Nick's Little Bit Of Net

Super Mario, the 8-bit Fairy Tale Hero

2012-02-23T10:22:00.000Z

Way back in the murky depths of the summer of 2008, much was going on in the life of Nick Mellish. (That's me. Hello!) I was nearing the end of my masters at the University of Sussex and about to live with some friends in Norwich; I was rapidly realizing that rather than being incredibly lightweight when it came to drinking alcohol, I was in fact allergic; and I was desperately trying to finish my dissertation.
All three things came to a head quickly: I dropped my MacBook just over two weeks before my dissertation deadline and, with almost nothing backed up, I had to write 18,530 words in fourteen days. On the day I handed it in, September 1st, my masters was over. I got quite drunk, and thanks to my allergy quite ill later that same day. I have not touched alcohol since.
I have very mixed memories of those few weeks. The first is of the complete absence of sleep which became almost a bade of honour: I couldn't sleep, I had work to do; I wonder how many hours I could go without this morning? And so on.
The second is of a short family holiday to Ireland, which consisted of me hiding in my room on a boat, feeling a little seasick as the weather worsened, typing away and being unable to join in with any of the fun going on.
The third is of the feeling of thorough joy upon handing in the dissertation. I don't think I had really realized how much of a stress it had been until it was out of my hands and into the University's. I nearly cried. If anyone wonders how much of a mess I looked, here's a photo:

(The first person to say I don't look any worse than usual gets a slap.)
The fourth, and final, recollection I have is the slight sense of... well, not embarrassment but amusement when I had to write the title of my dissertation. There, written in front of me, were other people's titles: Shakespeare: mythic hero or flawed man?, Popularist queer theory and its derogatory ways, The cultural significance of Wuthering Heights in a world without fear, and then there was my dissertation and its title, plopped in the centre:

Nostalgia, Modern Re-invention and Culture: the Evolution of the Fairy Tale Character from Little Red Riding Hood to Super Mario.

After all this time, I still get a thrill that I was able to write on this. The main thrust of the dissertation concerned itself with constructing a good, solid argument that computer games (and, in particular for the sake of simplicity, Nintendo's computer games) are forms of literature. Which they are. I'm more than willing to argue this one out with you another day. Part Two of the dissertation, so to speak, was a comparison of Super Mario and Fairy Tale characters, with particular reference to the works of Jack Zipes and, in particular, Max Lüthi and his brilliant work, The European Folktale: form and nature. There's one passage to do with this which I was quite pleased with, and continue to be to this day. It's a silly one, but was fun to write, and I thought I'd reproduce it here for everyone to see (with a couple of tweaks... I'm a fussy editor of my own work.)
Why? Well, because I'm currently in Lancing and it's raining in much the same way it did back in the summer of 2008. That's good enough for me.
I hope you enjoy it.

The 8-bit Fairy Tale Hero

[Computer Game:] SUPER MARIO 64

SCENE 15

BOWSER WORLD 3, PLATFORM SUSPENDED IN SPACE

Mario and King Bowser are here.

BOWSER: Mario! We meet for a third time. How are you going to defeat me now? Bwa-ha-haaaa!

MARIO: Well, you remember the last time, when I picked you up by the tail, swung you around faster and faster, then throw [sic] you into one of the bombs you’d thoughtfully placed around the platform?

BOWSER: Yep.

MARIO: I thought I’d just do that again.

BOWSER: Oh. Admittedly, that’s probably going to work.

EXCUSE ME?

Why does Bowser never learn? After his second humiliating defeat, you’d expect him to dispose of the bombs around the arena. Or at least sellotape his tail to his back to prevent that pesky plumber from grabbing hold of it.[1]

The above quotation comes from an article for N64 Magazine written by journalist Mark Green titled ‘Losing The Plot’. It put several computer games and their plots’ absurdities under close scrutiny, stating: ‘Start asking a few questions of even the most watertight game plots, and they start to unravel before your very eyes.’[2]

Despite the humorous nature of the above quotation, it makes a good point: why indeed does Bowser never learn his lesson? Is he arrogant enough to expect Mario to not think about using the bombs once again, or is he simply incapable of learning?

