Ian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ian, these last few weeks. It’s been more than 30 years since I last saw him, and we weren’t really friends, but he still keeps popping unbidden into my thoughts. 

I studied history for my undergraduate degree. Warwick University has quite a reputation in the subject, so it was (and I assume still is) a popular course with maybe a hundred students in total. My own particular specialism in Modern European and Renaissance History was a little more niche than the main course, but we all came together for lectures in the core subjects, and it was here that I met Ian. 

Ian was studying Modern History, I think, but he cut such a distinctive figure that he was hard to miss: he was tall and ungainly, wore aviator style glasses (before they came back into fashion) and a railwayman style cap. He wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, cool and would stride about the campus purposefully in practical looking shoes and an anorak. He also had funny little bald patches in his hair. At the time, it just helped underline how weird a kid he was, but thinking of it now, it looks like the kind of baldness you get when you constantly pull at your own hair until you start to pull it out. But yeah, he was the weird kid. 

At the age of eighteen, I was painfully aware of my own awkwardness, but you know what people are like, I found my own gang and Ian was firmly outside the boundaries of that gang and so we never really paid him any mind and certainly didn’t spend more time than absolutely necessary making small talk with him. In fact, now I think of it, he didn’t seem to have many friends on the course at all. This isolation was probably compounded by the fact that his hall of residence was International House, where all the students from overseas were housed. I have no idea how Ian ended up there, but compared to some of the other, big undergraduate Halls of Residence, he might as well have been on the moon. If there was a bright centre to the undergraduate universe, it definitely wasn’t to be found anywhere near International House. 

One night in my first year, I was knocking about around my own Halls of Residence when I became aware of a group of people sniggering about something. I wandered over to see what was up, and they were laughing at some poor guy who was hanging around the place, mooning after a girl called Sonia. 

It was Ian. 

I remember feeling slightly responsible for him, not because he was my friend, but because he was on my course and because I instinctively didn’t like this group of guys laughing at the poor sod in his anorak, sensible shoes and railwayman’s cap. Before I did anything else, I checked that Sonia was okay. She was not surprisingly uncomfortable that Ian was hanging around, following her about. I don’t think he meant any harm, but he clearly liked Sonia but didn’t really have the emotional toolkit to know what to do with those feelings other than to follow her around. At this point in my life, I don’t think I was anybody’s idea of a knight in shining armour, but I went up to Ian and suggested that I walked him back to International House. He recognised me, of course, and without too much persuasion, I took him out of my Halls and on the short walk across campus. On the way, we chatted. I explained to him that he was upsetting Sonia and he couldn’t just hang around her like that. He seemed to understand that, and we parted on good terms. 

I don’t like bullies, and I suppose I was just awkward enough around women that I recognised some of myself in Ian and wanted to do something other than just point and laugh at him. I didn’t really think anything more of it. 

A little while later, before the end of my first year, it was announced in one of our lectures that Ian was dead. He’d been cycling through Coventry when he had been hit by a bus and killed. A tragedy. His parents had arranged a memorial service for him in the campus chapel, and we were all invited to pay our respects. 

I walked past that chapel every single day on my way to the History Department or to the library. Did I go to the service? No, I did not. I can’t remember why I didn’t go, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t because I had anything better to do. I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I probably just wanted to be in the bar with my mates rather than attend a sad and awkward service with Ian’s bereaved parents. He was a bit of a strange kid, and he wasn’t my friend. Besides, other people would go, right? 

Wrong. 

Not a single student attended that memorial service. Not a single one of us had the decency to take 30 minutes out of our days to pay our respects. I remember feeling a bit bad when I heard that, but the feeling didn’t last and I got on with the serious business of completely taking for granted the privilege of a university education. 

Now, more than thirty years later, I find myself thinking about Ian quite often. What must his parents have felt when no one turned up? I think about that time when I walked him back to International House; did he have any friends, or did everyone just think he was weird and give him a wide berth? Was he lonely? God knows it’s hard enough just being a teenager. 

I know I can’t change the past, but I do wish that I could speak to my younger self and encourage him to be better; to do better. Of all the things that University did teach me, it seems that it took the passage of time to teach me empathy. 

RIP Ian. I can only remember the names of a handful of people on my course now, but I remember you and I’m sorry.

think of all the things we could discuss...

I make no claim to any superpowers. 

None of the really good ones, anyway. I can’t fly; I’m not the world’s greatest detective; I can’t climb walls and I certainly don’t have super-strength. I do seem to have an unusual empathy though; an ability to really connect with another creature. I don’t mean humans. God! Not humans! Humans are illogical and unpredictable. Who would want to have any special insight into that? 

My wife tells me that my special power is to make people want to feed me; she tells me that I have a “please love me” smile that it entirely irresistible to ladies of a certain age. Well, perhaps that’s true. And if it is, surely there are worse talents to have. But I’m not sure that I agree. People I can pretty much take or leave. I’m here for the animals. 

I’m not sure when this first started, but I’ve always seemed to have the ability to connect with animals. They seem drawn to me, and I’m certainly drawn to them. It probably started out the usual way, with cats and dogs. My grandmother used to have a particularly spiteful cat called Twiggy. Twiggy was a farm cat who had lost her tail at some point in the course of her long life. I don’t know if this misfortune was the cause of Twiggy’s bad temper, but she was famously vicious; the kind of cat who would scratch your hand as you put her dinner plate down. As a result, every gave her a wide berth, which probably suited Twiggy just fine. I liked Twiggy. I wouldn’t say that we were best friends, but 5-year-old me and 15-year-old Twiggy rubbed along alright, much to everyone else’s amazement. Mind you, I liked all animals, Twiggy was just one of the first in a long and growing list. There’s a picture of me from about this time, sitting outdoors with my feet up, reading with one hand reaching behind me to tickle a dog. I think that’s still me in a single picture. 

Growing up, I was a member of the Young Ornithologists Club, the Tufty Club and pretty much anything else that involved animals. Well, okay, the Tufty Club was about crossing roads safely, but who wouldn’t want to be in a gang with Tufty Fluffytail, Minnie Mole, Willie Weasel, Harry Hare and Policeman Badger? I still have the badge… 

Did you know that every spider is Scottish and speaks with a broad Scots accent? Wherever they might be found in the world, they originally came from Scotland and migrated. None of them have lost their native accents. They’re all exactly as Scottish as Groundskeeper Willie in the Simpsons. We have a really big one that lives in our house. She’s so large that you can hear her footsteps when she walks on bare floorboards. She only has seven legs too, having lost one somewhere along the way in her adventures. Perhaps wisely, the cat gives her a wide berth. She’s called Aragog, and whenever I see her, muttering in her distinctive accent as she goes about her business, I’m certain that she’s the wisest creature in the house. 

Most animals have names. 

How I know this, I couldn’t say, but these names are definitely not my invention because that would be ridiculous. Every wood pigeon calls themselves Joe Cool and the only words they say, Groot-like, are Joe Cool. “Joe Cool? Joe Cool” 

A blackbird is called “Un oiseau noir avec un bec jaune”. A female blackbird is called “madame oiseau noir avec un bec jaune” (the French for Blackbird is actually “Merle”, but what do they know?). 

Robins are all called Winter George. 

Gray Squirrels are all known as “Fatty Lumpkins”. This one is based on how they can be seen every autumn gorging themselves on hedgerow fruits, but it suits them all year round. I do know a squirrel called “Lazarus”, but that’s because he rose from the dead and chose a more appropriate name for himself. Dogs have a variety of names, depending on personality rather than on breed: scuttlebutt, waggles, side-eye, soft-as-shite… that kind of thing. There are also a few dogs that can clearly talk, and probably have a library filled with leather-bound books and a smell of rich mahogany. One or two smoke a pipe. 

I think you probably get the picture. 

It is, of course, extremely rude to walk past an animal of any kind without saying hello in an appropriate tone of voice. If accompanied by a human, it is always the animal that should be addressed first. 

Please don’t think that I’m alone in my madness: my wife was brought up in France as a child and was taught to hiss at cats. These days, she has learned to approach them respectfully, address them by name and offer the appropriate courtesy to see if they deign to acknowledge her presence. And you can’t blame my good influences for the change, either. Her mother tells me that, when she was a child, my wife couldn’t walk past a herd of cows without giving them a cheery “Bonjour madames les vaches!”. Obviously, we both do this to this day. After all, we’re not savages. Did you know that rabbits are actually “lapin d’affaires” and often run successful businesses from their warrens? No? Well, not a lot of people do, because they’ve never taken the time to ask. 

Perhaps I’ve said too much. I don’t want to betray any confidences. 

I’m told that I have a particular soft spot for the animals that no one else loves: vultures, rats, hyena… In the Serengeti a few years ago, we came across a pack of hyena sitting rather sadly underneath the carcass of a gazelle that a leopard had stashed in the fork of a tree that they couldn’t quite reach. One was sitting very sadly with is head resting on his paws, and, as we passed by in our jeep, he turned to look at us and he was missing an eye, presenting us with a rather grizzly, empty socket. Of course, I thought this was marvellous and just loved him all the more. 

Lots of people love animals, I know. But how many talk to them? Really talk to them, I mean. And how many of them listen to the answers? You should take a tip from me and try it sometime. It’s surprising what you can learn, and your lunchtime walk will never be the same again.

somebody I used to know...

