David Hadley's Blog, page 72

This Life Flows Like a River

So this, it flows like time, like the river toward the sea. It begins here, with a moment, growing as it moves down towards its end.

Our story is a river that turns and twists as it flows. We both started high in these hills of possibilities where the wind, rain and snows erode a place of beginning for both of us.

At first, we trickled down the slopes of childhood as the spring melted our snows. We grew into our own rivers of life, each far away from each other on mountainsides of our own.

We met, our tributaries merging, our solitary streams becoming this river while still high in those mountains of youth.

We grew and twisted together over those turbulent years as we rode over rapids and tumbled over waterfalls. We roared through narrow canyons as our youthful vigour threatened to burst our banks and send us flooding out, destroying the bridges that held our opposing banks tied together.

Later, as our torrents slowed, we came to the low valleys where our river widened and deepened. We learnt to flow slowly, take our time and not rush headlong for the sea. We became part of the landscape and the landscape channelled us, no longer switching back and forth, no longer desperate to carve out a channel of our own. We learnt to flow where the shape of the land allowed us.

We had time to dawdle, almost still, as this river flowed on. A chance to see, feel and learn of this land around us and we could see much further now the steep mountain valleys no longer constrained us in our raging. We grew older, calmer, and even wiser as our banks held us close together.

Now we taste the salt of the eternal sea on our lips and know that final estuary is not far away. Our banks that held us have fallen now and we feel the sea breezes and catch the cries of seabird on the air. We know soon that we will slip away from this river and become another small part of that eternal sea, becoming only a memory to those who walked our banks and watched us flow.

Even so, though as we merge into that forgetting sea we know that somewhere up in those far high mountains another spring will come. It will melt that snow and another river will begin to flow.

 

Something for the Weekend: Free Kindle Novel ��� Dance on Fire

Free for the next five days��here: UK or here: US

Extract:

���So, what do you think of him then?��� Pete inclined his head towards Johnny and Matt, who seemed to be talking about cymbals.

���I like him,��� Jenny said. ���He makes me laugh.���

���Yes,��� Spike said. ���I just hope he can play.���

���I don’t fancy telling him, if he can’t though,��� Pete said.

���Why not?��� Spike seemed genuinely puzzled.

���He scares me.���

���Really?��� Jenny laughed. ���But he’s only a tiny little thing.���

���I dunno.��� Pete shrugged. ���You just get this feeling with some blokes. I dunno��� perhaps it is a male thing.���

Spike and Jenny nodded, almost in unison.

���Besides that, he has been in the army. He probably knows loads of ways of killing with his bare hands and all that.���

���But he wasn’t in the bloody SAS or anything. He was only a musician, a drummer,��� Spike said.

���Perhaps he knows of a hundred ways to kill someone with just a drumstick then,��� Pete said. ���Anyway, he still scares me.���

���But you work with him,��� Jenny said.

���Only in the way a lion tamer works with lions,��� Pete replied.

Free for the next five days��here: UK or here: US

Description:

What do you do when sex and drugs and rock and roll are no longer enough?

At one time, Transmission were probably the most famous rock band on the planet. Now, even as they approach their twenty-fifth anniversary they are still up there, one of the top ten bands of all time. However, each of the surviving members of the band feels something, somewhere, has gone wrong, and the rock and roll dream they used to believe in so much has become an empty and hollow routine.

Dance On Fire is an exploration of the relationships between the remaining original members of Transmission, and their manager, as the band enters their 25th year together.

The novel charts their growing realisation that rock music no longer has any meaning for them, and they are – at best – still going through force of habit – ‘We’ve become our own tribute band.’ Dance On Fire is a novel about the shallowness of everlasting adolescence and the vacuity at the heart of the rock and roll mythology.

