David Hadley's Blog, page 73

Equal Opportunity Wizardry

It was not what she���d expected.

���But��� you���re a woman.���

Tessla looked down at herself. ���Well spotted.���

���But���.��� The leader of the group looked around at the others behind him, then back to Tessla. He made a stroking gesture under his chin. ���You don���t have a��� a beard.���

���So?���

���Well, wizards have beards.��� He turned back to the villagers behind him. They nodded and muttered in agreement.

���Not all of them. There were several in my classes at university that didn���t have beards, even when they graduated.���

A restless shuffle flowed through the group and they began to look at each other, shaking their heads.

���Graduated?��� One of the villagers asked.

���Became proper wizards��� qualified.���

���Oh.���

���That���s another thing,��� their leader added. ���You don���t look old enough.���

���I���ll get older��� eventually.��� Tessla hoped that was true. There was a tendency for only the good wizards to get older. The rest tended to suddenly stop getting older and become just a pile of ash next to a pair of smoking shoes. Natural wastage in the wizarding game was rather high.

���Well, we expected someone older, that���s all,��� the leader said.

���With a beard,��� someone else muttered from behind him.

���Well, for the money you were offering���.��� Tessla shrugged.

���But that was all the money in the village.��� The group stared back at her wide-eyed.

Tessla hadn���t the heart to tell them it was just enough for a night���s stay in one of the city���s inns, and not one of the best inns either. But she was desperate. She had debts to pay and the magical supplies shop had threatened to repossess her pointy hat. That reminded her.

Tessla dug deep into the travelling pack she���d borrowed and pulled out her new hat. Carefully she tucked up her hair and jammed it inside the hat.

The crowd in front of her gasped.

���See I have a hat. An official wizarding hat.���

The crowd glanced around at each other again.

The leader stepped forward, taking off his own hat and bowing. ���Sorry, your Maj��� Excellency��� er���. It is just that women wizards��� well���.��� He glanced back at the rest of the villagers. ���We���ve never heard the like.���

The other villagers nodded and muttered their agreement.

Tessla nodded back, feeling a bit more relaxed. ���It���s just there is a new law, throughout the land. I���m surprised you haven���t heard about it.���

They all shook their heads.

���The new equal opportunities law��� about women having the same rights as men, being able to do the same jobs���?���

The villagers shook their heads.

���Out here we don���t hear much about what goes on in the big cities.��� Their leader looked apologetic.

���Oh.���

���Anyway, er��� miss?��� the village leader said.

���Yes?���

���What���s a law?���

 

Close to the Flames

Close to the Flames

We arrange these memories into stories

And we tell our lives as tales around

A flickering fire on dark nights

When the world lies out of reach.

All I have is the touch of your skin

Against mine, as we watch the flames

Curling around the blackening logs

As each story of our lives before this now

Unfolds slowly into each other���s ears.

We had times before this moment

Even though it now holds everything

We have ever wanted, and want it to last

Far longer than any moment ever has done.

We do not want to break the spell,

Or look away from the flames,

Move skin away from flesh,

Or let the outside world back in.

The UK���s Leading Contemporary TV Dramatist

Toadspinner Inclinedplane is probably the UK���s leading contemporary TV dramatist. His several crime dramas, all featuring police detectives with all manner of personal problems and personal demons have become a must-watch for TV audiences sometimes numbering in the several.

His first detective, DCI Handjob, was a man tortured by the fact that he could not manage to finish a single full English breakfast in the police station canteen without interruption. Usually, he was disturbed mid-mastication by an attractive WPC seconded to the murder squad. More often than not, with the WPC reporting to him that a dog walker had found a body in some obscure location. Handjob invariably eschewed the easy solution that a satanic ring of sadistic dog walkers had committed all the murders. This despite the obvious fact that a dog walker who found the body. DCI Handjob – usually at dire risk to himself – often managed to solve the mystery of who was murdering the victims in exactly the length of each episode. Each time by reading lengthy extracts from that year���s Booker shortlist at the suspects until the suspects pulled their own heads off in despair. But, unfortunately, each week the confession did not arrive in time to save the attractive WPC, who was killed in her bath. Only for Handjob to discover an accomplice of the real killer murdered the WPC in an attempt to provide an alibi for the murderer and set up a second series for DCI Handjob.

