I Wonder, I Wonder

“I wonder, I wonder what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream that you wanted to dream?” – Alan Watts.

When I was a child I would choose what I was going to dream about before I went to sleep each night. I planned each dream, each twist and turn and each happy ending. There was always a happy ending. I awoke every morning happy in the knowledge that everything had almost certainly gone to plan. Sadly, it was only ever almost certainly because I very rarely remember my dreams in the morning. I am familiar with the tripping up the kerb thing, the finding myself naked on the way to school thing, the falling thing, the being somebody else thing, but only vaguely. I am certain of pattern, but very lacking in texture. I have no recollection of detail. It is such a waste, particularly given the range of dreams I could set myself these days. They would have made my ten years old toes curl.

It has always been a bit of a problem to me, sleeping. I’ve never managed to get the sleep I am told I need yet I rarely feel tired for lack of it. The hours between my wife retiring for the night and the time being right for my own slide into stygian slumber are spent picking at crosswords, reading books and considering why one whisky is never enough. They are frustrating hours because even after all of these years, I would dearly like to be able to drift off at will as many of my friends are able to do – more often than not when I am telling them a story.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what I would choose to dream about if I had the opportunity? Would I dream about being rich, knowing that I would have to wake up to not being so? Would I choose to dream about being handsome and popular, knowing that I would wake up a schmuk? Would I dream that I was still awake? The obvious problem with all dreams is that you have to wake up at the end of them or risk not waking up at all. Surely if you could choose what to dream, then real life would have to be a disappointment because most of the time, in the waking world, you are firmly stuck with what you have got, and what you have got is not all that it might be.

Perhaps you could dream a world that is more drab than the real one knowing that when you wake, what you have will seem bright and sparkly in comparison, but that too would be a waste wouldn’t it? A third of your life spent in circumstances far more dreary than they have any need to be. While you sleep, you could be a God, a rockstar, a saviour of mankind (peoplekind?). Your world could be filled with colour, a kaleidoscope, a garden in full summer bloom, then surely, rather than the ability to decide what to dream, you would crave the ability to remember it all in the morning.

I wonder, I wonder…

This Charming Man

He was Peter Perfect: Head Prefect at school, fast-tracked superstar at work, ideally partnered with first-love spouse, the only absent father that other kids actually wanted as their own, the man who never pissed in the shower. His eyes were bright, his teeth were gleaming, his balls were golden. He was every mother’s dream, but he was every father’s nightmare, because most fathers, having either known or been one themselves, are perfectly able to spot a shit when they see one. Julian Trite (in real life he was, of course, not named after a Wacky Races character) whilst being superficially exemplary, was actually nothing more or less than superficial. If his visage was very much P. Perfect, then his character was decidedly D. Dastardly. His soul was a black hole that had already sucked the life out of his personality. A flawless smile under a mop of hair that took no more than three hours to primp into shape and could not be allowed out in the rain, Julian had all the charm of a weekend in Chernobyl and the charisma of a whelk.

Yet like a Mr Whippy ice cream on a sunny day, he looked so good from a distance and with the sun behind him he could almost be mistaken for intelligent, or, at least, sentient, although he was in fact neither. He was a vacuum: a perfect hologram in unspotted underwear. To remain engaged in conversation for the full four minutes he allowed himself to be in the orbit of anybody who might see through him (virtually anybody with an IQ above that of a frozen pea) was a Herculean task. He gave ‘small talk’ a new emphasis. He offered the mental stimulus of an evening with Idi Amin and the conversational acumen of Marcel Marceau. In short, his dental implants had greater depth of character than whatever it was that loitered, fecklessly between his ears.

Now, I know that by this point you will have decided that I must have a personal axe to grind with Mr Trite, but I do not. In truth I have seldom been in his company, although we have quite commonly shared the company of others, and I have observed him from afar. You see he is the very quintessence of making the best of his own bad job whilst making the worst of everybody else’s. Men clustered around him because they felt, with some justification, that alongside him they would appear to have the magnitude of intelligence that could not help but persuade any unattached females in attendance to ponder the possibilities of exploring the contents of their trousers. But the ladies gathered around him because – oh what the hell – he looked so good, and when, in the morning, they discovered that he was nothing more than an empty vessel (a married empty vessel) the living embodiment of a Mexican Meal – all about the wrapping – well… nothing ventured… isn’t that what they say?