Free for the next five days��here: UK or here: US

Sex in the 1970s

Of course, back then the world was a different place. It was about 100 yards to the left of this one, slightly more purple on a sunny day, and faintly smelt of processed cheese. Most remember the 1970s as a time for people doing the sex in a slightly different way to the way it is done now. It was slightly more hairy in places and involved more use of the elbows, especially down the back straight before the chicane.

Back in those long ago days, though, sex was less ubiquitous in the media. In addition, there was no home recording technology as such. Consequently, the sight of a liberated nipple on the TV was a subject much discussed in workplaces and playgrounds for weeks afterwards.

Back then, of course, not everyone could afford nipples of their own. The UK Post Office was split into three parts at the time. There was the postal service, the telephone service and ��� as has long been forgotten – the Post Office Sex Service. In those days, you could wait up to nine months, or so, to have a landline telephone installed. Even then, you were offered a choice of only two models of phone. In the same way, the Post Office Sex Service too had a long waiting list for nipples, with the waiting list for the household erogenous zones even longer. The long waiting list was one reason why pubic topiary was much wilder and freeform in those days. Mainly because it was the only method by which most people could disguise the fact that the Post Office was yet to install their genitals, or even their nipples.

Back in those days, alongside the public phone boxes on almost every street corner, there were public erogenous zone booths. These were places where you and a partner could get to touch, feel, fondle or otherwise have access to public service erogenous zones. Many people made use of these booths whilst waiting to have their own erogenous zones installed by a Post Office engineer.

Back then, there was a massive separation between business erogenous zones and private zones. Businesses, of course, had need of several erogenous zones, mainly to keep their customers satisfied. This is one reason why office Christmas parties acquired the reputation they did. Many workers waited eagerly all year just so they could use the workplace erogenous zones with each other during the wild drunken revels that could see upwards of three Watney���s Party Seven barrels open at once.

Back then, of course, there were only three terrestrial TV channels and no internet or satellite TV. This severely curtailed whatever entertainment options available to the population of the British Isles.

Inevitably, in hindsight, the limited access to private erogenous zones, and the national nipple shortage, eventually brought down the Heath government. The crisis peaked when access to nipples was limited to three days a week. This forced the British government to introduce rationing coupons for erogenous zones too.

The Heath government, in a desperate bid to cling on to power, authorised the use of power cuts and candles. Mainly in order to disguise the great nipple shortage and the lack of usable erogenous zones by the public at large. The government thought that with the hirsute pubic regions of the day, the poor lighting would make it easier for people to confuse access to the erogenous zones of their partner of choice. Either with the pet dog, cat, guinea pig, the then fashionable shaggy hearthrug or even, in some cases, their home aquarium.

However, these measures did not fool the UK population were. Eventually, the consequences of the Great Nipple Shortage led to the denationalisation of the Post Office Erogenous Zone Service. Which, in turn, ultimately lead to the wide variety, multitude of styles and quantity of erogenous zones available to the British public these days.

 

The UK���s Leading Political Activist Comedian

Splunge ���Shagger��� Knobend has become the latest comedian to enter the political arena. Knobend recently announced he is mounting a campaign to start a revolution that will replace what he calls ���the worn out farce of democracy��� with something new. In a recent interview with the UK���s leading political interviewer, Wildebeest Prolestrangler, on the BBC���s flagship current affairs programme Turnitoffandgotobed, Knobend outlined his political philosophy and ideas. There, Knobend said that he envisaged a system where anyone over a certain age could help choose which politicians they wanted to represent them by ���making a mark in secret on a piece of paper. Then, when they gather up all those pieces of paper,��� the comedian said, ���they could see who the most people wanted to run the country. Now, don���t you think that would be a much fairer system than the one we have now where Evil Tories ride around hunting down ordinary workers with hounds?���

Prolestrangler then conceded the point that Knobend had indeed come up with a revolutionary new system that could easily transform the current political impasse.

