martin cadwell blog

Tag: half penny stories

  • The Disruptor in the Shop

    The Disruptor in the Shop

    The Disruptor in the Shop

         ‘People are placed on Earth to be disruptors, and by extension, some people will commit atrocities,’ Harrari said.

    Hakim nodded. He knew that Harrari was right. Having observed me for the last decade, he knew that I sometimes deliberately try to shake things up.

          ‘Some people, he whispered,’when they have been judged to be overly harsh in disciplining their children immediately jump up and protest, ‘You have to be cruel to be kind” He didn’t mean me. He knew that I don’t make excuses for being unkind. Quite simply, I don’t lie; If I did, I would ‘see’ far less; I would be merely a human; one of seven billion, and it had taken me over ten years of acceptance to become more than that.

    Harrari, as usual, was patient.

         ‘The shaking up of society is necessary. You are stumbling through your lives barely conscious. Disruptions often result in knee-jerk reactions through the discomfort of having nascent proclivities and behaviour revealed to all of you. But this ultimately results in better overall behaviour in the community and the condemnation of both the revealed attitude and the knee-jerk response.’

    I thought I got it. ‘Like an explosion in the rabbit population that is ultimately controlled by the amount of food available, disruption will reach a zenith and then there will be an adjustment,’ I mused.

    I was in my local shop, next in the queue. A bit of a slight argument was coming to a climax before me. I couldn’t help but overhear it.

         ‘Nobody likes you here!’ The young shop assistant warned.

         ‘I didn’t come here to be liked. I came here to disrupt.’

         ‘Disrupt what?’

         ‘You, plural. Your attitudes and habitual behaviours. Your blind adherence to a lifestyle that you incessantly shape to satisfy your desires to be left alone.’

    ‘Luxury’, I thought.

    The shop assistant looked puzzled. Clearly, the advice I had heard on attackers works; if you are about to be attacked, do something weird so the assailant is bamboozled for a moment. However, this lads private school education had given him a confidence that the other ninety-three percent of us in Britain could never emulate. I could sense that he was about to throw the interesting little man out. I wanted to talk to him, but I needed to be served first. Well, I say ‘needed’, what I actually mean is, I couldn’t be bothered to leave my selected loaf of bread behind to follow the man out, and then have to come back again to buy the bread. Just lazy, that’s all.

         ‘I’m sorry, what did you say? I wasn’t listening,’ I said. Neither of them were expecting me to speak. They stopped their intense staring at one another and looked at me. It works, do something out of the ordinary.

         ‘I don’t like repeating myself’, the man said.

    I noticed now that he had a long-term suntan. We had recently experienced a long period of sunny and dry weather, but his suntan was not the glow that healthy skin gets from a seven mile walk in the sun without a hat. That tan only shows that the sunlight was coming from above for a while. His tan had been given a long time to spread, so there was just a general colour on his face, neck and arms; less so on his neck. He looked to be in his mid-sixties and the young lad behind the counter was probably about nineteen. There was, most assuredly, a clash of comprehension.

    ‘Neither do I,’ I responded, pleased that the attention was now on me.’But I like to be understood when I speak.’

    I could see this chimed with him. Clearly, he wanted to be understood and often felt that he was saying things that others could not understand.

         ‘Whenever, I repeat myself, I raise my voice so I am heard, and then people tell me to stop shouting.’ He said to me, only half jesting.

         ‘Me too.’ I stopped, and then it hit me. ‘I think your IQ is bigger than you know what to do with.’

    Admittedly, that is not something that anyone might ever hear. It may even be the first time it has ever been said. Yet, I was overwhelmingly compelled to say it, and it just came out. Suddenly, I was a passenger in my life journey; a person in a front-row theatre seat watching a scene in which I had a walk-on lead role. The man looked at me stunned for a few moments. Strangely though, I had no desire to explain or withdraw my comment, back-handed compliment that it was. He understood though; uniquely understood. This became apparent.

         ‘I think you also have a high IQ’, he said, a slight quiz on his face.

    Aware that the puzzled shop assistant was observing this interplay, I cautiously offered, ‘Us aliens need to be able to spot one another.’ The now slightly nervous shop assistant let out something between a guffaw and a loud breath. Clearly, he thought this amusingly non-sensical. Harrari, had she been there, would have been insulted by my outspoken attempt to liken myself to her kind. But the man understood me, at least on the level I was on. He knew I wasn’t an alien but I couldn’t really say anything else to mean something entirely different.

         ‘Yes we do,’ he smiled. ‘It’s just that people have difficulty in understanding what I am saying. They…’

    I interrupted him, fully on autopilot now. I had to tell him that I knew what he was going to say before he inadvertently insulted the shop assistant as well.

         ‘Hmmm, now that you have seen the world that humans see, you have moved onto something else. You see…..er…. beyond the veil.’

         ‘Yes, that’s it,’

    He then went on to tell me who he was. I didn’t recognise anything he said until he finished with, ‘You know; like Elohim in the Bible.’

         ‘Ah! Now I know you. I know you.’ I said, more than a little discomfitted.

    I don’t know if I was fearful of being thought to be a charlatan, or I was in the company of a madman, or a angel. But this guy’s spirit wasn’t holding a banner above his head to tell me something. I was hearing something in the actual words that came out of his mouth that weren’t the words that the shop assistant heard. If I could just focus a little harder I would be able to hear it more clearly.

    Whereas, Hakim is my spirit avatar, and Harrari an abandoned alien I discovered in a wood I once lived in, this man was in a liminal position holding the door wide open to the spiritual world. But something was wrong. He wasn’t a friendly guide collecting tickets to a fairyland. He had torn the veil with an unfortunate slip or a hard, one-time only, thrust of anguish, followed by a series of clumsy visitations. Right before me was a spiritual vandal. It was as though he had, aimlessly wandering, actually stumbled across Mary Mapes Dodge’s boy, Hans Brinker, in her book, ‘Silver Skates’, with his finger in the hole in the dike to save Holland, and now he was repeatedly kicking him in the nuts. At the same time, he didn’t have access to all the aspects of the spirit realm so when he said to me, ‘I just hope this war is over soon,’ and then to the shop assistant, ‘He knows what I mean’ meaning I know, I had a glimpse that the confused lad was thinking that I am the cause of a war or even a participant in a war. Of course, the lad was right, but not really in the way he probably thought. I am not a neighbourhood menace; littering, swearing, spitting and illegally parking in other people’s spaces. I am quite simply not a liar. Messes people right up, that does. For me, I am at war with falsehood; lies that people tell themselves.

    If this strange little man really had any connection to the spirit world I should be able to identify that. That was me thinking though and ‘thinking me’ was running through all the available clues to tell me what to do. Long-term suntan means outside a lot; reasonably well-spoken with good enunciation; bottle of beer in his hand; and a recent confession that he could not read the alcohol content on the bottles he was trying to choose from.

