Jan Carson's Blog, page 18

Postcard Stories 2015 – Week Thirty Six

September 3rd 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Anna Wilt

It was fun pretending to be something you weren’t. On Monday Stephen dressed up as a lollipop man and escorted children, in twos and tired threes, from the Primary School gates, across the main road, to the park. On Tuesday he dressed up as a traffic warden and walked up and down Linenhall Street attaching Post-It notes to car windscreens as if they were actual parking tickets. A man in a Fiesta yelled at him, calling him all sorts of bad names, one of which was lunatic. Stephen didn’t really mind. He enjoyed the feeling of wearing a hat. On Wednesday he dressed up as an ambulance man. The modern name for this is paramedic. Stephen did not know this word and also did not know what to do when an old man had a heart attack outside Boots the Chemist. People were looking at him like he could help. But he couldn’t. Stephen was only pretending to be an ambulance man and he didn’t feel like pretending anymore.

September 4th 2015 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Lee Connell

I am writing a new story which was meant to be about Bob Dylan though it would have been carefully disguised so very few people could have recognized him; only people who know him personally such as his children and next door neighbours. Instead, this story has turned itself into a very different story about a ghost baby who lives under the table, making mountains from other people’s breadcrumbs.

I am telling you about my new story in the dark outside the cinema. I am being particularly careful to emphasise the fact that it is not a ghost story, (like The Others starring Nicole Kidman, for example). It is just a story about a normal family who have a ghost instead of a son.

“I slept in a room with a ghost once,” you say. “I was only a baby at the time. It didn’t bother me at all.”

I have not asked you to say this. Hearing this makes me feel like something has clenched inside my spine. I know my story will not have a happy ending now. I think I might start it over again and stick with Bob Dylan this time.

September 5th 2015 – Knocknagoney Tesco, Belfast

Alice McCullough

It is much easier to shoplift than you might think. Supposing, for example, an afternoon work meeting runs over and you have no time to prepare a proper dinner and there is nothing of substance in the cupboards. You might well run into Tesco on the way home from work, in search of a quick and easy meal. Whilst there you might pick up a frozen pizza and, for accompaniment, some garlic bread. You would not have taken the time to lift a basket and so you’d clutch the pizza against your chest, leaving a damp patch on your blouse, (the garlic bread, you’d tuck snugly beneath your armpit). Supposing you bumped into an old friend in the frozen section and you got talking and walked with her to the front of the store, you might well leave the building without paying for your dinner. You would then be shoplifting. But you wouldn’t be a truly bad person until you actually ate the pizza.

September 6th 2015 – East Belfast

Moyra Donaldson

After the success of his ground-breaking play, Dancing at Lughnasa, the Irish playwright, Brian Friel decided to begin work on a sequel. This play was to be known as Dancing at Lufthansa. It would revolve around five impoverished Irish sisters sharing childhood reminiscences, worries and laughs whilst confined within a mid-sized commercial aircraft for approximately one month. Friel immediately encountered problems. The purists thought the dialogue should be delivered in German while the dancing part of the play was almost impossible to stage inside an airplane; the seats were too close together and the low ceilings, with their overhead lockers made the high kicks impossible. Eventually Friel scrapped the idea of a sequel and wrote an entirely different play about Irish people and the things which interest Irish people.

September 7th 2015 – Belmont Road, East Belfast

Eamonn Rodgers

There are two pigeons sitting on top of the Post office sign. One is slightly larger than the other on account of its huffed up feathers. It looks as angry as a pigeon can look.

A noise is coming from behind the Post Office sign. Three, or maybe four, baby pigeons seem to be stuck down there. The situation is not ideal and they are saying so quite loudly in pigeon language.

You stand beneath the Post Office sign for a good minute staring at the slightly larger pigeon as it becomes more and more distraught. You assume this pigeon to be the mother, and the smaller pigeon to the father who is now in the doghouse on account of building the family’s nest inside a Post Office sign when an ordinary tree or chimney would have been more than adequate. You think about helping the pigeons but your coffee is getting cold and there is little to be done without a ladder.

September 8th 2015 –East Belfast

Sarah Crawford

On the fourth of January, 1954 a young Elvis Presley walks into a small recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee and pays four dollars of his own money to record two songs. He is eighteen years old. It is warm in Memphis, almost hot, despite the fact that this is winter.

In the same year Francoise Sagan walks into a small publishing house in Paris, France and submits her debut novel, Bonjour Tristess for consideration. She is also eighteen years old. In Paris, it is cold and Sagan wears a coat, possibly also a scarf.

Both events are well-documented because, with time, they will come to seem remarkably significant. Perhaps, in other parts of the world other eighteen year olds are spending the fourth of January, 1954 choreographing dance routines and writing operas or painting enormous canvases with oils and pastels only to find their work does not take. It is not as brave or bold as Presley’s or Sagan’s, or perhaps it is simply not of its time.

September 9th 2015 –East Belfast

Dave Armstrong

When I wake up tomorrow morning I will be French.

I am telling myself this over and over again as I fall asleep in the same way that despairing people will tell themselves, “everything will look better in the morning,” or, “tomorrow’s a brand new day.”

I am not expecting to look French in the morning. Neither am I anticipating the ability to speak French fluently like a native child, (though in my mind I will be running French subtitles and these imaginary subtitles will be spoken aloud by the voice of Eric Cantona).

When I wake tomorrow I will only be French inside. You will not notice the change in me unless you are paying particular attention to the way a common curse word will now sound like poetry or warm honey on my tongue, or the way I will be glowing slightly when I talk, as if I have swallowed a desk lamp, or the confidence now climbing out me when I walk, or the way I wearing scarves now, casually, with everything.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Thirty Five

August 27th 2015 – Ballymena

Andrew Farmer

I am trying to help the doctor. I have read somewhere that the local GP is allocated just 8, (or is it 11?), minutes per consultation with each patient. I am planning to be in and out of the surgery in less than 5. I have always been an overachiever.

“This is where it hurts,” I say, lifting my sweater to reveal the sore spot marked on my ribcage with a felt tip pen.

“I think I am allergic to citrus fruits,” I say, pointing out my face which is swollen from the lime slices I have been sucking in the waiting room.

“I probably have a kidney stone,” I say and hand the doctor a list of my symptoms carefully printed next to a Wikipedia article on kidney stones.

