David Hadley's Blog, page 184

The Island of Good Hope

The hard part was finding a way in. The community itself was on an island a few miles offshore. The main man, the leader of the so-called community, had some how or other, managed to scrape together the money, supposedly from his followers, to buy the island. Like most of his dealings, just how John Hopegood had managed to get that money, was something of a mystery. Just how and why he had become a leader of the Good Hope Ministry was itself another mystery. What the community got up to, all alone on that island was yet another mystery.

For me, though, the greatest of these mysteries was how and why Jane had ended up there.

When we were together, Jane had probably been the biggest atheist of the two of us. I had never believed in any kind of religion and so tended to just take lack of belief for granted, always being somewhat surprised whenever I encountered anyone who professed to be religious, regarding it as some sort of quaint eccentricity. Jane, though, had come from a religious family. Her father was some kind of high up in the church; I could never remember his proper professional title. 'Some sort of arch-druid' Jane spat dismissively once, when the subject came up. Consequently, she was much more antagonistic than I towards the various religions and their sub-branches, sects and cults, often seemingly going out of her way to gratuitously offend and annoy the religious whenever their paths crossed.

So, when I received the rather odd, disjointed letter from her begging me to rescue her from the Good Hope community after all the years of silence between us, I was more than a little surprised… and worried.

Thursday Poem: A Handful of the Possible

A Handful of the Possible

It was your bright dream;
A handful of the possible.
We thought we could find it.
We lived inside those dreams

And came home to find new times
had taken those dreams away
turned the world around
to face its face to a new day

And a new way of seeing
that grew into new ways of living,
leaving the past behind,
lost and almost forgotten.

And then we found out
the new way was no way at all,
leaving the helpless children

Alone without a home
and a place to run to
while we were out looking
for that one great thing

That makes all the other things
seem pointless and empty.
But there is no new way,
there is only the old way

And we need to return
before those old days
are lost and then forgotten

and we have to learn the art
of how to live once again.

Between Dreaming and Waking

The story began there, in that moment between dreaming and waking. The dream was still there, curled up on itself, waiting to unroll across the sleeping mind. The day too, though, was waiting to begin, ready to bring itself out from under the dark blankets of the night. Each of them was supposed to keep separate; the day should not fall into the dreams and the dreams never to occupy the space of a waking day.

Something went awry though as she awoke. The dream slipped free of its prison and ran free out into the day, while the day fell asleep on the pillow she left behind.

At first, Louise did not know that she had awoken into a dream, or into a world that had become dream, that she had left reality behind asleep on the pillow where her dreams usually waited for her.

Everything about this day look the same as every other morning to Louise, even when she walked trough her bedroom door on the way to the bathroom, without opening the door first, she didn't really notice. It was just one of those nagging things that seem to tap at the mind when first awake. She was just too tired to notice anything amiss.

However, when the small green dragon handed her the soap in the shower, she began to realise that things were not quite right.

The Weasel Code

As is often said, especially by those no-one has asked for their opinion, that there are some moments in the affairs of humankind that are just far too dull for anyone to bother remembering.

However, the Weasel Code Incident – as it became known – is not one of them, which is a bit obvious really; otherwise, no-one would have bothered remembering it, let alone giving it such a memorable name.

As for the weasel, Benjy, why he in particular is associated with this particular incident is one of those twists of fate that make reality seem far-fetched and way beyond the imaginings of mere fiction writers.

It all began back in the early years of WWII. As is now well-known, but at the time was one of the greatest secrets of the war, the Allies had cracked the German's ultra-secret – and they though ultra-secure – Enigma code. However, even to this day, very few knew that the Allies had also cracked the super secret German Weasel Code, through the use of their captured German code weasel, Benjy.

Benjy had been the highly-trained code weasel of a German general captured outside Tobruk in the latter stages of the desert war. Unfortunately for the German war machine, the General, Herr Kaput, had not had the time to feed Benjy the fatal dose of rice and treacle prepared for each code weasel to prevent it falling into enemy hands before capture.

What had not been revealed up until now, however, was that it was a raid on the general's headquarters specifically mounted to capture a live code weasel by the SAS that brought Benjy into Allied hands.

