travel

Right, then.

‘Gonna be like that, then, is it?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Oh, you didn’t need to, ya little sh*t, I know exactly what you did, and once again, you forgot the other side of the effing country.’

‘I did not see the other side of the effing country.’

‘Well, it was based on the other side of the effing country. Which way are the eyes facing, eh? We are lookin’ at you.’

The green eyed one was looking at the other, other side of the country. ‘Apparently, we still don’t exist. Isn’t it amazing that we still don’t exist. I’m not getting political at all. It is not in my nature. By the way, I have been there. I had to go allllll the way over there just to see a band. It was okay, I guess. Different.’

They start to mutter to themselves. ‘Did he just? I didn’t know he was here.’

‘Yes, he was,’ says his mother, and she raises an eyebrow. She doesn’t say anything else, but all the other westies know what she’s thinking. ‘We aren’t particularly stupid, and we haven’t forgotten how to speak properly, but we also haven’t forgotten how to dance to a stick with bottle-tops on it.’

‘Yes.’ Someone does a weird underhand punching motion that looks like he’s pulled back on it a bit so no one would get hurt if they’re standing in the way unintentionally.

‘That’s why I moved there,’ said an unnamed person. ‘They can be a lot more real. Most of them anyway. It is rather hot though.’

‘You get used to it,’ said a very tanned and, in his opinion, absolutely beautiful male of indistinct heritage. ‘My mum said I can come back whenever I want, ‘cos I’m a spunk and you’re not.’

The Independent publisher man was horrified. ‘You did NOT just say that. I am too, a spunk that is. My mum said I’m really cool.’

‘I think that might depend on the situation,’ said the mum of three young men. ‘I am not trying to sell them off, but really I think I raised some good looking blokes, so there.’

‘I know,’ said the mother of two girls and a boy. ‘I raised some pretty good lookin’ kids myself. So there.’

The mother of three girls shook her head. ‘Other people might not agree. You lot are trouble with a capital T. My lot are also trouble with a capital T, and I think if I married two of mine to two of yours, then we’d all be in trouble with a capital T.’

She was probably right.

The brother of the one who thought she was totally awesome shook his head and laughed to himself. ‘My sisters and I can dance really cool if we wanna. We just choose to be nice people.’ The dances they had done back in the day tended to take up most of the dance floor, and it was not the highland fling although it resembled it in a number of ways. ‘So, I guess there’s that.’ (His sister had been his wingman on one occasion.)

She had smiled at one of them once and nearly tripped over her own elbow. They had thought that was one of the funniest things they’d ever seen. ‘If he does that kind of thing, a lot of young women would have been in trouble back in the day,’ someone observes. ‘But, we are not allowed to talk about that, which doesn’t seem fair.’

D does not agree with any of this. ‘They are all quite magical, I said that to my dad, and he agreed. I think we should make a movie on this lot, and my dad just gave me the filthiest look. He said you guys are insane, but in a really funny way. He said,’ and here he points at someone else entirely. ‘He could not get your head in a vice because he trained you to get out of one, and he remembers that too. He’s kinda cool for an old guy with no hair.’

Some other people were mortified. ‘I do not think you can say that, D,’ said someone who knew how the system worked. ‘I think you might have to pull your head in, just a bit.’

‘I do not care about these people in my head,’ said D. ‘I am quite sure they can’t be real, because there is simply no chance they can be that cool. Who made them up?’

There was silicone in his world, and he didn’t quite understand that really cool people were not the people he thought they were.

‘Definitely not real,’ he muttered. ‘This is not my time at all. These guys are seriously not my people, but I can’t help but be impressed behind the scenes. That did not make sense, but I can’t seem to tell her I think they’re freshly minted coins and this is still not my time. Not today.’

No one understood that at all, and he didn’t mind, because apparently they weren’t meant to. ‘Not my time to die,’ he said, very clearly. ‘That’s all.’

Who was AARGH the seagull?

It might be time to get comfortable, so I can tell you the story of AARGH. Kids can read this one too, it’s quite safe, although as the story goes on it might get a little sad.

Anthony Andrew Robert Graham Herbert, or Aargh as he was known, was an excellent pilot. You might think all seagulls are excellent pilots because all seagulls can fly. People pilots fly too, mostly, unless they’re driving a great big ship, but we are talking about flying pilots, and flying pilots that are seagulls, so, although you may have just learned something new, we aren’t going to talk about that right now.

The fact all seagulls can fly does not make them pilots. Nope. A seagull pilot is extra special because they are particularly good at flying, and Aargh was a particularly extra special pilot because he was particularly extra good at it. Aargh could tell when it was going to rain, or whether it was going to be windy or sunny, or all those other weathery type things without even looking at a radar. He used that extra special way of thinking to his advantage, because he used the weather to fly smarter.