In this section, I am going to focus upon the computer game character and how it functions, as well as looking at them in tandem with the fairy tale character and studying their relation to both one another and non-fictional, real humans.

I shall begin by exploring the world of the computer game character both on it own merits and in relation to that we have stated about the world of the fairy tale character.

Worlds Apart

For the one who has made us all/ can’t be seen even if you’re tall/ Looks aren’t everything.[3]

Despite the appearance of freedom in many computer games, the characters and ultimately the player still have to answer to the one who has created the game to begin with. It is they who have imposed the limits they have and, as I shall now show, have installed some rather questionable points of morality or simply of logicality that go unquestioned despite our familiarity with them.

As with the fairy tale character, the Nintendo character does not function like the non-fictional human. They are not emotionally affected in the same way, nor do they have to operate within the spheres of life society has created for us as, again, like the fairy tale character, they live in a different world to us.

They do not go shopping; they do not ever require a shower or bath; they do not pay bills. Though Mario, for example, may have a job in ‘our’ world (he is a plumber by trade), his timely excursions in the Mushroom Kingdom implies that he does not require the financial benefits of his job back home whilst he lives within the Mushroom Kingdom.

We do not see from where he gets the money to construct numerous go-kart tracks[4] or how he can afford to spend so much time not plumbing, in the same way that we never hear how Bowser can afford to create the seemingly limitless number of bullets[5] and castles he has. Indeed, the worlds of Mario are more often than not covered in coins with various means in which to gather more (jumping on enemies in some instances, or running around wooden poles for example, as occurs in the game Super Mario 64).

The existence of such coins is implicit of a financial system of sorts in operation within the Kingdom, though the apparently free way in which to get them raises whole other questions: whose coins are they to start with? What are they worth in a sense relative to financial worth in ‘our’ world? If they are as abundant as they appear to be, and as easy to gather as Mario suggests, then why is not everybody a multi-millionaire? Or, alternatively, is everybody in the Mushroom Kingdom a multi-millionaire, and if this is the case, then what does that make the Princesses and their implied greater financial worth?

True, their birth alone confirms their nobility but not necessarily their financial worth; their expansive castles and the great lands over which they rule however do at least imply that they are noticeably affluent.

As questions, they never get asked simply because matters of finance and so on are clearly not important factors in the fictional world of Nintendo. We accept that Bowser can afford to build eight different castles in Super Mario Bros. without question, just as we take on board that Mario is a plumber without any need to see him engage in a nine-to-five session of intensive plumbing back in Brooklyn. It is not that such questions are never answered, simply that they are never raised, as they are not applicable to the games as they stand.

Whilst playing the games, the gathering of coins does not equate to any lasting financial wealth. More often than not, reaching a target of one-hundred coins results in a reward of some sort: an extra life perhaps, or a hidden Power Star[6]. So, they are financially worth something, but the accumulation of money here has a different value to in ‘our’ world[7]. Here, it is borderline essential if one is to operate within the world as it is; there, it proves advantageous but not essential.

However, its presence does at least acknowledge monetary worth with its gathering-and-improving status, though as with other ‘our world’ aspects, it operates mainly as an aesthetic riff on the norm; we understand how such things function operate and why this is so, and we recognize the alterations on such norms within the worlds of Nintendo.

We know that Mario is a plumber, and we see the various pipes scattered around the Mushroom Kingdom. After connecting the two things, we then discover that the pipes lead to different worlds or areas; thus they do not function in quite the same way as they do in ‘our world’. They look the same, and the basic premise of them connecting one thing to another is retained, but we do not expect to be able to fit into pipes in ‘our world’, nor we expect them to lead to another world altogether, or contain plants as is often the case in Super Mario Bros.. So as with money, the basic function of pipes remains the same, but the results of their use has changed significantly.

This basis of altering the norm is continued throughout the games. We know that we can jump, we know that Mario can jump; we know that we cannot jump above our body height without some sort of aid; we know that Mario can ‘jump enormous heights and crush opponents with his weight and yet suffer no harm to himself’[8] without aid. Again, we have an everyday function distorted within the computerized realm. The super ability of the computer game character is something I shall return to in a short while.