Well, that’s why you must never feel sorry for young Mr Trite because, deep down inside, he knows that he has a pickled walnut for a brain, but he is bright enough, at least, to know that he can always spend his evenings in the company of men alongside whom he always looks amazing and women (as well as a not inconsiderable number of other men) who may yet be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for one tedious, depressing and disappointing night.

Do not feel pity for him: he has more notches upon his bedposts than Elton John has had hair transplants and his conscience, like his IQ, has taken a permanent gap year trekking in Cambodia with a trainee taxidermist from Wolverhampton. Julian is a happy man and as for everyone else… well, he neither knows nor cares.

You may even feel that you know Julian yourself, but if you do, please keep it very, very quiet, because frankly I thought I’d made him up…

Wind and Wuthering*

Having recently scheduled some pre-prepared nonsense and taken a week off from writing, I am finding it very hard to get going again. I have tried using both hands, a variety of pens and a dozen different pads, but inspiration, as yet, has refused to put its weasel face above the parapet. Not that I blame it of course, look what I do to it when it does. My day has become locked into the kind of aimless listlessness that has me wandering from three chords on the guitar to three on the ukulele – not the same three chords, even I am not that listless (it has just occurred to me that when I am not listless, I must be list, and I have no idea what I should do about it) – a half-hearted scan through The Times Crossword, and a change of socks (due to the overwhelming conviction that the previous ones were, for reasons best known to themselves, holding me back).

Having not eaten meat for almost four decades I cannot fall back on chicken soup as a remedy so, in the hope that ceps are not sentient, I resort to mushroom which looks a little similar, but does not contain livestock, and a mug of camomile tea, the look and smell of which always brings hot Baby-Bio to mind. I drink it because, in my mind, it earns me a whisky. It also earns me, because I am driven to a period of cupboard scouring, a rogue Walnut Whip that was orphaned at least two Christmases ago. It probably had a Best Before date, but if I don’t read it, I figure I don’t have to abide by it. It is an immutable law of nature that if you do not read the Use by date, it cannot make you ill.

On days such as these I graze like a Dugong. Like a pigmy shrew, I feel light-headed if my jaw stops chewing for even a second. Bowls of fruit and boxes of chocolate are ravaged like fields of wheat in the path of a locust swarm. I fear that if the food runs out I will almost certainly eat the curtains. I would like to blame lack of sleep, an impoverished upbringing, sun-spots, lay-lines or, preferably, somebody else completely, but the problems are all my own. I constantly boomerang between periods of extreme productivity and the kind of lassitude for which a sloth would seek therapy. I ride the beast of abundance until I can hold on no longer and then I spend a wholly inappropriate period of time down amongst the feckless catching my breath and counting my toes.

Unfortunately for me, when the compulsion to write does return, it almost always does so unencumbered by any knowledge of ‘what about?’ It sweeps over me like a wave, plonking me on my poor, benighted swivel chair and whispers in my ear, ‘Well, I’ve done my bit…’ So, I stare at the paper for a while, I employ each of my favourite pens, I write right-handed and I write left handed (I’m not sure if it’s the curse of the ambidextrous that I never know which is which) I listen to something old and familiar and generally, sooner or later, things fall into place.

Although sometimes, of course, they don’t…

*By Genesis and on the player as I type…

The Re-education of Lancing Boil

At 8.32am precisely, Lancing Peregrine III slipped the bug into his overnight bag and slid, unobserved, from the building. It wasn’t unusual. There was nobody else to observe him anyway, and if there had been, none of them would have cared. Lancing was as unloved as it was possible for a person to be.

Boil they had called him at school: Lancing Boil – as in an excrescence. “A small and extremely annoying accumulation of pus” according to his then housemaster, now headmaster at his Alma Mater, and it was a strange kind of nominative determinism that ensured that Lancing had been a martyr to such pustules all of his life. Pimple, boil, or carbuncle, Lancing had spent most of his life skin-side of them. Barely a day passed him by without the eruption of a new whelk, and boy did he blame that school. The traumas that had been inflicted on his young self had, on occasion, been so extreme that his memory had erased them: locked them away in a mental vault to which he had lost the combination. He knew that the only way he would ever fill these gaps would be by somehow hearing the truth from someone else’s lips.

