David Hadley's Blog, page 74

Free Kindle Novel: Juggling Balls

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Juggling Balls available here (UK) or here (US)

A laugh out loud science fiction comedy in the style of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf.

Martin Laws hates mysteries.

So why has someone sent him a bag of juggling balls?

Why has he no memory of buying a new computer?

Why has that new computer decided Martin needs to go shopping?

Why does a hairstylist he’s never met before keep saluting him?

Most of all, why are so many Elvis impersonators trying to kill him?

Juggling Balls – a science fiction comedy featuring time travel, mind control implants and a future religion that claims an Elvis Presley clone as its saviour.

Oh, and an interplanetary terraced house.

��Free for the next Five days

Juggling Balls available here (UK) or here (US)

Extract:

It was a boiler room. Dirty, oily, dark and smelly. Martin looked up at the wall. A series of crude hand-drawn arrows on plain paper pointed towards the opposite end of the boiler room. He looked at his watch; he was late. He shrugged and began walking, parallel to the wall.

���Jus��� hold it right there, boy!��� The man stepped out from the gloomy shadows. He struck a martial arts pose, his hands weaving in front of his face as though he was miming walking through dense cobwebs. The rhinestone-encrusted white jump suit seemed utterly out of place in the dark, damp, boiler room.

���Er��� yes. Can I help you?��� Even Martin thought his comment sounded stupid and, possibly, redundant. He was relieved it was too dark in the boiler room for the other man to see him blushing.

���What?��� The walking through cobwebs mime halted for a moment. The man advanced towards Martin threateningly. ���This is the end of the line for you, boy, If you were looking for trouble you���ve come to the right place.���

���Well, actually, no. I���m not actually looking for trouble at all.��� Martin stepped backwards for each step the other man advanced. He knew soon, after a few more steps he would be against the wall, or – just maybe – the door. ���I was looking for Professor Stewart. Is that you?���

���No. Say your prayers, boy!���

���I feel I should warn you,��� Martin said ���I���m a black belt in unarmed cowardice.���

���Shut up boy, and prepare to die like a man.���

���That���s just it���.��� Martin could feel the wall behind him. Carefully he eased his hands along behind his back, searching for the door. ���Due to my extensive training in the secret black martial arts of cowardice, I have no choice but to whimper, plead and cry. To an obviously macho man like you it would be a severe disappointment, maybe even embarrassment. Killing me would bring you no pleasure at all. I���m just not worth it.��� Unless the door was made of brick, he had miscalculated. Martin backed into the wall and, as it didn���t magically dissolve to let him pass through, slowly slid down it. The jump-suited man towered over him, glaring down at Martin as he raised his hand.

���Just out of interest, why do you want to kill me anyway?���

���Don���t try that with me, boy. You know why.���

���Well, actually, I don���t.��� Martin glanced up, then wished he hadn���t. The deadly looking hands loomed over him. He ducked down and covered his head with his arms.

���Aaiiieee – ugh!���

As far as Martin was aware, it was not the usual cry used by deadly karate killers, and he didn���t seem to be dead, either. He peered through his arms. There was no one there. Gingerly, he lowered his arms and looked around.

���Sir! Sir? Are you all right, sir?���

���Mandy?���

���Yes, sir.���

Martin looked up. He had seen outfits like that before, but only in a certain type of magazine. Even in the gloom of the boiler room the black leather, what little of it there was, shone. Mandy was trying to push something back into her thigh-length leather boot.

���Mandy?���

���Sir?���

���Is that a��� a vibrator?���

���No, sir!���

���Are you sure? It looks like one to me.���

���No sir, it is self-defence unit 0012KZ.���

���Can I have a look at it then?���

���No, not at the moment sir. We need to get out of here and get you to Professor Stewart���s room.��� She took a long brown thing from inside the top of her other boot. Martin relaxed when he realised what it was. Mandy lit the cigar and took a deep drag on it.

���Right. But what about him?��� Martin gestured towards the inert form in the white jump suit.