For most of the time I've been in my monthly writing group, I've been doing a lot of "magical realism" style of fiction. I seem drawn to things like talking animals and a world that's like ours, only slightly different. In an attempt to try and get away from this, and in a style that's probably familiar to long-time readers of this blog, I've been delving deeper into my memories and dredging out things that I've never articulated before. It's been a rewarding and also occasionally alarming process. Cathartic, I think.

Anyway, here's something I wrote over the summer. It's all true, albeit obviously only viewed from my perspective. It's the story of somebody I used to know: Hugo.

--

To most people, Boris Johnson must seem like a character out of a book: he’s Billy Bunter made flesh; he’s Just William, he’s Flashman. It’s present in the ruffled hair, the snatches of Latin and in the classical references that pepper every speech. You can even see it in the way that, although he is clearly dressed expensively, he still somehow looks as though he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. It takes a lot of money to look that scruffy. Yes. Johnson – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – is every bit the caricature of the English public schoolboy of popular imagination. 

We should probably be used to this by now: since Robert Walpole became the first, Britain has been served by fifty-five prime ministers. Nearly all of those enjoyed a private education, and fully twenty of them (starting with Walpole himself and finishing with the present incumbent) were educated at Eton. Is it really any wonder that people with this sort of educational background often seem entitled, or that most of us think it’s normal to be governed by people like this? The history of our democracy tells us that both these things are true. 

Johnson likes to present himself as a man of the people. He loves to visit factories and warehouses and to dress up in the clothes of the normal working people of this country, to pretend that he’s just like us, when clearly, he is nothing like us. Can you actually imagine going out to a pub for a drink with Boris Johnson and trying to have a normal conversation with him? He doesn’t seem like a real person at all, does he? 

He might seem like an alien to many people, but he’s all too familiar to me, because I went to school with people like Johnson and I’ve seen this kind of easy, unearned self-confidence before. 

I first met Hugo when we were both thirteen and were being shown around our boarding house on the first day of term at our new school. It’s quite an overwhelming experience. Both of us had been to boarding schools before but being dropped off by your parents and being left alone with the eighteen-year-old prefects is legitimately terrifying. I’d been a pretty big fish in the small pond of my prep school: literally. As well as being head boy, a growth spurt also meant that I was also comfortably the tallest pupil in the school. That first afternoon being shown around my new school by two members of the school first XV rugby team (flanker and second row forward) was a pretty clear demonstration that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. 

There were fourteen of us in my year and Hugo didn’t make an immediate impression on me. I’m sure he didn’t make much of me, either. Probably we were both just overwhelmed by the whole experience. A handful of the other boys had been at my prep school, so I likely gravitated towards the people I knew. Likewise, one of the other new boys had been at Hugo’s old school, and I’m sure the two of them were drawn to each other as we tried to take it all in without drawing anybody’s attention. Now was a time for blending in, not sticking out. No one is that confident. 

It didn’t take too long after that for Hugo to make his mark. He was one of those boys who seemed to be full of boisterous energy and enthusiasm. He wasn’t as tall as me, but he was still a pretty big lad. At the age of thirteen, like a puppy, Hugo seemed to have huge paws, a massive head and a general lack of coordination, but he was also very physical and liked a bit of rough-and-tumble. He was pretty thoughtless and never really seemed to give any thought to any possible consequences, but he seemed to lack malice. He would act on impulse, get into trouble, but then be so charming that he always seemed to get away with it. 

It was hard to dislike Hugo. 

I liked him.
Everyone liked him. 

The environment at a school like this means that you spend an awful lot of time with the people in your house, and none more so than the people in your year. From that very first day onward, we would spend almost every waking hour of every day together, including weekends. We weren’t necessarily in the same classes, but we would eat together, play sport together, muck about together and sleep in the same dormitories. Over the course of five years living in each other’s pockets like this, you really get to know someone, for better and for worse. To make things even more interesting and to spice up the mix, most people also go through a lot of physical and emotional changes between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. There was very little privacy here and nowhere to hide. You learn to bury your emotions deep in an environment like this lest you show anything that makes you seem weak or makes you vulnerable. 

Hugo and I knocked along pretty well. We were very different people: neither of us were particularly good at sport, but I was pretty academic, and we tended to hang out with very different groups of friends. I spent a lot of time listening to music, reading and making a few, really good friends (many of whom are still my very closest friends today). Now I think if it, I can’t actually remember Hugo having any particularly good friends, but he was popular enough, and was certainly better-known around the wider school. As I said, there were fourteen people in my year in my House, around 100 people in total in my House and something like 900 people in the school as a whole. It was quite self-contained little galaxy of overlapping orbits. If Hugo hadn’t been in my year in my House, I’m not sure I would have had any reason to know him, and might actually have actively avoided him, but as things were, we spent a lot of time together and got on without ever really being bosom-buddies. At one point, we actually shared a two-bed dormitory. 

I think it was the arrival of the girls that changed everything. At our school, the first three years were entirely single sex, but as you entered the sixth form, girls were allowed to join the school (lucky them!). They had their own boarding houses, of course, but they joined our classes and they were assigned a boys’ boarding house for their meals. To the fourteen of us in my year in my house, now aged around seventeen, we now suddenly had four girls join us at mealtimes. It’s a bit of a shock for all concerned. It’s overly simplistic to say that it was the very presence of the girls that brought about the change in our relationships, but I think it’s fair to say that they were a prism that revealed a side of our characters that we’d never really been forced to look at too closely before. 

Like most teenage boys, we talked about girls all the time. Most of us had been at almost entirely single-sex boarding schools since the age of seven or eight, so we had no practical experience to speak of. The arrival of girls into our everyday lives was like the arrival of a foreign species. I can only imagine how bizarre an experience this must have been for the girls. For us boys, we suddenly saw these people with whom we had shared nearly every waking moment of the last three years, and thought that we knew pretty well, suddenly start to behave quite differently. 

For myself, I had very little idea how to begin to talk to these strange creatures, but I did have a fairly strong sense of how I did not want to behave. Hugo, who had often regaled us in the dormitory after lights out with tales of his supposed success with women, had a very different sense of how he wanted to behave. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a predator; women were not people in their own right but they were something to be pursued, consumed and then dropped. He was pretty cold-blooded about it too. I remember one poor girl, Alice, who soaked up the full focus of his charm. She was a year younger than us, seventeen, when he wooed her. She thought she loved him. Eventually, he got what he wanted and he more-or-less came charging out of his study to tell us all about it. He left her in tears and never spoke to her again. It felt wrong then and it feels even worse now I type those words. That is literally what he did, and I found it impossible to consider him charming when I knew that he was capable of this sort of behaviour. 

I haven’t spoken to Hugo since the day we finished our A-levels and left the school to head off to University. We have friends in common, of course, and he has sporadically tried to make contact with me over social media, but I’ve always declined. I think he has kids now, but after leaving school, he seems to have drifted through life on a sea of privilege and lack of consequence. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t had to work too hard for anything that has come his way in life. Perhaps he’s changed. Perhaps he hasn’t. 

There were a lot of people like Hugo at my school. 

Barack Obama observed of David Cameron in his autobiography that he had “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life.” That phrase really resonated with me. I know far too many people from my school days to whom that phrase could be equally applied, not least Hugo. Many ended up working in banking in places like Hong Kong and Sydney. None, as far as I’m aware, have gone into politics, but whenever I see Boris Johnson, I can’t help but think of Hugo and how much collateral damage someone like that is capable of causing to the people around them.

all greek...

The way I remember things, I breezed through my school years. Academically, at least. 

I might still bear the emotional scars of every other part of my education, but I’ve always believed that I found the actual learning stuff part of it pretty easy. Well, apart from maths. I’ve always been weirdly, hopelessly - pathetically - bad at maths. I’m good with words but hopeless with numbers and always have been. Until, one day, maths suddenly became less about numbers and more about understanding and manipulating formulae, at which point the fog started to lift. Luckily for me, this was also the point at which the serious exams started. If you know how formulas work and you know how to use a calculator, you’re laughing. I went from set 5 (out of 6) to an A grade and a possible a-level almost overnight. 

These days, this cackhandedness with numbers only really annoys me when it comes to Scrabble and crosswords: when you’re good with language, you’d imagine that turning a jumble of letters into words would be simple, right? Wrong. It’s disappointingly mathematical. But I digress. 

I’m not a genius by any means, but I am curious, was blessed with a good memory and had a priceless ability to be good at the types of exams we use to assess our children. It’s no accident that, as my education proceeded, I increasingly specialised in essay subjects. It’s not a skill that’s been all that much use to me in my adult life, I must say, but I always seem to have been able to put together coherent arguments in long form writing under pressure. Lucky me, as my exam results all the way through to my Masters degree will testify. 

Throughout my schooling, at the end of every term, I would be sent home to my parents with a trunk full of dirty laundry and a little report booklet. This booklet would contain a handwritten update from every one of my teachers for every subject detailing my progress for the term. I’m sure lots of people dread this kind of feedback (and I’m fairly sure all teachers everywhere must find this to be a terrible chore and it’s no wonder many resort to tired old cliches. MUST. TRY. HARDER). I used to love it. How could I not? As I remember it, this was mostly a succession of accounts of how remarkable I was: top of the class and on track for great things. Who wouldn’t want their parents to see this? 

Except in Maths, obviously. Until the age of about 14, my maths reports mostly remained a succession of tired and frustrated teachers not understanding why they couldn’t be the one to unlock my potential in the subject. Then, at the end of my first school year before the run into GCSEs began in earnest, I completed a 90-minute maths paper in about 40 minutes. A bored (and surprised) teacher began marking it on the spot as the rest of the class completed their papers. He put my score up on the board behind him when he finished the marking: 98%. Everyone else, still working their way through their exam papers just groaned. My response? To ask what I got wrong. You can only imagine how much the rest of my class hated me in that moment. My maths reports got better after that. 

