David Hadley's Blog, page 172

Thursday Poem: A Small Significant Box

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A Small Significant Box

I could have found a gift
something precious, beautiful,
in a small significant box
wrapped with a neat tight bow

to show that I do understand
and I know how the wind
blows your life away from mine
and how the rain falls down

as you stare from windows
searching for a rain-beaten road
that will take you away from here
and on to that longed for life
you wish you'd had the heart to take

that would lead you down that street
to that steamy small café where I wait
with a small significant box
wrapped with a neat tight bow
here on the table in front of me.

Police Rapid-Response Unit Deployment

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Still, it could be worse, I suppose. At least the police had the matter in hand within a few hours of turning up and completing their risk assessment forms and out-of-hours expense sheets. So, once everyone was sure that the situation was under control and the officers on the scene had made sure they had used the correct amount of crime scene tape to mark the designated area and the armed response team were in position and all traffic diverted to keep away from the area, they could – at least – send in their specialist Litter Removal Officers to make the area safe.

They then sent in the remote-controlled robotic Unwanted Discarded Item Machine to pick up the litter item, make it safe and then destroy it in a controlled explosion that did surprisingly little damage to most of the surrounding houses – which of course had all been evacuated for the duration.

After all, as the Chief Constable said at the packed press conference several hours later, it had been a particularly sizable fast food container that had been hastily discarded from what they suspected was a moving vehicle and… well, it was better safe than sorry. After all, we still all have memories of that incident barely a year ago when an untrained ordinary constable had bent down to retrieve a discarded soft drinks can – without first filling in a risk assessment form or calling for back up from a specialist fast-response litter removal team - and did his back in.

After all, if we want our streets safe(ish) and free from litter as possible then it is these brave officers putting their health and well-being on the line for us each and every day and so we should all show our gratitude and support each time. For, who knows, it could be your street next time.

Out of the Ordinary

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It was a very ordinary-looking mallard duck….

Except for the superhero costume.

Still, it seems, we have to expect that sort of thing these days.

After all, it was less than a week ago when I as was strolling down the High Street I was passed by a zebra wearing bra, knickers, suspenders and stockings… on a skateboard. It wasn’t long after that I saw the wood pigeon smoking a cigar whilst reading the Collected Poems of Keats.

It was then I started to wonder about the integrity of the space-time continuum and whether it had broken down completely, possibly due to the strain on its integrity caused by a sudden influx of porridge-eating bears into our local woods.

Not only was all the wildlife behaving rather oddly, there had been a rather disturbing influx of fairy tale characters into the locality during the last few weeks of the spring. All, no doubt, encouraged by those bears with the cottage in the woods and their porridge-eating escapades.

I was beginning to think that maybe some folk were right after all, reality just isn’t the same as it was when I was a lad. These days there seems to be far too much magic and fantasy disturbing our sense of what should and shouldn’t be the case.

Just then, a whole load of dwarf miners tumbled out of the pub dragging a very worse for wear Snow White with them, all singing… well, you know what they were singing, as they headed back to their cottage in the woods.

Slightly Closer to the Camels

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Well, there you have it. So be careful not to dent it, rough handling could cause a myriad of unwanted repercussions, especially if you have the lid off. Still, it has to be said, there are not that many of them about these days, especially when you consider just how much it costs to have them professionally cleaned.

Anyway, that is all I can say about that, so you’d better put it back on the shelf before she comes back in, she wouldn’t want to think that a stranger had been holding it… especially with the lid off like that.

After all, how would you like it?

Still, I suppose it only goes to show….

Or, perhaps it doesn’t. It is hard to tell these days, especially with the price of bananas being what they aren’t.

Anyway, I can’t stand here all day, not after the last time. Although, I do have to admit the arresting officer was quite polite about it, but he did explain that the terms of the retraining order are quite explicit and I was far too close to the penguins and therefore he considered I was – indeed – constituting a threat to their well-being, especially as it was feeding time and the penguins do find cutlery quite traumatic at the best of times. Flippers may be ideal for use underwater, but when it comes to table manners and correct etiquette they can be – at best – rather trying.

So, in the interests of keeping the peace, I agreed with him that maybe it would be better for all concerned if I did move slightly closer to the camels instead.

So I did.

Traffic Calming Measures

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Parallelogram Tachograph was not initially unduly worried about the increasing incidence of speed bumps and other traffic calming measures, for having the dexterous and supple wrists of the professional weasel-mesmeriser meant that she could steer her moped through the most complex traffic calming measures ever invented by a local highways department, even the ones created on a Friday afternoon after a long ‘lunch’ in the pub where most members of the Traffic Calming Measures Department were transported back to the office in wheelbarrows.

Oddly enough, most of the local traffic calming measures in her locality, that Tachograph had to negotiate, were in fact developed on a Friday afternoon. These traffic calming measures where created by rearranging the office furniture in the town planning department then tying to drunkenly navigate around the obstacles whilst pushing a drunk and unconscious member of staff around the resulting course.