The bug he had slipped into his case was, he thought, his greatest creation to date. A miracle of miniaturised IT, his tiny listening device lay nestled inside a minutely detailed model cockroach, perfectly formed in every nauseous respect. Anyone finding it would, instead of investigating further, simply squidge it with a boot and sweep away the nano-remains without a second glance. It was perfect. All he had to do was plant it.

Exactly what he expected to discover was, at best, uncertain. He felt sure that the now Headmaster must have skeletons hidden away, but exactly why any of them might feature him, Lancing had no idea. Never-the-less, he simply could not resist the opportunity that the school reunion presented. Even a weekend spent in the company of a band of now middle-aged men that he recalled more as torturers than classmates could not cool his enthusiasm. He knew they would apple-pie his bed; he knew they would put his underwear in the shower; he knew that if they got the opportunity they would leave fake (he prayed) excrement on his pillow. He was ready for it all.

In the event, his contemporaries seemed genuinely pleased to see him and, to his surprise he was not called Boil once; his dormitory bed went unmolested, as did his underwear. He felt a strange contentment. The evening of the reunion ball passed in a rapturous blur. He was part of the gang. They ate, they drank (Lancing himself consumed at least three half pints of shandy and felt decidedly giddy) they laughed and they reminisced. Lancing began to doubt his own recollection of lonely and miserable schooldays. How could he have got things so wrong? These people were not the characters that his fractured memory recalled. Could he be wrong too about the headmaster? He knew there was only one way he could be ever be sure. He would plant the bug as planned.

2am. The dormitory was, save for alcohol-fuelled snoring and the gaseous fallout of a monster meal, completely benign. Lancing climbed silently from his bed and crept stealthily from the room with the night bag over his shoulder. Save for the usual shock of old building creak and groan, the journey was uneventful and his entrance into the headmasters study went without hitch. Now, where to put the bug? After a short mobile-phone lightened skirt around the room he found the perfect spot and returned to the holdall to retrieve his silent little ear-in-a-roach.

Excitement overwhelmed him. He felt as though the bag was alive. He pulled the zip and a thousand – a million – live cockroaches flooded out across the desk, the floor, his feet… Lancing screamed in unadulterated panic and previously lost memories of a deeply buried biology-lab trauma overwhelmed his senses. He put his hand to his mouth as behind him the door burst open, flooding light into the room, and there, silhouetted in the frame were all of his fellow alumni accompanied by the dreaded headmaster. They were laughing fit to bust. “Lancing,” they chanted. “Lancing Boil the Bug Boy,” and Lancing realised, quite suddenly, that for once he had succeeded in his mission. He had filled a gap in his memory…

Things That Should Never Be Taken Seriously

Any poetry that contains the word ‘ain’t’
Politicians who promise to tell the truth
‘Buy one, get one free’
‘Self-made’ millionaires who started off with absolutely nothing – other than the million pounds their parents ‘loaned’ them
Anyone who phones unexpectedly and starts the conversation with ‘Good afternoon sir…’
Actors who believe their work is important
Anybody who tells you how good you look
‘But…’ (‘I don’t mean to be funny but…’, ‘I’m not racist but…’, It’s none of my business but…’)
Anything that offers results without effort
Anything that promises to make you look ten years younger
Politicians who claim to be ‘a man/woman of the people’
The manufacturer’s ‘miles per gallon/miles per electrical charge’ projection on a new vehicle
Anyone who wears a bow tie without being forced to
The efficacy of a baby’s nappy
‘Sale Ends Tomorrow’ notices
Anything that an Estate Agent says, unless you get it in writing
Anything that an Estate Agent says, even if you do get it in writing
Newsreaders who wink
People who dress up pets
Politicians in track suits
Anything that’s ‘foolproof’
Turquoise track suits
Clowns
People who wear turquoise track suits
‘If you wish to stop receiving e-mails from us, just click here’
The weather forecast
The first answer you get on a calculator
Anything that claims to be ‘leak-proof’
Celebrity chefs
Your partner when they’ve had a drink
Trendy vicars
Children who deny anything
Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’
Actor’s who claim to love their co-stars
‘I put in even more hours when I work from home…’
Politicians who say ‘I have been completely open about my tax affairs’
‘It’s a united dressing room’
‘I almost became professional in my teens’
Man Caves
Sweat bands
‘We will take all such allegations very seriously’
Elderly Chinese politicians with jet-black hair
Bidets
The word ‘operative’ when applied to a job description
A Russian promise
Vitamins
Pyjamas
Naturists (particularly those playing volleyball)
72-hour antiperspirant
Apathy
Politicians

You Cannot Be Serious!