After his success in the mystery drama genre, Toadspinner Inclinedplane moved on to the spy drama. Here an improbably good-looking bunch of British spies used technology never before seen outside a 1960s episode of Thunderbirds. With this technology, they managed, each week, to track down terrorist cell after terrorist cell. Often with the only clue a mysteriously-significant spelling error in an incorrectly addressed email. Or, occasionally, an errant hair from a supermodel who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Usually vanishing whilst having a bath, or removing her clothing for some other hastily contrived reason.

Spies had run for twenty-seven series before people started to notice that the terrorist cells were beginning to repeat themselves. Often their plots to assassinate various members of the political establishment or blackmail royalty looked wearingly familiar to the programme���s declining audience. However, Inclinedplane did manage to create a new plot for the last ever episode of spies. In the final episode, a terrorist cell planned to blow up a hotel. However, it is the very hotel where the head spy���s wife was having a clandestine lesbian affair with a supermodel, after they met on the set of a shampoo advert. Of course, the spies managed to save the day in the usual manner, although one of them was slightly wounded in the hairstyle by one of the terrorists.

After deciding to move on from Spies, Toadspinner Inclinedplane then took up writing historical drama. His Poshbastard���s Hall was criticised for being too harsh about the upper classes and their treatment of their servants. Many critics pointed out that now Toadspinner Inclinedplane was rich enough to announce to the world that he was a socialist, his views on the wealthy and privileged classes had changed completely. Critics often pointed out that hunting scullery maids with dogs on the grouse moors was without any historical foundation whatsoever. But fans of the programme didn���t seem to mind the overt political subtext as long as the upper-class ladies wore excitingly posh frocks. As well as having frequent dalliances with unsuitable, but hunky, men in the butler���s pantry, whilst the butler was out helping his master flog peasants to death in their smallholdings.

Toadspinner Inclinedplane has said that he intends ��to move on to a new drama genre sometime soon. Therefore, his many fans are keen to see what he will make of what has become a rather moribund and tedious genre when he takes over as head scriptwriter for the UK Parliament Channel early next year.

 

The Victorian Age of Exploration

Of course, Hesitation Gallump was one of the leading explorers of the late Victorian age. Although, by then a lot of the places lying off most of the major omnibus routes had been explored, with many explorers staying out long into the afternoon or early evening. Gallump, though, still felt there was a fair bit of exploring still to do, especially in the unexplored regions around the back of some of the UK���s less accessible garden sheds.

As we all know, the area around the back of even the most modest garden shed is often a place filled with all manner of wonders, many from ancient civilisations of which we know little about. Of course, not only were the unexplored areas around the back of the garden sheds at the time little navigated or understood, there were other unexplored territories too.

In earlier times, the invention of an accurate chronometer had helped make some of the more out of the way places explorable. So, by the time of Gallump, the gentleman���s pocket watch had become an essential item for Victorian explorers. The pocket watch enabled the explorers to pinpoint accurately where they were, and ��� crucially ��� how far away from the shops they were. It allowed them to get a lot more exploring done. Furthermore, the pocket watch still enabled them to have the time to pick up the things on the lists their wives had given to them on their way out of the house to go exploring.

To a Victorian gentleman, the shops were also relatively unexplored territory too. Of course, the first few shop explorers reported back to the geographical and exploring societies of the time with their astounding discoveries. In particular the astonishing news that these shops were filled with what later became known as ���shop-girls���. These discoveries meant that the number of Victorian gentlemen keen to explore these places of mystery increased exponentially.