    On the other hand, I was engaged in a disconnect of verbal communication that made sense somehow. This however, is how people with high IQ communicate. Connecting links are left unsaid because there cannot be any other solution. In other words, just making dots for the other person to join up. The problem for ‘thinking conscious me’ though, is that this is really similar to having a spirit conversation because there is no falsehood barring understanding between spirits. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said that he looks through a glass darkly in the Bible. Putting aside falsehood is most certainly the step to take if you want to talk to God.

    How do I know this? Not because I have a high IQ. No; because I know that a storyteller already knows the plot and often fails to provide adequate links in the story. A storyteller is prescient and the readers or listeners are not. Some of the dots need to be joined and some not.

    Does this strange man already know the story? Or is he a brain-addled highly intelligent alcoholic that can’t afford more than one bottle of quite expensive craft beer? Could be, because his tan says he does not drive; but then why would he drive, if he lives near the village shop? And, why buy a strong craft beer and call it your favourite?

    The only thing I could do was involve the shop assistant in a pseudo-conversation by making an obscure link to the strange man’s ‘He knows what I mean’.

         ‘I do,’ I said, ‘But he,’ meaning the shop assistant, ‘won’t remember the conversation we had yesterday if I say, Opportunity cost.’

         ‘Of course I do’, he burst out, insulted. To be honest, he might well feel insulted, because effectively I had just intimated that his current confusion was his own fault due to his inability to follow a conversation. However, it gave me enough time to pay for the bread, and follow the little man out of the shop.

    Even without the watching shop assistant I could not get a better read on the man.

    Some time ago, I could tell within the first two minutes of meeting someone if they had siblings; whether they were older or younger siblings; their siblings gender; and sometimes their age differences. The interesting thing is, a child adopted into a family of children gave the same clues as does an only child; none.

    This man was indistinguishable from any other man hurrying on his way and muttering over his shoulder, ‘Good to meet you.’ Except he said it twice so I suppose he meant it.

    When two people ‘rap’ it is like musicians ‘jamming’. You can’t suddenly start jamming or rapping, quite simply because someone needs to start and the threads need to be picked up by another. I had a work colleague with which we rapped, but we also spent most of our time just talking and working. This man outside the shop, back in the real world, was constrained by decades of social convention and just walked away. If there is a shroud to be pulled over someone’s spirituality, it was duly used.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates

  • Writing by numbers without numbers

    Writing by numbers without numbers

    [ 30 minute read ] 

    5,539 words read at 190 words per minute.

    This is the final post on Toby’s love story in which in order to write it I forced myself to face dragons from my past. There are areas in my mind that seem to eternally deny any probing. I shall just have to consider that part to be my ‘dark’. However, I am lifted by the lyrics in a Alanis Morissette song, in which she thanks someone for loving both her light and her dark. Incidentally, I only remembered her song ‘Everything’ this morning, after I had finished the story. I strongly encourage you to listen to her song after you have read my story. You can find it on YouTube.

    Lyrics from ‘Everything’ – written and performed by Alanis Morissette. Released in 2004

    ‘You see everything, you see every part. You see all my light and you love my dark. You dig everything of which I’m ashamed. There’s not anything to which you can’t relate. And you’re still here. What I resist persists and speaks louder than I know. What I resist you love, no matter how low or high I go.’

    Toby fell in love

    Mimie and Chloe

    (Spring 2023)

    The Spring air had brought a flush to Mimie’s face that was enhanced by her closeness to her older identical twin sister. Mimie looked fondly at her over the kitchen table.

          ‘You make me laugh so much, Chloe!’

          ‘I am glad, because you’re so ugly when you don’t!’ Chloe smiled back. A long and drawn-out moment passed while her smile slowly grew to a wide grin, ‘I’m pregnant.’ she said joyfully.

          ‘That’s great! Oh Wow! Oh God, I love you so much right now! I am so happy for you, Chloe.’ Light danced in Mimie’s eyes and she hugged her sister.

          ‘Owen is delighted, he insists he will be a great dad and he has put in for overtime. He wants to celebrate by taking me, us, to Rome just before its born. He thinks it will be easier to carry inside me than push a buggy in a crowd.’

    ‘He is such a man!’ laughed Mimie.

    She absent-mindedly rearranged the daffodils in a vase on the table. She was deliriously merry.

    January 2024 (The following year)

    Toby hated Winter. When he opened his front door a little slush fell in. The bare stems of a hazelnut shrub near his front door, despite being three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind and tiny particles of snow, like the ice scraped from the inside of freezers, chilled his face. The gusting blast had travelled countless miles from the East, and it had no gift of value, apart from a few partially decomposed, skeletal, leaves it blew across his path. Despite his flower beds still showing signs of frost, he took a few moments to carefully search for new growth, but found nothing he recognised. ‘Winter takes so long,’ he thought.

    The sky, grey with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his rushed, lightbreakfast was not large enough to stand in for satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around, during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to do so, and not for fun.

    His shortcut to the main road, through a spinney, took him past a long-abandoned bungalow. Its roof, open to the elements, had collapsed and lay under a blanket of snow where the shaded sun could not reach. On the footpath, a young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed him, coming the other way. She miserably passed him every day. Her face was reddened by the biting wind. Toby thought she always looked cold, and the baby must be, he thought. He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These days though, offering help came across as pity and contempt. ‘Perhaps she needs money for heating’, he thought. Tomorrow, he decided, he would leave twenty pounds on the footpath for her to find. He kept walking, feeling helpless.

    At the bus stop seven people were waiting. No looked at him. A couple of them rocked from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. Apart from little crunches from their shiny shoes crushing small islands of late un-thawed snow, there was silence.

    Like every day, the bus driver stopped the bus a little way from the kerb, causing the passengers to take a large step over the resident puddle. Toby, waiting for everyone else to move before he did, had time to see, in the puddle, a reflection of compacted dirty slush from the road stuck at the underside edge of the front wheel-arch, before he stepped onto the bus. He could not recall there never being a puddle there. Last in the queue, Toby took the only available seat; the seat that everyone avoided every day.

    Dave, occupying one half of the bench, was a dog-lover. He never spoke, but his dog-hair covered clothes spoke for him. Only people with head colds and wet tissues were immune to the conversation that Dave’s damp clothes had with fresh air.

    For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers’ heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward as the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.

    Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office building.

    Where the block paving concourse had lain in the shade for two winter months there was a sheen of green algae beginning to spread up the abutting walls, in a corner where a small heap of frosty leaves poked through a clump of partially thawed snow, that was now becoming translucent and glossy wet.

    February 2024

    Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down, it still touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.

    The baby was crying again. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears in Mimie’s eyes starred her vision and she had to blink a few times to clear them. After making the baby as comfortable as she could, she gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room.

    Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The man in the expensive suit blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, without knowing why, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.

    The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy’s wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. She desperately wanted to go home but went back to the flat.

    The next day, near the fallen bungalow in the spinney, now that there was no snow to shroud it, she noticed all the accumulated rubbish. Crushed soft drink cans and crisp packets lay alongside empty polystyrene fast-food containers and sodden pieces of paper. The striped segments of sun and shade through the trees and saplings only served to highlight the decay. Looking away and mindful of where she trod, she saw a dry twenty pound note on the wet path. Obviously, it had been recently dropped there. It wasn’t long before she realised what was happening; she passed the good-looking suited man and then found twenty pounds. Over the next six weeks, she found twelve more. She kept them. She didn’t spend them, she saved them; each time she took them home back to the flat and dried and gently ironed out the crease down the middle, all two-hundred and sixty pounds.

