David Hadley's Blog, page 164

A World Enough and Time

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Still, you can’t have everything, not only is there no place to put it all, the delivery charges are going to be a bit of a bugger, especially if you end up having to warp the very fabric of space-time in order to deliver everything to itself. You don’t get much choice as to the colour either, come to that.

Then there is the problems with the herds of wild animals migrating right across it as soon as you’ve got it put up on the shelf, not to mention losing a black hole or two down the back of the sofa and the problem with tripping over the dark matter in the middle of the night when you urgently need a quick pi… trip to the toilet in the dark.

Then, probably, just as soon as you get everything, they go and bring out a new model with loads more everything in it, for half the price and in a choice of colours. Thereby making yours look… well, a lot less like everything and more like a whole load of nothing, especially when that smug git from three doors down happens to mention he’s got the latest model and invites you round to have a look at it, knowing only too well about how you bought one of the last of the old model. Then he can’t wait to show you all the new features, including the wild animal migration control and the new version of string theory that prevents you from mislaying a black hole down the back of the sofa ever again.

But… like I said… you can’t have everything, just wait until the next new model comes out next year, then you’ll be able to give that smug git a lesson he won’t forget.

Some Odd Angle to This World

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It lay, I knew, at some odd angle to this world. It was there waiting for me, I had seen its high towers through the morning mists. I had glimpsed the road I would have to take to cross the old stone bridge over the river that separated this world from that, but only if I could find the key that would open the door to that world that lay waiting.

I had tried to conjure it with visions, with imaginings and with dreams, but always it lay just beyond my reach, shimmering into view, its mists clearing to reveal the far high towers and then closing again as the world slipped back away to its own dimension.

There were times when I tried to live in this world, dismissing my far world as some dream, as some fantasy that existed only in my mind and should be put away as just another childish daydream. I felt I had to create a life here, not wait for my life to begin amongst those far mist-enshrouded towers.

It was then that she came to me in my dreams; telling me the stories of those far towers and the route I would have to take down that road and across the bridge to get to them. She told me that she would be there, in the highest tower, waiting, waiting just for me, and I should hurry and go to her before it was too late and the door to that realm closed on me forever.

The Next Big Thing

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Well, it is not as if anyone had any choice in the matter. After all, there it was, just sitting there like some politician with an overwhelming sense of entitlement, and no-one could really shift it.

There was talk of some sort of hero, like King Arthur who pulled a formerly un-pullable sword from the stone. These days, though, are not the times of heroes, when the best that we can manage is regarding someone famous for being off the telly as a worthwhile human being.

Heroes belong to other times, other places. After all, these days it is equality that matters, no-one should be so above the common herd as to think or – worse – demonstrate they are not like everyone else. Originality is regarded with suspicion when being the best at being mediocre is what gets you the audiences, the contracts, the fame and the wealth. Being ordinary in front of the cameras is what matters, which is why – it seems – so many of the ordinary want to be famous and being famous is the only thing that matters… as long as you don’t do it by doing something too different.

Anyway, there the Big Thing sat, huge and immobile, with everyone standing around it wondering what could be done about it, right up to the time it was reported that some woman who’d once been on the telly had half-fallen out of her dress after forgetting to put her knickers on, and everyone rushed off to see if they could find a video of the occasion and the Prime Minister ever eager for popularity announced a National Bank Holiday to celebrate the woman falling out of her dress at such a nationally-important time.

The Big Thing still sat there – huge and immobile – but now no-one cared because it was only yesterday’s big thing.

A Close Encounter

‘Where?’ I said, just to be sure.

‘Take me…’ he/she/it… possibly even them… said. ‘…to your larder.’

I pointed to the cube-like thing it had in its hands… paws… feet… appendages. ‘I think your… er… translation thingy machine may be on the blink.’

‘Please…?’ It looked confused.

I was now fairly certain there was only one of it, although there were probably more in the machine that looked as unlike any flying saucer I’d ever seen and I love 1950s SF films. I suppose that is why I wasn’t too put out by having, or - as it now seemed - failing to have, a conversation with what could only be an alien. ‘Don’t you mean: Take me to your leader?’ I said slowly and precisely, as if I was taking to an exchange student.

It shook its… well, the top bit of it moved backwards and forwards. ‘No, take me to your larder.’

I stood, head cocked.

‘I am hungry,’ it said.

‘Oh, I see,’ I nodded too. ‘Only you see, these days we don’t really have larders… well, I don’t. I have a fridge, I have a few cupboards, a freezer, but no larder.’

‘No larder?’

‘No.’

‘But I am hungry….’

