Marc Nash's Blog, page 34

Pinboard Wizard - Friday Flash

We were milling aimlessly on the cork surface, just like the students outside on the green, only our frisbees capped our crowns. The great migration started inconspicuously when one of our number was plucked and removed to the furthest end of the frame pinning a green handwritten note. Gradually more and more of us followed, with typed, pictured, poorly Xeroxed notices and fliers. But it wasn’t for us to judge what we played host to. We only had to pinion them fast in place.
We anchored love affairs and lost items being returned to their owners. We oversaw money making enterprises and charitable deeds both. We silently monitored exchanges both fair and lopsided. We were responsible for people coming together to protest and take action. We rolled out a red cork carpet to new bands and poetry societies. All human wants hopes and offers were pinned on us. 
And some of us suffered for our staunch superintendence. There were squabbles, where some of us were snatched from their current supervision and moved to double up on a piece of paper with a fellow pin. Leaving the pillaged paper to float down to the ground all forsaken. Other brother pins were covered up as a new flyer was insolently just pinned up over their entire handbill, the stud pushing through its impression in the new notice but remaining all forlorn. Some pins lost their caps. Others had their ramrod spines bent and became invalided from service. Chunks of corkboard eroded, making our bailiwick shrink and huddling us closer together and stirring up more agitation accordingly. 

But eventually there were fewer and fewer notices pinned by and to us. The existing ones were never refreshed, but allowed to turn yellow and crumple and curl at their edges. The dust was no longer swept from the wooden frame of the corkboard which continued to seep its fibre on to the floor. We no longer had audiences stood in front of us admiring our pinnywork as they read. Instead the students walked by with their noses glued to tablets and phones advertising their wares. Nobody played frisbee out on the college green anymore either. 

Wings - Flash Fiction

He jacked the spike into the scorched blisters around his groin and depressed the stopper. As the liquid nectar palpated his arteries and shuttered his eyes, wings sputtered out from his back. Some loose feathers drifted haltingly to the ground in their wake. His wings gaped open feebly, revealing gaps in the plumage. He flopped on to his belly and cumbersomely drew his battered wings to enfold himself. The drug trickling through his tapered veins was taking him from butterfly back through to cocoon. When he first shot up, his thick, proud wings enabled him to soar above the treetops. Then he spanned mountains and bent the wind to the will of his graceful flapping. But now he could barely support the weight of his ragged feathers. They kept him pressed to the ground rather than elevating him above the clouds. When he used to glide, there was no sound at all. Yet now there was the agitated fluttering of the breeze ruffling through his denuded feathers. Or maybe it was the sound of his teeth chattering. His wings no longer prevented him feeling chilled to the bone as the chemical spur bluntedly vacated his blood. More larval grub now than cocoon even. He heard the sound of flies’ wings as they frolicked within his weeping sores. As the drug took its leave of him, his ears were filled with a loud whooshing. More wings, the percussion of devils thrashing their leathery appendages with delirious anticipation. While those angels glumly cupped their chins in their hands and silently retracted their own gossamer distentions.

An Ideal Woman - flash tale

The ninety foot billboarding inclining into her sheer stockinged leg. The footage of the catwalk model’s sway with her face eclipsed by popping flashbulbs. My French teacher’s arms shucking free of their sleeves when she pointed up to the blackboard. The breast-feeding neighbour through her kitchen window. The breast-feeding Madonna on a small canvas. My first love, teeth in braces. The dental hygienist in her billowing white coat as she filled my mouth with a sucking tube. The Hollywood actress on the recliner baring her pierced navel, be it taken from celluloid or a Pap shot. My mother. That contact sheet found on the pavement of woman unknown. The soft-porn magazine centrefold but one. That girl leaning against the wall at some party with utter disdain plastered across her face, echoed by the stance of her body. That singer, no not the obvious global one, the backing singer clicking her fingers as she accompanied her own rosy cheeked harmonies. And the violinist from when my favourite noise band decided to go all arty, the instrument cradled between chin and collarbone. That Jehovah’s Witness with the bluest eyes for all her buttoned-up severity. The waitress’s peachy arse and the pencil pragmatically threaded through her perm. The Lithuanian Silver medallist in her aerodynamic swimsuit. The Indian dancer with the bells around her dainty ankles and the perfect poise on one leg, hands steepling just above her head. The supermarket cashier with the huge hoop earrings that louchely jiggled as she louchely chewed gum. The woman on the side of the bus advertising god knows what but staring me down goadingly. That one call girl’s calling card displayed among impossible hundreds on the walls of the phonebox. The image of the missing girl on the Crimewatch show. These were my Frankenstein’s Monster segments of flesh which I disinterred from my erotic graveyard and knitted together into the impossible woman of desire, whom of course I could never come across. 