Mandy knelt down beside the inert man with a creak of leather and felt for a pulse in his neck. ���Elvis has left the building.��� She blew cigar smoke in the face of the corpse and stood up.

���He��� he���s dead?���

���Yes.���

It was the first time Martin had ever seen a dead body. A real live dead person, as it were. ���You killed him��� with a vibrator?���

���It���s not a���. He was trying to kill you sir.���

���I know, but���.��� Martin looked around the boiler room, what he could see of it in the gloom. ���I was on my way to Professor Stewart. These signs���.���

���The signs were put there by him.��� Mandy kicked the lifeless body at her feet.

Martin thought about asking her to show a little more respect for the dead. Then he realised the body could have been him. ���What��� what shall we do now then, Mandy?���

���We could have sex, sir.��� Mandy lowered the zip on the front of her leather costume, which to Martin���s eye was quite low enough as it was.

���We could��� what?���

Mandy smiled and turned to the door. ���It was a joke sir. On the training course, they suggested a joke could help defuse a tense situation, so I thought I���d try it. Did it work sir?���

���No, it fucking well did not.���

��Free for the next Five days

Juggling Balls available here (UK) or here (US)

Underarm Leek Defenestration

Spasmodic Weaseltorque is probably the world���s leading underarm leek defenistrator. Although still unrecognised as a full Olympic sport, underarm leek defenestration is currently taking the sporting world by storm. Sometimes as many as seven people each week download the YouTube video of the latest matches, sometimes as soon as several months after the most recent game.

Now, with nearly three national teams in preparation, there is talk of the Underarm Leek Defenestration World Cup taking over from football as the world���s number one sport. Perhaps even, in time, it could take over from Mr Darcy Bothering as the world���s most popular spectator sport.

However, despite having crowds at the live matches sometimes as high as in the tens, some critics have claimed that underarm leek defenestration lacks the excitement and tactical finesse of more complicated sports. For example, other tactically involved games such as standing around in a field for no discernible reason or even Premier Division Pottering About.

However, fans of the sport point out that the recent Cup semi-final between Cardigan Troubadours ��� Weaseltorque���s team ��� and the Grimsby Skypilots was a great match. It was classed as one of the tensest, strategic and tactically astute matches in the game���s history. At least since the legendary 45 – 49 points match between the Aylesbury Trollopbotherers and the Droitwich Catamites. That game took place at the very beginning of the original sport, back in 1896. Then only two years after the formation of the underarm leek defenestration association.

However, last Christmas saw the international arrival of the sport when Electronic Bodgeup released the first of their new yearly-franchised underarm leek defenestration video games. The release of the game became an international media event when TV crews and other media organisations discovered queues of nearly some people outside the shops selling it. Sometimes these queues formed almost five minutes before those shops opened. Those fans all eager to get their hands on a copy of the game, or at least see if the new Call of Gardening game was out yet.

Many in the sport, especially those involved in the nascent women���s league, think that the success of the sport lies in the embrace of new technology. Most fans believe there is a need for a digitised scoring system that makes the result of matches less dependent on the fickleness of the umpire���s rulings. Many also think it also needs a more consistent set of decisions from the linesmen standing on the pitch outside of the defenestration window.

Still, those of us who have grown to love the sport, despite the staunch opposition from the Welsh Anti-Leek Cruelty League, feel that this is just the beginning. With star players of Weaseltorque���s ability, charisma, and well-defined lunchbox when dressed in his match lycra, it is only a matter of time before underarm leek defenestration becomes the world���s new leading sport.

 

Domestic Wildlife In The UK

Spagboll Toastenquirer is, of course, UK TV���s leading domestic terrain naturalist. As we all know, the local habitat of the average British person has changed so much over recent decades. Consequently, it became apparent to the executives at the television channels that there was a way to generate money-spinning foreign sales and DVD boxed sets��� document the changing nature of the UK���s domestic households. Furthermore, they believed they could – in a bold and innovative way – that would win TV awards��� change the way people looked at their own lives and houses.