Soon it became impossible for any Victorian gentleman to explore any of the shops, especially the new department stores, without an appointment. This was mainly due to the numbers of explorers eager to meet and discover a new tribe of these shop girls. The explorers hoped they could – perhaps – make an assignation with one of these shop girls for some in-depth research at a later date.

Hesitation Gallump, though, decided that the High streets of Britain were already too well-explored. Furthermore, already returning explorers were now producing detailed maps of the explored areas behind most of the garden sheds in Britain. So, now Gallump felt it was time to explore even further afield and – maybe – even stay out after dark if necessary.

However, as he was preparing to explore the mysterious uncharted region that lay beyond his own garden gate, Gallump decided it would be prudent to organise some logistical supplies. So after a brief dalliance with a housemaid, he went in search of something he could take with him on his journey. Perhaps even, as he mused in his journal of the trip, ���one of those new-fangled sandwiches���. A concept he���d heard so much about at the last meeting of the Royal Geographical Society.

It was while he was out looking for one of these mysterious sandwiches, that Gallump made what was to be his greatest ever discovery. Following on the trail of a rather skittish housemaid, one day, he managed to discover several regions of his own house he���d never visited before.

Deep in the uncharted heart of his own house, Gallump discovered the kitchen and the previously unknown tribe of servants that lived there. He was astonished to find that some of them even knew how to make the mythical sandwich, which up until then had only been an object of rumour and speculation to him. Without delay, Gallump decided to give up on further explorations and to devote the rest of his life to understanding the mysteries of his own kitchen.

It was there he died, two years later, during a failed attempt to locate a fabled pantry lost several generations before. Gallump was a great man who made a magnificent contribution to the field of exploration and for that, he should always be remembered.

 

A Political Revolution

Many fans of UK politics have called for a revolution in the long-running British political soap opera, claiming that the show is now in terminal decline. They say it is too often little more than clich��d political parties spouting hackneyed and trite scripts that increasingly seem to have little to do with the real world.

In response, the producers of the show have promised that they are bringing in new scriptwriters into the programme. They have also promised that they are going to get rid of the current goodies versus baddies plot format. The scriptwriters are keen to introduce a much more nuanced approach to the performances of the leading actors as well.

Many political traditionalists are worried though that a more complex script and more nuanced characters will mean that UK politics will lose a good many of its stock characters, especially the baddies. Political fans think this will ruin the show. They point to the fact that the long tradition of goodies versus baddies in the parliamentary theatre as one of the reasons why the pantomime has continued for as long as it has.

However, critics of the current format point out that modern-day audiences are far more sophisticated and demanding. They believe the show needs more complex dramas if they are to hold the interest of the contemporary audience. This is particularly important if the producers of the show hope to attract new younger audiences as the current audience ages and dies.

Unfortunately, though, politics has been losing sponsors and backers on both sides of the goodies versus baddies debate. Leading industrialist and moneymen on one side and the trade unions on the other are increasingly unwilling to fund the ever triter and predictable performances put out by the various sides in the show.

Many in the Conservative party also have expressed doubts that their current role as the pantomime baddies in the political performances can continue much longer. Many have called for a new role, as one Toy MP said ���that acknowledges that the free market and individual liberty has done more for the wealth, health and happiness of all humanity than all the Left-Wing solutions put together.���

Many political performers on the Left are frustrated too that they have had no new script for a long time. ���We are bored with spouting the old class-war platitudes and the tired clich��s about inequality and the mendacity of the wealthy,��� one rising star of the Labour backbenches said recently.

There are rumours too that many of those playing MPs in the current production are dissatisfied with the roles they are playing. A few have been in talks with their agents about switching sides in the show, or even joining new parties, in hope of finding new material to perform and roles to play.

