was an old carpet tack, sitting up at an odd angle on one of the bare floorboards, and a trail of blood spots between the tack and the book pile.

The room though was empty. I picked up my trousers from the floor, pulled them on and opened the bedroom door. I paused and went back to pick up my golfing umbrella – not that I play golf of course, but I walk a lot - and crept out on the landing, following the trail of blood spots that….

The spots just stopped about three steps from my bedroom door, just disappeared. I took a firmer grip on the umbrella and started down the stairs.

Out Alone at Night

She stepped out of the night in front of me and I did not know what to say. I had expected something like this ever since I’d first seen her, three days before, walking alone down by the river as the day faded into the grey of a late summer evening.

Tonight, though, I did not expect to see her, not here, alone like this.

Around here, it is not like the city; especially the cities these days, where it is too dangerous for anyone to be out alone. Here, far away from the cities it is still safe to go out at night and to go out alone.

We have no gangs that roam our streets, searching for victims, patrolling the edges of their territories looking for other gangs to take on in their war against what it used to mean to be human.

Out here, we still like to believe that we hold onto the few remaining bare threads of what used to be a civilisation. Out here we, still try to care about each other. Out here in the dark countryside we still like to believe there is something worthwhile in being human.

No, I did not expect to see her out here because she had – I’d learnt from local gossip – escaped from some distant burning city a few days before; barely escaped with her life was the story I’d been told.

Now here she was standing in front of me, her one arm in a dirty sling and limping towards me.

I knew what she wanted of me, what she was going to ask me to do. I knew she had been forced to leave her child behind in that burning city and that she wanted someone to take her back and save her child.

I knew that the person she wanted was me and I had no power to refuse her and still I did not know what to say when, eventually, she told me that the missing child was my child too.

The Official Sponsors

Those were the days, you could tell because they had that day’s official sponsor’s logo on them and you aren’t allowed to use ay other company’s products on that day, which made for some rather unfortunate incidents on those days not sponsored by a toilet roll company… and as for the first Tuesday in October, which was sponsored by a leading pet food manufacturer: many people chose that day to begin their new dietary regime. Luckily, however, in this country at least, it was also the day after the day sponsored by a leading brand of sexual lubricant, so most people were too exhausted, or slippy, to get out of bed for most of that following day anyway.

Matters, though, did come to a head on that now infamous day in early June which was sponsored by the world’s largest arms manufacturers, which made the normal morning commute rather dangerous for many folk, especially with the free sample shoulder-launched anti-vehicle missiles that were given away to many motorists that morning. It was a morning when road-rage took on a whole new – and much deadlier dimension – although the police did report later that tardiness at changing traffic lights did hit an all-time low that day.

All-in-all then, although there have been some teething troubles (except on days sponsored by baby rusk manufacturers, of course) the new sponsored calendar in turning out much better than the naysayers predicted, especially when one company put a prize-winning bounty on those very same naysayers on last year’s National Chainsaw Day.

So… that’s all good.

Thursday Poem: Treasure Hunt

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Treasure Hunt

It could be so precious
radiant with captured sunlight.

It could be so dark
that light turns away defeated.

It could be some delicate jewellery
just made for your poised neck.

It could be anything at all
and I could be the one

who discovers it, then carries it
carefully back home to you.