Anyway. 

I was at my parents’ house a little while ago and they had a box of various bits and pieces on the kitchen table. I think they’d been looking for some old photos, but, for some reason, this box contained one of those old report booklets. I picked it up to have a closer look as I have two brothers and, sure enough, it turned out to be one of mine. It was the report for the Christmas term of 1986. I was in the scholarship stream at this point, being prepared for a set of exams that would ultimately mean that my parents got a fairly hefty discount off the bill for my next school when I was awarded an academic scholarship (my prize? I got to have my name in capital letters in the school directory and to be cordially hated by almost everyone else in a school not famed for its academic achievement and where the highest social status was reserved for the members of the school rugby team). I eagerly rifled through this report in its distinctive yellow binding, hoping to be able to show my wife what an intolerable swot I was at the age of twelve (she’d understand because she was, and remains to this day, by her own account, much worse). 

I quickly passed over all the good ones and came to rest on a report for Ancient Greek. Now, I only studied Greek because I had jumped a year at this school and was now in my second year of the sixth form, and the headmaster (who taught classics) wanted to give me as much intellectual stimulation as he could. 

At some point over the last thirty-five years, I have pushed this memory somewhere back into one of the dustier corners of my mind. Seeing this single, nearly transparent little piece of report paper brought it all flooding back to me. You remember I mentioned that I was inexplicably bad at maths? Well, I think I was worse at Greek. It was… well… it was all Greek to me. I remember sitting in that classroom on a dark winter evening and just failing to get my mind wrapped around this strange language that didn’t even use the same alphabet. It started promisingly when I learned by rote how to recite the alphabet. It’s something I can still do today and this skill has been surprisingly and unexpectedly useful to keep track of COVID-19 variants. That was as good as it got. When it came to writing that alphabet down, I couldn’t even get past epsilon, will all its preposterous curls. This single report told the whole sorry story, with this kindly and patient headmaster expressing his frustration that I seemed to have developed a mental block and was refusing to process any of the information he was trying to teach me. His frustration clearly came, not because he believed I wasn’t capable of learning Greek, just that I’d decided that I couldn’t and therefore wouldn’t. He finished by saying that, if this continued for much longer, he was going to have to – with great reluctance – remove me from the class. Not long after, this was exactly what happened. I remember feeling only relief at being put out of my misery. 

Reading this old report at my mum and dad’s table brought those memories back into focus. They aren’t unpleasant memories, by any means, but now they were challenging my long and somewhat proudly-held view of myself as having a more-or-less unblemished record of academic success throughout my school years. This is a key component of my image of myself and now it turns out to be not true. It’s not exactly untrue, and maths was probably all the evidence anybody needed to deflate that particular argument anyway. In fact, I’d say that it remains mostly true. 

That’s almost the same thing, isn’t it? Given some rounding to the nearest significant figure. That’s close enough for jazz, as my old maths teacher used to say. 

 --

[written for my monthly writing group, June 2021]

snapshot in the family album...

Me, the same month I started boarding

 

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to go to a boarding school? I bet you have, haven’t you? Maybe you’ve read Harry Potter and you like the idea of having banquets in a big dining room or having a house common room where you can snuggle down in your pyjamas and chat with your friends in front of a roaring fire before heading off to bed to continue the chat after lights out. 

It’s nothing like that. 

Well, maybe it is a bit. 

My parents sent me away to boarding school when I was 7 years old. One warm, sunny afternoon in September, I was loaded into the car with a trunk and driven for about an hour to the school where I was to spend the next six years. In my memory, with forty long years of distance, this came completely out of the blue: one minute I was playing at home and the next, I’m being sent away, never really to return before I moved out for good. That can’t be right though. I’m sure I must have known it was coming, because that trunk in the car was packed with a school uniform and towels and things like that, all with my name tape sewn neatly into them so they wouldn’t get lost in the school laundry. I must surely have visited the school itself too, although I have no memory of that either. All I remember is playing happily by myself all afternoon before being packed into the car and then, about an hour later, being dropped off at my new school. 

I was a pretty young seven, to be honest. I’m six foot five now, but I was small and nervous then, with NHS glasses and crooked teeth. I can still remember that first night so clearly. I was assigned to a dormitory called “Irving” with all the other new arrivals and my bed was right up against the window. There were around fourteen of us, all around seven or eight years old. The old, iron-framed beds had squeaky springs and were spaced about 2m apart. We were allowed our own duvet covers (I must have learned how to make the bed at some point over the summer too, as this is not something I had ever done before). If my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, the two covers I had brought with me were a union jack and a Peanuts cartoon featuring Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus and the gang. Lights went out on a strict timetable and we were left alone in the dark. A few people in the room started to sob. I think we’d been warned by the kindly matron or housemaster that some of us might feel homesick. I had wondered what that was, and now I was listening to the quiet sobbing of children missing their own families and their own beds, I still wasn’t sure. I hadn’t been away from home on my own before; this was all new, strange and a little frightening, but I still didn’t feel like crying. Perhaps I should be grateful that I never experienced home sickness in my time at school, but I do remember wondering at the time why I didn’t feel like that. Was something wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be missing my parents? 

We didn’t talk much after lights out, but none of us were really ready to sleep yet, so I suppose a bit of chatter was inevitable (if you weren’t crying yourself to sleep). I discovered that I could talk to the boy on the other end of the window if we both stuck out heads behind the curtain and whispered along the windowsill. I spent nearly every day of the next six years with most of those boys, but I don’t think I’m still in contact with a single one of them. I can still remember their names: Robert Munn was the boy across the other side of the window; Tim Smithson was the most homesick. In fact, Tim wasn’t able to shake off that homesickness in all the time he was at that school and he cried most nights. It seems a peculiar kind of torture to inflict on a small boy, doesn’t it? It’s character building, I suppose. Perhaps it’s far stranger for a seven-year-old separated from his parents to remain entirely unmoved. 

Now I’m older, I wonder how hard this must have been for my parents, especially my mother. To take your seven-year-old son – and I was a very young seven - and to drop him off at a boarding school for weeks at a time when you have never previously spent a night away from them? How much of a wrench must that be? You can console yourself all you like with thoughts that you’re doing the best thing for them in the long run, that this is going to be the education that gives them the greatest opportunities in life, that this will be the making of them… but on a very human level, you’re wrenching your own flesh and blood away from your side and leaving them to sink or swim in an alien environment that’s a long, long way from home. Mind you, I suppose that if not every boy was crying themselves to sleep with homesickness every night, it stands to reason that not every parent was sobbing over their lost babies either. Some families, after all, have been doing this for generations. It never did me any harm, etc. 

All my life, I’ve felt a kind of low-grade shame about my educational background. Obviously, it’s not something that I ever had any say in, but even now, I feel embarrassed about my schooling and I’m quite happy if it never comes up on conversation. I hate people’s preconceptions and I hate having them applied to me. Again, they’re not really my problem and they’re not something I can control, but if I can drift through life without anyone guessing that I had a private education, then so much the better. I’m happy to wear this invisibility on my sleeve as a badge of honour, which given how much my education cost, seems a bit of a strange reaction to say the least. 

As far as I’m aware, nobody in our family went to a fee-paying school before me and my brothers (I’m the middle of three. My elder brother started at this school on the same day as I did). My father is the child of publicans from Plymouth and he was never expected to go to university, never mind to medical school. The grades he got would be nowhere near good enough now to get him anywhere near a degree in medicine, but he studied at Barts Hospital in London, met my mum who was a student nurse and became a GP on the Northamptonshire/Buckinghamshire border. Fairly quickly, my mum gave up work to become a full-time parent and my dad became a GP in a busy rural practice. Clearly, to send all of your kids to a private school, they must have been doing alright, but I don’t remember us being especially affluent. We didn’t have fancy cars (not as fancy as most of the other parents’ cars in the school car park when we were picked up for half term, anyway) and we never went abroad on holiday. At the start of every winter term, kids would be talking about how they had been to Disneyland or wherever, and I’d probably spent a week in wales with my mum’s parents and a maybe also a week in Devon above my dad’s parent’s pub. Oddly, this never bothered me. I’ve never wanted to go to Disneyland. 

Maybe I should care more. My parents clearly made enormous sacrifices to send their children to boarding schools. For a fifteen-year period from 1981, my mum and dad put three sons through a private education. They did this to try and give their kids what they thought was the best possible start in life. They sacrificed their money and they sacrificed watching their children growing up. For what? For me to spend my time pretending that it never happened and, worse than that, telling them to their faces that there is no way on God’s green earth that I would put any child of mine through the same treatment. What an ungrateful little shit I am. 

--

I wrote this for my writing group in April 2021. I usually write some magical reality type stuff with talking animals and things, but I'd just finished Pete Paphides' "Broken Greek", and was inspired to write something a whole lot closer to home. Since I wrote this, there seems to have been a spate of people writing about their own experiences of boarding school, the complete opposite to how you imagine someone like Boris Johnson talks about his schooling. Lots of damaged adults still suffering the emotionsl repercussions. I'm not sure if that's exactly my story, but I did think that I had a story to tell. So here we are.

Sent Away from Rosa Fisher on Vimeo.

like a monkey with a miniature cymbal...