‘Sorry, you’re welcome to see what I have in the fridge, or a tin of soup, beans on toast or something.’

‘I am hungry,’ it repeated and looked up at me. ‘No larder?’

I shook my head.

‘No president, no Prime Minister, no larder?’ It made a noise like a sigh. ‘I am hungry.’ It looked up at me. ‘No politician at all… I am so hungry?’

‘Prime Minister?’ I said. ‘Politician?’

It licked it’s… well, I suppose they could have been lips. ‘Politician… yes. I am hungry.’

I thought for a while. This time of night it wouldn’t take that long to get to London with not much traffic on the motorway. I felt in my pocket for my car keys. ‘Come on,’ I said to the… the alien, taking hold of one of its appendages. ‘I’ll take you to our larder.’ I was pretty confident I could, once in London, find my way to the Houses of Parliament.

Digging

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It was a small village, spread out up the one side of a valley away from where the narrow river weaved down along the valley bottom. The slope, on which the houses lay in rows of streets above each other, seemed quite gentle, but as they said in the village ‘everywhere is uphill from everywhere else.’

This seemed to give the people who lived in the village a kind of weariness, as thought they spent their whole lives climbing, working their way upwards. It is true that the houses higher up the hill were seen as somehow posher than those lower down, but it was a matter only of degree. Even then, though, there were some who lived higher up, the councillors, the headmaster, various tradesmen and shopkeepers, who felt they were some how above the rest of us more ordinary folk.

Down at the valley bottom, the Miners’ Welfare stood in its own grounds. A fine building that mocked the finer buildings higher up. The miners, always in their best caps and mufflers and their best suits would sit outside in its the gardens as though sunlight and summer were a rare treat for them, as though they were somehow surprised to be out in the open air.

My granddad lived a few streets away from the Miners’ Welfare in one of the small terraced houses with precarious gardens, running down the slope, all held up by retaining walls that seemed always in need of repair. My granddad would be out in that garden in all weathers, digging, as he’d spent the whole of his life before retirement, digging in the mines, but now he could dig and look around at the valley above and below him as he dug and coaxed his prize-winning vegetables out of that thick black soil. One of the last things he said to me, before he died of the mine’s disease that strangled his lungs from the inside, was ‘there is nothing like having a view, being free to look around and see what lies all around you. Remember that.’ Then he picked up his spade and began to dig again.

I did remember it - always.

Something for the Weekend: Free Kindle Novel – Hanging Around Until

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Hanging Around Until

'Education is hanging around until you've caught on' - Robert Frost.

Set during the mid-1980s, Hanging Around Until is the story of Paul Carr, who, at the age of 28, decides to become a mature student at a North-Eastern university in the hope that an education will help give a direction to his life. On arriving at the university Paul discovers he is to share a house with five other students. Two of those housemates – Alison and Julia, each in their own way – turn Paul’s simple quest for an education into a tangle of confusion and uncertainty amid the turmoil of university life during the height of anti-Thatcherite campus activism and the birth of the new Left.

Available here (UK) or here (US)

[Extract]

[….]

‘I frightened myself yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was shaking so much I couldn't get dressed. I was expecting you to come back to my room, hoping you would but scared in case you did. I've been sitting up there for over an hour tonight trying to make sense of it all.’

I sat up and turned towards her. As we kissed, my hand moved up to her breast under the T-shirt. She broke off the kiss and looked down at the place where my hand disappeared under her clothes. I started to move my hand away. She took my other hand in hers as I let it drop. She stood up, still holding my left hand and led me from the room.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs while Alison was three steps above me, still holding my hand. I took a step forward, then another, and then we walked up the stairs together, hand in hand.

Alison moved over to her bed, still holding my hand. We sat down side by side. I kissed her lightly on the lips, lifting the jumper and T-shirt together. She lifted her arms to help me. I dropped the bundled clothes on the floor and she glanced down at them for a second. We kissed again as I reached out to touch a breast with each hand.

‘You are gentle,’ Alison said softly as she began to unbutton my shirt.

‘No, not really. I'm clumsy most of the time.’

‘One of the first things I noticed, and liked, about you was the way you rolled your cigarettes, so graceful, delicate. I could feel those fingers touching me.’

‘These fingers?’ I held up my hand. The fingers looked too thin, too long and too hesitant to be of any real use.

Alison helped me pull off my shirt and then pushed me back onto the bed. She undid and pulled down my trousers. She let her jeans, and then her pale green knickers fall to the floor. She sat down on my thighs, looking into my face as her hand held me. She lowered her face towards me. I felt the tips of her nipples brush my chest and the tickle of her hair. Alison kissed me on the lips; the chin, neck and chest, moving lower until her lips met her hand.