    March 2024

    Now that the days had warmed and lengthened, the ground responded and Toby pondered which shoots to keep and which to keep, He had decided to give everything a chance unless the result was only an ugly thrusting of green mounted by tiny flowers that quickly faded, or easily recognised weeds that had deep roots that perniciously grew forth into the light from just the tiniest shred left in fertile soil. Constantly cutting back unwanted ribaldry that inevitably lead to insignificance or disappointment was not something Toby felt he wanted to do. He stuck to his plan of transplanting the seedlings he recognised as being escapees from his neighbours flower garden, and discarded the rest.

    This morning, he got off the bus before it got to the road-works in the High Street.

    Kate, the prosecutor on Toby’s current case, eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day, they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a kernel of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.

    There was something sincere about Toby that she liked. His obvious compassion for the downfallen was apparent, yet he had a strong sense of propriety that she herself held to be valuable.

    In the Greek restaurant, Toby inwardly winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.

    ‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’

    The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had warmed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.

    It was not until the third lunch that Toby noticed how her voice, now she was not projecting it in court, came from her holding it in her chest and larynx, though each word was carefully enunciated in a deep and smooth tone. When she questioned Toby, she did it with a neutral, genuine curiousity as a child might, or an inquisitive visitor from a different country or planet. A few times, Toby surprised himself by thinking her voice sounded similar to an AI assistive tool with an almost indistinguishable Californian accent, yet it evinced a good private English schooling. He felt held by it; supported by it; and warmed by it. Naturally a talker, Toby found himself hunting for questions to ask her, so he could listen to her rich voice. Eventually, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.

          ‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her equally straight dark eyebrows.

    Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went, instead, with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’Yet, why not? It was after all her she that had precipitated these meetings.

    They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.

    The restaurant they agreed to meet at was outside of town. Toby stepped out of the taxi onto a wet, recently lain car park. It had trees on two sides that separated it from fields. The trees however, did little to slow a damp wind that brought with it the merest puff of the scent of wood smoke that dissipated and then came again and faded. Not quite a full moon the light from it was alternately obscured by fast moving clouds, and waving branches that cast sweeping shadows across the car park. Expecting, but not knowing why, that Kate would be fastidiously punctual, he waited where he stood. Five minutes passed. Then, feeling foolish, he went inside.

    Perfectly on time, Kate arrived at the restaurant with a light make-up that subtly enhanced her Eurasian features. Her dark hair was piled on her head. Despite there being some familiarity, and certainly an intriguing attraction, between them, they were still a little nervous, since this was an occasion at a different part of the day than their previous meetings and would have only one of two possible outcomes, one of which would be brought about solely by their mutual desires, and the other by a disconnect, or a shaped recognition of a job or meeting that they must return to in the coming days.

    By the end of the following week, Toby and Kate were thinking of one another often, but Kate decided that they should not meet for lunch anymore. Her idea, presented to Toby, seemed sound. She suggested that their dates, and nights out, should be fresh and not mundane; in any case, they were both embroiled in their cases during the week. Soon, through Kate’s contrivance, they settled into a smooth and relaxed relationship where respect began to make way and accommodate affection and then love.

    If an emergency vehicle siren was heard and they could not see each other, they worried that the other might be injured. They were silly, but love brings with it divergent, almost psychotic, thinking; Confidence is boosted and people become friendlier, which tricks the mind, and things that would have been considered trite and meaningless, while one dwelt in loveless solitude, become important and relevant.

    Each day, subconscious inspection of their relationship revealed new shoots of discovery. Kate was ticklish behind her knees and Toby smiled whenever he was asleep at Kate’s house. They made breakfast together and let their fingers touch when they reached for toast or their coffee. The shape of their lives, shared with one another, seemed to be conforming to their combined values in an environment of anticipated warmth and brightness. They saw no clouds on the horizon.

    Toby preferred tea with his breakfast, and at home, by himself, would eat a large but disjointed and hurried breakfast as he readied for work; toast in one hand and jacket in the other. Then put the jacket down, and scoop some scrambled egg, which never made it to his mouth without some of it falling off the fork back onto the plate.

    April 2024

    It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp, full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love; Kate had inflamed his desire and he had found satisfaction. She was strong and feminine; she hid her body yet was not modest in her words or actions.

    He plucked an emerging stinging nettle from near the self-seeded snapdragons. It stung his finger-tips but not really unpleasantly like a sting on the back of the hand would be, or on an arm or a leg; more a tingle; more an ‘ooh!’ than an ‘Ouch!’.

    His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely woman with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. A jogger, recently happy to exercise now her face and especially the bridge of her nose, wouldn’t get so cold, dodged the waiting passengers.The bus, unusually, arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

    April 2024

    In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings.

          ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

          ‘There’s twenty pounds down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

          ‘Move along’

    Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through.

          ‘Wait!’

    Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.

          ‘Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.’ Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. ‘It wasn’t too big a bump was it? Was it?’ Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.

          ‘Okay, what’s up?’

          ‘Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?’ Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a pseudo-date, off the premises.

          ‘Meet here? One o’clock?’ Toby smiled. Mimie grinned. Breakfast seemed too small again.

    Toby was intrigued, she didn’t work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn’t expecting to meet Kate until this evening.

    The lunchtime meeting with Mimie

    Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her incisors were the same length as her canines. It made Toby think of a friendly spider, a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie, guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found it.

          ‘You let me find money in the street’

    Toby looked up.

    She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks. Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would not look back at him.

          ‘The baby you saw me with, its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.

    Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She waited. A bus passed by outside.

          ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

          ‘Mimie’, she answered. ‘She died.’

          ‘The baby?’

          ‘No, my sister. I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to come back.’

    She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the baby now.’

    She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and started for the door.

    Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.

          ‘Come on, silly,’ she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them both a cup of tea each, avoiding the promised coffee.

    The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time, or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.

         ‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’ he mused.

    In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her mouth. His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship. Something had broken her.

    Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his wife and Mimie’s identical twin sister, Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and afterwards he apologised over and over again, wandering the flat naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s past or future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on a safe and carefully maintained ice-rink. She had said she felt that she was always between falling and landing, and her arms were flailing to try to right herself before the inevitable impact that was always coming.

    Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet together, made three little backwards jumps and bumped the fridge door shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed. Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took what she freely gave.

    May 2024

    The compassion he had felt for Mimie in Winter, caring for and pushing a buggy with a crying abandoned baby, and combined with his new understanding of her, brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed, She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again because he knew other men saw it.

    She did notice his change towards her, and his soft concern, to her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so much. Every day, she remembered her sister and how she had given herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep a link with her, and every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was somehow broken. It made it worse.

    August 2024

    Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden, overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a little frigid, was at times haughty, and the heat from her, though voluptuous, was never scorching like he had known, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly.