A Brief Meditation On Time - Drabble

Time gathered and heaped behind glass. Gravity was pressing down on the pile, driving the future  through the tapered present. Tiny grains of now. I try and clinch one in my sight, but it is too swift. Rapidly  supplanted  by another impelled from above. And then another. I can’t fix on any of these fleeting instants as they drop on to the mound of the past beneath. Whereupon they become swallowed and buried and I spend a lifetime trying to disinter any one lost moment. The future chamber is empty. Inverting  the hourglass I recommence the ungraspable passage of time.

The Eyes Have it - 10 songs about the eyes

He gazes into her eyes and she into his and they burst into rapturous song about each other. Or something like that anyway...

Here's 10 songs extolling the eyes, or otherwise.


1) "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"
I first heard this original version on the soundtrack for Dennis Potter's TV drama "Pennies From Heaven" and although Big Band music isn't really my thing, I bought the soundtrack. There's something really fragile about this version.



2) "A Pair Of Brown Eyes" - The Pogues
When the Pogues first happened along, everyone thought they were just Plastic Paddies from the local pub, but in time Shane MacGowan showed what a fabulous songwriter he was. This song may have signalled the public recognition of that fact.



3) "Dry Your Eyes" - The Streets
Cheeky Brummie chappy Mick Skinner pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of writing a song about heartbreak and even tries singing it rather than his usual rap patter. Well the chorus at least.



4) "Gypsy Eyes" - Jimi Hendrix

How good is this? Nothing more to say really.



5) "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" - The Adverts
Probably the most disconcerting song in this list, a mental patient projects himself into looking through the eyes of death row inmate Gary Gilmore as he is strapped in for his execution. Wonderful stuff.



6) "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" - Crystal Gayle
As with Big Band music, I really don't go for Country & western, but this is saved by not having that Southern twang that to me always seems to undermine any sincerity or intensity. This was a song from my childhood that always seemed to be on the radio, but I never owned it.



7) "She's Got Dickie Davies' Eyes" - Half Man Half Biscuit
Oh those comedy punsters with their then pop cultural references. if you didn't know, Dickie Davis was a TV sports presenter, with a bouffant, two-toned hair style that seemed to put him a world apart from the oafs and lumps he was fronting live coverage of. This is spoofing the Kim Carnes song "She's Got Bette Davis' Eyes". Ah simpler times...



8) "H Eyes" - The Ruts
Malcolm Owen the lead singer died of a heroin overdose. His songs veered from an extolling of the drug, to a total antipathy as here. Sadly missed, though this isn't one of his best creations (for that I suggest you check out "Love In Vain")



9) "Junior's Eyes" - Black Sabbath
Yep, suitably over the top as per usual with the Sab, but just about manages to preserve its dignity without sniggering.



10) "In Your Eyes" - Peter Gabriel
I am so relieved that Gabriel still has a career and Phil Collins doesn't. What the latter did to Genesis was a travesty!



And what do eyes do, or sad eyes anyway? Why, they cry tears of course. Here's a mini chart of songs about crying.

11) "Boys Don't Cry" - The Cure
Proof that The Cure were a pop band before they became a pseudo Goth pop band if you see what I mean. And that they didn't take themselves too seriously as shown by the substitution of lookalike kids for the band members in this vid. Love it.



12) "Cry Me A River" - Julie London
Now this, rather than a C&W singer is more my idea of a chanteuse. Sorry Crystal



13) "So Many Tears" - Tupac Shakur
Not just a thug living a Thug's Life, but there is genuine sentiment in this song. Sounds like az man who knew it was only a question of time before he joined the list of fatalities.



14) "None A Jah's Children No Cry" - Ras Michael & The Sons Of Negus
What a voice! Man I wish I'd been at that concert.



15) "96 Tears" - Question Marks & The Mysterians
Hey I'm a sucker for hammy hammond organ chops

Night Vision - Friday Flash

 






He pressed his eye to the thermal imaging camera’s viewfinder and peered into the distance through the flimsy curtains of the house opposite. Satisfied the optic was correctly appointed, he addressed his laptop monitor. Moving blobs of curdled colour. Contour lines of heat seared by the camera’s penetrating photons and thence picked out in pixels on his screen. Stratified clots pulsing and seething, the iridescent masses of two convulsing human beings.