You’d imagine that the first time you die is something that you’ll never forget. Well, to be perfectly honest with you, all of my early deaths have mostly just dissolved into one big blur. After a while, you just stop keeping count and the details seem far less important. It’s probably for the best, all things considered. There’s only so much pain and suffering and loss that anyone can be expected to put up with before it becomes overwhelming. Mind you, if it does become overwhelming, what exactly are you going to do? Kill yourself? In a very real way, that just compounds your problem. If you think that life is pain, then you clearly haven’t died often enough. 

I’m okay with most of the later deaths. I can remember them just fine, but that really isn’t very impressive because the plain fact is that the documentation is simply better these days. If you can’t quite remember the details of exactly how you shuffled off this mortal coil last time around, it’s now the kind of thing you can always just look up. 

Maybe it’s my age, but looking back over my deaths now, old and new, I find that I’ve actually become a little nostalgic about the good old days. Everything is so clinical now. Oh for sure, nobody in their right mind would be sentimental about massive rates of child mortality, plagues, constant, blood-soaked warfare and a medical profession that killed more people than it cured, but there was something almost romantic about the way people died back then. 

Life might have been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, but people still died of a broken heart, or passed away from old age peacefully in their sleep. These days, you might live to be one hundred and twenty years old, but medical science will now know exactly what it was that finally carried you off. One of a thousand different cancers, perhaps; the failure of a particular valve in a particular chamber of your heart or maybe something rather less banal like an untreated dose of parasitic visceral leishmaniasis (I don’t recommend it). Some people probably think that this makes the Dictionary of National Biography infinitely more interesting to read, but I disagree. What’s life – or death - without a little romance? 

 I suppose it all amounts to the same thing in the end. Well, for most people. Hashtag YOLO. 

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live just one life. I’m not asking to live forever (although I do think that might be a lot simpler), I’m just becoming a little tired of this endless cycle of life and then death. Perhaps this happens to everyone? Maybe most people just forget and I’m doomed to remember. Well, to remember most of it, anyway. 

It’s not as though I’ve learned anything really useful, either. Nothing that I can really benefit from, anyway. Stock tips don’t work this way around and there’s only so many times that any one person should have to go through adolescence. Trying to wisely share the benefits of your lifetimes’ worth of experience with someone who has instant access to the entirety of the world’s knowledge via their mobile phone is a complete waste of time. It’s not that they could just look it up faster than you can tell them, it’s that they’re so bloody busy on Twitter that they’re probably not even really listening. You’re wasting your breath. 

So what have I learned? All this time and all those lives; what have I actually learned? Well, I I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor; I’ve been virtuous and I’ve been dissolute; I’ve been famous and I’ve been utterly anonymous; I’ve lived long lives and I’ve died within a single heartbeat. What have I learned? 

As Hubert Selby Jr once said, “I knew that someday I was going to die. And just before I died two things would happen; Number 1: I would regret my entire life. Number 2: I would want to live my life over again.” Well, be careful what you wish for. That’s what I’ve learned. 

[for writing group session, March 2021]

bushs and briars...

It's been a while, eh? How's your 2021? Seems so far to be pretty much the same as 2020, so I can't really say that I'm a fan... but it's early days.

Although I've been pretty slack with my writing generally, I do have a monthly zoom meetup with some of the guys from my creative writing course in 2019. One of the things that I enjoyed the most on that course was - surprisingly - listening to other people reading their own work. I still really enjoy listening to these guys reading whatever they've written over the last few months, whether it's a poem or a short story or the next chapter in an ongoing work. The meeting has also been a good spur for me to pull my finger ou and at least create something every month. 

Here's one of them:

 -

Briars

It was one of those dank, gloomy September days; the kind of day that is oddly grey from dawn until dusk, as if the darkness has refused to fully retreat and is just biding its time until it can seize control again. 

The little girl didn’t seem to mind. 

She left her house towards the end of the afternoon and made her way towards the forest. In those parts and in those times, you were never far from the forest. Everything for miles around was dominated by those gnarled trees. It was ancient, so they said, and looking at those huge, gnarled trunks with their grasping branches, that was very easy to believe. Man came late to these parts and was not welcome. As the girl approached the treeline, tendrils of fog seemed to reach out of the forest and wrap themselves around her, pulling her in. Even before she had reached the trees, the forest seemed to grasp her claim her as their own. She quickly disappeared from view. 

If there was a path, there was little obvious sign, but the girl strode between the trees confidently and without any hesitation. The leaf litter lay thick upon the ground, the branches almost bare, but still no light penetrated through to the forest floor. Sound seemed muffled here, just the gentle swoosh of the leaves piled on the ground as the little girl walked through. She was watched as she walked: squirrels paused in the burying of their nuts to stare at her curiously with their liquid eyes, crows watched her without comment, their judgment plain. If there were songbirds here, there were none to be heard. If this troubled the girl, she showed no sign of it, walking purposefully through the wood. 

After a while, the path – such as it was – seemed to split in two. A junction. Neither way looked inviting and both seemed dark and overgrown. But the little girl did not hesitate: she choose the left-hand fork without blinking. Before long, she faced another fork, then another, each time making her choice without a heartbeat of hesitation as she worked her way deeper and deeper into the forest. By now, in spite of the chill of the late autumnal day, the press of the trees around her must surely have felt claustrophobic. In the gathering darkness, anything could have been watching; anything could have been waiting for this guileless child. Still she went on, plunging deeper and deeper into the gloom. 

Who (or what) lived in this forest? Wolves? Bear? Grumpkins? It was often whispered in warm, safe rooms filled with light that those who entered the wood carelessly were sometimes never seen again. Witches? Maybe so. Perhaps their cottages can still be found nestled deep within the trees, all made of gingerbread and with hot ovens ready to roast any child careless enough to wander too far from the safety of home. Perhaps this child? She walked on, steadily and without a hint of haste. She never looked anxiously over her shoulder to see what might be following or scanned the treeline for eyes tracking her progress. She walked steadily on into the forest. 

After some time, the girl came across a briar patch that stretched across the path. So thick had it grown that there seemed no way through, with thickly layered, thorn-covered tendrils tangled across the way. The girl stopped. Surely now, this must mean the end of her journey. No matter how determined she might be, there was now surely no way forward. She must turn back and leave the forest before the night closed in and abandoned her, all alone amongst those dark and forbidding trees and all the horrors that they might conceal. 

The girl did not flee; she did not turn on her heel to escape the oppressive darkness of the wood and to seek the safety of the warmth and the light. No. Carefully, and with no haste at all, she calmly and methodically began instead to reach into the briar thicket to pluck the ripe and juicy fruit to be found there. There would be blackberry crumble when she got home. With custard. Perhaps enough for bramble chutney too. 

Next week, she would return for the sloes. 

The forest was bountiful.

burn baby, burn...

I posted this here last year, but it seems apt to repost it on Bonfire Night. Please forgive the self-indulgence.

--

On a page in your journal, answer one of Neil’s questions from A Calendar of Tales. Now write a story from this answer. This can be as long or short as you like.

“What would you burn in November, if you could?”

Whatever happened to duffel coats? The question popped into Joel’s mind one warm, November morning as he walked towards the bus stop on his way into work. Joel was one of those people who always seemed to be cold, but the morning had been so warm and clear that even he had been forced to seriously consider leaving the house without a coat. He’d grabbed one on the way out, of course, but the short walk up the high street was already causing the first prickles of a sweat to bead on his forehead and to trickle down the small of his back.

Novembers didn’t used to be like this, did they? Joel certainly remembered duffel coats. Not the trendy, designer label ones that you occasionally see in the Sunday paper (‘This Season’s Must-Have Overcoats’), but the heavy, distinctly unfashionable ones that your mum used to make you wear with horn toggles and that covered you from head to knees and had a tartan patterned lining. They might even have been part of the official school uniform as everybody seemed to have one. If you tried wearing one of those on a day like today, you’d melt. Maybe that was why you don’t see them so much anymore.

And it used to be colder, didn’t it? Cold, crisp November mornings where you could see your own breath on the air and where the frost would sparkle as it reflected the thin, end-of-year sunlight onto the grass. Joel couldn’t even remember the last time he saw a frost. In February maybe? Only once so far this year? The world was warmer now.

As he neared his bus stop, Joel saw a pram dumped next to the old toy shop. As he got closer, he realised that it wasn’t a pram and but was, in fact, a strange contraption fashioned from ancient pram wheels and old crates. A go-cart! Good lord! Joel could scarcely believe his eyes. When was the last time you saw an honest-to-goodness go-cart? In the age of the micro scooter, it seemed like a glorious relic from a bygone age, yet here it was. Was it possible that… Joel got a little closer and peered inside. Yes! There it was! A pile of stuffed sacks dressed in raggedy clothes, with a painted-on face and a hat at a jaunty angle. Hanging around this approximately man-shaped pile was a cardboard sign with a simple, scrawled request:
“Penny for the Guy?”

As a cub scout, Joel could remember spending cold early-November evenings with the rest of his pack putting their Guy together. The best would be proudly pulled around town in a go-cart before being hoisted up onto the bonfire for burning. But when was the last time anyone saw a Guy? And what good was a penny going to do anyone anyway? The local Rotary Club or Round Table was surely going to need more money than that. Inflation meant that you couldn’t even buy a penny chew for 1p nowadays.