Obviously, the more complex and befuddling system created on those drunken Friday afternoons were the ones put forward by the planning department for the use of the Highways Department whenever some new traffic calming measures were urgently needed. Especially so, when it was discovered that commuters and other road users were managing to get to their destinations with only the minimum disruption, inconvenience and with little on no damage to their vehicles.

As the traffic calming measures increased in number and complexity, Parallelogram Tachograph no longer had the patience to constantly negotiate these increasingly Byzantine labyrinths on her way to mesmerise a weasel, especially if it was an emergency call-out which necessitated she reach her destination with alacrity, lest the un-mesmerised weasel run amok causing chaos and consternation to all in its immediate vicinity.

So, one Friday lunchtime, Tachograph set out on her moped to redirect all the road signs along the route the Traffic Calming Measures staff would take on returning from their usual pub to the Local Planning Office.

Then, a few hours later, the entire council Highways Department staff, weaved their slow, staggering way back to what they thought would be their office. As good and conscientious workers in the Highways, Department, they – of course – followed all the road signs to the letter, right up to and – slightly – beyond the point where they all: wheelbarrows, unconscious occupants and their drunken pushers, all fell over the sheer cliffs into the sea.

Being a typical local government authority, no-one working for the council noticed that an entire department had suddenly gone missing one Friday lunchtime, never to be seen again.

Consequently as a result of Tachograph’s sabotage, all the town’s traffic calming measures slowly fell into disrepair, and eventually all disappeared, leaving the townspeople to go about their normal business and actually get where they wanted to go with little disruption, interference or stress.

And, so, everyone lived happily ever after….

At least until someone in government noticed there was an area of the country that was living relatively stress-free lives, unencumbered by over-intrusive but inept bureaucracy and its pettifogging rules and regulations that attempted to control and distort those people’s lives,

The powers-that-be realised that this would never do and must be stopped before it spread to the rest of the country.

So, one morning, on the outskirts of that town, a small army of researchers appeared on the horizon, all armed with a clipboard and each with a multitude of boxes that needed ticking.

Emissions

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Well, it is not as if I needed a new one; after all why pay money for something just because it is new? I mean my old one was getting on a bit, but it still worked… more or less… after a fashion. Admittedly it didn’t have all the bells and whistles of a newer one… well it didn’t have any whistles at all, and the one bell it did have would have given a campanologist nightmares, but there you go. Technology marches on and before you know it, your left with something that makes people grin and wink at each other every time you lead it out of the stables.

Anyway, change was forced upon me when the EU brought in their new emission standards. She was rather old and well, you know what dragons are like when they get old. I mean, it is bad enough being around the front when they breathe fire, but when they get on a bit, it tends to get more dangerous around the back. Hence, these new EU emission guidelines for dragons of a certain age.

I suppose it is inevitable, the kind of things they eat which gives them their fiery breath. It is bound to take a toll on the digestive system as they get older.

Then there is the number of dragon pens that seem to burn down, all on their own, as the dragons in them get older. It plays havoc with the insurance premiums. Then there is all the hassle of getting them started on a cold morning. A dragon in a bad morning mood is not something you want to be arsing around with, especially when you need to take the kids on the school run and with the amount of traffic there days, getting to work can be a nightmare, especially if there is an accident. A mid-air dragon collision can be bad enough, but at least it only leaves a pile of ash on the ground waiting to be swept up.

Climate Change

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It was hoped by certain environmentalists that the UK elections of a few years ago would bring about a change in the UK’s political climate. For a while now environmentalists have been worried about the increasing levels of dangerous stupidity in the political atmosphere. However, now environmentalists are disappointed that nothing seems to have changed at all.

It has long been known that left-wing politics does, almost inevitably, bring about an increase in political stupidity and idiocy, with environmentalists pointing to the ‘Loony Left’ and their nuclear-free zones and other such inanities that caused massive increases in global political-idiocy in the preceding decades. There are now fears that with the Labour Party turning itself into a ‘1970s Politics’ tribute act that we will see a return to those earlier levels of unsustainable political idiocy.

The political right has – of course – also been a net contributor to the amounts of political idiocy in the UK atmosphere, with it achieving sometimes dangerously high levels out in the Tory shires. Sometimes leading to outbreaks of ‘Give them all a damn good flogging,’ ‘Hanging’s too good for them,’ and even some case of ‘send them all back where they came from’ infecting otherwise quiet nice areas of the country and thus making these areas virtually uninhabitable for people with a ‘political-stupidity-free’ lifestyle and political-idiocy-neutral footprint.

However, since the new government has come to power, scientists are having to rework their political-climate models as the change of government seems to have had little effect on the amounts of political idiocy in the atmosphere, with even some reports of higher levels of stupidity, especially with reports of a dangerous increase in the common-sense hole in the ozone layer above the houses of parliament.

No Such Concept

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The longer Sydrill stood there just smiling that enigmatic smile of hers, the more uncomfortable he looked. That slow, languid blink of hers when she is thinking, or listening to her translation machine, makes it seem as though she is frozen, not paying attention, gone off on some alien daydream or something.