What you see is what you get.

I have tried, from time to time, to put something ‘out there’ that was altogether more mature than my normal farrago, actually ready to stand on its own two feet, that was not quite so needy, but inevitably what leaves my head as ‘worthy’ hits the page as ‘trite’ and, by and large, any point that I think I might want to make is probably best served by being made by somebody else. Nobody ever had their viewpoint changed by a sockful of wet fish in the face. Whoever said that laughter is the best medicine has never had a UTI. It might be possible to successfully make a point with a joke, but only if you use a feather duster and not a bludgeon and, let’s be honest here, I’m not certain that I am aware of anyone who has actually laughed so much that it has fundamentally changed their point of view. I don’t think that anybody necessarily likes somebody more because they can make them laugh, although it definitely has the edge over making them feel as though they would like to swallow stones.

Whilst being the butt of a joke is never going to improve anybody’s demeanour, seeing somebody else getting their pants filled with custard may well work a treat. Nothing is quite as cheering as the misfortune of others.

Extreme emotion is incredibly difficult to channel properly. Everyone has experienced that moment at the lowest point of a funeral when grief overwhelms the senses and they find themselves giggling. No? Only me? Oh dear… It is in no way a mark of disrespect, merely a brain that is unable to process what it is feeling and so seeks relief in the first emotion that comes to hand: inevitably the wrong one. This is no sign of flippancy, but the mark of someone with an emotional compass that has been left too near the microwave.

There are times when I feel that the reality I occupy lies just one millimetre to the side of everybody else’s. I am the man who set off to explore the Cosmos and wound up in a bar in Kos. (Or, if my first draft is to be believed, ‘in a bra in Kos’.) On the whole, my world is split into three sections: 1. the huge things that I have no control over whatsoever – these are usually of incomprehensible magnitude and almost always distressing; 2. the usual day to day annoyances which occupy my brain in fevered worry for 99% of the time; 3. everything else – usually composed of sheer absurdity, frustration and chocolate. There is seldom anything amusing to be found in category 1, but if I couldn’t find it in 2 and 3 I would almost certainly be found wandering the Brecon Beacons in a woolly hat and loin cloth shouting ‘wibble’ at unicorns. My default position is always ‘Really? Are you sure?’

Truly you do not have to search to find absurdity, we are surrounded by it, so little of life makes any sense at all, and if you report on it, no matter how microcosmically, you simply cannot be serious…

Outward

You know what it’s like, sometimes just getting it off your chest is all that matters. Having parked my tendency to over-analyze, assess and worry at the last ‘dong’ of 2022 I am beginning to find that the bottomless well* of angst from which I have been able to draw these past few years has started to silt up a little, meaning that the bucket has less distance to fall before it hits paydirt, and when I haul it up, is far more likely to bring with it the kind of flotsam and jetsam to which only a well that is nothing like as deep as once it was is prone to hold. The crap in my literary pail is both more plentiful and more varied than once it was.

Now, I hear what you are thinking: ‘O.K. we’ve given you a full paragraph leeway now. You are a good distance into today’s tract and you still haven’t scratched the surface of ‘comprehensible’. What the hell are you talking about?’ Well, give me a minute. I’m sure it will come to me…

I have tried very hard to no longer worry about all those poor souls who do not read my blog – some people are beyond help – and concentrate instead on writing anything that piques my fancy and which will in turn, I hope, entertain you discerning few who do. If things have changed a little of late, that is why. The sunnier me is looking outward, but what I’m looking out at is not always great and, if I’m honest, I wonder how long Mr Sunny will continue to exist before the pre-Christmas gloomy-pants me reappears. Real life is already beginning to chip at my cheery façade, pigeons have started to roost in my greying locks and the vein that writhes across my forehead like a lugworm on heat has started to squirm. It is obvious through the news that the current ‘cost of living crisis’ is having a far greater impact on the population than two world wars, Covid 19 and Krakatoa combined. If Putin gets his way and World War Three erupts, I will be well cheesed off!