Almost without thinking, Joel began to smile and moved in for a closer look at this relic from his childhood.
“Alright”
Joel leapt back in astonishment, wrenching the headphones from his ears. Perhaps he was imagining it, but he could have sworn that the…
“Wotchoo looking at?”
The Guy was speaking to him, its twisted facsimile of a face didn’t appear to be moving, but he was definitely being addressed. Joel quickly looked around him, but the street was still deserted this early in the morning.
“Um…. Hello?”
This was pretty much as good as he could manage under the circumstances, all the while looking around the doorway and underneath the go-cart and the Guy to see if there might just be someone hiding under there, playing a desperately unfunny joke. There was nobody there.

“I’ve got a problem”.
Joel blinked, swallowed and then, for want of anything better to do, opted for a somewhat tentative reply. “Oh yes?”
“Yeah. I need a bonfire. I got to get burned, you see.”
Thousands of questions flooded through Joel’s mind all at one. He only managed to get one of them out. “Why?”
“Well ain’t that a stupid question? I’m a Guy. Guys get burned. It’s what we do. It’s what we’re for”.
Joel’s head swam as his reality began to collapse inwards. He shook his head and started to think that perhaps he should just walk away from this hallucination and just get on with his day. He began edging away.
“Where do you think you’re going? I’m talking to you and I need your help. I need to get burned.”
Joel froze and, a little reluctantly, turned his head back towards the Guy. “Well, how can I help? What can I do?”
“You need to find me a nice, big bonfire and you’ve got to slap me right onto the top of it and then I’ve got to burn”.
“Um. Okay. Can I do this later? It’s just that I really need to be getting to work now and my bus will be along any minute now…”
“Do I look like I can wait?”

And so it was that, somewhat against his better judgement and definitely confounding all his expectations for the morning, Joel found himself skipping work and instead hauling an old go-cart down to the river and the site of the weekend’s scheduled bonfire and firework display. The Guy didn’t really say very much now. Perhaps he’d said his piece. The day was really heating up now, so Joel had removed his jacket and, for a want of anywhere else to put it, had wrapped it around the sloping shoulders of the Guy.

As he sweated his way down along the riverbanks, Joel reflected how profoundly strange a tradition it was to burn the effigy of a Catholic on a bonfire every year. Perhaps it was an instinctive understanding of this that had led to the slow withering of the tradition. Perhaps it was just that the burning of the Guy was a late addition to an older, far more ancient fire ritual anyway, from a time when people huddled around bonfires to stay warm but also, more importantly, to stay away from the dark. Darkness was pretty hard to find now, real darkness, anyway. But even so, people still had bonfires and they still had fireworks at this tie of the year, even when the nights were warmer and the celebration of the torture and death of a Seventeenth Century Catholic was fading from memory. Oh, for sure, it was still called Guy Fawkes Night by some people, but mostly it was just Bonfire Night, and people turned up to bob apples and to watch the fireworks regardless.

The Guy spoke only once more as Joel hauled the effigy up the pallets and branches of the bonfire site at the rugby club. “You need to keep the spark alive for the long winter to come. To ward off the darkness”.

Joel reflected on this as he caught the bus into work at lunchtime, rolling up his shirt sleeves as the day grew ever hotter, and only then realising that he must have left his coat on the bonfire.

in the midst of life...

A spot of fiction for a change of pace? I wrote this last month for the little writing group I'm in. You'll have to do your own accent....

-

Life is a sexually transmitted disease, so they say. Invariably fatal. Well, I suppose that all depends upon your definition of life...and your definition of death. In a world where gender is no longer binary, it’s curious that people remain so stubbornly binary about something as fundamental as life and death. It’s not as though the undead are easy to avoid, either: vampires are everywhere. In fiction, anyway. I can’t speak with any certainty beyond that. Dracula was published in 1897 and the undead have been in vogue more or less ever since, up to and including an honest-to-goodness, glittering-in-the-sunshine Edward Cullen. Lazarus, of course, was raised up some time before that. How does that work? One minute your friends are all wailing and gnashing their teeth at your passing, and the next you’re back up and about. Where do you go from there? Can you go back to life as it was before? It’s got to be more than just a talking point, hasn’t it? Being brought back from the dead? You can hardly blame people for wanting to talk about it, can you? Alive one day, dead the next, alive again the day after and then back to the office as though nothing has happened? I’d imagine that might make some people a bit stand-offish. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” I mean, that’s quite a lot to take in, isn’t it? What’s in the small print? 

Could you be alive and identify as dead? You’d imagine it’s easier that way around than to be dead and identify as alive, but who can say for sure? People talk about the will to live, but could your will be stronger than your actual death? 

What about the Grim Reaper? Death himself. Does he come to collect you at the moment of your death? Does he play an active part in your demise, or is he just a voyeur, waiting for it to happen so that he can show you what happens next? What’s that scythe for, if not for cutting that mortal thread? Perhaps it’s just for show, like all those hourglasses he must have squirrelled away in his robes. 

You might think that I’m unusually preoccupied with these matters, but these are strange times and death is all around us. The world is getting hotter, wars are raging and disease stalks the land. But, if you think about it, when isn’t death all around us? Is there really anything all that strange about spending your life preoccupied with your death? Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you avoid saturated fats and wear a seatbelt? Isn’t that really part of the same thing? The same fascination? Another cliché: you’re dying from the moment you’re born; your thread is spooling out from the very beginning. You can take all the supplements you want and spend a fortune on face creams and cosmetic surgery, but simple fact of the matter is that you’re decaying from the very beginning; rotting away in plain sight. 

You’re pulling a face. I’m sorry if you find this distasteful, but there we are. We used to be more connected to death than this; we used to put the effigies of rotting corpses into the carvings on our tombs; we used to have skulls as momento mori in our houses to remind us that to live was to die. When did we forget this? Is that progress? We might live for longer now, but we’re just as likely to die. Have you heard about those rich people who have themselves frozen so that they can be brought back to life at some point in the future when we have the technology. Have they really thought this through, do you think? Do they get frozen before they die, or do they think that we’re going to develop a cure for death at some point? Can you imagine? Would you like to wake up at some point in the future, thawing out on a table somewhere, to find that you’ve been returned to a world you no longer recognise and where everyone and everything you’ve ever know is long dead? No thanks. I don’t like being cold, for one thing. And no, I don’t fancy being uploaded into a computer either. I’ve seen too much sci-fi to ever believe that can turn out well. Better to die sooner and decrease the surplus population. 

Anyway. Here we are. Yeah. Contactless, if you don’t mind. There’s some hand sanitiser there too, just to your right. Yeah, that’s it. Thanks for wearing your mask too. They get a bit hot, don’t they? Still, what can you do? Bye now. Have a nice day and stay safe!

the dream...

It was baking hot and Johnny immediately made me think of snow.
“Do you remember that kid?”
“Which one?” I said that like I didn’t know exactly which kid Johnny meant. Of all the hundreds of kids I must have seen over the years, including my own, there was only really ever the one that really stayed with me.
“You know damn well which one. On the West Side, near the Village. Around ’47. What did he say to you anyway?”

How could I ever forget?

It was one of those grey New York days where it seemed to be getting dark before it had ever gotten light and where a cruel wind whipped in off the Hudson. My feet were wet through my boots from walking through those damn puddles on every intersection in town. On a day like that, it seems about damn impossible to get warm, especially when your coat is maybe third-hand and was probably meant for a Florida spring, not a New York winter.

Since we’d got back from France, it seemed like we just couldn’t catch a break. One minute you’re a returning hero, and the next you’re just another bum trying to make ends meet. In those days, we took whatever work we could get and considered ourselves lucky. The Teamsters had the whole place stitched up back then. Same as now. If you weren’t part of that, then you were always grubbing around the edges, picking up the scraps all the while hoping that they either didn’t notice or didn’t think it worth having. It’s no way for a man to make a living, that’s for sure.

I likely wouldn’t even have seen him if the other kids hadn’t been there. It was them that caught my eye as we walked past that alleyway. They were shouting and I glanced over as we were walking past. Looked like a fight, with the bigger guys kicking the shit out of someone or something lying on the ground there with the boxes and the trash. Now, like most guys I know, I can’t stand a bully. As soon as I worked out what we were looking at, I couldn’t just stand there and waded straight on into that alleyway without a second thought with Jonny not far behind.

Like most bullies, those kids took one look at the two of us and hightailed. I let them go and carried on down to the little bundle hunched down in the trash. As I crouched down, it didn’t take too long to figure out that it was a boy. I reckon he couldn’t have been much older than ten, but it was hard to tell for sure. Everyone seemed a bit smaller now. Looking down at him brought immediately back flashing, memories of Europe. I’ll have nightmares about those days for the rest of my life and I can’t forget that dreadful smell that permeated everything. I scrubbed myself for weeks and never once felt clean of it. This kid was skinny too.

“You okay, kid?”
He seemed almost half asleep, but he managed to look up at me with a kind of half smile on his face. “Oh. It’s you”.
Johnny and I, we just looked at each other. Maybe he took a kick to the head.
“Did they hurt you? Those kids?” I gestured back down the alley.
“No. I’ll be fine”. He coughed, and for thirty seconds, his whole body shook with the effort. When he was done, he just sat there wheezing, wiped his mouth and then looked back up at me with that strange little smile.
“Do you need something to eat kid? When did you last eat?” I had a sandwich in my pack somewhere, and I shrugged the bag off my shoulders to get it. I was hungry and cold, but this kid looked like he needed it more than me. I found it and pushed it towards him. “Eat this. It’s corned beef. Bread ain’t too old, but it’s good.”
He reached up and took it off me, started shovelling it in like he hadn’t eaten in a week. Maybe he hadn’t.
Johnny touched my shoulder. “Maybe we should get him someplace warmer?”
I nodded. It was dark now and the night was only going to get colder. There was snow in the air now. He was so dirty that it was hard to say for sure, but it looked like the rags he was wearing were so thin as to almost not be there at all. No decent person would just leave him lying there. There wasn’t a whole lot we could do, but it was surely a whole lot better than doing nothing.
“Come on kid, let’s see if we can’t find you some soup”.
He shook his head vigorously at this. He didn’t want to be moved. I looked around: maybe this was all he had. Maybe it was all he knew. The wind gusted off the Hudson and the newspaper in the alley took off for a few seconds before settling back down onto the icy ground. I looked back to the kid and saw that he was beckoning me down with his hand, all the while with that crazy little half smile on his face, like he knew something. I couldn’t help myself, I smiled back and stooped to bring my face down to his face so he could whisper straight into my ear.