Even though we still have 3 allocated minutes left the doctor does not seem as pleased as I though he’d be. Perhaps I have already done all the best bits of being a doctor. All has left are prescriptions and updating the patients’ notes. A secretary could easily do this. Maybe he is even wondering what he went to medical school for.

August 28th 2015 – Belfast International Airport

Chris Lindsay

Items which have not made it through the security check at Belfast International Airport and are now sitting in a bin behind the X-Ray machine:

Homemade honey, (one jar, unopened).
Lucozade Sport, (four bottles, part consumed).
Three pack of Heinz baked beans, (single serving cans).
Gardening trowel, (one, mud-encrusted).
Head and Shoulders shampoo and conditioner in one, (economy sized).
Novelty handcuffs, (one pair, still in the box).

It is Friday evening. You are flying to Amsterdam. All the signs point towards a plane full of noisy stags and hens.

August 29th 2015 – Amsterdam

Matt Shelton

In our field we are having a wedding and some cheeseboards, lawn games and chilled white wine proper glasses. The sun is coming down over the flat Dutch lawns and guests are returning to their cars for sweaters and patterned scarves with which to keep their heat in.

Two fields over they are having a rave. They have picked the perfect night for it and the perfect place. There is no one here to bother save the cows and the wedding guests whose happiness cannot be held back by the constant klump and thump of bass drifting down the lane and itching into their conversations like a throat being cleared for attention.

When the whoop of young, dancing voices rises between speeches, the wedding guests do not ignore it. They turn and smile across the table, raising their glasses as if the noise is not an interruption, as if it totally planned. Perhaps they think it is the world letting out its own loud joy.

August 30th 2015 – Amsterdam

Matt Reznicek

This afternoon, in the Vondelpark, it sunned so hard that cyclists dropped from their bikes and stretched out in the damp grass to sweat the last few moments out of the summer. The sun coming from the West burnt our arms, our faces and exposed shins on one side only so we rose from our sleeping and cycled home, glowing slightly, as if we’d been in the presence of God yet kept ourselves at all times, inclined away from him.

Tonight the summer breaks and there is not only rain but also thunder and the sort of lightning which will illuminate a room like a strobe light. Even through curtains and closed eyelids the blink of it goes discoing through our sleep. We wake the next morning ashamed to have once again dreamt of the world’s end. The trees in the Vondelpark are overnight orange yet the sunburn is still stinging on our forearms; a reminder perhaps that the miraculous cannot hold.

August 31st 2015 – Amsterdam

Paul McVeigh

There are eleven black and white images of the photographer Allen Ruppersberg exhibited in a row on the second floor of the Stedelijk Museum. This is one image for each of the letters in the artist’s surname. There are anagrams of his first name printed into each individual frame. The photos were taken in 1973. They depict Ruppersberg emerging, in stages, from being a white wall; now you don’t see him, now you do. By walking backwards across the gallery this could easily become, now you see him etc. etc. The piece is name ‘Nella’ which is the artist’s first name spelt backwards. Perhaps then, this is his preferred approach to art. The museum’s interpretative panel says, “you can ‘read’ the series as a sentence or short story.” The interpretative panel says nothing about which side to begin reading from.

September 1st 2015 – The Limelight, Belfast

Ali and Rhoda Freeburn

For her forty second birthday Stuart bought Jill tickets to a Polyphonic Spree gig. It was ten years since they’d last played Belfast and both Stuart and Jill were looking forward to hearing them again.

“We should wear robes,” suggested Stuart. “That’s what people do at Polyphonic Spree gigs.”

Jill was not convinced, but eventually Stuart’s enthusiasm wore her down. She got the sewing machine out and made two simple choir robes from a set of old sheets.

Stuart and Jill were the only people at the gig in robes, excepting of course the band, (who never left home without them). Jill felt like a right numpty and said so quite loudly so that everyone standing close to them would know that the robes had been Stuart’s idea. Jill had to admit that robes were a lot more cool and comfortable that the jeans she usually wore to gigs, but she would not give Stuart the pleasure of saying this out loud and, all the way home on the bus, complained of the cold and the people staring.

September 2nd 2015 – East Belfast

Bri Farren

I am practicing so in the future I will be the kind of professional journalist who is taken seriously by colleagues and members of the public alike. I am almost always carrying a notebook and pen thereby giving the impression that I am keen and ready to capture the next big story. I am performing ordinary tasks such as cereal eating and teeth brushing with a set deadline in mind. This will help me achieve greater efficiency within the time limits afforded to professional journalists. I am asking demanding questions of everyone I meet such as, “were you happy as a child?” (to the girl on the till at Tesco’s), and, “why is your face like that? (to the man who serves me coffee in the morning). I am wearing flat shoes. I am buying a trenchcoat. I am telling myself quite firmly that the truth is the only thing which truly matter. I am practicing hard. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror I no longer see myself. Instead, I see a professional journalist wearing my face.

Postcard Stories 2015 : Week Thirty Four

August 20th 2015 – Bangor

Lesley Doherty

During the night the edges of the town unpicked themselves like a long row of dropped stitches. Soon there was nothing more substantial than tree roots and a solitary garden fence binding the town to the rest of the Mainland. Around about 3 o’clock a large gust of wind came whipping down High Street, across the Marina and far out to sea. The town was tempted to follow and, with nothing in particular holding it back, unloosed those last few anchors and floated off into the night. For an hour or so the lights could still be seen like the first muted blush of sunrise, creeping across the horizon. In time this disappeared, as did the memory of the town, (which hadn’t been as popular of late, as in its heyday, during the 1960s). There was a beach now where the town had slipped free and most people thought it a vast improvement. Waking the following morning, the townsfolk were quite happy to be free of the Mainland for they had always wished to be an island by themselves.

August 21st 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Jenna Maghie

Every time something terrible happened, (and terrible things were happening with increasing frequency), Jim went straight to the book store and bought a book: mostly novels, occasionally poetry collections, once a hard-backed cookery book because the cover looked good enough to eat. Having bought a book, Jim felt instantly calmer but this calmness hardly had time to settle before a dreadful panic seized him and he began to wonder how he would ever have time to read all these books. Still, Jim bought books and piled them in towering stacks around his bed, hoping there would soon be a time for reading. By the time the truly terrible thing finally happened, Jim’s bed was entirely encased in books. He crawled inside. It was like a house in there and smelt of paper. He breathed in and out, drawing in the dry scent of unread words. He felt safer than he might have felt without books.