This is the way it works. We bought a new TV this week having burned a hole in the back of the old one with a lamp that was obviously much hotter than any earthly lamp should be. (Don’t ask!) Aware of our duty towards due-diligence, we thoroughly researched, and read reviews until we understood the exact nuances of what pushes a five star rating down into the nether-lands of four and a half. We were prepared and we thus made the right and proper choice. The TV arrived and I set aside the usual long weekend to set it up. Amazingly, all went without hitch. We turned it on and it was really pants. We contacted the retailer who said, ‘Are you sure? It’s a really good TV. Have you seen the reviews?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the reviews are indeed superlative. The TV is not. I’ve sent you photos.’ They viewed them and agreed that it was, indeed pants, but that the photograph from a position directly in front of the screen was very good. It was. Unfortunately, as I showed them, it took no more than half a step in either direction to render the screen unviewable. So, long story short, they were very good, no complaints at all, I had retained, and used, all the original packing, the TV was picked up and will very shortly be refunded except… You know the panic that sets in within ten seconds of everything going exactly to plan? As part of the setup I was encouraged to put in a PIN and I never took it off. They will want to turn it on, won’t they, to test it. I presume if they consider it to be the kind of TV that is perfectly saleable to the kind of viewer with a single chair in the middle of the room, they will do so and should he/she decide he wants to change anything… Oh dear…

Now, I am perfectly aware that such a situation would be of absolutely no concern to 99.999% of the human race, but to a handwringer such as myself, it has the potential to turn my whole life upside down. I have already considered the probable course of events that will inevitably lead to me being either locked away in Strangeways for Fraud or, should plod not come a-knocking on my door, finding myself nostril-deep in concrete footings as a result of the secondary purchaser of the errant TV being the kind of person with whom you do not mess, particularly if they cannot watch Eastenders at one degree west of ideal. Do I ring the retailer and give them the new PIN, even though I know that panic will then set in and I will have to reset every other unassociated PIN on everything I know and use – even though I, myself, can’t remember any of them? At least if GCHQ is planning on looking in on me, there’s a good chance they’ll get somebody else I suppose.

So, that’s how it works. Trashing a relatively new TV has disturbed my newly found equilibrium barely at all, but putting a random four number sequence into its bastard replacement as I set it up, has every potential of throwing me back down that bloody well which is quite suddenly getting deeper by the second. I’m sure the bucket will no longer reach…

Ah well, airheads always float I think. I’ll just bob around here for a while, waiting for New Year’s Day 2024 and another New Rosier Year ahead. I’ll unburden myself by posting the odd missive, and as for those who don’t want to read them, well, they’ll never know will they, and I’ll be smiling on…

*My depth of ‘subterranean reservoir’ knowledge is not all it might be, but I have a feeling that ‘bottomless well’ may well be a total oxymoron**, as such a hole – like a politician’s excuse – would never hold water. Oh well, too late now.

**As opposed to ‘total moron’ e.g. me.

Selling Snow to Eskimos

Photo by Frans van Heerden on Pexels.com

It was said that Julian could sell snow to the Eskimos and, whilst he had never actually tried it, it was certainly true that he had on occasions managed to sell the actual straw that broke the camel’s back and had misappropriated along the way so many mickles that his muckle* was now the size of a luxury three story bolt-hole on the Algarve, paid for in tight wads of ill-gotten gains. Thanks to him, Westminster Bridge had more Japanese owners than Sony and The Shard had more stakeholders than it had windows. He had sold more fragments of The True Cross than four woodyards across the city were able to keep up with and if the slivers of the Elgin Marbles he had allowed Greek Visitors to repatriate over the years (for a small fee, obviously) were gathered together, the British Museum would have to open a new wing.

Julian wasn’t a bad man; anyone that knew him would tell you that. As a young man he had been a successful Estate Agent, but he could not stand the accusations of falsehood that were continually levelled at him, so he became an even more successful car salesman where the falsehoods were never his own, but the symptoms of a dysfunctional workshop. Later, after a very short, but extremely lucrative few weeks selling worthless credit-scheme encyclopaedias door-to-door, he felt that he was prepared for a future of living off his own nefarious wits. He had never married; he had no children and all of his relationships tended to be short-term – not through choice but through necessity. He could not stay in any place for long, he could never allow his friends to know his next move. The longest relationship he had ever maintained was over the three years in which he had shared a Strangeways prison cell with ‘Slasher’ Murdoch and his abominable socks.