Of course, such a programme would also combine many lucrative bold and original TV genres into one new genre, thus saving a great deal of money. However, the executives believed it would still check off a large number of boxes once the time for the TV licence-fee renewal discussions came around again.

Therefore, TV executives came up with a concept that envisaged a nature programme combined with the domestic genres such as house improvement and cooking. A new TV concept that would combine all those genres, as well as history, science and almost everything else they could think of into the one programme. Thus, they could employ the most telegenic of their many presenters to front the programme without the need for signing any new contracts.

Toastenquirer first came to prominence, as it were, for her use of well-filled tight t-shirts in gardening programmes. The low-cut design she favoured managed to boost audience figures for what had become a rather moribund genre. Especially so when each episode involved a great many close-up shots of Toastenquirer bending down directly in front of the camera to bed her seedlings.

The pilot programme of Domestic Naturalist featured Toastenquirer exploring the kitchen of an ordinary suburban semi-detached house. The cameras followed Toastenquirer discovering such natural wonders of the domestic kitchen as the toaster, the rolling pin and ��� in a memorable sequence ��� a spatula. Of course, for many modern Britons the kitchen is a place where takeaways are warmed up in the microwave. So this wealth of domestic natural history was a real eye-opener for many viewers, especially when Toastenquirer did what she did with the spatula and a couple of freshly-made pancakes. Apparently, that night as soon as the show was finished, NHS casualty departments reported a surge in male wrist injuries, which they directly attributed to the sensually erotic way Toastenquirer tossed her pancakes. Not only that, the resultant activity under her t-shirt caused many viewers to immediately order the DVD boxset of the series before the pilot had even finished broadcasting.

This was Toastenquirer���s fame assured and another 12 series of Toastenquirer – Domestic Naturalist ��� as it was now called ��� were commissioned as soon as the pilot had aired.

 

What this City Used to Be

Something���.

There was movement out there. Something flickered past one of the windows, or rather one of the holes where the windows use to be.

It had been a long time since there had been any windows. Only us older ones remembered when those holes in the walls had glass in them. Back then, the winter winds didn���t howl through the holes, like the souls of all those who once filled what this city used to be with all the complexities of human life.

These days, though, there are not that many of us old ones left. Now each year that passes, the memory of what this city used to be fades and dies.

To many of the younger ones the city is just a story us old ones tell each other around the fires. To them, the city is no different to the rivers, the forests, the hills, the mountains and the valleys. Just more of the landscape they live in and try to survive through. To them, the buildings, what remains of them, are like the hills, mountains and valleys of the lands that used to lie outside the city. The roads too are no different from the rivers and streams to them; all of it seems natural and part of the world they live in.

And so do the creatures too.

We tell the stories of the old world. How it used to be, in the time before they came. To the young ones it seems like just another story told around the fire to keep the dark away.

But the creatures came, some say from the stars and some say from a world lying parallel to this one. Some even insist that the creatures were an invention created by us, some sort of being, a super-soldier or something meant to win all wars.

No-one really knows for sure, and perhaps all of those that did know are long gone. All that remains now is we few survivors, haunting the ruins of the cities like the ghosts of the civilisation that used to be���.

There are the creatures too��� them. The creatures who haunt our nights, picking us off, one by one by one, in the ruins of what use to be our world.

Soon, we know there will be none of us left, unless we can find a way to fight back. We need to take our world back from those creatures that stole in from us. Then, perhaps, one day these cities will rise again and no longer be these ruined memories of what they used to be.

 

Mouse On The Roof

We were up on the roof of her building that night. I say it was her building, but – like me – Mouse didn���t own anything.

���Who do you think owns all this?��� Mouse said to me as we looked out over the roofs of the city. Smoke rose from the chimneys even though it was a warm summer night. There was light behind most of the windows. It was past dark, but not late enough for the city to sleep. That is, if a city ever really sleeps.

I shrugged. Mouse had a habit of asking me these strange questions on matters I���d never thought about before. ���I dunno��� the Emperor?���

From the way Mouse laughed, I thought that must be the wrong answer.