First though, let us look again at 'Losing The Plot’. Focusing on Ocarina of Time, the game is criticized within the article for its aforementioned flawed real-time system (“It’s very pleasant watching the sunsets and sunrises of Hyrule, but Link seems stuck in a perpetual Groundhog Day-style scenario, where everyone acts in the same way every single day”[9]) and also its lack of adherence to the law:

LINK: I’ve come to buy that Deku Shield.

SHOPKEEPER: Where did you get the money for that from?

LINK: I just ran around in the grass outside. Oh, and I stole some of it from other people’s houses.

SHOPKEEPER: Police![10]

Why is the morality of Link’s thievery never raised? I wish to look at this in tandem with a quotation on fairy tales and their morality in recent times:

most rewriters of fairy tales took the easy way out when it came to incorporating lessons into their stories. Instead of integrating a moral into the plot, they simply superimposed a lesson on a story that, in its original form, often just told how beauty triumphs over ugliness or how the underdog can turn the tables on the privileged.[11]

I feel we can apply this to computer games to a certain extent. No one, for example, questions the morality of Link breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots, stealing their money, and yet we see guards scattered around Princess Zelda’s castle, ready to chastise any intruders and ward them off entering the castle without permission, all of which occurs within Ocarina of Time.

On a practical gaming level, this is simply another way to extend the gameplay, forcing the player to find a way to enter the castle undetected by the guards; she or he must make Link climb walls, take short-cuts along fields and hide behind hedges in order to reach Zelda without detection; if seen by the guards, they find themselves chucked out of the castle and forced to begin the task afresh.

On a moral level though, there is clearly an issue of ambiguous legality concerning the dos and don’ts in Hyrule. Why is breaking and entering so acceptable when it is a resident’s home and not the Princess’s?

The answer to this lies in Link himself. As a character, we know him to be virtuous, kind and most definitely on the side of the goodies; by extension then, we would not expect him to do anything untoward or nasty to those who do not deserve such punishment. We can therefore read his actions in two ways: either that the residents of Hyrule deserve having their rupees stolen since they have misbehaved sufficiently to warrant punishment (we can trace this notion of someone being deserving of such acts without us knowing why to the fairy tale Herr Korbes, where we see animals attack the titular character, eventually killing him with a millstone, with the justification being that ‘Herr Korbes must have been a very wicked man’[12], and nothing more), or that they shall not be affected by the robberies and so these intrusions cannot be classed as such.

Interestingly, it was only in later editions of Herr Korbes that this justification was given. Earlier versions assumed that the reader was familiar with the cruel nature of the titular character (in Germany, Herr Korbes in the equivalent of the Bogeyman.) This fact was lost in translation though, so clarification was added.[13]

Returning to Ocarina of Time, we can deduce that Link’s presence is permissible in the houses by their owners since he is neither denied entry (as happens sometimes when the time is wrong, for example, or when he does not carry the correct key, for another) or hounded by guards on his way into the building, as happens when Link attempts to see Princess Zelda.

To continue, Link is not charged money for his actions within the houses, nor does he have to fulfill any tasks in order to secure the cash. He simply enters, loots, and leaves. He may talk to the inhabitants of the house at any time but they do not question his actions. Other rooms may reveal themselves to be shops or rooms where Link must complete a specific set of actions in order to receive something of use, but the houses contain no such distractions. Their purpose is simple: they are spaces to be explored and exploited and nothing more. The characters within are of visual interest but no more; not talking to them will not affect the game any more than talking to them would, other than it shortening the amount of time spent in the house.

The houses therefore present us with a moral shade of grey amid a very black-and-white stance on what is right and what is wrong. They serve a function in that they allow Link to progress further through the game thanks to the increase in his funds, and in doing so they ignores the moral roots of the tale being told: we have Tatar’s superimposed morality in action. When it suits the tale being told, the rules are very clear in regards to what is and what is not acceptable. When it interferes potentially with moving the story onwards though, such rules fade into the background and show their presence as integral to the gameplay rather than the story. It pleases us on a gaming level to try and solve the task of the moving and searching guards; it displeases us on a narrative level in that the presence of guards suggests a law that is not present elsewhere.