August 22nd 2015 – Ballymena

Chelley McLear

The last time I visited my regular hairdresser for a haircut she was not available. The girl at reception offered me an appointment with Simone instead. Simone came highly recommended.

“You see that,” said the receptionist, pointing at a haircut photo in the window, “Simon done that one, and all the photos in the toilet.”

“Alright,” I said, but I was nervous, and grew more nervous when Simone appeared at my chair and it was clear from the way her eyes hung and the very definite way in which she grasped my shoulders, that she was blind.

“She’s blind,” I mouthed to the receptionist.

The receptionist smiled and thumbs upped me from across the room.

“Have you been a hairdressers for long?” I asked, and Simon replied, “yes,” as she was feeling around the bench for scissors.

I did not believe her, but I could not say this out loud.

Instead, I said, “I’ve double booked myself. Sorry, I should be at the dentists right now.” I held my jaw like I had a toothache, but of course Simone could not see this. Afterwards I felt bad. She must have known I was lying about the dentist.

August 23rd 2015 – QFT Belfast

Eleanor Ford

There are six boys living in an apartment in the Lower East Side. You are watching a documentary about them. They are steps and stairs from twelve years old to about nineteen and have long, dark hair, poker straight like the man from Extreme who sang, ‘More Than Words.’ It is difficult to tell one brother from the next, though one has shaved his eyebrows off and you remember him. Their father has taken the front door key so they cannot leave the apartment. This continues for years, almost two decades. The boys watch movies constantly and, when the watching is not enough, they begin to film their own versions of their favourite movies with elaborate home made costumes. You wonder if you are a bad person because you spend the entire documentary wondering where the boys got the materials for their elaborate costumes. Surely, there are bigger questions on the table.

August 24th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Grace Tinney

When you were seven years old your mother took you to visit Santa at the old Co-Op building on York Street. In those days Santa’s Grotto was located on the top floor of the department store, in a room better known as the Orpheus Ballroom where Belfast’s young couples danced of a Saturday or Friday evening, sipping non-alcoholic minerals through paper straws.

Santa gave you a plastic plant in a plastic tub. Your sister received a set of jam jar covers in red and white gingham. She was five years old and far too young for boiling fruit.

You wanted to complain about the in-store Santa. You had no idea what could be done with a plastic pot plant. You didn’t complain, for the real Santa might find out and think you ungrateful.

Later, you wondered if the Co-Op were having an early spring clean; passing off unsold trifles as presents; hoping the boys and girls of Belfast would keep the giftwrap on ‘til Christmas morning.

August 25th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Gareth King

Things I am not allergic to which sometimes provoke a physical reaction:

Words
Very sharp cheese
The sound of a smoke alarm when it is almost out of batteries
People walking two or more abreast on a pavement
People stopping suddenly whilst walking on a pavement
People walking on a pavement in a meandering fashion, flitting from one side of the pavement to the other as if drunk
Freddy Mercury’s mouth
People who insist upon making you dance when you are quite happy watching other people dance
Edible items with a floury consistency such as peas, beans and improperly cooked parsnips
Fiction aimed primarily at Young Adults.

August 26th 2015 – Ballymena

Dave Louden

One month we decided to watch every episode of the X Files in existence. This was before Netflix. Boxed sets of each series could be rented from the video store next to the nail place for three nights at a time. Three nights was not enough time to watch an entire series of the X Files for we were, at the time, reasonably functional people with jobs, friends, and standard sleeping patterns. We watched each episode on 1.3 time. This was a compromise. Instead of 50 minutes an episode now required only 35 minutes of our time. And, if Scully seemed to be talking a little too fast, trundling through her conversations like an eager chipmunk, we were all but oblivious, our minds assuming her to be one of those motor-mouthed Americans until, ten years later, there she was in The Fall, annunciating every word slowly, slowly, slowly like a person speaking in the their second language.

Postcard Stories 2015 – Week Thirty Three

August 13th 2015 – Bedford Street, Belfast

Amy Burnside

At the traffic lights behind City Hall you notice that the man in front of you is struggling beneath the weight of two white, carrier bags, unbranded. You step closer, marking your pace to keep time with his. You can see blood pinking at the top of his bags. Your imagination is already half way up the Dublin Road. You lean towards him at the next junction and the colour inside his bags is peach pale, like flesh or skin. ‘Dead people,’ you think, ‘chopped up for ease of transport.’ The gall of this is remarkable at five o’clock in the afternoon. He is even smoking and sort of smiling as he smokes. You are blind now with curiosity. Outside the BBC you catch up with him and peer into the bag and it is full of pigs’ legs and pigs’ feet. Strange enough, but not particularly sinister. You are almost a mile now from where you meant to be.

August 14th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Gracie McMurray

Found Story:-

Belle and Sebastian are having a colouring competition on their website.
Belle and Sebastian are a ramshackle, cute, and only occasionally fey folk-pop band.
You know what, Belle and Sebastian CAN dance.
Belle and Sebastian draw inspiration from Felt records, Hal Hartley films and public transportation.
Belle and Sebastian can’t resist some retro-leaning quirks.
Belle and Sebastian were once told they would be the next Radiohead.
Belle and Sebastian are not the next Radiohead.
Belle and Sebastian were the product of botched capitalism.
Belle and Sebastian can be great and terrible within the same song.
Belle and Sebastian can’t afford to write music any more and had to get regular jobs instead.
Belle and Sebastian are fiercely loved.
Belle and Sebastian have created more immediately thrilling music than this in the past.
Belle and Sebastian hate being photographed.
Though often praised by critics, Belle and Sebastian have enjoyed only limited commercial success.

August 15th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Hazel McMeekin

We were all, by this stage, extremely rich and decided out fortunes would be best used in purchasing islands. Fortunately, there were many islands for sale that year and we were able to buy six small ones which sat adjacent to each other in the Lough. Each of us immediately fell to decorating and furnishing our islands according to individual taste. One was red, one was like something from the 1960s, one was without vegetation, and another without wildlife of any kind for the owner was a notorious vegetarian and terrified of accidentally stepping upon some innocent creature. Once finished, all six houses were splendid things, like small museums of themselves. “Come visit my island,” we called from our own shore to that of our neighbour’s but no one ever left their island for it was almost perfect there, or how they particularly envisioned perfect, and what could possibly be achieved by leaving perfection, even for an afternoon?