A few moments later, I whispered: ‘Come here. No, all the way up here.’ She crouched as I kissed her deeply. She stroked my hair and smiled down at me as I looked into her eyes from between her thighs.

Alison rose slowly, unwillingly, but in some other, greater, need and moved backwards, lowering herself again. She moved languidly, as slow as a lazy summer afternoon.

A few minutes later she began to speed up, then her back arched, stiffened. She sighed deeply and fell onto my chest. I rolled us onto our sides. Alison opened her eyes and looked at me as I resumed the slow rhythm.

‘Do you like it slow as well?’ she whispered.

‘I prefer to play the slow Blues rather than a twelve-bar boogie.’ I demonstrated both rhythms.

Alison laughed deeply in her throat and hugged me close, ‘I want adagio rather than allegro,’ she said before nibbling at my nose.

‘Yes,’ I whispered as I began to kiss my way slowly down her body, pausing at each breast in turn before moving lower. My tongue entered her navel and trailed lower. I could taste echoes of myself as my tongue moved deeply before returning to trace and caress along the mystery of folds and creases.

My tongue moved deeper again. Alison stiffened and relaxed as it eased her open and crept inside. As my tongue curled and turned and my lips kissed, my fingers traced the journey where my tongue had travelled moments before. Alison moved with the rhythm of my fingers and tongue. Her rhythm changed and mine changed to match hers. My fingers and mouth changed places and the rhythm continued, grew and changed.

As her body relaxed from the sudden stiffness again, I retraced my kisses back up her body and ended with two kisses, one on each closed eyelid. I eased back inside her and felt the warmth enclose me. The slow, gentle rhythm began again.

We lay on our sides facing each other. Alison lay with her head resting on my arm and my body between her thighs. She reached up to stroke my face. I kissed her fingertips and sucked them into my mouth. She held me tightly with her legs breathing hard against my ear. Moments later, I stiffened and then finally relaxed.

Alison trailed her fingers down my sweat-damp chest and rolled onto her back. I lay for a moment between her spread thighs, tracing around a nipple with my finger then I too rolled and lay on my back.

Alison turned and laid her head on my chest, wrapping her legs around me. I could feel a warm dampness on my thigh where she held herself against me. She sighed softly and rolled onto her back.

She looked across the pillow at me. ‘I've been thinking about that since the moment I first saw you.’ She reached out to touch my cheek. ‘For a time I was hoping you'd turn out to be a bastard, but you're not. The more I got to know you the more I wanted you. But that's the problem.’

‘What do you mean?’

She sighed. ‘I just wanted to get through this year and get out of here. I didn't want to get involved with anything… or anyone.’ She lay on her back with her hand over her face.

I reached out a hand towards her, but I couldn't seem to make it touch her. My hand fell back uselessly. ‘I'm sorry. But I wasn't expecting anything like this to happen either.’

‘Pathetique is about right.’ Alison turned to face me. ‘You looked so pathetic lying on your bed earlier. If I'd had any sense, I would have walked away. Would we be here like this if I'd waited for you to make a move?’ She stared across the pillow at me, ignoring the single tear that ran slowly down her cheek, daring me to contradict her. ‘Well?’

‘I never feel really sure,’ I said, hesitating. ‘I'm always afraid to act in case I'm wrong.’

Alison sat up slightly, leaning her head on her hand. The sheet slipped down over her breasts. The small pale nipples stared back at me. I wanted to take one into my mouth and be held. ‘Well, you'll just have to learn how to take a chance, won't you?’ She smiled. ‘Do you know how long it took for me to arrange my dressing gown yesterday morning, so it fell open like that?’

Disorientated by Alison's sudden change of mood, it took me a few seconds to realise what she had said. ‘Did you really arrange it?’

Alison laughed, but did not answer. She smiled at me for a moment and then kissed me on the lips. ‘Why can't I stay angry with you?’ she murmured, more to herself than to me. ‘I suppose you ought to go now, before the others come back.’

‘No, I want to stay.’

‘That's nice to hear,’ she said. ‘Even though I'm not sure I want you to stay.’ She took my hand in hers and turned it over, tracing the lines on my palm. She turned it back over and touched the small scar - diamond-shaped, pale and almost white - in the centre of the back of my hand. ‘After all, I know almost nothing about you, and you don't know much about me.’

‘Does any of that matter?’

She shook her head. ‘Maybe... maybe not.... I don't know.’ She lay back, staring at the ceiling.

[….]

Available here (UK) or here (US)

The Erotic Uses of Strawberries

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Well, it is not as if there was any doubt about it. She had the strawberries ready, and we all know what that meant.