The SAS, the Special Accountancy Service, had for some time been aware of the number of orders and invoices the German army generated for supplies of rice and treacle and Allied intelligence suspected that this was something to do with the use of code weasels by the Germans.

Before the outbreak of war, some Polish mathematicians had speculated that any code generated by weasels fed rice and treacle would be virtually unbreakable. It was this idea that the German high command had noticed and copied. This made it essential that the Allies capture a code weasel as early as possible in the war, so they could break this code.

AS we all now know, radar was an offshoot of the British search for a reliable rice and treacle detector. The early experimental radar could – of course – detect when a weasel went pop, but by then it was obviously too late to capture that weasel, at least without a dustpan and brush. Therefore, the Allied boffins decided to begin work on the rice and treacle detector (RAT).

To disguise the use of the RAT in the desert war, the Allies started to call their soldiers The Desert Rats, thus hoping to fool the Axis intelligence to think that any mention of the RAT was in fact just a reference to ordinary Allied troops and therefore of no particular vital intelligence value.

Disguised as a German logistic corps rice and treacle delivery unit, a SAS squad managed to infiltrate General Kaput's headquarters and lure Benjy away from the coding room using an imitation female weasel assembled by the boffins back in Britain.

Once Benjy was in their grasp the British undercover accountants created a diversion to cover their escape by deliberately misfiling several hundred German infantry invoices to keep the German soldiers busy and created a smokescreen to conceal their exfiltration from the German HQ by setting fire to a yet un-reconciled cashbook.

Once safely back behind British lines Benjy was handed over to military intelligence who rushed the code weasel back to the UK , never once accidentally leaving him on the train when they got off to change trains, which was another first for British military intelligence, a feat of diligence that was never once repeated in the post-war years.

Once Benjy was back at Bletchley Park and safely ensconced in the code shed it was only a matter of days before the Allies could decode all of the Germans most secret military intelligence traffic and so the war ended much, much sooner than would have otherwise been the case.

It is Coming

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Then there were the dreams, dark broodings shadowed dreams that seem to hint, to suggest, to portend. Even the most pleasant dream of, say, a summer's day spent by the river had a dark cloud somewhere in it, a portent of the storms to come. Most dreams, though, were of the darkness itself; of shadows and dark places. There were things people could sense in the dreams hiding there, moving in the shadows, crouched and waiting.

As the time went on, people began to mention the dreams, tentatively at first to each other. Then the media got hold of them and all of a sudden there were seemingly endless TV programmes, newspaper and blog articles, all about the dreams and how – it seemed – everyone on the planet was having them, or at least some culturally-specific adaptation of the dreams.

For some of the religious, of course, the dream presaged some sort of final time, the time when their saviour of whatever it was came back to do what ever it was he - and in some cases, she – had long ago promised to do, but never as yet ever done.

Others made plans to welcome our alien overlords, mapping out landing fields and debating endlessly in their blogs and chat rooms about who would be the best ambassador for the planet to make first contact with the aliens when they arrived.

Scientists too, checked the data on everything they were running, earthquake monitors watched avidly, volcanoes checked for the first signs of eruptions, CERN monitored its sensors and shifts increased in nuclear power stations and nuclear submarines.

Everyone was expecting something, and the longer the dreams went on, became more frequent and more vivid, the more we knew it was coming.

After the Dark Days

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Sometimes it was easy to forget, we could go through our days, and even some of the nights, without something reminding us of the Dark Days. These things, we are told, get easier with time, that the memories come less and less often and when they do, they do not burn so harshly. That is true, I suppose, but it took a long time. With the Dark Days burnt so deeply in our memories, all of our memories, it was hard to escape them completely. Even those later days, when the memories were – most of the time – little more than a dull ache, and a darkness in the memory we taught ourselves to look away from, there was always a sadness, a sense of loss visible in everyone's face.

We became proficient at recognising the signs: the sudden silences, the laugh that sliced itself with silence as though laughter – which is the best medicine for all that ails the human, we know that now - somehow seemed inappropriate and disrespectful of all those we'd lost.