August 16th 2015 – Salt Island, Strangford Lough

Erika Meitner

Over the hill we go, seven poets and a picnic basket, a handful of children who are carrying sticks and collecting pocketfuls of bone white shells. We have come in search of seals. We have discovered no seals, only thistles and nettles which are not kind to summer sandals or bare ankles. We stand on the brow of the hill and there are still no seals though we almost convince ourselves that those black lines cresting the curled waves are the backs or raised heads of seals. We are not disappointed to have been here. It has required bicycles and cars, two boats and much walking and still there are no seals. Every inch of the journey has been worth it though, to stands here on this hill, casting our long shadows, together across the Lough.

August 17th 2015 – Portrush

Claire Savage

This is not summer as other countries know summer. It is lightly spitting. The sky is dove gray and yet it is warm so we are going to eat sandwiches on the beach and toss a Frisbee around. We may even take our fleeces off, if only for a moment.

And, when the children say, “let’s go swimming,” we will reply, “it’s far too cold. Sure, a wee paddle will do instead,” and in we’ll go to our ankles.

Because the air is cool the sea will feel slightly less cool. This will be a trick of the mind.

When the first wave takes the dryness from our rolled up hems we will say, “uch, why not? This is the best it’s going to get this summer.” Out we’ll go, past our knees and belts with not a thought for the sodden journey home. And we will be full of the summer, like American children on American programmes. We won’t even really notice the drizzle.

August 18th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Stephanie Conn

Every day should begin with a strange man yelling at you on a telephone; ideally in a language which you are no longer au fait with, but once spoke, somewhat hesitantly, in High School, so you will understand enough to know this man is angry with you in particular and not just angry about the larger injustices associated with being alive, but you will not understand enough to grasp the specifics. The specifics might be enough to keep you from sleeping tonight.

After you have been yelled at by a strange man on the telephone in a foreign language –let’s say French, (though it could just as easily be Spanish, German or textbook Latin)- you will be more awake than before the yelling. You will feel anger bubbling in the pit of your belly. Perhaps you will cry or twist the telephone cord round your finger nervously. The skin will be thinner on your face. You will not be sleeping when the day delivers its next smart kick.

August 19th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Catherine Gander

I thought the first things to be forgotten would be the hard facts: the Battle of Hastings, the freezing point of water, how might days I might expect to encounter in February, during a Leap Year. This was not true. The first things which slipped free were feelings: the ill-defined anxiety of whether a room was there for the entering or the leaving, who I loved and how much this love could be leant upon when a name could not be found to pair with it, how I’d arrived at this place with the curtains drawn and it, not yet, gone three. There was not even a way to say that I had forgotten these things; only a jumble of words, too long or too short for the job, and a clenching of fists when the words would not come. Even then, the hard facts remained and I could say: 1066 and zero degrees and 28 days clear, 29 in each Leap Year, which was a ludicrous way to let you know I was lost, like using a fork to spoon soup.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Thirty Two

August 6th 2015 – East Belfast

Joy Eggerichs

By the time it reached the age of five the child had been talking for thirty five thousand consecutive hours and showed no sign of stopping. It favoured questions. No switch or button could be found upon the child’s person with which to turn off, or briefly pause, its tongue. Even when placed in a locked room with no stimuli the child continued to make observations about its current situation and the situation immediately preceding and what it might have for supper, thereafter. This, combined with the knowledge that the child talked constantly during deep sleep, seemed to suggest some sort of design fault: a nervous energy peculiar to the subject in question. However, when the scientists placed their results next to those of fellow scientist who were also observing five year old children, they could only conclude that this same design fault –the propensity to chatter- ran like a hairline crack, through the entire species.

August 7th 2015 – East Belfast

Lisa Scanlon

Normally, by lunchtime I have forgotten my dream but today was different. I was opening the curtains in the living room and remembered the way you’d appeared from behind my curtains last night with a loaf of bread in one hand, and your daughter tucked behind you like a tiny chicken. You were anxious to eat bread and talk of Flannery O’Connor but all my teeth came out and collected like broken mints in the cup of my hand.

“Not tonight,” I said, and even then understood that this was a dream and tomorrow night you would not be behind my curtains with bread. It was not the teeth which gave this away, or even your presence in my room when we both know you are a hundred miles away in a tower. It was all your talk of Flannery O’Connor when I am certain you do not know who she is.

August 8th 2015 – East Belfast

Amy Herron

The smell of dish cloths bleaching in the basin is making her think of swimming pools. When she is thinking of swimming pools she is not thinking in the present tense. She is considering those deep blue swimming pools of her past: the Continental holiday pools, the one with the wave machine in North Wales, the neighbour’s pool which was somewhere between a paddler and a proper thing with walls, the pool she learnt to swim in with its damp talc tiles and its propensity for verrucaes, the swim floats with the corners chewed off and the drunken sound of hearing Elton John singing his songs underwater. The two dot holes in her swimsuit, like a vampire bite, where her locker key hooked on and the after swim hunger, spooning around her belly. She swishes the dish cloths round the basin and carries the smell of swimming pools into the next room, and the next.

August 9th 2015 – East Belfast

Ellen Wilmont

I became a policeman because of Taggart and Poirot and Inspector Morse. I wanted to solve mysteries and put clues together. I was particularly good at jigsaw puzzles. After two days on the force I realized this was not something I should say in the staff room. There were no mysteries to solve, to clues to pin on white boards and join together with string. Instead, there were drunk drivers and football fights and burglaries where there was no point brushing for fingerprints. I did jigsaws in my spare time and hoped this would be enough. I was not enough. I wanted it to be like on television.

During my tenth year there was a murder. Though there were not clues as Poirot would see clues, there was the distinct possibility of an incident room. I saw myself with a notebook, in a down lit interview room, drinking bad coffee with an assistant. This was not to be. A specialist team arrived from London. There were forensics. I began to consider other careers.