He turned to me, the heavy gold cross he wore on a gold chain around his neck flashed in the artificial light of the room. I smiled back at him. ‘Wait,’ I said.

‘No,’ Sydrill said.

‘No?’ the Archbishop echoed.

‘No,’ she repeated, turning to me and raising what would be an eyebrow, if she were human.

I shrugged.

The archbishop turned from Sydrill to me and back again.

‘There is no such… concept,’ Sydrill said eventually.

‘No… g… god?’ The archbishop was – to say the least – shocked.

‘No,’ Sydrill smiled again. I had to admit smiling was the one human concept she had mastered so easily, but then she’d been good humoured from the day we’d met, which was quite remarkable when you consider we met when I pulled her from the wreckage of her ship.

At times, I had the feeling that she found the human race perplexing in a way that tickled her sense of humour. After all, I think humanity is rather ridiculous most of the time myself, and I’m one if us, so I could understand how odd… silly, even, we could look to some outsider. I knew that Sydrill wanted to laugh at the Archbishop, but some innate sense of politeness, good humour, even humanity in a sense, kept her from making her beautiful tinkling laugh, a sound like a brook babbling over rocks, that I found so lovely.

‘Translation machine has records of old times,’ Sydrill nodded to the machine around her slender wrist that resembled a high-fashion lady’s wristwatch. ’Machine has memories of old long time ago… religion. But now only Drasken… the… the mind-damaged… think such things true these days.’ She smiled that smile at him again.

‘Oh,’ the bishop seemed deflated as he wandered off.

Sydrill turned to me. ‘Why you never mention this… this religion… thing before?’

I shrugged, wanting to take her home and kiss her, spend the night with her again. ‘I suppose it never occurred to me. It is not something I ever think about.’

‘Good’ she said and did that thing with her long purple tongue across her small pointed teeth that I now knew meant she was thinking exactly the same thing I was. ’We leave?’ she said. ‘We go home and fuck?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said.

Oil in the Veins

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Obviously, I tried my best, but she refused to let go of the mallet until I’d promised never to look at a piston ring in quite the same way again. I couldn’t help it; I’d grown up in an industrial working class area. All my life I’ve been surrounded by engineering. When I was a boy I wanted a hat like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and I dreamt of trains entering tunnels and bridges and girders and constructing other massive erections.

After all, it was the way she pulled out her calculator that day in school that first attracted me to her. Up until then I’d been playing around with an old slide rule, usually under the bedcovers at night, but seeing the way her fingers stroked those keys as she calculated a square root brought back that glow of hot pleasures to me I hadn’t felt since I held the spanner of my first Meccano set in my hot eager hand.

I still remember rubbing away with my first bastard file with all the pride of one born to the sound of a shop floor and I will always remember the time I produced my first handful of swarf while thinking of her.

Now, here she was, many years later, naked in my workshop, standing over the Austin Maxi engine I’d rebuilt – mostly out of old cornflake packets and empty washing up liquid bottles, it’s true, but it still worked as well as the original – even better in the cold and the damp.

I told her to put the mallet down and step back, away from my piston. I could tell from the wanton look in her eye that she couldn’t wait for me to re-bore it. She licked her lips and put the mallet down, instead picking up a can of lubricating oil. Slowly, she tipped it up.

She hadn’t looked so sexy, naked, since the time I lost the nozzle from my WD40 can and had inadvertently sprayed her instead of my nuts as I worked to loosen them. Later that day we’d taught each other so much about the use of screw threads and the way she’d gripped my nuts had changed forever my view of the metric system.

‘Come here,’ she said, rubbing the oil into her perfect skin as she cleared the surface of my workbench and lay back, suggestively licking the tip of my favourite spanner. This was something I’d never seen in any workshop manual, and I’d read most of them – even the one for the Austin Allegro.

‘Service me,’ she said. ‘I need someone who knows how to use his tool.’

I stepped closer to her.

As she began to unbutton my overall, she whispered to me. ‘Later, I’ll show you some of my favourite blueprints.’

Sighing, I leant forward and kissed her as she took me in her arms, whispering dirty secrets about how she was overheating under her bonnet.

Changing Times

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These days we go back to places and see how they have changed. When we were younger we used to go to new places, seek out the new. These days we no longer want, or need, the new. The familiar and the changes to it – however slight – are what we look for these days.

Not that we are against change, or against the new. We know that we have no power to halt the march of time and we are not sure that if we did have the power to halt time, to keep everything as it is, or better, turn back the clocks to some other ‘better’ time, we would want to do any such thing.

We are happy that time marches on… well, not exactly happy, maybe resigned to it, but not in a defeated bitter way. We get older, the world gets older. We know all that and we accept it. We are not even sad or bitter that the world seems to have passed us by. We were not people who thought the world revolved around us, or that it ought to revolve around us. We never wanted to be the centre of anything, never wanted the world’s attention, never craved fame or glory.

No… now we are happy to sit and watch the world and time going about their business, passing us by. We do not have to scream for attention, for the world to notice us. We have found a place where we can sit and just let it all go by, knowing we have found a kind of peace… and that is enough for us.