���Politicians these days are so out of touch,��� Knobend added. ���Maybe each local area should have a group of people, one for each what I like to call a political party. A group of individuals who get together and decide who they think will best represent that party in the local area. I believe this person ��� man or woman, it doesn���t matter ��� could be called a candidate, who they then put up for election.��� Knobend then asked Prolestrangler if he didn���t agree that was much better than the current system. A discredited and outdated system where ���the Evil Tories��� select who will represent them by picking the one candidate who can eat the most working class babies at a single sitting.���

Again, Prolestrangler was amazed at the grasp Knobend had of political theory and philosophy. Prolestrangler then moved on to ask the putative revolutionary about economics. ���Money is evil. It is that simple.��� Knobend said. ���I would ban all money, shoot the bankers and get rid of anyone who earns more than I do. I mean I���m just a poor working class kid with only seven homes in exclusive locations around the world, 47 top-end supercars, 5 yachts and a couple of Caribbean islands of my own. So I know what it is like to not have much, to be one of the excluded, to be poor. I, of course, blame the corrupting influence of money for all of modern society���s woes.��� Knobend sighed. ���I know that the current economic system may have lifted millions out of poverty, done much to reduce hunger and poverty and disease. I know it works much better than any other system human kind has ever developed. And I know that even the poorest person in the modern West has material riches and well-being far beyond what an ordinary medieval person could dream of, but are we better off? I���m sure that deep down people would much prefer to scrabble about in the mud, dying in their thirties from starvation or an easily preventable disease. That���s why I would close down the electricity grid, make atoms illegal and ban all chemicals from the world.���

As the interview drew to a close, Prolestrangler thanked Knobend and said with tear-filled eyes, it was the most profound, moving and intellectually-stimulating interview he had ever undertaken. He was a man who had interviewed all the world���s political leaders for the last twenty years, including several American presidents and Valerie Singleton and had never felt so politically enlightened before.

But, as Knobend said to end the interview, ���thanks, but I���m just a simple comedian. What do I know?���

 

A Great Historical Militant

Hesitation Mediahub is probably the UK���s leading figure of historical militancy. Yet few School-age worker drones have heard of her and the vital role she played in bringing democracy, especially for women, to this country.

Of course, back in the 18th century, under the famous Rich Bastard ruling, a very few men, and only those wealthy enough, were allowed to vote. Only the very rich land-owning aristocracy could vote for both local politicians and the nation���s MPs. This they thought was an excellent idea as only they were allowed to stand for election. Thus, in reality, many of them could only vote for themselves, especially in low population areas.

However, Mediahub then published her learned and erstwhile bestselling tract ��� Rich Bastards, Sod the Lot of Them. This earned her respect of the militants keen to see a change in the antiquated laws and ��� often the lawmakers ��� that ruled this country.

Of course, many of those militants, despite espousing common cause with the ordinary people had little or no idea what those ordinary people were like. Although, to be fair there were�� a group of them, known as the Daftbuggers, who had managed to live without servants for almost two weeks, with very little loss of life amongst their membership.

Mediahub herself, although ostensibly middle-class, as a daughter of a rural clergyman, was no stranger to poverty. She had seen it many times from her carriage window as she was driven from tutor to tutor or to the dressmaker or milliner. She said she found it shocking that several of the poor she had seen from her carriage were so impoverished. Some of them, she claimed, could barely afford the widescreen TVs and satellite TV subscriptions that parliament at the time had decreed was essential for even the most basic standard of living. Some of them, she was aghast to see, hardly had enough money to keep their children in that season���s Premier League football shirts. Mediahub, to her horror, saw some of the poor wearing replica shirts that were two or three seasons out of date and were ��� possibly ��� hand-me-downs from older siblings.

She vowed that England should never again see such poverty and – maybe in a few centuries time ��� neither would Scotland either.

However, with the foresight unusual in militants, progressives and revolutionaries, Mediahub saw that the solution lay with those very Rich Bustards. The very rich bastards her fellow activists and their fellow travellers so despised. She saw the necessity of getting the Rich Bastards to invest in the industrial revolution. This, she saw, would mean that, eventually, those poor people would be able to afford the satellite subscriptions and the current season���s replica football shirts. Then as their income rose and technology changed, competition would force the rich bastards to innovate and improve, lest they suddenly become poor bastards.