August 10th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Lesley Martin

After the bodybuilders leave the building the place smells like the Costa del Sol for a week: fake tan, rubbing oil and the piss thin smell of stale beer on carpet. In the bathroom there is an orange sheet on the toilet seats from where the bodybuilders have hovered and quit hovering and then sat, smudging their mahogany tan all over the white plastic. Also on the taps there are fingerprints. The walls and floors have faired better. In preparation for the tanning, (which is done with spray hoses like sheep being doused against lice), we have covered everything with plastic sheets. The sight of the bodybuilders –both men and women- lumbering from one end of the building to the other with arms and legs and taut faces tanned the mottled colour of Jacob’s Twiglets sticks with us long after the smell has dispersed. It is like watching ET emerge from his cellophane tunnel over and over again.

August 11th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Claire Shaw

There are feral children living inside the Dublin Road Cinema; three of them. They do not have names as such and, having learnt all their language from the movies, have come to call themselves Disney and Pixar and Bat Man, (Bat Man being the smallest of the three and the only male). They cannot remember how they arrived here at the Dublin Road Cinema but they do not want to leave. They scuttle from screen to screen when the lights are down, avoiding the ushers and eating popcorn in handfuls, straight from the floor. During the day they sleep, curled like pretzels, beneath the folding seats. Their skin is like milk or paper from never having been outside. When they see themselves in the bathroom mirrors, wild-haired and white, they touch their faces, and touch the faces of their siblings, and they do not pass right through each other. It is a relief to know they are not yet ghosts. Ghosts are thing which end badly in every movie they have ever seen.

August 12th 2015 – East Belfast

Olive Broderick

The sister came out of my mother fist first, like Superman taking off. Only she could not fly and she was not wearing a costume of any kind. In the sister’s closed hand was a tiny egg; a bird’s we presumed. The Midwife had never seen anything like this before. It was unclear how the egg had come to be inside my mother or how the sister had found it and grabbed for it, without a torch to see.

“Perhaps, it will hatch,” said the Midwife.

We wrapped it in towels and placed it under a desk lamp and sat vigil with it every night for a week. Perhaps, we were expecting it to contain a tiny, tiny child like a smaller version of the sister. It did not hatch and eventually began to smell. My father threw it in the bin and we all went back to watching the sister. She was a week old by this stage and we were all still wondering about her.

Postcard Stories 2015 : Week Thirty One

July 30th 2015 – Armagh

Jake Grubbs

This room is haunted by the ghost of a mobile disco, long since shuffled on to a more lucrative venue. Each night this week I have fallen asleep to the Top Twenty Sounds of the Sixties filtered through my bedroom carpet. It is almost impossible to choose sleep over the possibility of a thumping bass line or a snare drum sniffing beneath my feet. My legs, inside their pyjamas, underneath their duvet, are twitching like a trapped sneeze. My body does not want to be in bed, or sleeping, or even thinking about sleeping. It is Hell bent on disco.

I have asked the hotel for a new room and they say there are forms to fill in, procedures etc. And rooms can only be exchanged if damp has been found or there is something like a bad smell present. They do not have a procedure for being haunted by a mobile disco. My eyes cry. They are dried out from not sleeping. My feet and legs and dancing hands do not cry. Actually, they could not be happier.

July 31st 2015 – Belfast

Pete and Cathryn Blair

The man sitting opposite us in Boojum is approaching his chicken burrito with such obvious and untempered enthusiasm that long lines of sour cream have escaped from his mouth and are dripping down his cheeks like those limp jowl mustaches occasionally worn by Mexicans. Watching him eat we are all of a sudden rendered without appetite. It is impossible to tell whether the sight of him slobbering has turned our collective stomachs or if in observing his unchecked appetite we feel inadequate somehow; incapable of experiencing such primal joy in something as low as meat and cheese and mushed up avocado.

August 1st 2015 – Ikea, Belfast

Joan Weber

I left my father in Ikea. He was too old to go on. When I showed him the living room department –all those armchairs in lines and grids like a street map, and right next door, the same again in beds- he looked straight into my eyes and I could see the tiredness had settled into him. It was too much to expect him to make it to kitchens or bathrooms, the lighting department was already well beyond him.

“Sit down here,” I said, lowering him into a brown, leather armchair, a kind of Scandinavian take on Eames. “You have done well,” I said, “so well, to make it this far.

I could see he was glad of the rest, glad to have the expectation lifted from him. I turned away from my father and progressed on to bedrooms and kitchens. I did not come back. There is, after all, only one route through Ikea.

August 2nd 2015 – Ormeau Road, Belfast

Anna Aderton

“Where are you in that photo?” asks the man with the video camera.

She takes the photo in her hands, holds it close to her face. She finds her husband in a blue coat, two sons and a daughter. She does not have the words for any of them but traces each individually with a blue nailed finger.

“Where are you in that photo?” repeats the man.

She says, “I am not,” even though she clearly is and the photo is from the days before she stopped feeling present, started slipping the words for husband and love and family, still remembered the difference between home and a place briefly visited on holidays. The man with the video camera is asking her to think about this past time and her words are not the right words, but somehow better, “I don’t know how to say it. The air was very good.”

August 3rd 2015 – East Belfast

Averil Buchanan

I gave the decorator no such instructions but when I returned to inspect my room, discovered that he’d painted over the area of wall beside my bed where I had woken from an inspired dream and, with no paper or pad to hand, scrawled the opening lines of my novel directly on to the wall.

“Do you remember what was there before the paint?” I asked him, pointing to the exact spot where the words had been.

“More paint,” he replied.

“No words?” I asked and he shrugged and said he was not used to noticing words and was there some sort of problem here?

“No problem at all,” I replied.

It was unlikely that the dream words would have caught properly in the morning. It was even possible that I’d dreamt the act of writing. But, I did consider for hours thereafter, the strange way we see only what interests us and glance quickly past the rest.

August 4th 2015 – East Belfast

Gillian Magnall

That winter she decided to close the door and remain inside her apartment for four straight months. It was to be a kind of experiment. She kept a pot plant with her and every day at three used an old-fashioned ruler to measure how much she’d grown and how much the plant had grown under similar conditions. By February first she had not grown one inch taller but her waist was perceivably wider. (This did not even require proving with a ruler). The pot plant was dead. She did not know what to make of these results but wrote them down anyway and was thankful that it was not her dead and the pot plant expanding. In April she left her apartment for the first time in four months. There still a coldness in the air outside and her skin glowed like milk in the sunlight. She went straight to the store and bought herself another pot plant.