    One warm evening, under low-wattage garden lighting and shielded by high fences, Toby and Kate lay naked, dozing in the soporific scent of lavender, night-scented stock and honeysuckle, when a cold shower surprised them.

    The shock of it on Toby’s skin was exhilarating. ‘Mimie’, he thought.

    Christmas 2024

    Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to share,the fruits of his labours in his garden. Pests had decimated his crops throughout Spring and Summer, but strong sunlight and night-time showers had been kind. There had been triumphs and achievements. Eating the first strawberry of the year was always the best flavour he tasted in Summer. Alongside this, he had discovered that they also ripen off the plant, though not so sweetly. Yet, those less sweet fruits that were left to resolve themselves when severed from the bond of the group, and which developed from their own resources, tended to last the longest.

    In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops; ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and frozen raspberries Kate wanted, to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that morning, at 5am, by torchlight.

    Later that evening

    Keeping the engagement ring, meant for Kate, in his pocket he made his final resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.

    Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.

    He knew that just off the High Street there was a road junction where young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first, her greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t much going on that night.

          ‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’

    Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. It was irrational of her, she knew, but she also knew how Toby felt about her. Toby knew then that he would never see her again. Their lives would, from now on, never cross again. He felt that he did already know that before, but now he was certain. The look of horror he thought he saw there was to him the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’ But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm implacability on it.

          ‘This is a Mourning Ring. It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond, which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it, but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and looked down.

          It’s….it’s worth something.’

    It was worth more than something, he had swapped a four thousand pounds engagement ring and paid an extra three thousand pounds for it.

    She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it. The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket, which was still held in the ring, melted it.

    Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked away. His shoes crunched. It had begun to snow again, but with little half-frozen flakes that whipped in the nervous wind. On the other side of the road, a car crunched over the ice crystals forming on the road. The driver, possibly inebriated from a party, belatedly switched on the headlights.

    Toby had passed three dark houses before he heard her call to him.

          ‘Toby!’

    He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.

    Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now bare hand.

          ‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’. The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark night air.

    As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement near Mimie, swirled around her ankles, brushed her feet, and settled down again.

          ‘Happy Christmas Toby’, she breathed. ‘Thank you.’

  • When arrogance meets complacence

    When arrogance meets complacence

    I like to play mind-chess with unsolicited visitors to my home

    Sometimes, a person on my doorstep, tries to sell me Broadband or something, and because I don’t respond to marketing or sales techniques at all, rather than just poke them in the chest with a broom and shoo them away, I give them the time of day and allow them to practice their elevator-pitch (an opening spiel that is intended to open a door of curiousity). I ask questions and let them respond. Eventually, the conversation peters out and they quietly go, at least a little rejuvenated and not immediately shunned.

    Every now and then, a pair of people knock on my door to talk to me about Jesus and God. I thoroughly enjoy these moments because I have a deep belief in the spiritual world, so I am not afraid of any witchcraft or hypnotism they might try to trap me with. Some time ago, I came to understand that ‘omnipresent’ means, in the past, present and the future. That means that, theoretically, we can pray in the future for our sins in the past and God, being in the future, hears those prayers and prevents us being spoiled by sin, or even committing sin. I use this as a universal truth with the evangelists on my doorstep, and we play mind-chess for a while. If, towards the very end of the conversation, I mention that ‘omniscient’ means knowing what will happens in the past, present, and future, it shows that planning to pray in the future, like next Sunday, to cover a sin we are about to commit today, is useless because it is not sincere. God and I have a good laugh at this over a brandy and a cigar. Neither of us smoke or drink, so we just laugh instead.

    I created James and Brian, two characters to show how foolish most of us are, and especially me. At the end, you can hear God laugh at James’ stupidity. This is just a story. I have taken a strong view as narrator to make a case for James.

    two men either side text reading, Half Penny Stories

    Mind Chess

    (With a nod to Transactional Analysis)

    The allotment was empty when James got there. The gate was open but there were no delusional would-be market-gardeners to be seen. The exposed dry soil made James think of water. It even smelt dusty today; humidity levels were low, and it hadn’t rained for over five weeks. His own plot was green and abundant with fresh growth but everywhere else was a scene of abandonment. Bare soil with random segregated weeds moping in the sun made James contemptuous of the absent hobbyists and pretenders. Only gooseberry bushes seemed to be growing; gooseberries bushes scattered across arid plots surrounded by congregating weeds vying for position, like unruly football fans at a match that hadn’t started yet.

    Nobody, it seemed, was concerned with neatness or order, yet farmers, James thought, with all the land they cultivate were tidier than these lazy losers. Some things came easy for James. Having self-propagating flowering plants with lots of ground-covering foliage that prevented the soil drying out and kept weeds down in early Spring was just the obvious thing to do; knowing this allowed him spare time. He had long ago concluded that if he hadn’t expended any energy sowing these seeds or tending the plants he really didn’t mind digging them up to plant other preferred seedlings. Some things were difficult for James. Compassion and empathy were alien to him, so much so that he was ruthless even with himself. He had had his turn at suffering and avoided any circumstance that had a probability of happiness, as he saw it. Happiness, he felt, could be taken from him, by accident or by someone’s will. He was disappointed with life and lived a life of asceticism, with no expectation of joy. You might expect him to be in fine physical shape but he was lazy, preferring to use his brain to find ways to alleviate or avoid the toil of hard work. He was also young; not even sixty-two yet.

    Pushing his bicycle with day-glow green handlebars and front forks, he went further in, hoping for something stimulating that was emotionally free, but finding nothing of interest. His own plot, he saw, was just as he had left it, green and luscious with its covering of Limnanthes douglasii, or Poached Egg plant. This was safe for him; no emotion or effort put in and free aesthetic value taken out. His mental cost – benefit analysis said ‘win – win’. He was about to leave when he spied a man painting a tiny shed, going just beyond scumbling and changing its colour from grey to duck-egg blue.

    James quickly learned that Brian used to be a secondary school teacher, because Brian wanted him to know that he used to be useful. By association with his career, Brian hoped that everyone he told would continue to think that he was a hero, a modern day crusader in driving forward decades of young minds into a bright future but was realistically a voracious and gaping maw of banality in the North East of England; an unattended torpidity that would swallow up even the sharpest of students. James, on the other hand, was an unqualified educator; a corrector of intellectual mistakes, and a ruthless and unfeeling man who had dedicated himself to proving everyone he met, wrong, stupid, a waste of space, or obsolete. 

    James had strong views and knew the far-reaching extent of his mind outstripped most others. Where others relied on heuristics, James experimented; where others got information from newspapers, television and social media, James parasitically sucked dry selected information he found in the people he met; though never the information that the host thought valuable and had gleaned from their favourite media sources. James was instead searching for tiny connecting pieces to complete his collection of finished thinking. He needed to understand his world in fine detail, so he could eventually show the rest of the world that he was right to hate everyone for their stupidity and and right to be a loner.