In time, though, we learnt how to laugh properly and to see that laughter is not inappropriate – it is one of the most human of sounds and one of the most comforting when the pain cuts so deep.

Monday Poem: At Least Forever

At Least Forever

It takes a moment, it takes a season,
it will take at least forever or longer,
to close the gap between this fingertip
and the soft reassurance of your skin.

But I can wait, listening to you breathe
between each eternity and forever
it takes to get this close to you
and I can wait for the seas of time

to dry up, turn to dust and pour
on down though the glass bulbs
of every single moment that passes
like a grain of sand through that narrow tube

that separates then from now
as it still separates me from you.

Succinct Encapsulations and Underpants

She may very well be the woman of your dreams, with a complete set of adjustable spanners that make you heart throb with desire. However, even though she may wander unclothed through your dreams clutching a brace of those selfsame spanners and fill your daytime thoughts with thoughts of the nuts you could tighten together, she may not – in the end – come to agree with you that the 1978 AA Road Atlas is humanity's greatest literary achievement… and that way only disappointment can lie. At least if you have gone to all the trouble of arranging her fruit bowl in alphabetical order and she has dismissed the notion as somewhat unworkable as it places too many kiwi fruit between her bananas and her mandarin oranges.

Still, as they say… or they would if I could recall an aphorism that encapsulates such a quandary in a few pithy words, but I can't, not whilst wearing these special anti-folk wisdom and popular philosophy-proof underpants anyway. You may well, ask why I have chosen to deploy such protective underwear at this time, however, that is a tale for another day… and – of course – for a pair of anecdote-recounting compatible underpants….

So until that day dawns, I will bid you farewell.

Endless Winter

The weather was cold, wet, damp. It seemed like there would never be another summer again. The winter seemed endless. Each day we would reluctantly drag ourselves from the sleeping furs and peer out into the damp, misty gloom of another dull day. The cold seemed to have seeped into our bones making us feel weary with the world.

The tent itself was cold, damp and leaking. Everything inside it felt cold and damp too. Everything had a strong earthy smell, from us, from the travelling packs, from the tent, as though buried underground for a long time.

We knew too, if the weather did not change that we would die out here, in the cold and the damp. We needed to move, to carry on. We needed to find somewhere new, some place where we could begin to build a new life. This was not the place, but if we did not leaver soon, we knew we would never find it and we would end here.

Each day we awoke, we dreaded looking out of the tent to see what sort of day it was out there. Each day, we knew would be just another cold and damp day. We all regretted, even though we did not say, coming to this cold Northern land where the days seemed to be over as soon as they'd began.

Then one day I looked out on a bright sunny day. True, it had been snowing in the night, but at least it was dry and I could see further than a few mist shrouded yards from the tent. This was it. This would be the day we would move to some new place and try to make a home.

What a Man has to Do

If this was going to be the story, I didn't want to be the hero of it… not again. They often quote 'a man has to do what a man has to do', but until you are right up against it, you never truly realise what that 'has to' really entails.

Usually, I didn't mind being the hero, or rather the 'main protagonist' in his stories, especially the ones where the naked women emerge into the clearing in the woods, dive into a river or go swimming in the sea. I didn't mind representing those manly virtues and traits at all then.

The comedy, funny stuff, wasn't too bad either, sometimes I'd end up looking like a bit of a dick, but often too, there I would get the girl. At least a decent cheese sandwich or some toast, if nothing else. The penguins though were a very different matter, and I did everything I could not to appear in anything he wrote where they appeared.

However, when these stories came along where I had to do the heroic stuff, I began to get a bit worried. I mean, I'm no coward, but some of the enemies, the 'antagonists' he came up with in some of those pieces, weren't even human. In fact, several times, I was pretty sure he had no real idea who, or what, I was meant to be facing. I just know that I often came off worse, especially where he forswore a conventional ending and then had me killed off in some form of unexpected ending with a twist, like….

Hang on….

What is that shadow on the ground?

Why is it getting bigger…?

Oh, fuck, there's a piano falling from out of the sky!

It's going to land here….

Right on me….

Aaaarrgghh…!