David Hadley's Blog, page 187

The Spoon in History

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Still, you do not have to have had a more than average relationship with a spoon to realise just how vital a piece of technology they have become in the modern high-tech world. However, back in the days when dining etiquette demanded people eating soup must use a fork, it became apparent that cutlery had become, rather than the boon people had first hoped, a traumatic ritual of propriety and manners that had most people baffled.

Of course, once the days of just gnawing off as much bison as your jaws could manage had passed, the invention of the flint knife had introduced the notion of bite-sized portions. Unfortunately, because of the sharpness of the flint tools, the curse of wafer-thin meat slices was already upon on our ancient ancestors as they gathered in their caves for a buffet supper.

However, the flint spoon and the flint fork were not very successful at all, and the flint spatula never got past its first round of consumer-testing before being unceremoniously withdrawn from the market.

However, at about the same time, the big thing of the moment, especially in the domestic market was the secret of fire. Consequently, any utensil invented in that era had to be still usable with hot food, sometimes flaming (literally) hot food. Therefore, any utensil based around wood technology, including the perennial stand-by of the time – the pointy-stick, tended to have a habit of bursting into flames, thus rendering the whole eating experience somewhat unsatisfactory, especially to those with either burnt lips or fingers.

As luck would have it though, someone with suddenly rather hot fingers flung one of those flaming hot sticks out of the cave into the snow, where it rapidly cooled down, just in time for a passing mammoth to step on one end of it, flattening it out. Thus was the spoon – as we know it – born; and not long after, civilisation and the first tentative sit-com scripts came along, bringing into being the modern world as we know it.

The Dick

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Cleft Moraine regarded himself as an old-style traditional dick, but apart from that, he also worked as a private eye, or at least that's what it said on his office door. Lately, though, work had been slow. These days it seemed that most people didn't care if their wife or husband was having an affair, being as they were usually too busy updating their own social network statuses to notice.

Moraine was drinking, these days, drinking to forget. Although, all he seemed to do was forget how to stay in his chair after about the third or forth bottle. Spongecake Sugarthighs hadn't been the love of his life, but she'd damn-near broke his back one afternoon in a hotel room on the south coast and for Moraine, that was as close to love as he'd ever got. She'd left him though, as they all left him when they found that he was such a complete dick and would never be anything different no matter how they tried to change him.

It was late in the afternoon with the sun setting over one of Tipton's finest pork scratching factories; even through Moraine's grime-encrusted window, he could see it had been a fine day. He realised it must be late afternoon because he had already fell out of his chair and his glass was empty, lying on its side on what had once been a carpet next to his head. He heard a noise and turned his head… slowly.

A pair of black high heels was standing on his carpet by his empty glass. The shoes contained feet and the feet joined nylon-encased legs that went up, disappearing under a knee-length skirt.

'To save you straining yourself to look, yes, they are stockings,' A voice from somewhere up above the legs said.

'Good,' Moraine said. 'I've always preferred stockings.'

'I'm surprised you've got the legs for them,' the voice said.

Moraine looked up to where the face would be, if the low sun had not been shining through his office window at exactly the wrong angle for him to see anything of her face. Although, he realised, from this angle her body was well worth paying attention to.

At least, until one of those high heels kicked him in the side.

'Do you always consult from the floor?' she said, an edge creeping into her voice.

Moraine knew that getting up at this hour of the afternoon was usually more trouble than it was with, but this could be a job. He was a dick, true enough, but not that much of a dick to turn down a job offer… it would be nice to eat again.

Thursday Poem: Naked in the Rain

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Naked in the Rain

She turns slowly, naked in the rain,
feeling the brown dry grass greening
beneath her turning dusty feet.
Feeling that dust turning towards

the now living again earth that pulses
With the need for the growing
not wishing to escape as clouds
of dust rising up with her every step

Longing to escape the dry deadness
and become a cloud floating free
to go wherever the wind will go.

But now the sky falls as healing water
onto her upturned face, washing her clean.
Washing away all her dry dusty tears
with fresh clean tears of its own.

She was the Story I Told

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She was the story I told myself as we sat together wrapped in a fur, watching the flickering flames. With her, I was never alone again, even though she only came to me during the night. In the daytime, we kept our distance from each other, knowing stories only have their power in the dark when the dancing flames can weave their magic around the tales we tell each other.

As we sat there together, wrapped around each other's body, I told her the story of where she was born: the village where she grew up and the parents that looked after her, although, as is the case with so many of these stories, the parents who looked after her were not her own parents. The woodman found her in the forest as a baby, of course, and brought up as his own child. However, as I held her long delicate fingers in mine, feeling the warmth of the fire upon them, I told her that hers were not the hands of one of us ordinary folk.

I told her the story of the magical woods and the not-human that creep amongst the trees and their mischiefs, of changelings and half-folk and kidnapped princesses. I told her the tale of those princesses taken to the woods and never brought back.

Then I told her the story about how I would be the one to rescue her and take her back through the forest and back over the hill, back home to the castle where the king and the queen still mourned for their long-lost child.

The Biscuit Tin Event Horizon

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Earlier today, physicists announced they made some startling discoveries over the recent Christmas period, which have thrown some light upon what up to now as been regarded as one of the fundamental problems in physics. Scientists at the University of Little Frigging (formerly the cowshed) claim they have discovered proof of the theoretical concept known as the Biscuit Tin Event Horizon. Theoretical physics postulates this as the point in the time and space continuum where the force emanating from a biscuit tin (or similar food container) becomes too strong for any passing body to resist.

It is a well-known physical phenomenon that whenever there is a food container in the near vicinity it becomes almost impossible to resist the force that pulls the body towards that container until the lid is prised off and the contents of the container accessed.