He knew the outline of one of those forms intimately, yet he couldn't discern it from the other at all. They were too amorphous in their shifting stratified chroma. Hotspots (or cold spots) writhed in the centre of the two bodies. Shading into paler at the peripheries. Ectoplasmic as they squirmed and thrashed. Two bloated worms under his microscope. The heart and viscera eclipsed within the dark shades, the flimsy muscle and tendons hollowed out in the lighter complexions. Her dark heart possessed, it was hard to credit it was actually her in the room there.

Light didn’t code for sex, yet here one ranged through all the blue shades of the spectrum, while the other all the reds. Differing wavelengths, Dopplering away one from the other? Yet the two coagulations of colour were certainly proximate to one another. Where discrete fascicles overlay each other, the blue-red didn’t fuse into green. Each preserved its swirling integrity. A curvilinear puce yin and a teal yang. Or vice versa. Was it possible that she was blue with frigidity towards the man in there? Perhaps he was the one callously aloof towards her, but then his own dander raised as he thought of the monster just using her for his own ends. He returned to refocus the camera lens.

He resumed his gaze at the monitor. The heaving shapes looked like agar cultures in a giant square bed of a petri dish. These two bacteria, heaped twin bacillus cultures. Agglomerating. But not reproducing. It was as if another entity was walking through her body, working through it. Emptying it. Slowly eviscerating her. But then the pith hardened and reformed and grew bigger. A burst of passion perhaps, inflating the dark area. The cold-hotspot. He mustn't let his own emotions saturate their respective tints. Adulterating their complexions which otherwise might be far more complementary. The forms looked pregnant with another inside. Pregnant with each other perhaps? Swelling together. No longer possible even to determine dorsal from anterior. An infant’s shapeless painting. No longer human. The beast with two backs. With a single shot he could rupture those chromatic borders, bleed red into blue into red. Dark into light into crowning dark. 

But what if she had been similarly hued within his own embrace? He throbbing volcanic shades of red, her all ice-cool blue of detachment? A crystal sapphire of flinty indifference towards him. He had to know. He had to find out for himself. He had to get inside that house, pull the man off her and take his place. Then he would return here and consult the colour chart for her answer. For her true colours.