    There are two types of people according to James; sublime people of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth who were beneficial to him; and the rest of the world. James categorised Brian to be obsolete and a drain on public learning. However, Brian, innocently holding his small tin of paint in one hand and a brush in the other, and comfortable in his fug of accumulated miscomprehension had roused James’ interest. Mental stimulation was the drug that kept James alive. He never showed his true colours when he first met someone. Instead, he let them rudely promote themselves and then gave them reasons to go away and think about how they might wake from the weary slumber that was home to their comforting insensibility. James thought himself special. Conversely, he knew this and that is why he hated himself. Self-flagellation had eaten away at James’ confidence and left only a paradigm of behaviour almost completely devoid of compassion.

    Initially, Brian was friendly and not alarmed and after general conversation on plants and how he had moved his shed, Brian suddenly swerved onto a blustering, and clearly unrefined, path with an outburst on people dumping their rubbish in the Birmingham streets. Brian wasn’t quite ranting and James knew that he wasn’t crazy by the standards of the time. He recognised a man that spent at least a couple of hours with a pint in his hand at the bar of his local pub on Sundays. Like everyone else, talking, for Brian,  was almost entirely only mental exercise.

    ‘They just dump their rubbish in the streets’, cried Brian indignantly. ‘I mean their mattresses and things. They should take it all to the tip.’

    James, calm in his thinking, knew that not everyone had access to a van or trailer in Birmingham, and there was a rubbish removal-person strike in Birmingham, so no-one could arrange for a mattress or old cupboard to be taken away either. To James, Brian was certainly, by the standards of the day, completely average in his thinking; clearly insane. James, however, was charitable in classing it as ‘lazy and crust coated thinking’. He recognised the patina on Brian’s thinking; patina that was a result of poor maintenance and a reactive exposure to lazy thinkers. ‘Get your thoughts out, use them, Brian, and embellish them with facts and fresh ideas. Where is your inventiveness, Brian?’ he thought. He could almost ‘see’ extraneous bits of thoughts being sheared off in Brian’s head as they were shaped to fit with other similarly corroded thoughts, and cobbled together, to quickly throw up a feeble scaffold so flimsy that only a minor test would knock it down, but sufficient enough for him to formulate his own opinion to use as a remedial buttress; an opinion that once it had reached his fore-brain and left his mouth would be his long-standing fall-back position because it was the only one he had. It would be a buttress to a non-existent scaffold that becomes the foundation for the next scaffold. Now that it had been recently and neatly placed on the wobbly shelves in the library of Brian’s mind, he would be attracted to its shiny newness. The attendant analogue library filing card for where it was stored, would, with its crisp corners and uncreased facade, for a long while be more attractive than its dog-eared, mis-filed, and stained neighbours. Brian had made all his relatable experiences obsolete. Thinking stalled.

    James felt compelled to help Brian restart his donkey-engine, cement-mixer type mind; a mind that needed to first be pulled free from a bog of mistreatment.

    Unfortunately, the mind is not hermetically sealed from the outside world and the gatekeepers in charge of inward-bound information in Brian’s mind were now baffled and throttled by newly installed governors that came in a box-set with a belief that his education was completed when he achieved a recognised teaching qualification.

    Brian’s unconscious source thought was, ‘I know my subject and the University has told me that I can adequately teach it. I have experience of teaching in secondary schools as part of my degree, so I now know everything I need to bend young minds to think like me. They really should, you know, because I am right. No! More than that, because I care, I am a hero!’

    He had, a long time ago, in younger years, consciously thought, ‘I am so excited. I want to help young people. I really care.’

    Any observer could, in retrospect, suggest that the demons were ready and waiting to leap into him to corrupt his valiant hope while he fervently clutched his University approbation, but already they were in him, part of his core, inherited from his parents, and encouraged by his friends and peers.

    ‘No new information is needed. Don’t explore. You have all the information you need to teach empty heads. Relax.’

    ‘Well done!’ to Brian meant, ‘You have done enough. You can stop now.’

    This necrotic stagnancy was starkly evident to James in the rest of their discussion. Brian had opinions on Government handouts; criminal records preventing people from ever working in their whole lives; and who might attend and be an appropriate recipient at Food Banks. James, with a robust understanding of these social issues through diligent research and empirical knowledge threw in ‘Shame on them!’ as the conversation segued from benefit cheats to habitual scroungers. This left-over salty seasoning of the stew of Brian’s opinion on righteously moaning benefits recipients was too much for Brian’s palate. But James had carefully measured that condiment into his hand to check its volume and supposed effect, and smiled at Brian’s donkey engine mind chewing on old slime and chunks of debris from his socially-conscious 1990s history, when it balked at the jet-wash of fresh briny thinking.

    Brian, with his self-assurance, had already made his first mistake with James; thinking that everyone watches television and have similarly long straws that are permanently thrust into the same soup of Orwellian nonsense and thus everyone is supplied with the same delectable but mentally-hostile nourishment. One of the reasons why James did not eat media-cake was because it tastes delicious but is hostile to the body. It satisfies a want, yet secretly poisons a need.

    Subconsciously, Brian was reconnoitering for people to add to his group of confirmation-bias addicts; searching for another stumbling mess of a person who prefers an easy route through a jungle of information; a route that was crudely cut by a man with a machete following an animal track, that became a track for illegal loggers. A path that is there by dint of its availability. The more people use it, the more easily it is found, due to its wide and trampled aspect. Brian was used to following the pack. His younger self would have wept.

    ‘They just dump their rubbish outside other people’s homes in Birmingham.’ Brian remarked, alluding to, though not saying outright, people leaving their rubbish outside the homes of people of colour, and not instead gently placing it outside white people’s homes. James was aware of that happening. He suspected that Brian thought he would jump on his band-wagon of aggrieved righteousness because James was closer in colour to Indians and Middle-Eastern people than the old-school notion of what a European should look like; Scandinavian and Danish Vikings from 1000 years ago. In any case, James didn’t bite. He went the other way in thinking and held one idea back for the shock value, if it was needed.

    In his head he went with an idea that, in a lawless environment there is no infrastructure to guide someone towards making mutually beneficial decisions, which came out as, ‘Why not, everyone else is; and where else is there to put it?’ James had now set himself up to fatally fail in his mission to destroy the canker in Brian’s mind. He would never recover from this outward attitude of simplistic laissez-faire.

    It was not the first time James had been mistaken for an Asian or Middle-Eastern man. He spent a lot of time outside and grew tanned even by the winter sun. Certainly, he wasn’t going to, without question, be waving a flag for a brown ethnic minority people he did not belong to, and crying foul at every mistake made by a Viking, which Brian, it seems, thought he would.

    Neither was he about to run around shouting ‘Up the Vikings!’

    ‘Is that what you think happens, Brian?’ James thought, ‘Brown people will always have opinions that support only brown people?’ He never said it, though, because he still believed he held the central position in the game of chess, that was, to him, their conversation. He knew that attack would cause Brian to defend, and then there would only be a game of attrition; Brian would never have a confident gambit if he was forced to defend himself. It was his opponents’ gambits that James liked to publicly dissemble.