August 5th 2015 – East Belfast

Patrick and Lee Henry

When the new rabbits lined up to choose their super powers Mark was miles away, thinking about a detective show he’d seen on television last night. Chloe chose speed and Richard chose speech, (which was always good for confusing the humans). Sarah, who was the smallest of all the new rabbits, chose flight for she felt this might give her something of an advantage if faced with a much larger adversary.

“And what would you like for your superpower, Mark?” asked the Spirit Animal.

Mark, without proper consideration, chose to become luminous. This was the first available super power on the list but really only intended for underwater creatures. Each night, while all the other new rabbits roamed the streets of East Belfast growing into their powers, Mark was forced to stay home in the burrow, watching CSI repeats. It was too dangerous to be out in the dark where his glowing fur made him a soft target for every speeding car, every urban fox.

Talented Friends : Kelly Creighton

“But there is promise. You can see a new year from here. If you squint hard enough it’s possible. I suppose, for some, there are good things to come, like sun and rain.”

I’m not a big fan of crime fiction. That’s a bit of a lie. I’m a massive fan of Agatha Christie and Inspector Morse and all those old-fashioned crime shows currently re-running on ITV3. When it comes to contemporary crime fiction I’m not quite so enthusiastic. So, when I heard that Kelly Creighton’s debut novel was going to be crime fiction, I was filled with trepidation. When your friends write books, you’re duty bound to read them and when they’re not very good, (or not the kind of book you particularly enjoy reading), it’s hard to find honest but reasonably encouraging things to say. I had no need to worry about The Bones of It.

Technically this novel might well be classified as crime fiction but it’s so much more than that. It’s a beautifully penned and piercingly insightful character study of both Scott, (the novel’s young and very troubled narrator), and his father, Duke whose character, or perhaps more accurately, lack of character, is revealed to the reader in slim sections as the plot unfolds. The descriptions are perfectly apt; this is a Northern Ireland I instantly recognised, and it was incredibly refreshing to read a local novel set in a provincial seaside town rather than Belfast city. These are characters I wanted to spend time with whether they engendered feelings of empathy, sympathy or, in the case of Duke, cold, hard, loathing. And this is a plot which unfolded subtly, flicking backwards and forwards between time frames so it was only in the final sections of the novel that the whole story came deftly together. As a debut novel, it is extremely accomplished.

However, what I liked most about The Bones of It was its honesty. This is part of the new wave of fiction coming out of Northern Ireland where the stories are set against a post-Good Friday backdrop. The Troubles is present but not glaringly so. The political tension is still inherent in this story but it is not the novel’s focus. This is a difficult tone to maintain and Kelly does it masterfully. It is both a conflict novel and not a conflict novel and all the better for being bother. Above all else The Bones of It is first and foremost a book which deals with familial relationships and the strains which bad decisions, illness and grief will put upon them. It is a story about consequences and the legacy left by one generation to the next. This works as well in the macrocosm of Northern Irish culture as it does in the details of Scott’s troubled family. It is, as the quote above suggests, both hopeful and despairingly honest about the Northern Ireland we are now living in and how it will shape up in the years to come. The Bones of It is well worth a read and a good think. I’m looking forward to see what Kelly does next.

The Bones of It is published by Liberties Press and available to buy from their website www.libertiespress.com

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Thirty

July 23rd 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Kim Keightley

At the end of the year we collected all the concert tickets which had not been claimed and placed them end to end in a line. There were approximately two thousand nine hundred, (an average of six per concert). There were enough of these tickets to circle the parameter of the City Hall twice.

We could be reasonably sure that some of these unclaimed ticket holders had been put off by rain and others had been taken ill, some had died en route to their concert of in the days directly preceding, others had simply lost the inclination to hear live music and were rich enough to afford such waste. We were also certain that at least one of the left behind tickets belonged to someone who had, in the days between booking and claiming their seat, fallen so fastly in love that all previous plans had been forgotten or perhaps obsolete; part of a chapter now closed.

July 24th 2015 – East Belfast

Sheila McWade

I have stolen my neighbours’ recycling bins on either side. I lifted one on Tuesday morning and the other on the previous Tuesday. I imagine my neighbours returning from work to find their recycling bins missing, moaning about the theft over dinner while using words such as, ‘typical,’ and, ‘you can’t take anything for granted these days.’ Tomorrow they will phone the City Council and demand new recycling bins. They will not for a minute suspect me the thief. I am a good person to live next to. I always smile. I wave from my doorstep when I see my neighbours to either side. I make very little noise. Now I have stolen their recycling bins and gotten away with it I will feel more confident about stealing larger items from my neighbours: wheelie bins, bicycles, small trees, the family car, my neighbor to the right’s husband who has a beard. This has been my intention since I first became a thief.

July 25th 2015 – Enniskillen

Karen Shannon

The charity shops of Enniskillen are a particularly rich source of wedding hats. Pastel pink and blue and yellow saucer-shaped affairs are circling these shops like lost planets looking for a good place to settle. All the colours of the ice cream spectrum arranged across the windows on mannequin heads and these mannequin heads are without arms or legs or even shoulders but have not seemed to notice their diminished state. They have been designed to bear a hat and are bearing wedding hats, some with low slung veils or flowers, and are therefore smiling. They have not thought to ask for arms or even a necklace with which to disguise the place where their throats run out. No one is buying these hats. This is Enniskillen and everyone knows everyone else. No one will risk the embarrassment of arriving at a wedding in their neighbour’s hat.

July 26th 2015 – Dundonald

Rachel and Tony Ho

The summer you turned three we read the Gruffalo so many times –cover to cover, whilst curled into the side of your bottom bunk- that you could recite the entire book from memory. This did not stop you asking for the Gruffalo every evening between toothpaste and lights out. You did the words and I did the voices: the mouse, the snake, our favourite, the fox, and the Gruffalo himself. Together we made a sort of harmony. We surprised ourselves with the seriousness of it all, as if this was church or some such thing with liturgy.