Of course, to the shock and disgust of many of her fellow radicals, Mediahub was proved right. The country did indeed get richer and technology did improve life, especially the lives of the poor. This continued right up to the present day when now the poor no longer die of starvation in their thousands because of crop failures and agricultural mishaps. Instead, now the poor die from obesity from eating too much while sitting gawping at their massive flat screen TVs, while wearing their favourite team���s most up-to-date football shirt.

It is thanks to such perspicacious militants such as Mediahub herself that we live in such a time, these days. For without her and her kind the Rich Bastards would still rule over us, allowing us little say in the course of our lives. For that, we should be ever thankful to her.

 

Dr Chililicker���s Sexy TV Time

Obviously, it was not that simple, but these things never are. Or, at least, it was not as simple as the expert on the TV programme claimed. As we all now know, she had been doing it for years, including all that stuff with the whipped cream and the thermal underwear.

However, we all ought to be grateful. After all, TV has been losing out to the internet for such instructional matters more and more these days. It is much simpler to look something up on the internet than wait around for some TV programme to tell you how to go about doing things.

Even with cookery programmes, the last of the great instructional TV programmes has gone the way of the DIY programmes and the gardening programmes into being more about entertainment than edification.

Therefore, when Garlicpress Chililicker first appeared on our screens promising us a TV series about some of the more recondite erotic practices most people were underwhelmed. We, more or less, expected either a travelogue where the undoubtedly sensuous presenter stood in front of some of the world���s most recognisable erotic landmarks and talked at us. Failing that, we assumed there���d be scenes where she stared pensively out of a train or plane window while, the voiceover told us what she was about to say to us. This is something that is usually the case in most of these high-value overseas-saleable documentary strands. Or we would get her hugging some tearful prole at some emotional moment. The plain, but passably telegenic, ordinary person suitably overawed at the visitation on earth by a god of the household shrine made manifest as that god brought down wonder upon their poor head.

Instead, refreshingly, we get just Chililicker herself in her white lab coat, standing behind the experimental bench in her sex laboratory. There telling us, in an endearingly engaging way, why we have ��� up to now ��� been doing sex wrong. Then, she explains how – with a few simple accessories from her extensive range (on sale in all good retail outlets and a few disreputable ones) – we can all start to do the sex properly. Including that thing with the avocado, the tadpole and the fob watch from that film we���ve all seen and claimed not to think much of.

Of course, there have been some who have complained about this TV series being the point where sex on TV has gone beyond everything we���ve pretended not to watch before. They say the frank and revealing way that Chililicker talk about sex takes all the mystery, excitement and discovery out of the activity. They argue that her animated diagrams of exactly where to put the sliced melon and who should wear the balaclava, like porn, turns sex into just another commodity. The critics point to how sales of Chililicker��� sex equipment have gone through the roof. They suggest that it is in the end, just another marketing opportunity that uses the fig leaf (as it were) of education and edification as a hour-long advertisement in primetime for Chililicker��� goods and services.

However, many more feel that Dr Chililicker���s Sexy TV Time is probably the best programme on TV for a long time. Many viewers have pointed out that the sale of her accessories shows something new is happening. They say that this is something that has stoked people���s enthusiasm for actually getting down and dong the sex for themselves, as in the old days. Rather than just getting out their laptop to watch porn. Fans of the show claim that by itself is a sure sign of people learning and discovering and using TV in the best possible way.

However, only time will tell whether the phenomenon will last or fade into obscurity. Anyway, tonight���s programme is an end of the series special. In tonight���s episode Chililicker will reveal ��� at last – exactly what she wears under that lab coat and where we can all buy it from. So make sure you don���t miss it.