Scientist have also discovered that the amount of biscuits taken from the biscuit tin in order for the body to achieve an escape velocity which enables them to break free of the biscuit tin's force field is dependant upon the mass of that body. The greater the boy's mass the more biscuits are needed to convert into energy in order to escape back beyond the biscuit tin event horizon. This mass is calculated in pies, the greater the body' pie index the more biscuits or similar foodstuffs it need to convert into energy in order to escape.

The Lucky Ones

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We knew, when the first snows fell, that it would be difficult. It was a new world for us now. The interconnected civilisation that we had grown up within had all gone, destroyed itself and left us alone.

Before it all fell apart, people used to say that those that survived the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to; man-made or natural disasters; disease, illness, misfortune, were the lucky ones. For a long time, especially as that first winter took hold, we didn't feel like the lucky ones at all.

In fact, we often came across the bodies of those who could no longer cope. It was hard to say why they gave up, but they did. Maybe it was the loneliness, maybe it was the fear, maybe it was the uncertainty, maybe it was just the grief from all they had lost overwhelming them, maybe it was the lack of a clear future, or even the lack of hope. Whatever it was, when we were out on scavenging missions, or during our search for somewhere to wait out the winter we came across their bodies. These were not the bodies from before, from when it happened, but from later, all showing signs of suicide of one form or another, from pills to shotguns to hangings to all points in-between. Sometimes, it seemed that every apparently abandoned building we went into contained at least one body.

Eventually, it got to the stage where we began to look for excuses not to explore any more buildings; fearing that one day, we would find the one tragedy that would push us, ourselves, over the edge too.

Exploding Trousers

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We wore exploding trousers and held on tight to the skin of the hamster as if it was any other ordinary Thursday afternoon.

'These are not my damsons,' she said, turning towards the controls for the electronic reindeer.

'Don't touch those!' I cried. 'They are not meant to be utilised by a naked woman who has recently been smothered in low-fat margarine.'

'What should I do then?' she replied. There was a hint of anger in her voice. I knew this could threaten a limit on the amount of time she would allow me to use the devices on her. I leant over and pressed the button in eager anticipation, feeling the thrill of the vibrations, even through the rubber plumber's outfit I was wearing.

'Where's the stoat,' she said suddenly. 'Oh, no!'

'What?'

'I think it has escaped.'

'Shit.'

'Exactly. Just over there to be precise.' She pointed. At least that explained the smell. I'd been too polite to mention it before, remembering the number of pickled eggs she'd eaten the previous evening.

'He's gone now,' she sounded dejected. 'What shall we do now?'

I knew it was no use now. She wouldn't even contemplate it, not without the stoat, or the weasel. I switched the devices off and set up the Ludo board.

Jury Duty

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It began even before they picked us both to serve on the same jury. When all of the new intake were milling around in the lobby of the court building with none of us having any idea what was going on or what to do, I felt her glance at me. I turned and caught her eye, and her smile. Then, later, as we queued to go through the first of that day's various bureaucratic hoops, she was only a few places behind me in the queue.

Then there was some sort of introductory talk, and it was her perfume that I remember most, that and the way her thigh in stockings – even then I knew they were stockings and not tights – and a tight skirt, kept pressing against mine.

We chatted in the first tea break; names, places, nothing at all in common. She worked in a High Street hairdresser in one of the local towns I have never been to, and well, I sit here day after day using my fingers and this keyboard to populate my computer's memory with characters and stories that never seem to go anywhere.

Anyway, purely by the luck of the draw, apparently, they selected us together for the same jury. Of course, she sat by me as the judge told us twelve good people that our case would be a long complex one, while I felt the warmth of her hand moving higher up my thigh as her left breast brushed repeatedly against my arm.

By the time we all parted on that first day, I was beginning to look forward to my jury duty.

Monday Poem: This Solid Moment

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This Solid Moment

There is a hill where I can stand
to see the world spread out
almost capable of being held
in one open cupped hand.

That is the place for me
the place I must stand
in order to see and make sense
to untangle all these bonds

that tie me to this ground
and to the solidity of this time
which holds me within a moment
that I cannot escape, to fly

out into the sky that flows
far beyond any horizon
I can see from this valley.
There is a hill where I can stand.

Dread of the New Day

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There were times when it seemed too hard, too difficult to meet the new day. Times when the night never seemed long enough, even though she chased restless sleep across the bed all night. She dreaded the sound of the alarm, which would, inevitably, drag her from whatever exhausted sleep she'd managed, where her dreams chased her down twisting corridors and through dense wild woods. Whatever it was that chased her in those dreams, she knew would be waiting for her every time she managed some exhausted sleep at the end of a long night of dreading the next day, but longing for some sleep, even if it meant those dreams chasing her across the bed.

When the alarm sounded she would lie there, not looking at the clock, hoping, even though she knew it was not, that it was the weekend and that she would be safe, if only for a couple of days. Alternatively, hoping it was some school holiday and she would not have to see them, face them for several days, if not weeks.

Then she would drag herself from the bed, reluctantly leaving the one field of torment and those unknown fears that chased her nights away, steeling herself ready to fare the torments of yet another day.

Sometimes, as she went about getting ready for the day she tried to console herself that one day, maybe even today; it would be different, that she would somehow find that secret key that would turn the day her way. Other days, she hoped to find something, maybe from the books that were her only comfort, some way of turning her world her way. Maybe, some day, she thought she would find some way of turning herself invisible or find some other power that would make her tormentors cower in front of her for a change.

Every day, though, seemed to be always the same for her, no matter what she thought, hoped, dreamed, said or did… at least until today when she woke up knowing, for certain, that it was the day when her world was going to change forever.