Now you are five and consider yourself too old for the Gruffalo. You like Frozen, and nail polish, and talking American like a girl you heard on the Disney channel. Tonight I am making you read the Gruffalo. It is a deal for staying up late but you are not best pleased with my book choice. When I start to read you fall into the voices. We are still a sort of harmony and now there is a third strand; a five year old you, funny and quick and already wise enough to appreciate the grace of remembering.

July 27th 2015 – Ulster Hall

Anna Newall

This morning it is raining like the sky is a ceiling and this ceiling is leaking and there is not a bucket in the world big enough to catch the drips. We are in a circle with percussion instruments singing songs and making rhythm. Those of us ill-inclined towards tambourines are tapping on the floor with feet and walking sticks. Some wise soul has suggested summer songs, for example: ‘Summer Holiday,’ by Cliff Richard, and, ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ We are doing our best to be enthusiastic. We are singing and shaking and tip tapping the summer into the hardwood floor. It is not catching. We are not believing ourselves. We sing, ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,’ and though this feels like admitting defeat it is much better suited to the pitch of our throats. Perhaps this is something to do with the Northern Irish accent.

July 28th 2015 – Armagh

Carrie Davenport

Armagh has almost as many hills as San Francisco though not quite the same quota of sun hours. Everywhere your car is slipping; backwards, forwards, down a hill, your handbrake too limp to brace itself against gravity. At the bottom of these hills you recall your childhood house and the neighbours across the cul-de-sac who let their children play inside the family car until one afternoon the middle son discovered the handbrake, raised it like a drawbridge, and let the car pitch down the drive through the gates, over pavement, road and pavement, to bury itself, bonnet first, in the front of next door’s house. You see the car clear as you saw it twenty five years ago, peaking like a cartoon mouse through the tiles and crumbling rubble of their downstairs bathroom. Also the screams of adults which were angry screams and only a little concerned.

July 29th 2015 – Armagh

Michelle and Roger Porter

Today you are at a literary festival in a rural, market town. Technically it is a city on account of its two cathedrals. Only the locals call it a city and, when thinking about it honestly without tourists, understand it to be actually a town. There is, after all, not even a proper Marks and Spencer’s here.

A well-known novelist if offering you her son’s hand in marriage. In return she would like a reading and an opportunity to sell her books. The son is thirty two; too old to be still at home, underfoot and nesting. He is, you are told, particularly fond of Belfast girls. You are seriously considering this deal. She is, you remind yourself, a reasonably well-known author. You wonder if you should place something else on the table: money, cake, a pair of she goats, some sort of dowry. This is probably because you are in a rural, market town. In Belfast such transaction do no occur. Many people remain unmarried.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Twenty Nine

July 16th 2015 – Ballymena

Amanda Rankin

A man on ‘Escape to the Country,’ (which is a television programme featuring couples who wish to relocate from the city to a more rural setting and may or may not actually be called, ‘Country Escape’ or ‘A House in the Country,” or some such nonsense), wishes to buy a house with room for a donkey.

“You can’t just buy one donkey,” he is told. “You need at least two. They don’t cope well alone.”

The man is crestfallen. He only has the savings for one donkey.

“It doesn’t necessarily need to be another donkey,” he is told. “They’ll settle for any creature of a similar size for a friend: small ponies, larger goat, a human being crouching in their field.”

In this sense the house buying man is quite similar to a donkey. Standing shoulder to shoulder it is easy to see that his wife is another species entirely. They hold hands for the cameras, but their eyes are soft and lonely like two strangers coming across each other in the same field.

July 17th 2015 – Linenhall Street, Belfast

Heather McMeekin

The giant, elastic band ball which sits on the counter at reception has begun to disintegrate. Pieces of red and cream rubber are peeling off it like strands of over-cooked spaghetti. Even thus diminished it is still the size of a bowling ball or a turtle.

“How long’s it been here?” we ask the receptionist.

She speculates for a moment but thinks fifteen years at least which is longer than most marriages these days.

“At the heart of it,” she continues, “there is a paperclip and a piece of paper folded up. A lady started it off who is now dead.”

She lets us bounce the ball up and down on the foyer floor. More elastic bands peel off. We wonder what, if anything, is written on that folded up piece of paper. Holding the giant elastic band ball we reminded of meteorites but they are lighter than they look and this is so much heavier.

July 18th 2015 – QFT, Belfast

Carol and Andy Rossborough

Brian Wilson brought dogs into the recording studio and made them bark for the tape, big dogs with sleek legs. It is easy to picture these dogs standing on their hind legs, stretching for the hanging mics as if they were bones or sticks dangling from the studio’s ceiling. At the times people questioned the wisdom of dogs and the various other noises Wilson claimed to be hearing in his head. Even after its release the American listening public would continue to question the wisdom of having dogs on a popular music album. Pet Sounds would not sell well in the States. In Britain, where they still appreciated dogs and visionary art, it would fly off the shelves. This wouldn’t be nearly enough to satisfy Brian Wilson or the various other noises inside his head.

July 19th 2015 – East Belfast

Tara West

There were two ways of looking at the issue with the window box. Either, she was terribly bad at caring for plants, or if one considered the situation from another, more sympathetic angle, the same plants felt so at ease in her company, they were more than happy to lower their guard and let their worst sides out.

“Like the way you just don’t care how you look around family,” she eventually decided.

This thought was a comfort to her when the leaves browned and began to fall off.

July 20th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

John D’Arcy

There was once a man who could not keep the Christmas inside him. Though this man did not look particularly festive and bore not even the most fleeting of resemblances to Father Christmas, there was something about him which lit a room up like a string of fairy lights every time he entered. There was nothing particularly remarkable about this man’s appearance, or even his name, which was John, (the most common of all names for a common man), yet the party did feel like it had begun in earnest until he arrived, smiling at the door. When this man grew older, and occasionally forgot himself in public spaces, he could not hold the Christmas still inside himself. He would launch into round of Jingle Bells, even in July, every time he heard a bell chime or a shop door tingling open. Far from irritating people, this man made them smile and remember that Christmas was never more than six months away.