���The emperor rules us, but he doesn���t own much beyond the palace and his riches.���

The palace and his riches���? I thought that was plenty. ���The priests?���

Mouse did not laugh this time. I���d noticed she never laughed when people mentioned the priests, even though she had as much contempt for them as the rest of us who lived out on the streets. ���No, the priests they take a vow of poverty.���

���Do they?���

���Yes, why else do you think they are so wealthy?���

I nodded. No-one wears more expensive clothes than the priests, or eats off gold plates and drinks the finest wines from the clearest crystal glasses as the priests.

���Who then,��� I said. ���The merchants?���

���Ah, now.��� Mouse settled down on the rooftop and pulled off her shirt. The moonlight reflected off her pale skin as she opened her arms for me. ���The merchants own so much, true. But they are not the richest people in the city.���

���Who is the richest, then?��� I said, kissing her neck.

���We are,��� she said.

I stopped kissing and looked into her eyes. ���Do you mean we are the richest because we have each other?���

She laughed and kissed my lips. ���No.���

���What then? We have nothing.��� I gestured around the roof of the building. ���We don���t even have anywhere to live.���

���True,��� Mouse said as her hand unfastened my trousers.

I gasped at her grip as she pulled me towards her as she rolled on her back.

She sighed as I entered her.

���Are we the richest because we have this?��� I emphasised my point with a thrust that made her catch her breath.

���No,��� she said.

I gave up. ���What then?���

���We are the richest because we are the best thieves in the city.���

���And?���

���So, it all belongs to us already,��� she laughed. ���We just haven���t got around to collecting it all yet.��� She wrapped her arms and legs around me and pulled me as close as lovers can ever get.

 

Hollywood Celebrity Scandal – Latest

Celebrity watchers were aghast last week when the first of several tabloid front pages claimed to have exclusive footage of some ��� then unidentified – celebrity ���sunning themselves��� at an exclusive Caribbean holiday destination. The tabloid warned its readers of the shock the paper had in store for them on the seventeen pages it had devoted to its Earth ���Shaking Exclusive. There, in�� several pictures spread across those seventeen pages, it showed the�� celebrity�� – later revealed to be none other than Pumpkin Dropincentre herself – actually cutting her own toenails.

Of course, as soon as the pictures were published Farcebook and the Twatosphere went mad with���� shocked and outraged fans of Dropincentre responding to the story. All expressing their outrage, shock and trauma at the sight of their heroine engaged in such a mundane task.

���My faith in Hollywood, celebrity and the star system is in tatters,��� one anguished Dropincentre fan posted on her Farcebook status. ���I will never look at the world in the same way again.���

Several Dropincentre fan clubs also reported that many members had ceremonially burned their membership cards, returned signed photographs of the star. In several reported cases, fans had tattoos of the film star removed from their bodies. Some of which were in very intimate places, often resulting in a great deal of pain for the fans concerned.

Hoping to ride out the storm, Dropincentre���s bodyguards immediately moved her to a secure location, for her own safety. Her security staff all feared that the gathering of outraged fans could, as some fans had threatened, burn down the holiday resort with Dropincentre still inside it.

However, fearing another night of disorder after the two nights of riots sparked by the incident, the US president went on prime time TV. He personally begged Dropincentre to appear before her ���deeply traumatised fans��� and explain how something this outrageous could happen to one of the world���s greatest stars.

Consequently, three days later, a very contrite and haggard���looking Dropincentre herself appeared in the world���s media. She apologised profusely for letting her fans down, tarnishing the image and reputation of Hollywood and the film industry and ���most of all, letting myself down.���

Later, after the public apology, her PA, manager and agent called a joint press conference where they again apologised for Pumpkin���s unthinking act for ���desecrating the whole celebrity system���. They promised that she would be seeking counselling for her unfortunate addiction to personal grooming. They also promised she would donate a substantial percentage of her income from her next seven films to various fashionable deserving charities.