After his release he had crossed the Channel and armed with nothing more than a smattering of schoolboy French and the ability to talk nonsense in something that sounded vaguely like Italian, managed to make a perfectly decent living selling the Eiffel Tower to Asian tourists, many of whom had only recently availed themselves of an outstanding investment deal for part-ownership of one or another of London’s prime river crossings, but he found that the custodians of French law and order were not as forgiving, nor as amenable, as many members of our own capital’s constabulary, and he was forced to move a little further down the continent, where the police were too busy to waste their time on a sixty-year old chancer, where the suckers were plentiful and the deals were simple, even if the pickings were slimmer.

Still he was happy there. He was older now; the weather was good, the sun shone most of the time and overheads, in general, were considerably lower than the two capital cities he had worked before. The natives were easy-going and the tourists as naïve as anywhere else. The living, although meagre at times, was easy. The villa was his latest acquisition, his putting down of roots, and it had been such a steal! Julian’s ‘experts’ had found it oh-so-easy to persuade the yokel owners of the fragility of the foundations; the weakness of the walls; the rude health of the Death Watch beetles in the joists. The money had, on its way to the seller, found its way through more hands than a Pokeman card in a schoolyard, along a path that was so labyrinthine it probably had a Minotaur as its guardian: it had been laundered more assiduously than his underwear. His currency was clean, clean, clean, and he was confident that no-one would be able to find fault with any of the paperchain, so it was with some surprise that he found himself being ushered into the office of Mr Ferreira, manager of the bank through which all of his financial transactions had, eventually, progressed.

The dark wooden room felt like the court rooms with which he was much more familiar. He felt unusually vulnerable and the discomfort danced around the features of his face. He did not have to ask the question which was banging around his head – Was there some problem with the deal? Had someone, somewhere, questioned the source of his capital? – Mr Ferreira read it in his eyes and answered it without hesitation, his whole demeanour signalling a major pothole in the road. “We have the paperwork for your house, senhor” he said.
“And?… Is there a problem?” Julian knew he would not be there otherwise.
Mr Ferreira sighed heavily. “The problem, senhor? The house, it is not your house.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is not your house because it was not the house of the man to whom you paid your money…”
Julian was aware that he was gaping like a stranded fish.
“…You see senhor, you really should have been more careful,” continued the bank manager. “The Algarve, it is full of con men…”

*‘Many a mickle makes a muckle.’ a Scottish ode to thrift…

Tales of the Unexpected

Photo by John Michael Thomson on Unsplash

Trawling the kind of television stations, as I do, which have the average daytime viewing figures of three if you include the dog, I stumbled across a barely remembered ITV series from 1979 called ‘Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected’ – later, after Mr Dahl had, presumably run out of unforeseen expositions of his own, just ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ – and it struck me, what would be the point of a ‘Tale of the Expected’? Surely, in order to tempt the viewer to persevere through the myriad funeral plan adverts and into ‘part two’, there would need to be the expectation of something happening that was at least to some degree not quite as anticipated? Imagine the pitch: “I like the general concept, so, what happens in the end?”
“Oh you know, the expected.”
“Brilliant! Here, take this million pounds. It’s going to be a blockbuster!”

The work of all fiction is surely to take you away from the expected, but the problem with calling something ‘Unexpected’ is that you then know to expect it. The only way that you would be able to engender shock with the ending of a Tale of the Unexpected would be to make it totally expected, thus, probably putting you on the receiving end of a multi-million pound lawsuit from a group of viewers or readers with nothing better to do. It is like expecting someone to be shocked when a large brown bear appears in ‘The Tale of the Large Brown Bear’.