 

How She Named It

This was how she named it. Carla stood on the verge of this new world, unwilling to take the step to enter it.

It was a world she���d dreamed of, for as long as she could remember. She had been born to a woman who hardly ever noticed her, in the darkest corner of a failing city.

Somehow, Carla had survived a city that destroyed so many of the people she knew. Her mother had died young. Carla had fled to live on the streets for a while until she was captured – as she saw it – by the Social Services that were as negligent and hopeless as her mother had always been. Somehow, Carla knew how to survive the drink, drugs, prostitution and other traps that caught and often killed her contemporaries. If they did not die a physical death, then they suffered a living death, which seemed far worse to Carla.

She did not know when the dreams first began. To Carla they had always been there, the true parent she���d never had and the only carer that actually did care about her.

When her world got too much for her, Carla was able to escape into her green valley far from any city and the people that poisoned it. The valley had soft green hillsides, rising above a slow meandering river. The valley had woods where a girl on the run could hide and never be found.

She had always thought that the valley was more than a fantasy, more than a dream of escape. Carla felt the valley must exist somewhere.

The office at the orphanage always had a calendar with photographs of rural scenes on each month���s page. Carla searched through every year, when the new calendar came, looking for somewhere like her valley. Carla assumed she must have seen something like those calendars when she was very young and created her valley from that memory. Every calendar she searched had places not too unlike her valley, but had no place that was her valley.

When she was older, she���d hunt libraries, museums, art galleries and then the Internet, searching for her valley, or someplace like it. Somewhere far from the city that still held her trapped, waiting to take its turn with her.

Then one day high up on a city roof, a few streets away from the orphanage that she would leave forever the next week, she saw a door.

It looked like an ordinary door, leading to a stairwell from the flat roof. Carla knew it was no ordinary door and that it was a door only for her.

Then when she opened it, she saw the stairs leading down, like any other rooftop door. She felt as though her dream had died. Eventually, she took a step forward, even though she only wanted to slam the door and run away.

Once thought the door, she saw the valley she���d been looking for all he life, there spread out before her. It was then, when she stepped all the way through the door into her valley, that Carla gave the place a name for the first time.

���I���m coming home,��� she said.

 

Celebrity Charity Worker of the Year

Tadpole Honeythighs was, of course, once the world���s most famous Hollywood actress. However, she is often these days more in the news for her splendid charity work, where she tours the world helping local underemployed journalists, TV crews, photographers and paparazzi earn a living. Her presence enables them to make some money by filming and photographing her, interviewing her and making in-depth profiles of her as she tours some of the more photogenic poor areas of their country. Sometimes Honeythighs will even allow them to photograph her as she shares intimate and private moments with the poor, diseased or dispossessed. Often all while she is offering quotable words of comfort and a chance for the impoverished peasants to buy a signed publicity photograph from her.

Not that she signs her own autographs these days, of course. She has a specific PA amongst her entourage that signs such photographs for her.

Such visits by Honeythighs to the poor and ill are meticulously planned to look as spontaneous and heartfelt as possible when shown on TV and in other media outlets. All providing the media companies manage to meet the terms of her exclusivity contracts.

Honeythighs herself has appeared in several recent interviews with media outlet that have paid enough for the privilege of a meeting with her, rather than one of her PAs, publicists or interview doubles. In several of those interviews, Honeythighs has said that she finds playing the role of caring, compassionate celebrity is one of the hardest roles she has had to undertake. At least since playing the nit nurse in a game of Doctors and Nurses with the boy from next door when she was a child. ���Although, for that role at least I had the proper dressing-up nurse uniform,��� she mused in one recent interview.

However, many critics of her performances in these spontaneous visits to the poor and dispossessed have said that her performances are now somewhat predictable. There are rumours that Honeythighs has taken these mounting recent criticisms seriously. So, her next visit to an area devastated by some natural disaster will feature a new script written specifically to emphasise her caring and spontaneous nature.