    Brian still believed that James was from the same economic background as himself and maintained his ‘friendly pontificating over a Sunday pint in the village local’ attitude. He breached the subject of criminality and having a criminal record forever preventing young adults from getting jobs. As a teacher, he’d had an enhanced criminal record check because he was working with vulnerable people. He presumed that everyone has the same check; James knew they don’t.

    ‘On application forms, hopeful people, in the UK, must confess to any convictions within the last ten years. After ten years, their records are deleted, and they are considered reformed and no longer a threat to themselves, the shop-keepers’ sweets, or other people. Actually’, James continued, ‘the records are not deleted. Convictions for most offences are simply not revealed when requested by a potential employer, except for certain crimes.’

    Brian looked uncomfortable at this, inconveniently sure that young criminals were eternally doomed and condemned to be forever unemployed by their foolish earlier actions. By this time in the conversation, James knew that Brian, the ex-teacher, still foolishly believed that education universally solves unemployment in all environments, and is the sole and absolute requirement for opportunities for success to emerge. Brian, born in the North East of England has lived in the south of England for too long, and, in James’ mind had forgotten his home. When James added that as an employer, he had worked closely with recruitment agencies to get people at very short notice for some of his contracts, Brian’s spluttering, pollution-spreading engine of a mind encountering a steep incline in the road to progress, switched on the automatic choke because its core temperature still remained too low, and so more stale fuel from his tank of denial was sucked in, at the expense of fresh air. He refused to learn something new or believe that he was wrong. He did not recognise that he needed to purge his system.

    Brian shifted back to talking about food banks, believing that it was, in fact, James who was clearly exhibiting signs of mental disorder, and he tried to link education, criminality, and poverty with a circumstance he had read about and seen on the news. From his self-imposed, though much supported by his peers, elevated position of superiority over mentally aberrant individuals, such as this moron before him, he thought that James would agree with his confused and blind belief that all visitors to food banks are food-poor. ‘How can he not see the truth? It is in the newspapers, for goodness sake!’, he irately pondered.

    However, when Brian demonstrated this fabricated empathy for peasants living on bread and water, James had to make sure Brian knew that many of them indeed eat cake. He had attended a food bank perhaps five times over as many years. Extra money went out as a larger direct debit than he was anticipating and five more times because he was ineffective in temporarily saving money by switching utility providers.

    ‘As someone interested in social enterprises, I spent a lot of hours talking to the organisers of local food banks and hubs.’ James explained.

    ‘All of them complained about rising numbers and how to tax people with a set ‘donation’ of around five pounds for each visit. My input with them was, as a general rule, to not allow people to attend if their benefit is paid that same week.’

    James was now beginning to reveal his ruthlessness, but he knew that the same people week after week were getting free food so they could buy luxuries such as eating out and expensive day-trips with the money they saved. This at the expense of both the needy and the food-hubs which spent money on food to accommodate the greedy as well as the hungry.

    ‘Shame on them’, he said again.

    Brian, in his turn, was irritated by James’ arrogance and finally ended the conversation when James tried to explain how needs and wants change as people mature, so financial income has a different utility for different age groups.

    ‘I really must get on with painting this shed. My wife will kill me if I waste this paint.’

    James turned his bike around. A duck in the pond laughed when an opportunistic jackdaw who had delightedly watched the whole thing croakily called, ‘Hear! Hear!’.

    Brian blinked and stared, confounded, and watched, paint pot in one hand and brush in the other, while James pushed his bicycle away, towards the gate at the edge of the allotment and back to the road.More cars were parked at the gate.

    James, alone with his thoughts again, was convinced that he had proved himself right. Students really are held back by coasting teachers. Yet, blindly, he had corrupted himself because he had no evidence to back this up. It was still supposition. Nonetheless, he closed his thought-experiment examination of teacher and pupil interaction, and added one more theory to his collection of completed thoughts.

    The duck, unable to keep the smile off its face, put its head beneath the water, then needing air, withdrew it,  shook it, and laughed again at the jackdaw as it shamefacedly flew away.

  • I met myself and now I want to be a better person

    I met myself and now I want to be a better person

    You make me want to be a better person

    Because we cannot hear what our voices sound like to others we are surprised to hear it when we first hear a recording of our own voice. Similarly, I once heard that if we met ourselves in the street we would always thereafter cross the road whenever we saw ourselves to avoid another meeting; such is the distaste we would have at our own selves. In other words, we would not want to be friends with ourselves.

    two silhouettes of men surrounding text Half Penny Stories

    The man in his fifties

          ‘What, you don’t need me anymore?’, said the man in his fifties to me as he came down the library stairs.

    This man did not seem to be offended nor surprised, merely bemused. I suspected he was not significant in improving my day, and he seemed to be wondering what he would do before he finally disassembled after gradually fading, if I continued to ignore him. At least, that is what I was wondering.

    I ignored this familiar, though not recognised man. I had no idea who he was, simply because I had never seen myself before without prejudice, and never heard my own voice coming from outside my own head, without the resonances in my mouth and nasal passages acting as feedback.

    At the time I didn’t realise that I had imagined and created him to guard me and warn me of impending danger, which he had so far done exceedingly well, though not in a language that I understood, more as an uncomfortable feeling, of concern in a particular direction. I knew that it had been useful, really useful, to be somehow connected to someone unbiased and disconnected from the world by a slight phase shift; a delay of a few milliseconds. I had also used him as a counselor, or just someone to act as devil’s advocate; a sounding board, if you will; this was, after all, someone I had never met in the real world, would never be punitively accountable to, or ever expect him to tell my secrets. But at this time of first meeting a visible, seemingly solid, manifestation I was still clueless.

    Later, when I was talking to an elderly lady, the man in his fifties came back, talking nonsense, well, almost nonsense; certainly interjecting himself in a boorish manner. He seemed to be someone else’s idea of confident and open, and desperately, though dismally, trying to demonstrate some kind of learnedness that encompassed the current situation and everything in it.

    Disgusted, I walked away and left him to it – not wanting to become engaged in any kind of difficult dialogue with him. I felt sorry for the elderly woman, leaving her talking to, what was really just obfuscation of her slight problem with a shopping trolley; a bit like inclement weather. I didn’t know it was myself she was talking to, me just a few days, weeks, years ago, but now projected as a probable future outcome. It was that same person, me in the past and recent present, compressed into a single moment. I had, in fact, two decades ago as a teenager, created a manifestation to fill the gap in my own emotional mis-education. No wonder no-one liked me now if I was going to be like that.

    During the next few days a few people, strangers I met, looked at me a bit too long as though they recognised me, or  puzzled as though I had sworn out loud for no reason, or saw a change in me. How could they? They had never met me. No, but it soon became apparent they had met the man in his fifties. To be fair, they hadn’t actually met the man in his fifties. Instead, their own being, imagined, created or organically existing, inside of these strangers, who in their cases happened to be the same age as themselves, had met the man in his fifties; this being my future self if I did not change my ways. They knew each other, and on days off had sometimes met and wildly pontificated their theories on everything; they were, after all, not bound by a fear of failure and consequently were supremely confident.