Obviously, if I’d been a tabloid reporter, this would be the point I’d make my excuses and leave…

but I’m not…

…so I didn’t.

After all, I had paid…..

And the strawberries looked very tasty.

Anyway, after some of the most low-down filthy and highly-charged sexual experiences it has ever been my pleasure to indulge in, and - it should be remembered - I once went on a day-trip to Luton. We used up all of the strawberries in what was later confirmed as a World Record Time.

Afterwards, of course, we had a nice cup of tea, and I asked her if she’d ever been to Luton herself. However, she did decline to answer in case she incriminated several members of parliament, many top-flight business men as well as the seven premiership footballers who had all taken out injunctions against her mentioning any mutually-consensual strawberry-related activities they had indulged in whilst in her presence.

However, she did happen to mention what she did get up to with a bestselling author and a punnet of strawberries, but we all know what writers are like. Even though writers are justly well-known for their extensive and extremely-skilful sexual techniques, you wouldn’t necessarily want one in the house.

Still, that is Luton for you.

Following the Instructions

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Not only that, I couldn’t get the device to work, despite denying my inherent maleness and making an attempt to peruse the instruction manual. However, any attempt to read the manual was cunningly prevented by the expedient of writing it in something almost entirely unlike English as it is known and abused throughout this fair land.

After all: Throughputting the electrician no put hand wet touchy-feely, is – I feel – open to a number of interpretations, some of which could require the aid of my lovely assistant who was, at the time, otherwise engaged in certain practices that are best not divulged on a forum such as this, at least not without insisting all readers don their protective headgear and make sure all under-age penguins are briskly ushered from the room beforehand.

Anyway, once I’d discovered how to plug it in and connect it all up in something approaching what I guessed was the correct manner, I thought about switching it on.

So I did….

Then - in a sudden flash - the universe wasn’t….

We ended up with this… this… whatever it is we exist in now, instead.

So, if you are looking for someone to blame, you must – I feel – blame my lovely assistant for not being there – in the necessary protective headgear – at the time.

After all, you can’t blame me… I was only following the instructions.

Arcane and Mystical Codes

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Back in those long ago days, of course, there was no such thing as the internet and any connoisseur of the rude and naughty had to make their way out into the open air in order to even get a glimpse of a photograph of an underdressed young lady. Furthermore, cute kittens could only ever be found gambolling on greeting cards and on posters in the bedrooms of teenage girls.

Still, we were young then and had the thighs of those not unused to strolling down a public thoroughfare in the midst of winter, or – if we were unlucky – getting extremely moistened by the typical British summer downpour.

Still, at least, in those days you didn’t have to rely on a sort of hit and miss game of ‘guess the next letter’ in order to get your word processor spell-checker to reveal to you how to spell ‘connoisseur’, in fact – if you were lucky you’d never even had a go on a typewriter, let alone had to learn the secret arcane code of the mystical Qwertyuiop tribe and their strange rituals of dexterity and incantation that would bring forth words of great wisdom onto the screens or pages of the ungodly.

You could also, if you so choose, wear a hat. Which, when you are just sitting there typing looks rather overdressed for the occasion, if not silly, unless of course you choose to wear a pith helmet, which is always stylish, no matter what the occasion.

Grow Old Together

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Side by side, we sat together on the riverbank. It was a perfect summer day, a cool breeze taking the edge off the heat. She turned, looked at me, and I knew then. I saw then the life we could have together, a perfect life.

I could live with her, here in this valley, down by this river. We could live together, love together, have children and grow old together, live a simple straightforward life. It would not be a life free from troubles; no life is ever free from troubles. Together, though, we would be able to face all that a capricious fate threw at us. We would stand together; both against the world and with the world. It would be a good life. I would have the love of a good woman, and no-one could wish for more.

I saw that all in one turn of her head as a butterfly flickered past behind her and she stroked the grass as though it was the fur of some well-loved pet. I knew we could lie down together in that grass she seemed to be preparing for us to lie in and the contract would be sealed. We would have our lives together from now until the end and everything could be all I ever wanted.

She knew though, moments later, that the next morning she would wake up and I would be gone.

It was not that I didn’t want that life she offered me, I could think of nothing better, nothing I would rather have. Nothing except that desire I had to see what lay over the next hill and the knowledge that if I stayed here, in this valley with her, I would never have the need to find out. That each night, after we’d put the children to bed, I would come out to this riverbank and stare over at that hill in the moonlight and the not knowing what lay beyond it would kill me in a way that the heartbreak from leaving her behind never could.