July 21st 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Becca Dean

I am making a robot of myself. It will look exactly like me, only silver. People I know will see the robot of me in Tesco’s or on the bus and will be struck by its resemblance to me, and also its shininess. They will see themselves reflected in its face or on the smooth slope of its back. They will automatically stop to check their hair, tucking wayward strands behind their ears as if the robot of me was a mere mirror, only there for their convenience. The robot of me will not be funny, or write stories, or be good at conversation with wine. I will be particularly careful to ensure it is a dull dinner party guest for fear that my friends might begin to prefer its company over mine. The robot of myself will exist to do things I do not enjoy doing such as tax returns and going to funerals. I will not bother to give the robot of me a name.

July 22nd 2015 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Sophie Collins

When it came to the final number and everyone in the audience was asked to sing along with ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ two people did not know the words. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, two people only knew the phrase, ‘somewhere over the rainbow,’ and the accompanying melody. During the other sections of the verse and chorus these two people opened and closed their mouths silently in time to the piano. From a distance it was impossible to tell that they were not producing sound, though there was an almost imperceivable time lapse between their jaws and the jaws of those audience members sitting to their left and right. Both these people had had rather disappointing childhoods and this was why they did not know the words to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ The memory of their disappointing childhoods came back to them as they lip synched and both, without consulting one another, determined not to cry and also to Google the lyrics as soon as they got home.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Twenty Eight

July 9th 2015 – East Belfast

Josh and Amber Chang

Stormont and travel and a thing about Rory McIlroy and then we are in the east of the city where the residents of an end terrace are complaining about the sixty foot bonfire resting against their gable wall. The tower of wooden pallets is already twice the height of their home with two hundred more to be added over the weekend.

“We’ve to move out of our own house,” the wife is saying, “and dear only knows what we’ll come back to in the morning.”

“It’s like the bloody towering inferno next door,” the husband adds.

They are sitting in their living room, a little too large for the sofa cushions. There is floral wallpaper behind their heads; a kind of feature wall. Behind the camera the cameraman is beginning to sweat. He imagines the heat is rising from the walls and the fitted carpet though it is four full days yet ‘til the Twelfth. He requires both hands to hold his camera steady, both feet to keep himself from running. He is determined that he will not be here again next year or in some other angry room in this godforsaken city.

July 10th 2015 – Royal Avenue, Belfast

Clara Kane

It is four days until the release of Harper Lee’s new novel. There is a blackboard in the window of the bookstore counting the days backwards from ten. People are taking pictures on their mobile phones. People are pre-ordering and re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird, just to get the plot straight in their heads. (Sometimes, in the past, they have mixed this book up with Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. It has been a long time since O-Level English Lit.) On the internet the American actor, Reese Witherspoon is reading a selected passage of the new novel. This is available for download; a kind of literary trailer. It is very possible that the publishers have opted for the wrong voice –Witherspoon is all teeth and tight polo necks- surely Harper Lee would sit easier in an older throat, something worn around the edges. However, in four days’ time a book will be the most important thing in the world. In light of this small, (and fleeting), miracle the details seem entirely irrelevant.

July 11th 2015 – East Belfast

Jonny Currie

There are small, jungle-living monkeys in the new Ikea advert. Look at them eating bananas straight from the fridge, turning the taps on and off with reckless abandon and smashing the crockery like there is an endless supply of affordable cups and plates. They are having a jolly old time, these little monkeys in their jungle kitchen, and yet you cannot enter into their joy. You are reminded of the red-faced monkey in the National Geographic advert, squatting unhappily in some Amazonian river. You see this monkey constantly. It has the face of your father, sad and frowning as if utterly devastated. You find this advert impossible to watch and, by association, all monkey-based advertising.

July 12th 2015 – Portrush

Alice Quigley

The boys who work the summer shifts at Barry’s are wearing green bomber jackets now. In the old days, when you spent your holiday money on the two p machines, feeding the coppers in one by one so you could buy an hour to eye the best looking boys, learning their name badges off by heart, (Ian, Johnny, Chris), they were wearing royal blue doctors’ coats, like the long ones worn by old men in hardware stores. These were not the coats of youth or youngish men and it was always a pleasant surprise to find their smooth faces and their boy band haircuts peaking over their collars. Those blue coat boys are thirty five and older now. They have children and university degrees and take their holidays on the Continent. They have been replaced by their former selves in lawn green coats. Everything else is the same, even the ghost train.

July 13th 2015 – East Belfast

Simon Magill

In the middle of the street which runs like a tree-lined artery between the Belmont and Newtownards Roads, two birds are fighting over a piece of food. The larger bird lifts it and drops it and lifts it again, struggling to haul its breakfast across the road and under the hedge. The smaller bird can only peck at its opponent and lose. The first bird is a crow, the second a starling and no bigger than a child’s curled fist. From a distance it looks like meat they are fighting for. Up close it is a third, even smaller bird, dead and oily with the blood. It could well be a starling. You choose to see it as a starling. It is easier to believe that one bird, at least, is fighting for vengeance and justice and an eye for the eye of a fallen friend. Otherwise it is just two creatures consuming a third and this is something you see almost every day.

July 14th 2015 – East Belfast

Andrew Moore

Up to a certain point in history British children were familiar with the work of Snoopy and Charlie Brown. They may not have known them under the collective name, “Peanuts,” but nevertheless understood exactly what was being implied when, on the eve of their weekly bath, they were referred to as filthy, little Pig Pens and scrubbed with a facecloth. American children are still familiar with the work of Snoopy. They watch him at Christmas and wear him on sweaters. However, somewhere in the last twenty years, their British peers lost interest, or perhaps demanded something more complex from their cartoons. This sad fact and the pancake breakfast, remain the only two examples of American superiority still standing after two hundred years of hard trying.

July 15th 2015 – Bedford Street, Belfast

Paula Cunningham

Of course it would be desperately difficult to prove this as fact but they do say that Agatha Christie was the first Western woman to stand upright on a surfboard. There is context to this story if context is required. The first husband was a diplomat of some sort, widely traveled though not as interesting as the second husband who was an archaeologist. (Death on the Nile, ancient oriental weapons, fascination with the Near East etc. etc.). It is not the longest of leaps to imagine them visiting Hawaii or to picture Agatha in a long-legged swimsuit standing behind an upright board. This was, after all, the Queen of Crime Fiction; a formidable woman, well-accustomed to standing upright in a man’s place. What is harder to reconcile is the image of a surfboard with the way she came to be remembered: pearled and suited with a pen in hand, an only so slightly younger take on the Queen Mother.