Political art critics have pointed out, though, that any changes to the form and even the players and stars in the political circus may be too late. ���Already,��� one said, ���we have seen audiences drifting away from the political shows to things like reality shows and talent competitions, entertainment forms where they feel their vote really matters.���

It has long been a contention of those critical of political theatre that the audience votes, although paid lip service to, do actually change very little in politics. Many voters say they find it hard to tell the difference between the political actors. Several voters find it hard to distinguish which are the goodies or the baddies because they are all so alike and indistinguishable, but worst of all, dull and unentertaining.

Most voters, these days, feel that unless there is a revolution in the political circus soon, it will become yet another performance art struggling to attract the kind of audiences its long history and traditions ought to deserve.

 

Her Name is Silence

Her name was Silence and she waited in the darkness of the night for the dawn to come to her. She thought about light and how it grew from the horizon before the sun rose up from its night time resting place. She thought about the dark of the sky and how it grew lighter as the stars faded and the moon went away.

She thought about the meadows and the hillsides; how they grew green and living from the shadows. She thought about the forest that edged her green meadow and how the shadows stayed there safe under the trees. All waiting for the night to return so they could grow and spread.

She thought about the dawn; how the birds rose up to greet it with song. She thought about giving names to the birds and the other animals that waited for the dawn, but her name was Silence and she thought all names should be like that.

Before, when she���d lived amongst other people, they���d insisted on giving names to things. Almost as if giving something a name could control it.

She knew she didn���t control anything. She was not sure if she understood anything. All she knew was that she had to sit in silence and meditate on her name for the dawn to come and take the darkness away.

Silence did not know – or care – whether she was happy, alone in her valley with no-one else to talk to. She wanted to forget about words and the troubles they bring. She wanted to leave explanations to those who demanded them.

Silence thought understanding would come with time. One day, when she was prepared the others would come. All making their way to her valley where she would be ready then to speak of all she had learnt, knew and understood. Then, when the pilgrims arrived, seeking enlightenment from the wise woman of the holy valley, she would be ready then to change her name from Silence.

As the dawning sun warmed her face, Silence rose up from where she was sitting. She gathered flowers, still damp from the dew, in her arms. She climbed up the hill, staying ahead of the slowly spreading light. When she arrived at the grave mound, high on the hillside, she spread flowers across all the graves. After placing the flowers, she stood for a moment at each of the graves of the women who had lived alone in the valley before her, back when their names were once Silence too.

 

Sexual Aids and Their Drawbacks

Anyway, not that we were overly cynical about the experience, but, as you will know if you are a frequent peruser of this��� whatever it is, we have had some experience with devices, products and ideas allegedly intended to enhance or improve�� the sex life of the��� er���. more experienced couple. We have met with somewhat mixed results��� and, of course, a few fatalities amongst our collection of marmosets. However, not to be disheartened, and in the hope of blagging a few more freebies we again set out to explore some of the more recondite fringes of this area of human endeavour.

Once we bought a few more batteries in, of course.

Many women are familiar, if not on intimate terms, these days with the various devices available for their personal relief. Many of which, due to advances in technology are now often far more reliable than the male of the species.

Many too will be familiar with the recent case of Mathilda Mellowthighs and her rampant rabbits. Especially when the farmer brought his case against her for letting her rabbits loose in one of his fields and seriously perturbing his sheep flock.

Not only that, some recent confusion in the online ordering system recently meant several eager women were each left with a brace of mute swans instead of the devices they���d ordered from a sex toy website. The matter would have mainly gone unremarked as it occurred during the busy pre-Christmas shopping rush. Unfortunately, though, one of the women had her arm broken by an irate swan when she tried to insert the batteries.

In addition, serious harm was averted by swift action on the part of the bomb squad when malicious hackers diverted the orders of several lonely male online shoppers, eager to purchase the latest in blow up dolls. The hackers redirected the orders to a secret terrorist quartermaster website. If it weren’t for that swift action by the bomb squad, then several single-occupancy flats and several other such dwellings could have been destroyed in the subsequent explosions.