It is not just the computer game but the fairy tale as well that regards finance as a plot point and nothing more. We are told that Hansel and Gretel’s family are poor, their father unable to ‘provide enough for his family’s daily meals’[14], but this is only stated to give Hansel and Gretel’s parents an excuse to rid themselves of their children, thus forwarding the narrative. Bluebeard’s wealth is hinted at through his ‘golden coach’ and ‘several servants’[15], but this financial affluence is only present as it enables Bluebeard to live in a spacious castle holding the secrets that prove to be his undoing. Cinderella finds herself impoverished in a rich household, but only so she can appear comparatively ‘good and pious’[16], as requested by her mother, and get married at the end.

A financially orientated hierarchy is in operation in the world of the fairy tale, but as with Ocarina of Time, it exists for the sake of the plot or not at all. If a character is poor or rich, then they are poor or rich for a reason as dictated by the plot, and their financial position will only change if it is integral to the story being told.

I’ve got the brains/ You’ve got the looks/ Let’s make lots of money.[17]

This returns us to the issue of money in Nintendo gaming as previously discussed: why are not all the inhabitants of the worlds of Nintendo millionaires? Since rupees can be found in trees and fields and elsewhere, too, why does their still appear to be a financial hierarchy in that some people are clearly meant to be wealthier than others in their dress and location? Indeed, if one smashes the pots in a room, exits the room and re-enters, they will find the room full of pots once again, once more potentially containing rupees: not only are rupees easy to come by normally, they and their containers can apparently be born into existence at the speed it takes for one to close and open a door.

How do businesses conceivably survive in Hyrule when money is available to everyone simply by exiting their front door and going back into their house? In fact, why does Hyrule even have law enforcement? The regenerative ability of damaged property and the ability to try breaking and entering time and again before eventual success makes the proving of culpability on the perpetrator’s behalf impossible to prove, so why bother trying?

We have a difference in rules present: the rules of commerce are present in that one must spend in order to accumulate, but they are simultaneously usurped by money being freely available.

We never see any other characters getting the money we as players do though, so we are left to assume that it would simply not be worth their while getting in. It would not forward the narrative; the characters have not been programmed to leave their houses. Link or Mario or whichever avatar the player has assumed alone are the only ones who have the intelligence to recognize the ability to take advantage of the availability of currency present; they are the only ones who have the intellectual prowess to collect these coins.

In both a programmed sense and a character one, the other characters in the games are limited. They are background, not even ciphers: they do not possess the stereotypes or traits that would mark them out as ciperhic characters. They are no more than background and as such the law does not concern them. Zelda possesses a more integral role to the story though so her personal guards are indeed concerned by the maintenance of a law and of order.

So, it is not that the law does not exist, only that it affects only those who are deemed important enough for it to have an effect upon, namely the protagonist, those who are connected to him, and those who are directly connected to the story being told.

In general though, it is not an issue raised in the game, just as the question of why everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom isn’t obscenely rich is never touched upon within the games themselves. This state of affairs is just another piece of confirmation that they inhabit a world parallel to ours, and the fact we do not question the oddities within the games displays willingness on our behalf to accept this reality. If we expected the two realities to be compatible, then the games would raise many troubling issues; the fact we know them to be oppositional in many ways means we acknowledge these differences and differing rules.

In tandem, one also accepts, on a subconscious level, that the characters we control are merely avatars and not three-dimensional beyond an aesthetic sense (depending on design and/or computer power).

We do not question that Pac-Man travels the same maze time and again, forever chased by and chasing ghosts, without any complaints regarding geographical repetition, nor do we assume that Ms. Pac-Man objects to such repetition because her mazes alter as you progress through Ms. Pac-Man. When Mario tries his hand at athletics, golf, go-kart racing or even painting, we do not label him a Renaissance Man, nor do we find it unusual.[18]

Aesthetic resemblance to that which is non-fictional (such as Mario) or that which is not (such as Bowser) does not alter the fact that the bond between player and character remains one step removed at all times; we see Pac-Man and Mario as one and the same, in the same way that Prince Charming and the Handsome Woodcutter are identical. Beyond appearance, their one-dimensionality links them and makes them as one.