    Later that day, I met the elderly woman again. The wheel on her stolen shopping trolley was still about to fall off, much like it had been ‘borrowed’ in the 1990s and had never been properly maintained up to today. That in itself was strange, but that she looked like how my wife might look in forty years was overwhelmingly disturbing.

           ‘Who was that awful man?’ she asked. I had a strange feeling then that I was not going to remain married. This fleeting feeling of deja-vu and prescience broke the veil of incomprehension. I understood in a small way who the man in his fifties might be.

    Hakim, my outrageously handsome childhood friend met me at the bar in the pub that evening. He was much more sanguine about how my day had played out. When I say handsome, I mean that I try not be seen with him in public because, although my features are plain, in comparison with his, I would be arrested for being in possession of an offensive face. My only advantage was that being slightly taller than average height I towered over his diminutive one metre fifty stature.

    We stayed sitting at the bar, our usual place. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing’, he said, ‘I have had whole conversations with animals about re-incarnation.’ He climbed down from his stool and flambuoyantly limped over to the docile dog in the corner.

          ‘Jean-Paul’, he said, ‘When will you give me that ten Francs you borrowed from me twenty years ago in Paris?’ Hakim has a sense of humour that makes it difficult for me to know when he is joking or just crazy.

    While Hakim was in the toilet, the man in his fifties came in, stood briefly at the bar, then took a stool there, two stools away, waiting to be served. My heart sank. It plummeted into depths of despair when Hakim walked jauntily back in without his limp and climbed his stool again. Please don’t talk to him, Hakim, I prayed.

    ‘Long time no see, Martin! Have a beer?’ My name is Martin but Hakim was not looking at me. I was beginning to realise that Hakim might actually have whole conversations with dogs, and why he is supremely confident; he could see my older self, just as I could. For the first time, I regretted reading that book. ‘Mind Games’, when I was fourteen, and particularly the chapter titled. ‘How to manifest a being’. A kaleidoscope of jigsaw pieces fell into place as developing thoughts in my mind. Most of these I knew to be only suppositions, such as virgins have a greater ability to manifest in the spirit world, like Oracles in ancient civilisations. I had manifested ‘Martin’, my avatar, before I had scratched the itch of carnal desire with someone else. ‘Martin’ was consequently, not a temporary being.

    Alarmingly, it seemed that my manifestation now had agency over itself. I suspected that Hakim already knew this. I knew that I would not shake ‘Martin’ off, as me in thirty years time, without help. I looked hopefully at Hakim, who ignored me.

           ‘Get Martin whatever he is drinking, please.’ he said to the barman, gesturing to the man in his fifties.

    Oh no! I thought, This is the avatar that connected with the being that guided me, without tripping, through a completely dark wood, after I fell in a ditch. I didn’t like this manifestation but I should.

    – end –

    silhouette of a female face in profile

    Are these the persons who precede us? 

    Do these persons judge us before we ever arrive? So when first impressions in the real world count, they really don’t?

    Realistically, I think first impressions in the real world do count, yet not necessarily in the ways that many people postulate. We can tell if someone is fit by the way they walk. We can tell if someone is polite or merely aware of social protocols. I am fairly certain that it is how we perceive ourselves that causes us to shape ourselves to a reasonable conformity of our expectations. I slouch, not so much because I am tall, but because I am jaded. I make mock gestures of tipping my hat to strangers to let them know I have a sense of humour and a recognition of manners past, because I feel isolated. There are a myriad of tiny things I do which I do not recognise because I have not met myself and can’t see them. If I met myself coming down the street, I would see a man tipping an invisible hat and jauntily and happily moaning about his perception of the world. I would cross the road to avoid myself. The little story is about how awkward I would feel if I had to introduce my embarrassing invisible friend (me) to my other friends, as someone I love and respect. Strangely, this invisible friend is someone my friends and family have already met.

    ‘Old Martin, You make me want to be a better person.’

  • From imagination to Understanding

    From imagination to Understanding

    two men either side of text that reads, Half Penny Stories (It might have happened)

    Walking into the spiritual world through a portal disguised as a wood

    There is a theory that if someone falls from a great height that their whole life flashes before them in the moments before their demise. The theory has it that their brain is seeking a solution for the predicament the body is in by searching through that person’s memory of the past for a similar experience that has a solution with the prospect of survival.

    I believe that, and might add that I also believe that in a fevered state, which may arise from near death, illness, or extreme stresses on the body, such as often occurs from sudden drug or alcohol withdrawal, there is an opportunity to ‘see’ or ‘perceive’ something that is ‘otherworldly’ – perhaps of the spirit world, or as I alluded to, maybe even ‘aliens’ who live in a ‘world that we humans find difficult to see (another plane of existence perhaps). In the psychiatric world this is known as psychosis. In extended periods of lack of sleep it is common for the sufferer to enter a psychotic existence until the brain is able to adequately process the experiences of the last few days and weeks, albeit in a weird and wildly ‘imaginative’ way. Who really thinks they can fly or their sibling is a horse?

    If I may lead you back to the supposed existence of ‘aliens’ and the reverence we humans would have for their power to destroy nations, just as God destroyed nations in the Christian faith before the birth of Jesus; I might suggest that invisible angels guide people on earth today and are as powerful as invisible ‘aliens’ would be. While I cannot find much on the spiritual world in Buddhism I am certain that reincarnation must stem from a supreme influence which has no personality. Loosely then, I might consider ‘Karma’ to be the building of an angel by gathering some of the spiritual world into a more concentrated form that influences environments and people. Certainly, I have been lost in a totally dark wood and climbed out of a ditch with wet boots and been able to accurately find my way back to my tent with many turns without bumping into anything at all or tripping, without seeing a single thing, and stopped walking at my tent. I was ‘told’ I was home and to reach out my arm. I reached out my hand and felt my tent there in front of me. But not just any part of the tent; the entrance end. I think at that time, I had a good heart that was true to trying to understand and help people, otherwise I would not have been faultlessly guided to safety and would have instead been led into a thorny bush or a low branch.

    There is also a belief that Jesus visited India and brought back some knowledge to his own place of birthplace. My own feeling is that there are many beliefs yet only one truth. Just as Jesus in the Christian faith is an avatar of God, or a personification of God, in order for the non-perceptive people of Jerusalem to experience a limited God, all the interpretations of the truth; Judaism, Buddhism, Islamism, Hinduism, and the beliefs of the native tribes of the world, are one and the same, yet have different avatars of gods, angels, spirits, and evil – even invisible manifestations created by a common belief by a group of people or a very strong individual. Dr. Suzanne Newcombe writes on page 350 in ‘Buddhism in Practice’ in the Open University book, ‘Crossing Boundaries’, ‘According to the doctrine of skillful means, it is appropriate to change the appearance of teaching in order to make it more accessible.’

    A crash

    On the 5th May 1977 a Canberra bomber airplane, based at RAF Wyton, crashed in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, England, onto a residential area. The two pilots, and three children on the ground died. I was in an Art Class at school at the time and witnessed the crash and explosion from a window. For no apparent reason I rose my desk and went to the window and looked in the direction of the imminent crash a few seconds before the impact; five other students did the same, but they were not copying me, despite it being highly unusual for any of my classmates leaving their studies on a seemingly aimless task. We were always only attentive to our work, such was our schooling.