Achey Breaky Purple Heart

Here’s hoping... A lickety-split inspection to ensure I haven’t tucked the back of my dress into my knicks, or anything classy like that. A sharp intake of freshly minted breath. A crisp confirmatory nod bestowed in the direction of my selfhood- 
’My name is...’ That’s all it says on the tag. Precisely that. Dot, dot, dot. (Dash, dash, dash/ dot, dot, dot, having been strangely omitted). No name and no pack drill. Nor have I been awarded the order of the twin purplish hearts that everyone else here seems to sport on their lapel. Where seemingly, some thoughtful soul has limned two interlocking hearts on to the cardboard, (pink tingeing purple as the hues dissociate along its ply). Just in case one should look down at one’s adapted, office-soiled, visitor’s pass and momentarily become fuddled as to where one was.
A carbon life-form dating society. With the emphasis on form. For we, all of us here tonight, are being recycled. A job lot of pre-laminates obviously. The badges I mean. Even though every one in attendance, prays to be bonded and have the past overlaid. First name terms only, rather than those of divorce settlements past. Or no terms at all in my case. For no one on the door had a pen and the point on my eye liner pencil was just too chubby to cut the mustard.
Folded into this sterilised lucky dip, I have been shorn of my cover. In this unsanctified chapel of love, I have been de-christened. All because it was a bit of a rush. At the last minute, some shrinking violet faced with the prospect of being a wallflower, pollarded herself and I, at the head of the reserve list, was grafted on. Pinned and hemlined up. Pitter-patter, pitter-patter. Be still my fluttering heart. Leave that to the eyelashes. Oh well, you know what they say. In for a penny, in for a pound. Never has my stock been so low.
Still, it does present somewhat of a problem, as to how I tender myself to my fellow travelling love contractors. How I dovetail with these hawkers of the heart. The natural icebreaker of having my name stamped and barcoded plainly for all to perceive, is in dry dock hock. Whereas I can see champagne aplenty has been flung at all tonight's other prospective maiden relaunches. Frangible confidence shattered, my bottle long gone. The strangers in this flow do not pass me like ships in the night. They just proceed to give me, with my nebulous flag of inconvenience, a wide berth.
Save for the ketch with the bottle-thick spectacles. He who heaves to, at each and every bobbing prow, has now sidled into my Chanel wake. Pitching so close into my bosom as to leave a vaporous spume on my nameplate, while he tries to focus his magnified sextant. For my part, I am acquainted with the unmagnificent sex of his balding crown. He hoists up his specs so that they crest his forehead, in a myopic attempt to pierce my anonymity. Now even he prepares to cast off, shaking his head foggily, which serves only to bring his glasses scything down on to the bridge of his nose. My escort scuttled before I got out of port.
Scanning the room, I espy hands wrapped around tumblers of cheap, warm bubbly, indexing fingers freed up so as to point at the swirls and loops on each other’s autographed insignia. I can mark them trying out the sound of one another’s handles. Sipping at them with their lips. Ingesting the consonants and swilling the vowels around inside their cheeks. Showering the palate with the blend, of conjoining the name with that of their own. Contemplating whether to imbibe or expectorate the vintage before them. You begin to see my problem. My unwritten invisibility. Seems I am to be the undesignated driver for tonight. As they all give rip to their avid ferment, I am reduced to smoothing a crinkle in my bodice, where the badge’s safety pin has rucked up the chiffon beneath.
Okay then, so I’m thrown back on my own resources. I have to be myself. But who exactly is that? I have no accreditation... No wait. Go with it. Use it to my advantage. Here goes nothing... “I know, these badges! The bubbly in hand is the only indication that this couldn’t be an AA meeting. No, not the breakdown service”. I don’t know though...
That went well I thought. An icebreaker like the one applied to loosen up Leon Trotsky. This perishing no-name badge will be the dea(r)th of me. If first it can cede me any life amongst these lovelorn wraiths. I fluffed my line, for these could not be recovering alcoholics, since they at least are possessed of some spirit. This lot’s more akin to a convention of call-centre operators. ‘Hello, Archie speaking. What may I ask, is the nature of your inquiry?’ Maybe I just imagined I heard that for a chat-up line. Or perhaps they could pass for a group of personnel officers on a motivation course. ‘Well, downsizing one’s ambitions, is an occupational hazard at this stage in life’. If only the stakes weren’t so great. How much more personnel could it get, than those two interlaced hearts, lovingly felt-tipped by some romantically deluded secretary from Cupidity Corp?
Thinking about it, since I was so a late an insertion, had my badge actually been attended to, it would probably have been after the secretary had knocked off for home. In readiness for her evening of pre-packaged ready-meal, Mills and Boon pre-cooked intimacy and a re-corked bottle of Blue Nun. With an imitation carnation in her table vase. No, my heart’s design would indubitably have been coined by the Hostess-Panderer herself. And more than likely it would have resembled a walnut. She’s a busy lady after all. To judge by watching her crossing the room, as she trifles with the most dirigible men here.
Even my posy’s wilted now. It’s not fair. While they’ve all moved on to the getting to know you stage. The apparel beyond the name. The flesh beneath the clothes. Sizing up the genes, imagining the look of mutually engendered babies. They’ve stopped nodding empathic assent to their partner’s recitation of their history. Too distorting of glances slyly thrown towards the calculus of curvature and buffness.

My prospects here have been completely stunted by this one scandalous circumstance. Perhaps I should demand a refund. No, more than likely they’ll stake me another date night instead. And even appropriately sanctioned, I think I’d rather share an evening round the dinner table of their secretary. Swapping overblown notions about love. I’d bring the wine though.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving - Flash Story

JANUARY: To see in the New Year and to prevent her head turning and casting a roving eye, I bought her a heavy choke chain necklace


FEBRUARY: For the designated month of love, I splashed out on pearl drop earrings


MARCH: Easter came early this year as did my beneficence, since her egg was a Fabergé one


APRIL: Ducking inside from a particularly squally Spring shower, I found myself imprisoned in a jewellers and could only secure our freedom through the purchase of a gold (contra-) armband


MAY: For my faerie queen I bought her a filigreed wreath, albeit it more closely approximated a diadem. Actually it was a diadem


JUNE: Flaming June and another coruscation of light refracted off gem facets. This time a diamond encrusted watch. Yet still she was forever late, perhaps getting lost in gazing the diamonds and losing track of time


JULY: To prepare for our Summer travels, she had to get her accessories in order for our evenings out. Several handbags were purchased in different materials while I silently implored there to be no crocodiles or snakes where we were heading for surely we would incense these animal gods by culling their progeny and then flouting the fact


AUGUST: I had anticipated an expensive Caribbean holiday to suffice for outlay this month, but she insisted on a memento of the trip and that meant some expensive pearls which may or may not have been locally sourced. Then there was the 'small' gift from the Duty Free, just to exploit the tax situation on offer, because it would be remiss not to.