Prick them and they shall not bleed; poison them and they shall not die, in any infinitely terminal sense; wrong them, and they shall not revenge.

Our suspension of disbelief is not hinged upon any pretence to imagine the computer game as a real entity, but is born of an acknowledgement that the player is forever Player in the same way that the reader remains Reader, in the Barthesian sense of the term[19], and is bound by the words in their book, unable to alter the ending of the story or change the way a character acts in any given situation. We can encourage our characters ever onwards– in a literal sense with the computer game– but our lack of authorial power renders our attempts to change that which has been written already nil. Even the computer game such as Ocarina of Time with its free-ranging feel and lack of linearity’s bounds has still been carefully crafted with an expansive set of ‘do’s and ‘do not’s programmed into it by the authors of the game. To quote Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr once more, ‘the player either follows the rules exactly as defined, or she loses the game’.[20]

The players find themselves in a difficult position then, stuck in-between the limitless explorative possibilities and the sense of freedom and control this brings, and the knowledge throughout that you cannot do certain things as the game’s author has created boundaries within which to operate, thus rendering the feeling of freedom a façade in many ways, hiding as it does the truth that the author remains in control and has (or has already had) the final word.

However, it is precisely this status quo that allows the player to remain removed from that which they are controlling. I put it forward that it is the clear role of subservience that generates the aforementioned distance between player and plaything. The one completely in control is able to see that which they are manipulating and are aware that their manipulation is what affects their subject; the one completely under control is unaware of any choice or sees no way in which to implement the choices they would like to realize, instead waiting for instructions and never creating commands for themselves to follow; the one in the middle is able to both control and wield power whilst being aware that there is a higher source of power that places impositions upon their possibilities, despite potential appearances to the contrary.

Is this like reading a book though? Are the Player and the Reader the same? I would argue that yes, they are. The subservient position beneath a creator, the ability to work with what we have been given, the knowledge of the difference between one’s own non-fictional mortality and the eternal fictional creations laid out before us, the ability to bring the dead back to life by either re-reading a novel from that start or resetting a game: both Player and Reader achieve these ends and whilst the work to get there may differ, the results are the same.

How comparable are the fairy tale and computer game character though? I would say that they are one and the same, the latter having ‘evolved’ out of the former. The medium through which the characters’ stories are told may have changed, but the characters themselves have not.

They inhabit the same worlds: similar to ours, but different; they act without conscious thought, slaves to the tales’ authors and the plots they traverse through; they are depthless, never psychologically developing and only altering their abilities if the game requires this to be so; they are able to achieve the non-fictionally unachievable. Ignoring the difference in their medium, the characters themselves act in the exact same way.

For an example, let us look at another critique of Ocarina of Time from ‘Losing The Plot’:

SCENE 5

HYRULE FIELD, EXTERIOR, NIGHT

Link and a skeletal Stalchild [an enemy in the game] are in pitched battle.

STALCHILD: You fight like a true warrior! Your mastery of the sword must have arisen from years of training, using knowledge passed down through countless generations of your family.

LINK: Not really. I found the sword in a chest a few minutes ago.

EXCUSE ME?

Throughout his quest, Link stumbles across swords, shields, catapults, hook-shots, boomerangs, bombs, ocarinas and horses, all of which he uses expertly mere moments after finding them. This is the kind of kid who learnt to ride a bike without stabilisers.[21]

So, just as it is ‘sufficiently miraculous that the [fairy tale] hero always receives the very thing he needs’[22], so it is miraculous, too, that the computer game character is able to pull off the athletic feats they do without any practice beforehand, or are able to weald the weapons they are given without any former training.

Just as ‘someone named Hans’ turns up ‘from far away’[23] after Clever Else’s father has decided she should get married, or the prince’s frog form is thrown against a wall, releasing him from his spell and turning him human again, just as the princess has lost all patience with the ‘nasty frog’[24], so you can bet that at exactly the time it is required, Link will find the correct weaponry available.