    I might leap to a misty conclusion and say that the pilots were seeking a solution to their imminent demise which was a result of them trying to steer their ailing plane away from housing and with their ejection from the aircraft not an accepted solution. Certainly, there was at least ten seconds from when I left my art-room desk and the explosion on the housing estate.Apparently, though, one crew member did eject but still sadly met his demise. They could both have ejected earlier but they did their best to save the residents of the housing estate below them.

    Another Crash

    Perhaps, there is a tenuous explanation that is linked to me once being able to unerringly find my tent in a completely dark wood in 2017 without tripping or bumping into obstacles when I explain that my tent was pitched in the same tiny wood, which either was a field or bordered a field in which a badly damaged RAF Stirling bomber, also based at RAF Wyton, crashed at 04:35am on 11th April 1942, following a raid on the German city of Essen. 

    In that crash, in Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, England, Squadron Leader Drummond Wilson died instantly and Sergeant Edgar Gould died from his injuries, despite being rescued from the burning plane by Sergeant Southey. Perhaps, there is even a link in that I was leading a somewhat nomadic life at the time, just as were the gypsies on the gypsy site nearby, who attended the crash.

    Sgt David Southey (Co-Pilot), who died in 1999, believed that the gypsies had pulled him from the plane and he always insisted afterwards that if a gypsy knocked on the door that his household had to buy something from them, as they had saved his life. Later research now shows that it was due to the bravery of Flight Officer Clifford Reeve that he survived. Of course, gypsies were non-people and weren’t allowed in pubs at the time.

    Perhaps, somewhere in my spiritual record it is noted that I uselessly answered a call for help from pilots about to crash in Huntingdon, only because my unperceptive self and my mortality denied me the appropriate power to save them. Later, in Godmanchester,  where other pilots had died and I needed help, I was afforded it, though not necessarily by the ghosts of the pilots. Commonly, many of us would call this ‘karma’, though most would believe that this karma manifests itself in the world that we can perceive, I think it also manifests in the same place in which it is stored; the spiritual world.

    Perhaps then, Sergeant David Southey (from the Stirling bomber crash in 1942), who believed the gypsies rescued him and he then went back to the burning plane to rescue his colleagues, inadvertently entered into the spiritual world a record that a deserving nomadic person should be assisted when in need, and I happened to be near his Stirling bomber crash site seventy five years later. Perhaps we need to be near a place of someone’s personal sacrifice where they also spiritually place their gratitude and prayer, and it also be seared into the record by their intense emotion.

    Fevered fog and intense emotion

    So, back to reading the spirit world through a fevered fog, perhaps it is also true that the fever of intense emotion also writes in the spiritual world. I can’t help believing that there are pockets of intense emotion that mottle the world we know. Of course, with countless battles across Europe, murder and assaults by bandits and outlaws, we would be hard pressed to find a place of peace there. Perhaps, the deserts of the world might afford us some spiritual silence, as long as they have been deserts for a long time. Yet, I also believe that we cannot know peace until we have a reference point and a contrasting situation or environment.

    Like dropping food colouring from a pipette into clear water the contrast of opacity and translucence is obvious. Of course, primarily, we notice this as colour (were you thinking red?). After a while, all the water is just coloured pink from red food colouring or light blue from blue colouring. So, if we were able to swim in the fresh clear water and then a giant or god dropped food colouring in, we would observe the event from afar, and when we enter the phenomenon, discover that our environment is different to the clear environment of before. Over the course of time, our whole world, in the glass or vessel holding the water, would be diffused with this original colouring event. It would be more gradual the further we are away from the initial event. Eventually, our descendants would be born into a world that to them would just be normally pink, yet is far from being natural.

    Background radiation is supposedly what is left over from the ‘Big Bang’, the beginning of the universe. Many of us have heard this with Geiger counters in Science classes in school at about eleven or twelve years old as a series of random clicks – ‘Cosmic radiation. It comes from outer space!’. we are told. Most of it apparently does.

    When the United States of America started testing nuclear devices in the 1940’s, they did it near to where Kodak, the camera-film people, had a camera-film manufacturing plant. Some developers of the film noticed defects that they could not explain. During the manufacture of the film some of the radiation from the tests chemically resembled some of the chemicals used to make the film, and this radiation became embedded in the film. Kodak had to change their manufacturing process to ameliorate the problem. There was also, supposedly, a large US Government cover-up. (Of course, they didn’t want the Russians to know about it – and Erin Brockovich would have been straight there).

    We know that radiation has, what is called a ‘half-life’, just as caffeine in your coffee does; twelve hours for caffeine  (a cup of coffee drunk twelve hours ago affects the body the same as half a cup of coffee drunk now). For radioactive material, this means that the radiation emitted from something is half as much as it originally was after its half-life period has passed. So a half-life of one hour means that every hour there would be half as much radiation; after each hour it would go down like this (100; 50; 25; 12.5; 6.75…..) Half as much as it was a hour ago. A banana containing potassium, is radioactive with extremely, super-duper, low doses and has a half-life of billions of years.

    So, if the spirit world has a half-life of hundreds, thousands, millions, or almost five billion years, we will find it particularly awkward and frustrating to find any spiritual enclave that is surrounded by, yet different to the one we know and spend our daily lives in (pink suffusion from the red food colouring of calamitous events). But, I don’t think so.

    Gaining respect through mutual understanding

    When I was living in the woods in 2017, and guided back to my tent in the pitch blackness of unlit woodland, it could have been a ghost, a spirit, or a lost alien. I can tell you that, prior to that, during the day, in the wood, my glasses would be flicked from my face with a loud click. Every time this happened I looked around for a branch that could have snagged them, but I was never near a tree or anything. I came to realise that it was a prank, or someone, or something, didn’t like me wearing glasses. I could have been scared, but I very quickly realised that invisibility and the ability to move silently provides the best surprise in any attack. If something wanted to hurt me, it could do it at any time; any time at all. It did not need to wait for me to be asleep. So, its intention was to alert me that it was there, but why?

    Shortly after that understanding, I had a dream that ‘it’ told me that it hated me when I first pitched my tent there, but because I recognised that the wood was the rightful home to the animals and other beings, and I tried hard not to disturb their peace and security, ‘it’ now liked and respected me. My glasses stayed on my face from then on. My own security was important to me too, and the dog walkers, from then on, never came near to a place where they could discover my temporary home. I am certain they were gently guided away by my invisible and silent friend, even through telepathy.

    What can we learn from this? If ‘they’ don’t want us to know they are there, we will never know they are there; our perception will just be barred from their world.

    Space is transparent but might become translucent if we try to go to Mars

    Astronauts come back saying how much they value our world when they see it from orbit. They say that they appreciate that everything they know and value is ‘down’ there.  Most of me believes that they are more susceptible to spiritual influence out there though. There is just less ‘noise’ out there.