As Dropincentre���s manager said, ���we all hope this draws a line under this tragedy, and we hope never to see anything as catastrophic again. We have all learnt lesson from this and hope the general public feel they can ��� in time ��� forgive all of us for this terrible act.���

However, only time will tell if the fickle public will once again take Pumpkin Dropincentre back into their hearts after this most heinous betrayal of their trust and devotion.

 

Only Distances

Only Distances

In the heavens, we see only distance

Not the fates of lovers or of nations

Not allowing ourselves to be taken

Close to any saving grace this season.

Only watching each bright star to notice

Where it falls into a final darkness

Far beyond the edge of everything else

We could never touch and hardly can see.

Stars do not perform their dances for us

Or to give us signs and portents telling

What to seek or how we should behave now.

They are there and we are here and only

Distance connects us with light each threading

Out from there to here and everywhere else.

Over there is as significant as

Over here. No place can overshadow

Any other place the light still touches.

 

Only The Heat And Dust

The distances danced in the heat. We watched from the shadows. It was too hot to be out there, during the hottest hours of the day. But there was something moving out there, we could see it.

Shading her eyes as she watched, Wendy turned to me before letting her hand drop. I did not look at her; I kept watching the distance and the shimmering shapes. I felt Wendy���s turn and heard the question she didn���t ask.

I nodded and she left my side.

Wendy was back in less than a minute. She handed the rifle to me while she checked the shotgun was loaded and ready, as it should be.

I checked the rifle, blowing dust off the lens covers on the sight. I didn���t want any of that dust on the lenses and the dust gets everywhere, no matter what.

Sometimes it seems that the only things we have too much of these days is the heat and the dust.

I peered through the sights at the shimmering distance. The shapes leapt into view. There were figures staggering in the heat, two or three of them. I waited for the shapes to resolve a little more.

���Three of them,��� I spoke for the first time. I felt Wendy nodding next to me as she counted her shells out, ready for reloading.

I scanned the horizon slowly. ���That���s all of them.��� I swung back to the shapes shimmering in the distance. In the meantime, one of them had fallen to the ground. A wave of dust billowed up as the fallen figure tumbled and rolled down the side of the dune.

���A man, a woman and another one that could be a child,��� I said.

Wendy���s hand hesitated over her shells. ���A child?���

I nodded. My hand reached for hers. I could feel a layer of the gritty dust on her skin.

We looked at each other for a moment. Then I took a deep breath and lowered my eye to the sight. The woman fell to her knees by the man who���d fallen down the dune. From the way he was lying, it looked unlikely he���d get up ever again. The woman knelt by his side, her face raised to the sky. I could just hear her scream on the breeze. On the dune above her, the child stood alone and lost; a young girl who had no idea why the world had turned against us all like this.

I felt Wendy looking at me again.

���All right,��� I said, lowering the rifle. I took my hat, grabbed a couple of water bottles and we set out together into the heat. Both ready to save the woman and the girl from what this world has become.

 

The UK���s Leading Contemporary TV Actress

Pulchritude Kneetrembler is probably the UK���s leading contemporary TV actress. Famous for her roles in several of the UK���s leading TV shows of the last few decades, she has gone on to become one of the most in-demand voice-over advertising artists. She has also opened several hundred supermarkets and other retail emporiums, often to crowds numbering in the thousands.

Kneetrembler got her big break at the age of just seventeen, when she first appeared in the short-lived ITV soap opera set in a sweet pickle factory production line. Pickled was supposed to offer an insight into ordinary working lives. However, since most of the target audience for the programme were themselves out at work when the programme was broadcast, it failed to be re-commissioned for a second series.

Then, after an award-winning appearance as a pair of rather well-manicured hands in a famous washing-up liquid advertisement, Kneetrembler went on to achieve fame and fortune as a Bond girl. However, since Bond that year was played ��� in one of the worst pieces of cinematic miscasting – ��by Frankie Howerd, Kneetrembler did not get the recognition that her sterling work in the role deserved. Although, since then, several critics have pointed out that although, she did not have a speaking part; no-one throughout the history of cinema has filled a bikini to such devastating effect. Even Frankie Howerd himself was more than impressed and was very influential later offered her a role as a slave girl in the film version of Up Pompeii.