The stories told may be told in different ways, the characters themselves may be imagined via the written word in one instance and realized via computer processing in the other, but they remain identical. The computer game character is not like Nancy Drew, or the fantasy character, or the Prime Minister in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; the computer game character is like the fairy tale character, for the computer game character is the fairy tale character. They are one and the same thing.

[1] Mark Green, ‘Losing The Plot’, N64 Magazine, Issue 31, August 1999, p. 135.

[2] Ibid., p. 132.

[3] Sparks, Looks Aren’t Everything, Big Beat (21^st Century Edition), Ron Mael, 1976.

[4] As evidenced in the Mario Kart series of computer games.

[5] In several games in the Super Mario series, flying bullets attack you, sent by Bowser who had presumably constructed them.

[6] Power Stars are items that must be collected in order to progress through the game Super Mario 64; indeed, collecting one-hundred coins in one of the main levels will unlock a Star.

[7] In the game Paper Mario for the N64, the notion of Mario’s coins having no financial worth comes into play after he breaks a vase and has to earn ‘proper’ money by getting a job. However, since the series this game is from often takes a post-modern approach to the Mario games as a whole (for example in Super Mario RPG for the SNES, characters comment upon the Princess’s irritating habit of being kidnapped) I shall be discounting it here.

[8] Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, (United States of America: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 35.

[9] Mark Green, ‘Losing The Plot’, p. 134.

[10] Ibid., p. 134.

[11] Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales And The Culture Of Childhood (United States of America: Princeton University Press 1992), p. 59.

[12] Brothers Grimm, ‘Herr Korbes’, in The Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes (Reading: Vintage, 2007), p. 193.

[13] Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales And The Culture Of Childhood, p. 163-4.

[14] Brothers Grimm, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, in The Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes (Reading: Vintage, 2007), p. 71.

[15] Brothers Grimm, ‘Bluebeard’, in The Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes (Reading: Vintage, 2007), p. 816

[16] Brothers Grimm, ‘Cinderella’, in The Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes (Reading: Vintage, 2007), p. 107.

[17] Pet Shop Boys, Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money), Please, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, 1986.

[18] Examples of these careers for Mario can be found in the games Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Mario Golf, Super Mario Kart, and Mario Paint (for the Nintendo Wii, N64, SNES and SNES again, respectively) amongst others.

[19] See Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’.

[20] Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, p. 95.

[21] Mark Green, ‘Losing The Plot’, p. 134.

[22] Max Lüthi, The European Folktale: form and nature, p. 58.

[23] Brothers Grimm, ‘Clever Else’, in The Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes (Reading: Vintage, 2007), p. 158.

[24] Brothers Grimm, ‘The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich’, in The Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes (Reading: Vintage, 2007), p. 5.

Emily Winter

2012-02-14T07:44:00.000Z

This a story I wrote last year, which appears in Love and Other Adventures!, my short story anthology. I thought I'd put it online for Valentine's Day: enjoy!

Nick x

SCENES FROM PARTIES: EMILY WINTER

Em half-listened in on a conversation between Rose and a small group of people she recognized from college about ‘that bitch Sally Tankard at college’. She swirled her cup around, the scent of whiskey cutting through the lemonade and the array of other alcohols nearby as her drink lapped at the edges of her cup. She put her cup down and thrust her hands into her jean pockets, still not entirely certain why she had come to the party. Because it was something to do after work? Because she may be able to sleep in beyond midday and halt any sort of hangover? Because Jo was meant to be there.

Jim stood nearby, nodding and pretending to not be looking at Em. He was pretty, of course, everyone said so, and Em couldn’t quite understand why it was her he seemed to be looking at tonight, especially when Beth was trying her best to catch his eye, willing him to pay her attention as he had done before. She joined in with Rose, animatedly talking about the time that Sally had flirted with Mr. Stopps. (A lie: it had been Beth who had, but even though everyone knew it, no-one told her otherwise.)

Em had been hanging around this conversation for long enough now to know that if she left, no-one would really notice that she had gone. Part of her wanted to try and involve herself a bit more, even though Sally wasn’t that bad really. Part of her wanted to get out into the garden and try and clear her head before she made another attempt to engage. Em took a step back and shuffled to the exit.