He liked to travel, too. Most seagulls don’t like to travel too far at once because they’re a little bit lazy. All they are really interested in is food, and the easiest way to get it.

I’m not saying Aargh wasn’t interested in food. He definitely was. But, he liked to go places and see things, and he liked to feel the wind under his wings. Because of this, he travelled further, and further all the time — which was probably the reason he was such a good pilot. If you want to be really good at something, you have to do it all the time, not sit around and eat things and be lazy, and shout at other seagulls. I’m not saying he didn’t shout at other seagulls, because he did (a lot), but that was just part of his charm.

That’s what he said, anyway.

Now, you might wonder why such a charming seagull as Anthony Andrew Robert Graham Herbert would shorten his name to Aargh. It sounds a bit squawky, doesn’t it?

As it happens, this is a very normal thing to do amongst seagulls. You see, most seagulls have long beautiful names, but it’s very hard to get your name out really quickly when you’re trying to grab a chip, or a piece of bread. It’s also really hard for other seagulls to yell out your name when they’re trying to get your attention. For this reason, they get all the letters of their whole name and they put it all together, like AARGH, or EEEK, or CORR. (I haven’t met a seagull yet called Blimey, and I think it might be a bit long.) Anyway, when you see seagulls eating, you might hear them saying things like that. They are yelling out their own names, or each other’s.

They say other words, of course, but people don’t hear those words too much. I think this is mostly because they don’t see seagulls up close too often when they’re not eating so they can’t hear them talking. Personally, I like to listen to them when they are resting on one leg with their eyes closed, or have found themselves a nice warm spot in the sand to sleep for a bit. Then, I might hear things like, ‘Bloody wind nearly blew me over just then’, or ‘Nice and warm, nice and warm, don’t poop here.’

As I was saying, Aargh was a pilot, and he used to travel. It’s how he meets his wife. She lived up one end of the country, and he lived down the other end. Well, he didn’t really live down the other end, because he travelled all the time, and wherever he laid his lap that was his home, but he was born down the other end.

I guess that shows just how far he could travel…

…to be continued.

Three Thirty am – the witching hour.

There is a little Golden Book story I would tell my kids when they were little. It was something about a mouse that decided to go sailing on his bed. He would get up, brush his teeth, and do a list of boring things before starting his day. I’m not sure why it was important to start with this particular image, but who am I to argue?

As I’m writing this — having got up, for no particular reason (aside from old habits) at three thirty am, the cat has decided to meow forlornly at glass doors because apparently, once again, he has forgotten where his cat flap is. A cat flap is a cat door. I needed to write that because “language barrier”. I don’t know either, I’m just repeating what the little voice beside me says.

So, the extremely contrived image sent to me during last night’s (it’s still last night, and one half hour past the witching hour when I woke up, ya bastards), was the picture of an old fashioned key sitting on the corner of a window sill. Now, when I looked at that particular key (god this cat is driving me insane), I said in my head, quite clearly, “Wardrobe key”, so if anyone reading this had a dream along these lines and wondered why “wardrobe key” came to mind, that was me. Sorry about that, but not really.

The funny thing about writing so early in the morning, before the sun has come up, and while everything is silent, is that something happens to the writing on the page. It does its own thing, and I am, well I’m not forced exactly, but I tend to think, ‘okay, I’ll go along with it,’ and whoever it is writing the other side of this says, very clearly, ‘Let’s see where it take us.’

This is not usually my form of transportation…

I do prefer to write with a slightly more professional flair, which is something that seems to have escaped me these last several months or so, and to be honest with you, I’m not particularly happy about it. So there.

Back to the topic at hand. ‘Wardrobe key.’ The lion, the witch (pauses) and the wardrobe. Not in this case though. In this case it’s because I happen to have an old fashioned wardrobe around here somewhere, so I kind of know what those keys look like.

Then of course, there is the other type of ‘old fashioned’ key. The one not sitting in the corner of a window sill that I’d be worried about being knocked off said window sill by a random elbow. The door key, which is apparently why I’m writing this for you.

The following is from a story I wrote.

Picture the scene:

He’s woken up to something and he doesn’t know quite where he is. This room has doors on both sides of the bed, an old fashioned lamp which he doesn’t remember having turned on, and the rain outside is falling. Through the window, and reflected in the lamp light, the raindrops look like a thousand meteorites. (I wrote that a lot better the first time around).

Click-click.

Someone is trying to open the door. This is what has woken him up. The door in question is on the right side of the wall where the head of the bed is. The other door leads outside.