What he told me that day will stay with me forever. He told me that nothing could hurt him now because he was already dead; he told me that I would die too, not now, but in 1953. He was weirdly specific about that, but before he let me go, he told me that this would be okay, that everything would be okay. I believed him, too.

“So, do you remember that kid then? The one in the alleyway in ’47?” Johnny was still talking. I guess the whole thing must have stayed with him too. It seems weird to think about the cold when you’re stood in the middle of the longest heatwave anyone in the city can remember, but at that moment, both me and Johnny were standing back in that alleyway five years ago, cold down to our boots even as we waded through the puddles from the open hydrants.

I guess that kid’s strange little half smile will never really leave me, and 1953 ain’t over yet.


--

I actually did dream this. I woke up in the morning with this story lodged in my head.

aliens...

Write a brief dialogue between your character and someone else. Make them disagree. Add in descriptive sentences throughout until you feel that it’s balanced.

Ancient Aliens

After a long, comfortable lull in the conversation, Joe leaned forward on the sofa, took a deep and thoughtful breath and looked over the room at Sam. “You know what?” He didn’t pause for an answer but ploughed straight on, “I reckon it must have been aliens”.
Sam rolled her eyes. Not this shit again. A few glasses of red wine, some crappy late-night programming from the SyFy Channel and a few too many spliffs always had this effect on him. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah”. Joe looked thoughtful for a moment. “There just isn’t any other explanation that makes sense”. At this pronouncement, he sat back definitively.
Sam crossed her arms. “Explanation for what?”
“For everything”.
“For everything?” After all this time, Sam couldn’t resist biting. “Aliens are responsible for everything? Would you care to narrow that down a little?”
Joe frowned. “Ancient aliens were here when mankind was still scraping around in the caves. They flew down, showed us fire and built the pyramids and shit”. He sniffed and reached for his tobacco. “Without them, we’d still be grubbing around in the dirt”.
“Yeah. And that’s a fact, is it? No room for argument?” To be honest, Sam didn’t know why she bothered talking to Joe when he was like this. It was funny up to a point, but she should know better than to expect any kind of sense out of him.
“Well, how else do you explain it? The Aztec pyramids. Egypt. We still don’t really know how they built those, do we?”
“Ah yes, if only they had access to unlimited, disposable slave labour in those societies, eh?”
Joe didn’t even bother looking up from the delicate construction of his next joint. “Well, I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand it”
“Someone like me?” This was old territory, but Joe either didn’t recognise the danger he was walking into, or he simply didn’t care.
“You’re so fucking logical. You need to be a bit more…”.
“Yeah? A bit more what?”
“Open fucking minded”.
Sam laughed. “Pass that over here, you twat and shut up”.
Just another Saturday night.

magic...

Write a brief dialogue between your character and someone else. Make them disagree. Add in descriptive sentences throughout until you feel that it’s balanced.

The contents of the magician’s car

Jan had more or less given up on hitching a lift when the magician pulled over to the side of the road. He wound the window down.
“Where are you headed?”
He wasn’t quite wearing a hat covered in a star and moons motif, but he was sporting what looked like a velvet smoking cap and he did have a long, white beard. He also seemed friendly and, as she hadn’t seen another vehicle for more than an hour now, Jan put her bag down in relief and turned towards him.
“Ipswich. I’d be ever so grateful of a lift, if it’s not too much trouble”.
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all. I’m headed in that direction, more or less. Hop in”.
It wasn’t much of a car really. Although it didn’t seem to be that old, it also felt ancient. Opening the passenger side door, Jan paused for a moment.
“Oh, excuse the mess”. The magician reached across and began to gather up crinkling crisp packets, piles of books and what looked like a very battered leather briefcase. After a minute or so, there was just about enough room for Jan to climb inside. She tried not to think about some of the stains on the seat and felt it was probably best not to mention them. She really needed this lift, after all.
“This is really very kind of you. I wouldn’t normally do something like this. I’ll pay you petrol money of course”.
“Hmm? Oh, don’t be ridiculous. It’s no bother at all. No bother. You look exhausted. Why not close your eyes for a moment and enjoy the ride?” He waved his right hand in a slightly odd gesture, and Jan immediately felt her eyes beginning to sag. Maybe she was more tired than she thought? Before giving in to the sudden drowsiness, Jan glanced behind her, into the back of the car behind the driver’s seat. What she saw quickly drove any thoughts of sleep out of her mind. She gestured over her shoulder.
“What’s that?”
The magician didn’t even bother looking back and instead kept his hands firmly on the wheel. “That, young lady, would be none of your business”. His extravagantly bushy eyebrows arched upwards in a mild rebuke.
“What do you mean? It’s glowing!” Even as she spoke, the faint blue light she’d seen emanating from the back seat began to intensify and to gently pulse.
The magician continued gazing out of the windscreen into the night and said nothing. As it turned out, the sound of the engine wasn’t quite enough to obscure other sounds.
“What was that?”
“What?”
“That noise”.
A flash of irritation crossed the magician’s face. “Also none of your business”.
Jan suddenly felt vulnerable, trapped in a moving car. Being stuck in the cold, dark night on the edge of the road in the middle of nowhere didn’t seem so bad now.
As if sensing her discomfort, the magician’s demeanour softened and he let out a gentle sigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I don’t often have other people in the car, but you looked a little forlorn back there on the side of the road and I felt I really ought to stop to offer you a lift. I’m not much of a knight in shining armour, I’m afraid, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. Not really”.
Hearing this, Jan began to breathe more easily, but the blue glow in the back seat seemed to be getting brighter and brighter. “I don’t mean to pry, but what is that?” She angled her head slightly to one side, indicating the back seat. “If you don’t mind me asking, of course”.
The eyebrows flickered briefly, but then the magician sighed a little and turned his head towards her.
“It’s really nothing to be afraid of. Just don’t make any sudden moves and you’ll be fine. Most likely. He doesn’t like surprises or strangers, but he’s usually sleepy at this time of day.”
Jan turned anxiously to look at the back seat again. The glow seemed to be coming from underneath a large picnic blanket. As she watched, she could see that the blanket was moving slightly, as if something was breathing slowly and rhythmically underneath it. It seemed to be snoring slightly.
“What kind of a dog is it?”, Jan asked hopefully.
“Oh, it’s not a dog. What makes you think I have a dog?”
Jan blinked. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“No. I’ve told you: it’s none of your business. Besides, you wouldn’t understand and you’d get upset”.
“Can you pull over the car, please? I’d like to get out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s the middle of the night and we’re in the middle of nowhere. I’m not about to stop the car to leave you here. It wouldn’t be safe”.
“But it’s safe in the car?”
That flash of exasperation again. “Yes. Of course it is”.
“Then what’s under the blanket? Why is it glowing?”
The magician seemed to focus even harder out of the car windscreen. Perhaps it was Jan’s imagination, but were his knuckles turning white as he clutched the steering wheel? It started to rain, and now the gentle sound of breathing from the backseat was obscured by the rhythmic thud of the wipers.
“I told you that you should rest. It would perhaps be better for us all if you just had a little nap until we get to Ipswich”. The magician made that strange hand gesture again, more emphatically this time, and Jan felt the world beginning to swim before her eyes. She fought the feeling, but everything suddenly seemed so far away and unimportant to her now. The only thing that mattered was sleep.

Jan only awoke when the car suddenly stopped and she was jerked into consciousness. It wasn’t raining any more, but it wasn’t quite yet light. It must be nearly dawn, she thought. I’ve been asleep for hours. As she surfaced, she began to remember and instinctively checked the seat behind her. The blanket was still there, but she couldn’t see any movement and it was no longer glowing. She turned back to find the magician beaming at her.
“Hello there. Did you sleep well?” Without bothering to wait for a response, the magician continued. “Well, we’ve made it safely to Ipswich”.
Jan blinked at him sleepily and looked out of the car window again. They were pulled up on a quiet residential street somewhere. It could have been anywhere for all she knew.
“We’re just off the ring road, about ten minutes’ walk from the main square”.
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you”. Jan paused before continuing. “I had a very strange dream last night. It seemed very real, though”.
The magician turned to face her, the bottom of his strange little smoking cap almost touching his magnificent eyebrows. “Oh really? Well, I’m sure it was nothing”. He seemed almost amused.
“Well”, said Jan, “I suppose I should let you get on. Thanks again for the lift.”
“Oh, it was nothing. A pleasure”.
Jan opened the door and began to lift herself out of the car. As she turned to close the door, movement caught her eye and the blanket on the back seat seemed to twitch suddenly. The magician seemed unperturbed, but perhaps keen to move on.
“Be sure to take care now. Goodbye!”
Jan pushed the door closed, the magician pulled away and within seconds, he was gone.