Anyway, by way of research, I managed to sit through one or two of the aforementioned tales and I have to report that the makers did pull off quite a clever trick: the ending in each of the episodes I watched could, in no way, be described as unexpected unless you have the imagination of a ball of Edam cheese, (Now don’t get me wrong here; I like Edam, but you have to admit, as far as cheeses go, it is pretty much without imagination isn’t it? A super-mature Cheddar will tell a tale of derring-do so vivid that it will seep into your dreams for weeks; a liquefying stilton will lull you into a false sense of security before suddenly gripping your chest like a reverse Alien, creating the kind of heartburn that can only be alleviated by the consumption of shed-loads of port, and gout; a lovely crumbly Cheshire will have you falling in love with anyone who provides just the right fruity chutney; an Edam will have you wondering only whether you have cheese-scented soap or soap-textured cheese, although it will allow you to make a passable model rabbit out of the wax.) but more ‘Odd’. ‘Tales of the Odd’ would have been a much better title and would have encompassed the feeling of ‘Well, I know exactly what he’s going to do, but why in God’s name would he?’ that accompanied every episode I saw.

Because I was expecting the unexpected, then the only way to actually make it unexpected was to allow it to be completely expected but lacking in any logical explanation. When I was a boy, the ‘Amazing Tales’ and ‘Astounding Stories’ magazines I read delivered exactly what it said on the cover, but the endings were never unexpected. You always knew that the family next door were actually aliens and that dreams were the actual reality and vice versa: not unexpected, but definitely astounding. It would be difficult, wouldn’t it, to relate to a story in which the denouement was not, to some degree at least, expected. Life’s not like that is it?

Well, I know what’s coming next, so that’s my excuse anyway…

Telling Tales

Having taken some time out from ‘storytelling’ (my own immature over-reaction to the discovery that nobody ever reads my ‘Little Fictions’) I recently decided that the time was ripe to begin again (my angsty response to the realisation that very few people read my anything). Not on a regular basis, you understand, but on more of a laissez faire footing. (It’s my blog so I can do what I like etc etc…)

Short stories – as opposed to their more gregarious long-form cousins – appeal to me because I have never been hampered by lack of experience when writing them and, if I’m honest, so much has to be left out of these tales that almost anything can be sidestepped with a little effort. (One of the reasons I – alone – love Frankie & Benny so much is that I do not have to worry about plot, development or denouement. I just have to eavesdrop on their conversation.) What I don’t know, I make up. Research? What do I want with research? I’m not a university post-grad. I will occasionally check a fact if it is called for, but if it doesn’t exactly tally with what I want from it, I have been known to twist it just a little. Happily ‘artistic licence’ is equally available to journeymen.

I have been trying for a while now to keep the word-count of each published post down to a level that does not test your patience quite so much as once it did, but the problem with ‘stories’ is that there is so much more to fit in: a beginning, a middle and (occasionally) an end for a start; by the time I have parachuted half a dozen gags in and removed the most tortuous contortions from my syntax I am inevitably left on the border of ‘should I split this into two parts?’ territory. The answer, for anybody else that might be tempted, is ‘No’. Half of the people who read part one will decide that there is nothing to gain from reading part two (they have either guessed the ending, misunderstood the beginning, or decided that life is far too short) and nobody ever reads part two when they have not tackled part one. Reader-wise, part two, even if it culminates in the most cunningly contrived plot twist since Agatha Christie last dipped her nib, will be read by one man and his dog (unless the dog can find a more enticing arse to lick). It is better to plod on – even in the light of the knowledge that once the word-count pops its nose above the parapet of a thousand words most readers will blow it off – and none-the-less get the saga out there in a single overlong splodge.

So, here’s the strange thing. Having spent the last few months wheeling out my usual tosh in bright, new 500-600 word segments, I find that, quite unexpectedly, the meandering paths of my most recent fables have resolved themselves into their literary cul-de-sacs in a not dissimilar length of time. My tales, although no less a waste of words, do actually waste less of them now – they are even shorter stories – which leads me, of course, to worry: are they now too stripped down? Will even fewer people bother to read them? (My guess is that unless WordPress introduce negative ‘Views’, the answer will probably be ‘No’.) And then, inevitably, to ‘does it really matter, I’m not being paid by the word – in fact, I’m not being paid at all’. In days of yore I had a gift for hitting the editor’s requirements, word-wise, on the very head: not gifting so much as a free sentence to the cause, but now, happily, I don’t have that worry. I have few (although extremely discerning) readers, no payments and no worries. And such tales as I now have to tell will take as long as they need to be told. And when they need to be told, I will tell them…