As one bomb-squad officer said later, ���it is always wise to check the small print when ordering anything that claims it can be blown up in the product description. Especially so in today���s climate of terrorist extremism���.

Consequently, the wife and I have been somewhat more cautious about our online sexual aid shopping of late. Especially when our last order for some erotic restraints led to us to being kept captive on an unmapped tropical island by the American security service. At least until we admitted complicity in several unsolved terrorist acts. These included the assassination attempt on George Bush Senior by the use of exploding broccoli. Along with a recent attempt by a terrorist cell linked to a militant Oxford Dictionary worshipping terrorist cell to force the entire United States to start spelling things properly.

We have seriously considered, after these mishaps, curtailing altogether, or at least reducing, our explorations of the modern technological advances in the field of sexual enhancement. But in the end, we decided we should continue, at least until the UK TV channels start putting some decent programmes on again.

 

The UK���s Leading Chat Show Host

Bikechain Diskpartition is probably the UK���s leading exponent of the art of the chat show. Initially, Diskpartition became famous for his starring role as a mute tree-stump in one of Beckett���s least interesting stage plays. Diskpartition puts his uncanny success at being a chat show host to what he learnt during that play���s 27-year run at the Busstop, Cleethorpes. ���Basically,��� he said, in a recent interview, ���it is all about learning how to shut up.���

���After all,��� he went on to say later in the interview, ���the whole point of a chat show is for the guests to flog their stuff. It is nothing more than a sort of extended advert. So you have to give the guest time to flog their latest wares. Otherwise, they just won���t turn up again. Then, neither will the TV audience. Without those viewing figures, you will soon find yourself out of a job, trying to peddle your own ghost-written memoirs around the very same chat show circuit.���

Still inexplicably popular, after all these decades, it seems now that the chat show will never go away. This is why a need breed of entertainment writers have emerged to serve the chat show circuit. Their primary function is to come up with the several humorous anecdotes each celebrity guest needs when they have to hawk their latest wares around the chat show circuit. These writers specialise in the self-deprecating humorous anecdotes that audience research has shown goes down well with chat show viewers. Such anecdotes make the celebrity uttering them seem like an almost normal human being. And nothing like the self-obsessed narcissistic semi-psychotics that most stars almost inevitably become from having to perform their media personality for far too many hours every day.

As one of this new breed of anecdote writers recently said, ���most of these celebrities on chat shows are actors, often either in show business or politics. So playing a role, pretending, comes naturally to them. Give them the lines and they can deliver them, usually in that gentle self-mocking way that research shows goes down well with the TV viewers. However, some of them are pop and rock stars. The pop stars are usually from an acting background or have been to stage school so they know how to deliver lines and can take direction.���

���However,��� he went on to say, ���the real problem lies with the old school rock stars. To them and their audiences authenticity was always essential. So they are so used to faking it that, many of them cannot deliver the lines you give them. Fortunately, though those that are still alive are so addled by drink and drugs. So their incompetence at even producing a short anecdote or even a self-deprecating one-liner response or apparently off-the-cuff spontaneous remark often collapses into incoherence. It can often seem endearing to an audience lost in misty rosy-eyed nostalgia for a youth they pretend to have experienced. Even though at the time they were stuck in their teenage bedroom studying for exams and listening to Abba.���

Still, though, with his show now in its twenty-fifth year, Bikechain Diskpartition still dominates the late-night chat show slot on UK television. Consequently, it looks as though the chat show format will continue for as long as the audiences enjoy its own very special brand of fake authenticity.

 

Flotsam

When I first saw it, I couldn���t make out what it was. As I drew closer, I could see it was a heap of material. I thought it could be a bundle of cloth dropped off some ship, either on purpose or by accident, and the tides, the currents, had washed it up here on my beach.

Much like I washed up here, three years ago.

Things do wash up on the beach occasionally. Back when I first washed up here myself, I used to come down to the beach every day. I wanted to to see if something had washed up, or to see if there was a ship on the horizon, coming to rescue me.