Jan really hoped this was Ipswich.

remember, remember...

On a page in your journal, answer one of Neil’s questions from A Calendar of Tales. Now write a story from this answer. This can be as long or short as you like.

“What would you burn in November, if you could?”

Whatever happened to duffel coats? The question popped into Joel’s mind one warm, November morning as he walked towards the bus stop on his way into work. Joel was one of those people who always seemed to be cold, but the morning had been so warm and clear that even he had been forced to seriously consider leaving the house without a coat. He’d grabbed one on the way out, of course, but the short walk up the high street was already causing the first prickles of a sweat to bead on his forehead and to trickle down the small of his back.

Novembers didn’t used to be like this, did they? Joel certainly remembered duffel coats. Not the trendy, designer label ones that you occasionally see in the Sunday paper (‘This Season’s Must-Have Overcoats’), but the heavy, distinctly unfashionable ones that your mum used to make you wear with horn toggles and that covered you from head to knees and had a tartan patterned lining. They might even have been part of the official school uniform as everybody seemed to have one. If you tried wearing one of those on a day like today, you’d melt. Maybe that was why you don’t see them so much anymore.

And it used to be colder, didn’t it? Cold, crisp November mornings where you could see your own breath on the air and where the frost would sparkle as it reflected the thin, end-of-year sunlight onto the grass. Joel couldn’t even remember the last time he saw a frost. In February maybe? Only once so far this year? The world was warmer now.

As he neared his bus stop, Joel saw a pram dumped next to the old toy shop. As he got closer, he realised that it wasn’t a pram and but was, in fact, a strange contraption fashioned from ancient pram wheels and old crates. A go-cart! Good lord! Joel could scarcely believe his eyes. When was the last time you saw an honest-to-goodness go-cart? In the age of the micro scooter, it seemed like a glorious relic from a bygone age, yet here it was. Was it possible that… Joel got a little closer and peered inside. Yes! There it was! A pile of stuffed sacks dressed in raggedy clothes, with a painted-on face and a hat at a jaunty angle. Hanging around this approximately man-shaped pile was a cardboard sign with a simple, scrawled request:
“Penny for the Guy?”

As a cub scout, Joel could remember spending cold early-November evenings with the rest of his pack putting their Guy together. The best would be proudly pulled around town in a go-cart before being hoisted up onto the bonfire for burning. But when was the last time anyone saw a Guy? And what good was a penny going to do anyone anyway? The local Rotary Club or Round Table was surely going to need more money than that. Inflation meant that you couldn’t even buy a penny chew for 1p nowadays.

Almost without thinking, Joel began to smile and moved in for a closer look at this relic from his childhood.
“Alright”
Joel leapt back in astonishment, wrenching the headphones from his ears. Perhaps he was imagining it, but he could have sworn that the…
“Wotchoo looking at?”
The Guy was speaking to him, its twisted facsimile of a face didn’t appear to be moving, but he was definitely being addressed. Joel quickly looked around him, but the street was still deserted this early in the morning.
“Um…. Hello?”
This was pretty much as good as he could manage under the circumstances, all the while looking around the doorway and underneath the go-cart and the Guy to see if there might just be someone hiding under there, playing a desperately unfunny joke. There was nobody there.

“I’ve got a problem”.
Joel blinked, swallowed and then, for want of anything better to do, opted for a somewhat tentative reply. “Oh yes?”
“Yeah. I need a bonfire. I got to get burned, you see.”
Thousands of questions flooded through Joel’s mind all at one. He only managed to get one of them out. “Why?”
“Well ain’t that a stupid question? I’m a Guy. Guys get burned. It’s what we do. It’s what we’re for”.
Joel’s head swam as his reality began to collapse inwards. He shook his head and started to think that perhaps he should just walk away from this hallucination and just get on with his day. He began edging away.
“Where do you think you’re going? I’m talking to you and I need your help. I need to get burned.”
Joel froze and, a little reluctantly, turned his head back towards the Guy. “Well, how can I help? What can I do?”
“You need to find me a nice, big bonfire and you’ve got to slap me right onto the top of it and then I’ve got to burn”.
“Um. Okay. Can I do this later? It’s just that I really need to be getting to work now and my bus will be along any minute now…”
“Do I look like I can wait?”

And so it was that, somewhat against his better judgement and definitely confounding all his expectations for the morning, Joel found himself skipping work and instead hauling an old go-cart down to the river and the site of the weekend’s scheduled bonfire and firework display. The Guy didn’t really say very much now. Perhaps he’d said his piece. The day was really heating up now, so Joel had removed his jacket and, for a want of anywhere else to put it, had wrapped it around the sloping shoulders of the Guy.

As he sweated his way down along the riverbanks, Joel reflected how profoundly strange a tradition it was to burn the effigy of a Catholic on a bonfire every year. Perhaps it was an instinctive understanding of this that had led to the slow withering of the tradition. Perhaps it was just that the burning of the Guy was a late addition to an older, far more ancient fire ritual anyway, from a time when people huddled around bonfires to stay warm but also, more importantly, to stay away from the dark. Darkness was pretty hard to find now, real darkness, anyway. But even so, people still had bonfires and they still had fireworks at this tie of the year, even when the nights were warmer and the celebration of the torture and death of a Seventeenth Century Catholic was fading from memory. Oh, for sure, it was still called Guy Fawkes Night by some people, but mostly it was just Bonfire Night, and people turned up to bob apples and to watch the fireworks regardless.

The Guy spoke only once more as Joel hauled the effigy up the pallets and branches of the bonfire site at the rugby club. “You need to keep the spark alive for the long winter to come. To ward off the darkness”.

Joel reflected on this as he caught the bus into work at lunchtime, rolling up his shirt sleeves as the day grew ever hotter, and only then realising that he must have left his coat on the bonfire.

cry me a river....

Set a timer for 60 seconds and write the opening of a story. Set the timer for 30 minutes and finish it.

When was the last time you cried? What caused it?

When I was a younger man, tears were a precious commodity, to be hoarded at all costs; buried from view; to be kept secret from the world. Maybe they were, so we reckoned with the wisdom of youth, a myth. Perhaps they didn’t even exist at all. Not to a real man, whatever that was, as if any of us would know.

Now that I’m older, many things have changed. For me, at least - I’m sure there are many other men of my age who still cling to the certainties and stupidities of their youth, but I do not believe that I am one of them. The passage of time has taken many things from me, but it has also stripped me of some of the certainty and ignorance of my youth.

There’s nothing wrong with crying. Of course there isn’t. Why would there be? Why do some men seem so afraid of such an overt display of emotion? Is it some lingering Palaeolithic need to hide a weakness that might single us out from the pack and render us vulnerable to predators? Perhaps we’ll never know.

Although I don’t remember feeling the pressure of my masculinity, I didn’t cry much. Oh sure, I cried all the time as a small child. I’d cry at the drop of a hat. I’d cry long and hard, as though the world was against me. They were real tears too. My brother, after me, would cry bone dry crocodile tears, but mine always flowed freely down my cheeks as I cried and cried at the cruel, unfeeling world.

And then, at some point, I stopped. The tears dried up. At school, my friends cried for their parents and for distant homes, but I never did. I even felt guilty that I didn’t feel at all homesick, but I didn’t cry about that either. The absence of tears wasn’t because I was afraid to show my emotions, it was because I simply didn’t feel any.

Over the years, I built an armour around myself to protect me from the unpredictability of feeling. Almost nothing can penetrate the forcefield around me and it has left me feeling blissfully numb to the unpredictability of feeling.

Now that I’m older, that armour seems to be slowly melting away and I’m beginning to feel the world seeping in around the edges. I’m now feeling for perhaps the very first time. I’ve been numb for so long that suddenly I’m now feeling everything with the intensity of the new.

I never cried before, but now the tears flow readily. The sensation is so new and so unfamiliar to me that I don’t know what to do with it. My first instinct is to hide it. I’ll be watching a mediocre film in the dark of the movie theatre or on the sofa at home and the hot, prickly feeling of tears begins to mist my eyes at the lamest, cheesiest of sentimental promptings. I don’t know if I’m ashamed, exactly, but it feels like a part of myself that I need to keep buried. I sit in the dark and try to wipe my eyes dry in secret, as though this sudden, unexpected display of emotion is something to be embarrassed about, revealing some terrible weakness of character.

When was the last time I cried? When was the last time I watched a stupid reality programme featuring a sick cat? Does this make me more vulnerable to predators? Maybe. Well, there’s not much I can do about it now. The armour is gone and, for better or for worse, those feelings aren’t going away any time soon.

--
I'm not sure this is exactly a story, but this is what came out when the timer started ticking.

the climb (part ii)

Take your subverting expectations short story. Shift the location, take risks. Come up with a scene that is frightening or upsetting, or just beyond the bounds of what you’re comfortable with.

I didn't know how far I could go with this one. Have I gone far enough, or is it obvious?

• A teenage girl climbing a rock cliff with a man below her

Trying her very best not to be noticed, Liv quietly worked her way through the seething Bank Holiday crowd. What is it about Boxing Day that it seems to bring out the very worst in people? Retail therapy they call it, when what they really mean is that one day is more than enough for most families to tire of the magic of Christmas. Barely twenty-four hours with the shops shut and most people can’t wait to flee the claustrophobic confines of their tinsel-bedecked homes. George Bailey had many other problems to deal with in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, but the toxic combination of cheap alcohol, crappy gifts and simmering resentment wasn’t one of them. She could practically smell it coming off the crowds now, the cloying stench of hangovers, regret and unalloyed consumerism. Liv also seriously doubted that Bedford Falls ever experienced this kind of a crush outside Debenhams. Zombies, the lot of them.