However, by then Kneetrembler was already working for the Royal Shakespeare Company for a season at their Stratford upon Avon theatre. Although,�� most of the time she was working in the box office, sometimes she got a starring role selling refreshments and ice creams during the intervals.

Whilst she was working at the RSC, she was talent-spotted by a group of BBC executives on an all-expenses paid fact-finding mission. They hoped to discover just who this Shakespeare bloke was and if he could be persuaded to write a soap opera or a detective series for the BBC.

The BBC at the time was looking for a well-established actress to provide essential corpses for their various detective dramas, hospital soaps and as audience members for Question Time. However, Kneetrembler proved too interesting for Question Time and she had to settle for being an ���ordinary member of the public��� for the BBC News department. She had to be on call for when it pretended to ���go live��� to TV News reporters who were actually in a blue screen room just down the corridor. A ruse perpetuated by the powerful TV reporters��� union who felt its members were too important ��� at least in their own minds ��� to have to venture outside into a world very few of them believed existed.

After this, Kneetrembler, was now�� in her late sixties. Thus, she was too old to even play a convincing teenager, so she was signed to play the Feisty Dowager��� in their long running�� saga of working-class family life Down t���Pit by the BBC. A story of how one aristocratic family of miners survived during the chaos of the Miner���s strike and their noble attempt to save the brave leader Arthur Scargill from assassination by the evil Thatcher���s fascist stormtroopers. A role which has bought Kneetrembler several awards, and the promise of a return to Hollywood in the near future, providing the bikini still fits her.

 

Weapons Of War

 

As we all know, several European nations in the nineteenth century invented their various ���folk��� musics as a weapon of war. After all, most of them had seen how the British Highland regiments had used the bagpipes to such fearsome effect in earlier wars of colonial expansion. Consequently, several European countries with imperial ambitions went about developing offensive folk music capabilities of their own, up to and including the use of the accordion by Germany���s highly efficient stormtroopers.

Traditional folk instruments were highly effective in the wars against poorly armed and tactically na��ve native warriors. Even the mere sight of the traditional instruments being brought into the front lines by the European armies was enough for the warrior chiefs to quickly order their men to lay down their spears. As one tribal chief once said to a Victorian newspaper reporter, ���I���ve seen what the accordion can do to lightly armed warriors; no matter how bravely they fight.���

Of course, WWI changed so much about warfare, and after it was over many called for a ban on the use of folk music and traditional instruments on the battlefield. However, deep in the heart of their mandolin laboratories the pre-WWII allies as well as the Axis powers were working on even more powerful instruments of destruction.

Britain achieved an early lead in the development of radar that also helped with the invention of far more powerful battlefield instruments. In particular, these developments in electronics enabled British Soldiers ��� for the first time ��� to use amplified instruments on the front line.

Although, there was then a great moral debate about whether countries should use amplified folk instruments in warfare. For example, the great philosopher Bertrand Russell claimed the amplified instruments were a step too far towards barbarism and unnecessary cruelty. Especially, he declared, when the BBC began broadcasting Folk Music Specials over the airwaves towards occupied Europe and deep into the heart of Germany itself.

The Germans, despite their deprivations as the war entered its final stages, responded with one of Hitler���s most terrifying secret weapons. The Germans subjected the British Isles to hour upon hour of uninterrupted accordion music night after night. Several daring raids by the RAF at night and the US Air Force during the day eventually halted it. These attacks against heavily defended targets deep in the heart of Germany itself ended this last act of terror against the British population by destroying Germany���s massive wartime accordion production.

However, despite many attempts to outlaw the use of offensive folk music since the end of WWII, there are still many secret facilities, in several countries, where the development of these instruments of war continues.

All people can do is hope that these fearsome instruments are never again unleashed in anger against innocent populations.