These days I don���t bother that often. That is mostly because day after day of nothing tends to get wearying, depressing. What���s worse, though, is when something washes up on the shore that reminds me of my life back before I ended up here. It can be anything: a packet, can or bottle with some familiar logo. Even if it was something I never liked, like Coke Cola, the nostalgia is nearly unbearable.

At first, I expected rescue quite quickly. I presumed the world must know, even if most do not care, that the plane had gone down. As time passed, I grew more and more certain they���d presumed everyone must have died in the crash. After all, I was rather surprised that I���d somehow survived myself.

I have no idea it happened, there were the minutes of panic. Then the seconds of sheer terror as the plane fell out of the sky���.

The next thing I knew, I was here, on the beach, coughing seawater and sand out of my lungs as I inched my way up the beach and out of the sea.

I arrived at the bundle of clothes and saw it had hair. Then I saw it had skin, arms and legs. It was a woman. I thought I���d have to drag the poor drowned thing up to the tree line and dig a grave for her. I knew that if I had died in that plane crash and my body had washed up at the feet of someone, even if that someone was a castaway alone on a desert island, I���d want them to do the right thing.

Then she coughed and moaned. I saw her hand reach out to clutch at the dry land as mine had done all those lonely days ago.

I reached down and took her hand in mine as her swollen eyelids flickered open.

���Am I safe?��� Her lips were cracked and broken, but I could make out the words as she croaked them.

I nodded, unable to remember how to speak for a moment��� then I smiled. ���Yes, yes you are safe,��� I lied.

 

Sexuality and Maturity

She approached me and made a somewhat improper suggestion concerning the peach and marmoset yogurt in her hand. Of course, those of us who have been around for a while tend to understand these things a little better than the younger, less experienced, person. Consequently, I was not as perturbed by the experience as I would have been were I still a callow unbearded youth.

Therefore, when she made the suggestion, I did not flee for the hills, or more likely these days, machine a post on a social network, with a selfie of me clutching my favourite yoghurt-eating spoon. Instead, I invited her around to my place. There I could offer her the choice of several yogurt spoons and a comfortable place to recline as the time of full on yoghurt-based intimacy drew us ever closer to each other.

Of course, once the lights dimmed, I put on the suitable music. Then I made my way back to where she was now reclining in a provocative manner with the yoghurt poised and ready for our mutual spooning. I remembered the yoghurt restraints left her by a previous lady of my acquaintance. So I hurried off across the now darkened room to the sex utensil drawer in the sideboard, and, of course, fell over the cat.

I don���t know if you���ve ever tried cleaning yogurt off a cat while underdressed and in a darkened room.

Well, if there is a better way of killing the aura of romance, incipient heightened sexual adventure and experimentation, then I can���t think of a one. That includes, by the way, the incident with the policewoman, the traffic bollard and the fairy lights last January.

Anyway, as I said, once you get to a more mature cast of mind, such things are less shocking or outrageous than they would appear to one of younger years. However, she was not overly impressed by my cool and laid back attitude to the tragic loss of the majority of the yoghurt. Nor was the very annoyed cat that left only the hollow echo of a rattling cat flap as it fled the scene. No doubt to post a picture of itself and the indignity it had suffered on one of those websites entirely devoted to the suffering and indignities�� the human race pour down upon the noble feline race.

Anyway, she pooh-poohed my suggestion of replacing the yoghurt with crumpets, which were the only erotic foodstuff I had left in the house at the time, apart from the kiwi fruit, of course. As she so haughtily said as she shrugged on her coat in a huff and left. ���Kiwi fruit and crumpets? What kind of girl do you take me for, you pervert?���

Still, once she was gone, I did discover a couple of Quality Street left over from two Christmases ago in the back of the sex utensil drawer. So my evening was not entirely wasted, if you know what I mean.