Her dad loved that stupid film and, as a result, the family watched it every Christmas Eve before the adults rolled off to the pub and then on to Midnight Mass. Liv cherished the precious few hours after the film finished and before the adults rolled back into the house. Silence and a chance to read and to just revel in being alone. Blissful silence and the chance to hear the ringing bell when the next angel got his wings. However long it lasted, it was never long enough. It was practically a Christmas tradition now that she pretended to be asleep as her parents giggled and fumbled their way around her room in search of her stocking shortly after they rolled back into the house.

Santa Claus is coming to town. A merry blooming Christmas to you.

The morning after always brought with it fuzzy heads, but that had never yet stopped the opening of fizz at breakfast. Well, it’s Christmas, isn’t it? Although she was only fourteen, Liv usually had a flute pushed into her hand so that she could raise her glass in toast to the season alongside everyone else. Cheap prosecco seemed to her like a pretty good way to ruin an orange juice. The very thought of that sour smelling, sickly sweet cocktail made Liv wrinkle her nose in disgust. Ugh.

Liv paused as she worked her way past the crowds outside Next and risked a glance back over her shoulder. There he was: tall enough to be clearly visible as he walked urgently past Argos. He was looking around, craning his neck to get a better view. Liv didn’t think that he had seen her yet, but the sight of him gave her renewed purpose and she ducked inside John Lewis, through the sudden blast of hot air blowing down around the door and into the shop. The crowds were thick here, surrounded by reduced Christmas gift packs of fancy-looking wine and biscuits. Liv headed towards the escalators, but her progress was slow as the people around her thronged together, competing for a bargain they wouldn’t have looked at twice only two days ago. Frustrated, Liv turned again and saw him as he passed the doorway, pausing before turning into the shop. Her heart seeming to skip a beat and, more urgently now, she pushed herself against the crowd in an attempt to disappear.

She’d been a happy child, more or less. As happy as most people, happier than some. Although she was barely fourteen now, Liv somehow thought of herself as older. Her earliest memory as a child was of her father gently brushing her hair after a bath and then tucking her into bed to read her a story. Liv had always loved reading, but above all else, she had loved being read to, by her father most of all. She loved the way that he would do all the voices in a story, working to make every character come to life, whether they were a mouse, a goblin or a Gruffalo. The scary stories were the best of all, not because Liv liked to be scared, but because she loved to be comforted. Her father would take her in his arms and smooth her hair, telling her that everything would be alright. Even now, she wasn’t sure whether she was really scared or just pretending to be. She was too big for stories now; her body was changing. Sometimes, in spite of everything, she still longed for someone to scoop her up again and to tell her that everything would be alright.

But it wasn’t alright. Liv didn’t like the stories now. The past is a dangerous place filled with secrets and questions that can never be answered.

She looked again. He’d seen her, and was pressing through the crowd, eyes fixed on her. She involuntarily gasped out loud and reeled backwards. The man standing beside her stopped browsing for a moment to look down his nose at her disapprovingly. There are unspoken rules to being in a crowd like this, and nobody likes to see these rules broken. He was small and tweedy and smelled of pipe smoke, but after a quick glance at her, he quickly turned his attention back to the port and stilton gift set he was admiring. He tutted to himself and Liv moved on, arms in front of her now as she swam her way through the press of people, breast-stroking her way towards the escalators. If she could just get upstairs now, she could dip out of the exit on the first floor and hope to lose herself in the seething throngs in the rest of the shopping centre.

Being small gave Liv some advantages in the crowd as she ducked and weaved her way through the throng. It wasn’t advantage enough, though, and being tall and strong brings other advantages. He was now elbowing his way towards her and was gaining fast. She ducked and began to push frantically towards the escalator, realising too late how exposed she would be as she began to rise up above the fray on the step. As she stepped on and began to lift up and away towards the first floor, he stopped and smiled at her as their eyes locked. Then, he simply stepped onto the escalator, about ten steps below her, and they both rose slowly up towards home furnishings.

The shop was busy, but the escalator itself wasn’t all that crowded. Had he wanted to, he could easily have worked his way up to close the gap between them, but he did not. He just stood there and watched her with a slight smile on his face. Liv looked down at him and tried to calm herself enough to think straight. Escape seemed unlikely, but surely there wasn’t much he could do in such a busy shop, was there?

Too soon, the escalator step she was riding reached the first floor and discharged Liv, unwillingly, to begin its journey back down. Huge, flat screen televisions were broadcasting the Boxing Day football and what looked like an episode of the Blue Planet. A humpbacked whale with its calf breached the surface of the ocean and plunged back into the depths in glorious 4K high definition. Liv barely noticed. She only had eyes for the man beneath her, cresting the climb and walking confidently, but slowly towards her. She didn’t have the strength to run any more. Instead, she waited. He crossed to her and reached for her hand, his other hand reaching up to stroke her hair. Her skin crawled and it was all she could do not to physically recoil from his touch.

“You nearly lost me that time.”
“Did I?”
“You won’t be getting such a head start next time, I can tell you that for nothing.”
“I see.”
“Yep. I reckon you will.”
Liv looked up at her father with a face filled with a mixture of fear and resignation as he took her gently by the hand and began to lead her home for her bath and for her bed.

tidings....

Tell a short story in 100 words.

I must have been about nineteen when it began. It was the magpies, of course. I don’t know why or how it happened, but they spoke to me, their rude chattering laid bare before me in all of its glorious, symphonic clarity. At first, I was afraid to perceive the meaning behind their staccato laughter, but soon I was simply overjoyed to be included in their world. It was, of course, a secret never to be told. Who would believe it? But quickly their voices became cacophonous, unbearable tidings of the devil himself. And now I cannot make them stop.

down by the river...

Using the questions below, create a character. This person can be based on people you know or have completely invented. Write a sentence or two describing what the character wants.

What is their name? Age? Gender?
Joseph. Joe. 16 (or at least just into his teenage years. He’s small, so it’s hard to be sure how old he is as he looks younger than he actually is). Male.
What do they look like?
Small for their age. Mousey brown hair, nondescript features. Glasses. Perhaps slightly tubby. Not fat, but not fully grown into their body yet. It’s puppy fat that’s likely to disappear as they get older, but Joe doesn’t know that and is perhaps a little self-conscious about his size.
What’s in their purse or pockets?
He’s probably got a scrappy old pair of binoculars around his neck and a notepad and pencil somewhere in his pockets.
What’s their favourite thing to do?
Be outdoors and not cooped up indoors. Just walking and looking out for wildlife. Joe has a deep love for all wild things.
What do they hate?
Noise. Heat. His love of the countryside means that he doesn’t really like the build-up of houses and shops and roads that tends to come along with any concentration of people. Joe likes quiet and his own company.
What matters to them more than anything in the world?
Animals. Joe is a sensitive soul and he derives a sense of peace from a communion with nature.

Using the character you created above, write a conversation or a situation where this person cannot get what they want. You may find other characters emerge from this—let it happen. Try opening the scene at the main point of tension—for instance, in the middle of a fight— and fill in the necessary details as the scene plays out.

“After you’ve finished your breakfast, I’m going to need your help in the garage.”
Hearing this, Joe’s shoulders dropped almost imperceptibly. He had been planning to spend his day out along the track by the river with Ged, whiling away the time looking to see if he could spot the red kites that had been seen down near the old nature reserve. He paused before answering.

“Yes, dad.”

The hesitation hadn’t been for long, but it was long enough to convey his reluctance to his father, who had been looking for it.

“I don’t want to hear any attitude from you about this. You know how important this work is to this family.”

Joe knew from bitter experience that there was no way that he could win this argument. Whatever he said now was going to be leapt upon by his father as a sign of rebellion and insubordination. Even saying nothing was likely to provoke.

“Yes, dad.”

Even though he was careful to keep his tone neutral, Joe watched his dad cautiously for further escalations. There seemed to be none forthcoming, so he thought he’d push his luck. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. “What time do you think I might be able to get out later on?”
There was no immediate reply, so Joe pressed on. “I was hoping to get down there whilst it was still light.”

His father looked at him over the kitchen table. “What’s down by the river?”

This felt like a trap and Joe hesitated as he considered his options. As far as he was concerned, the less his father knew about Ged the better. It was bad enough for him already that his son was wasting so much time away from home wasting his time, heaven knows what he might think if he heard his son was hanging around with that weirdo.

“I just wanted to get some air today, that’s all.”

“There’s no fresh air anywhere and I’m not sure it’s safe down there anymore. You know that I prefer you where I can see you. You certainly shouldn’t be going down there on your own.”

“But…”

“There’s no ‘buts’ about it. You’re not to go down to the river and you’re going to be helping me fix this engine for as long as I need you to be helping me to fix it. Now.”
Joe loathed it when his father finished with a ‘now’. What he meant, of course, was “…and that’s an end to it”, Joe knew this. And yet, every single time, he felt an almost overwhelming urge to shout “NOW WHAT?” back at his father. So far, he’d been wise enough to keep this thought to himself. So far….

Joe wasn’t a bad lad and he’d happily help his father with the engine. Better to bide his time and to slip off out when his father wasn’t looking. If they made decent progress with engine, or if one of his father’s friends called by, then he could look to slip off and his dad probably wouldn’t even notice he had gone. Play the long game, Joe. Play the long game. Don’t blow it for the rest of the summer by being hasty now.

“Yes dad.”