SEPTEMBER: I was given a month of for good behaviour. However I was exhorted to make a sizeable donation to her pet charity for pets


OCTOBER: I didn't know she was Jewish, no matter how much she had strayed from that particular faith. They apparently have four different new years and this month saw not only one of them, but the most significant. Even though it was the month of atonement and expiation and a laying bare, so that on the High Holy day itself leather shoes are not permitted as man is not to raise himself above the beast. She purged all her footwear and after the ceremonies were over, we had to go out and restock her wardrobe for an entire array of soles


NOVEMBER: Arrogating as many holidays as humanly possible, we were also marked to honour Thanksgiving and more importantly the start of the headlong rush to shop. I had to show my gratitude with a generous purchase of a bracelet bedecked with precious stones. I was a tad charmless in the store I admit.


DECEMBER: And what did Santa bring her for Christmas? Why an eternity ring of course. A same- again for next year and all years thereafter cast iron platinum plated guarantee. And what did he bring for me? A pair of fur-lined handcuffs.

The Importance Of Story Titles

When you've written a novel, the title is very important. It has to leap out at a potential reader, it ought perhaps also to suggest what the book is about. It represents the first hook, along with the cover design.

But when one is talking about a collection of short stories, then the title of each of the individual stories is released from such a burden. Then the author can think about the title's relationship to the story, whether it adds a layer of meaning, revealing something that isn't perhaps so accessible just from the text itself. Or perhaps it offers a counterpoint that takes the story in a wholly different direction from that seemingly in the text.

One of my favourite films Nick Roeg's "Bad Timing" is a twisting and turning non-linear narrative, which the viewer comes to realise all hinges around the title itself. I love that idea, that everything stems from and ultimately comes back to the starting point of the title.

I've published 4 collections of flash stories, some 128 tales. I went back over them and picked out my favourite ten titles and below explain what I like about them. The common theme is how they integrate with the thrust of the story, but that doesn't mean they all came first before I wrote the story itself. far from it. Some come part way through, many came only after the story was finished. it's quite rare that I have a title and that everything flows from that. But finding a title at the end of the process of writing often comes from a way of sewing it all up in a pleasing way, even if that way offers some echoes that reverberate after the story has ended. See what you think.

1) "Lunar Tic" (from the collection "52FF")
A man is in prison with the electric light on 24 hours a day so he can't distinguish night from day. My spin on werewolfism, as he is afflicted with a mental state where he longs to see the moon for the transformation it enables. The title puns his mental affliction with the catalyst that brings it on.

2) "Cry Baby Bunting" (From the collection "Long Stories Short"
A story about a child being snatched during a street party to celebrate a Royal Wedding. I originally wrote and published this on my blog in real time on the day when such a royal occasion was being celebrated up and down the country, though not in my area. Writing live, the title was "A Royal Weeding", but when I came to turn it into something more honed, the metaphor of bunting features heavily in the story as both celebration and mocking threat, that I knew it had to have a central prominence. Then a dim and distant recollection of the nursery rhyme came to me and it was perfect for the story.

3) "Ur, Um" (from the collection "28 Far Cries")
I think this is perhaps my favourite ever title as it tickles me with its sense of playfulness. It's a literary story about language with a title that seems to represent a total lack of literacy and articulateness. The ancient city of Ur is taken as the first ever human city and the prefix has come to stand for the primal or the first in many fields - in this case an Ur-language, that is the ancestor human tongue from which all languages subsequently developed, which in my tale a man wakes up one morning to find he can only speak in this tongue. Since it is related to all our current languages, people think they recognise it, yet can't understand him. hence the 'Um'. The story is subversively comic as he becomes a celebrity and a diplomatic incident all at once.

4) "Strains" (from the collection "16FF")
Like many words, 'strain' has several shades of meaning. Firstly there is that notion of straining to attain something at full stretch. Then there is the notion of straining a liquid through some sort of filter or membrane. There is also the notion of a family strain, as in being related to the same (genetic) strain. Finally there is the meaning of strain as distant music or sound in the air. This tale combines several of those different strains of meaning (did you see what I did there?) It is about trying to recapture the quality of sounds heard while still in the womb, but forever being denied the membrane of the mother's abdomen through which such sounds were filtered. It's a simple one word title that perhaps suggests more than it reveals until you have finished reading the story.