There are rumours that she has hired several studio lots in Hollywood to mock up various typical natural disaster scenarios to produce trailers for her visits to the disaster zones. This will enable her to appear to be the first celebrity on the scene. Thereby, bringing the victims a much-needed chance to get close to a celebrity as they fight for their lives in what Honeythighs hopes are award-winningly photogenic ways.

However, there are some, including a few judges in the Celebrity Charity Worker of the Year panel, who feel that the award ceremony should go back to its roots. These people believe the award should celebrate and reward celebrities who do real, quiet but valuable work, often with unsung and unfashionable local charities, such as local hospices and animal charities.

Nevertheless, for the moment, feeling within the industry is that audiences still love the glamour, excitement and high body count of top-flight celebrity charity workers out in the field. They believe audiences want to see their celebrity charity workers going out into areas that are still high on the nightly TV news running order.

As one such critic said, ���who wants to see some bit-player with a walk on part in some afternoon soap opera, grooming a bedraggled Labrador with a slight limp? No, what people want from their charities is glamour, excitement and a hint of dirty sex. Trust me on this.���

 

New Fundamental Particle Discovered

Until now, scientists have had little theoretical understanding of one of the most profound fundamental forces that shape our universe. Until recent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, it was thought that cheese was just another foodstuff, albeit one of the greatest, if not the greatest, foods ever discovered by humanity.

However, whilst the experiments to determine whether the Higgs Boson actually existed were underway, one of those fortuitous accidents that underlie scientific progress occurred.

Whilst setting up the detector to try to detect the Higgs boson, one of the technicians happened to drop a few crumbs of his cheese sandwich into the device.

All went well as the then unknown particle of what later turned out to be farmhouse cheddar was accelerated to near light speed. However, rather than breaking down into the constituent particles that make up the atoms of that cheese, something else happened. Scientists were shocked to discover that it is actually cheese itself which is the most fundamental basic building block of the universe.

Until then, scientists had little or no real theoretical understanding of how cheese creates the universe from these fundamental cheese particles. Nor did they know how these cheese fundamentals go on then to build into the particles, which make up the protons, neutrons, electrons and their anti-particles. All of which are the basic building blocks of all atoms and hence the universe itself.

Cheese as we know does have various unusual properties even at the macro level. As recent experiments have confirmed, cheese, when heated to a sufficient temperature, does become a self-sustaining critical reaction that can be used as a power source.

However, as some scientists have now discovered, the cheese particle does indeed have its complimentary anti-particle. This anti-cheese particle, which although it looks like cheese, does not have any of the properties, such as taste, of cheese. Therefore, it is known as American Cheese, in honour of the discoveries made at the Theoretical Cheese Laboratory at Princeton University.

Also, some scientist have expressed concern that the experiments undertaken in the recently-completed Large Cheese Collider on the French/Swiss border could be compromised by the use of French cheeses. As many of the French cheeses lack the robust fully-flavoured nature of say the English cheeses. Many scientists fear that the use of French cheeses could result in some experimental ambiguities that could be neutralised by the use of say a Wensleydale or Cheshire cheese. Let alone the robust structural integrity offered by the utilisation of a fully matured Stilton.

However, these are early days in experimental cheese science, so undoubtedly the scientists still have a lot to learn about the nature of cheese. Especially the ways in which cheese shapes the universe around us, but – most importantly ��� how it reacts with the cats that ultimately control the very universe itself.

 

Out of the Ashes

Out of the Ashes

This is not how beginnings are made,

Out of the ashes

Of what has recently fallen.

We ought to go out beyond

To find a new greener valley.

One where the memories

Do not haunt each waking step

And dreams are filled with places

And faces that we know too well,

But will never see again.

Time will wake us to new lands.

New lands will bring us new times,

Free from the stains of memory

Soaking into dusty dry ground,

And free from the weight

Of all we have lost

Bearing down on our shoulders,

Making each slow step

Far too heavy to take.