When this happens, the guy we’re looking at not only is already naturally a little on edge, he’s very well trained, so there are a million thoughts running through his head. He’s unarmed, he was told he’s got all the keys (which he is now questioning as someone is definitely trying to unlock the door), and he is preventing himself from doing something stupid by trying to figure out all the scenarios of how to deal with an intruder without waking up the rest of the house.

As he is who he is, he decides, rather than flinging the door open and confronting someone, he is going to use the door that goes outside, go around the side of the house, and come back in behind whoever it is that is trying to unlock the door to the bedroom he was told was “completely safe”.

As he is also an ex carpenter by trade, he has all these random thoughts about the fact the door (that someone is currently attempting to unlock) is very sturdy and won’t be broken down in a hurry by “whoever it is”. All of his experiences, what makes him who he is in this moment, come together and form him into something honed to a fine point, a weapon in himself and he uses everything without thinking about it.

I’ll add here, the person on the other side of the door is still trying to unlock it, not break it down, nor does it seem to be at the point of them breaking it down. This is giving him a lot more time to not only wonder who it is (there are really only three choices: the first choice is someone who is not living/residing inside the house, the second choice is a teenage girl, something he’d not want happening either, and the third choice is an old lady, which just seems very odd as she is the one who gave him the keys) but to decide how he’s going to deal with them. If it is who he thinks it is (a very large man), then he’s going to need to be “on the ball” or seeking the advantage.

It does not exactly go his way. Most of it goes his way, but not the outcome of his snap decision of how to confront something. I suppose, by the end of this scene, or scenes, he gets lucky, but that doesn’t change the fact the first decision he makes is to attack, rather than defend. I would say any psychologist would tell you this guy, whoever he may be, could potentially be a problem. What I’ve given you here though, is an example of how someone specifically trained might deal with something.

It’s a shame that for this scene the guy was in a suburban house, with an elderly relation and her granddaughter. His first instinct (although it is to protect and defend later) is to be the one with the advantage. It’s fair to say he’d chosen to observe what he was dealing with first, and went about dealing with it far better than he might have under different circumstances. It is also fortunate the person he was dealing with (although he didn’t know it) knew him and what he would be thinking.

It must also be said, in this particular scene, the circumstances under which this guy is in at this point of time and leading up to it, the “context” if you will, gives him every right to behave exactly as he does (although, in the end, it’s not something he has been able to share with anyone).

The Desolation

I sang this idea when I was around twenty-two, twenty-three. It had not been a happy time.

My brother was plucking away on his guitar in what one might call a “sitting room” and had come up with a very simple melody. I could hear the echoes in it, if that makes sense.

I “whispered” this in the painted man’s ear many years later, and he didn’t understand this, not at all, but I think perhaps he is seeing the truth of it now. Perhaps. As a singer, not so much, he has been to too many places to see the truth of things. He says I can say this again, not because he wishes it, but because he simply didn’t know what I meant. He didn’t think I was the one who told him. He thought it was a dream.

There is no need for belief. This is just reality.

‘Driving down a dusty gravel road

Has no end

And no beginning

Look at a sky that’s blue and cold

Wonder where I’ve been lately…

There’s nothing to be seen

For miles

In the early hours of this morning

All I can remember now is your smile

Wonder where I’ve been lately.’

— Kate Tew. (this was quite some time before I was married, in the scheme of things, so that was the name I used)

It was a song about, not about dreaming, it was a song about loss. I sat in that room with my brother, and his friends, who were my friends, and these friends now can see this as clearly as I can. You see that long, red-pebbled road, the sound of nothing, the plume of dust rising behind from the tyres on the gravel, the flat plains to the sides of the road where everything is low and scrubby, and this pale, pale blue sky that goes on forever. It is during this time, and at this point, I thought I was lost and alone, for that is how it felt. It was a desolation, a loss, and a reminder.

The reminder is; life goes on after these times of grief. Life goes on. You get back up, you dust yourself off, and just keep going. As I said, I was twenty-two, twenty-three at the time. Something had ended in my life, and I was not at the point of understanding it was a good thing. I needed to go through the stages of grief and loss to move on. I am not referring to anything other than a relationship that failed. This is why you need to get out of those sandboxes and see why other people are here.

I tried to make that person understand but it was not the right time for him. He has separated himself for a reason, and it is not my place to verify his identity, which is why it has been changed. This is his reminder of the dream I whispered to his open soul. He grieved later that I did not explain the words.

Is it too simple for you now/not now — this is definitively the truth and not a “piss-take”.

He doesn’t need to be saved. Sometimes I think you people are very silly. This is his choice, not yours, his life, not yours. It will all be shown quite well in the end. I do not judge. I simply listen.