5) "The Caller To The Bingo Caller's House Calls House" (from the collection "52FF")
I like the repetitions of the words in this, but each time the same word has a different meaning. The whole story is contained within the title, as the tale is told in bingo calls by a man who comes to prey on the Bingo caller's house while he is away calling numbers. This title was definitely the last piece in this particular jigsaw and only arrived when the story had been finished.

6) "Just Aphasia Going Through" (from the collection "16FF")
A pun on the word 'aphasia' as sounding like 'a phase you're' "Going Through". For a story all about creeping dementia and the loss of recall of words. unfortunately of course, dying brain cells are anything but 'a phase'. This title came about halfway through writing the piece.

7) "28 Grams" (from the collection "52FF")
This was an easy title to come up with, for the piece was literally that, 28 lines, each containing a word with the suffix 'gram' in it. It also was intended to echo other titles such as the movie "21 Grammes".

8) "Tendering Her Resignation" (from the collection "Long Stories Short")
Tender is a wonderfully multi-layered word. Nurses tender. Money is tender. Jobs are put out for tender, while when we've had enough of a job, we tender our resignation. When we are resigned to our lot, that such a job is not for us. In this tale, a daughter gives up her own life to stay at home and tend to her housebound mother. but her frustration bleeds out around the edges, much as with her mother's ulcerated wound staining each fresh bandage. The daughter is both tender and resigned.

You can sample the full story here.

9) "Calliopes, Caltrops and Cantos" (from the collection "28 Far Cries")
This title took an age to come up with. It's a story about a poet-soldier and I knew I wanted to show that seeming contrast between the creative act of poetry with the destructiveness of war in the title and that I had it in my mind it should be alliterative. 'Cantos' represented the poetic, 'caltrops' (an anti-cavalry defence) symbolised the war and 'Calliope' interceded between the two, both standing for the epic muse of poetry and song, but also being a discordant steam organ emitting squalling sound as the antithesis of Calliope's divine singing.

10) "Per Capita" (from the collection "28 Far Cries")
'Per capita', that slightly technical economic term derived from the Latin. Meaning per head, which is exactly what i wanted to allude to in a tale about a beheading video. I wanted to explore how these videos are designed to play on the emotions, they are recruiting ads within their constituency after all. The victim is a pawn in a much larger game of symbols, so that even as they are decapitated, their fate is calculated to boost support to the cause of the executioners. After 3 per capita videos, the US and the UK have recently decided to declare war on ISIS. I've blogged on the legality & impact of these videos here.

11) "Compulsory Consumer Choices Even Unto Death" (as yet only published to blog)
I wanted a long-winded bureaucratic title to reflect the world gone mad in this dystopian tale and yet one that also meant exactly what it said. How even in death and the manner of our despatch into the afterlife, we are faced with choices.

Is Viewing A Beheading Video A Crime?

While indisputably morally repugnant, viewing a beheading video is not a crime. Sharing it online however is a grey area. A crime has been committed, that of homicide. But who do you report it to? The act happened in Syria, so reporting it to your home police force isn't going to achieve much. The intelligence services of the West couldn't find Osama Bin Laden for 10 years and they're unlikely to track down "Jihadi John" unless a ground campaign kicks ISIS out of Syria. Sharing such videos, which after all are designed to inflame passions to the extent of recruiting more followers to the ISIS cause, could be deemed to be incitement to commit terrorist acts, which would constitute a crime. But no one took FB to court when they (albeit briefly) hosted beheading videos in the name of debate, until public outrage forced them to take them down.

There is a parallel here with sharing images from the London riots of 2011. Many people on the streets were not participating in the destruction, violence and looting. But they were stood there recording the action on their cameras and phones in order to share on social media and blogs. Again one could say they were committing the offence of not reporting a crime (or rather a lot of crimes), but who exactly would they have reported them to? The forces of law and order were completely stretched and overwhelmed by trying to deal with the riots. Phoning in an incident would not have prompted any police response. In that case, posting images to FB probably wouldn't be regarded as incitement and certainly not to terrorism. But the point remains, what is the responsibility of file sharing of contentious footage?

I've written fiction about a beheading video. But my exploration was about how these are designed to wreak an effect, what the symbolism is about and how it works. And of course existing solely in words, there isn't the instant visual force of a video, much as has centred around the argument this week over Hilary Mantel's short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which has seen senior political figures call for a police investigation into the legitimacy of the story as art, or whether it represents a crime. So I don't think I have to turn myself in to the cops just yet.

Clearly the boundaries need still to be defined.