By now, a large huddle of boys had crowded into the kitchen, surrounded by empty, half-crushed cans of lager which most of the boys didn’t really like drinking, but they didn’t dare to drink anything less manly than beer.

Em edged her way through them, ignoring the stares from some, and made her way to the back garden, throwing her empty cup at one of the boys as they made a jeering noise; not quite a wolf whistle but close enough. The smokers gathered just outside the door, scuffing their shoes on dirt and pebbles. Em walked into the garden itself, humming along with the chorus of Lovely Rita as it played indoors. The host had just discovered The Beatles, and like everyone else who has ever discovered The Beatles, she wanted everyone to know that this particular song she was playing right now was better than most of the ones people had actual heard of and was underrated.

Em absently frowned and picked at her nail varnish, chipping cheap, tiny bits of yellow away onto the grass. Damn it, what was the host’s name? Damn it.

In the corner of her eye, two people who had never spoken to one another before kissed, awkwardly.

She stared up at the night sky, clouds hiding it for the most part. She could just about make out the tiny green and red flashes of an aeroplane passing slowly through the air. In the distance, the Toomebridge Tower pierced the air; a huge red tower almost perfectly replicating the Tokyo Tower which itself ripped off the Eiffel Tower. It was normally illuminated but one of the lights was apparently broken, and so it hid almost perfectly in the night-time. She tried to breathe heavily enough for her breath to cloud her vision, but it wasn’t cold enough. Sighing, Em checked her phone. It was early enough to have to leave with an excuse, but late enough for her to want to go.

“Oh, there you are,” came a voice, which made Em jump. She turned around and saw Jo, smiling. The kissers made their way indoors, drunkenly holding hands, a little embarrassed but mostly pretending to not care.

“Hey,” said Em, her voice a little husky. She coughed. “Sorry. Hey.” She coughed again. “Sorry, I haven’t spoken for...” she thought about it. “I don’t know. Hours.”

“It’s alright,” said Jo. She looked around the garden and, sure they were alone, leant in and kissed Em. Em closed her eyes and felt herself shake slightly as Jo’s breath exhaled onto her face. She breathed in Jo’s perfume and picked up the faint taste of orange lip gloss.

They pulled apart and Em smiled, dizzy as Jo’s arms supported her waist.

“I wish you wouldn’t shake when I kissed you,” said Jo.

“Sorry,” said Em. “Guess I’m still nervous.”

“Unsure?”

“No, just nervous. This doesn’t normally happen to me. Normally I do nothing and no-one knows I like them.”

“Oh. Well, I like you.”

“Yes,” said Em, though she felt her breath pinch her neck as she said it. It was one thing having someone kiss you and thinking they liked you, another to hear that person say it aloud. “I like you, too.” Jo looked unaffected. “A lot.”

They kissed again. Em half-opened her eyes and saw Jo looking around as they kissed, still concerned they’d be caught. This annoyed Em: on the one hand, she didn’t want anyone to know because things would be said. On the other, she didn’t care if anyone knew and wished that Jo didn’t either.

“Come on,” said Jo, pulling away and taking Em’s hand. “Let’s go inside.”

They walked inside, letting go of each other’s hand, through a now empty kitchen and past a group of cheering and whistling people watching Beth and Rose make out with each other, lies about Sally having presumably been exhausted now.

Em paused and watched them kiss, cheeks flushed and eyes closed, a bottle of beer in one of Beth’s hands, a strand of her hair flicked away by Rose in a clumsy gesture. Is this what she and Jo looked like? Perhaps not. The crowd started to make more guttural noises, some of the younger men watching closely as if to capture every second of it, every movement of their tongues and stroke of one another’s hair. And why did Beth and Rose do it? For fun? For serious? For Jim? Poor Beth.

“Come on, you,” whispered Jo. She pulled Em away from the doorway she was watching through and pushed her, hard, against a staircase, kissing her just as hard, eyes closed now, messy as she stopped kissing her and started again, rapidly, lots of tiny kisses, nothing long enough to develop into anything much but short enough to leave Em wanting more.

She grabbed her hands and tugged up upstairs, tiptoeing across the soft carpet to one of the spare bedrooms where a large bundle of coats sat on the floor. Kicking the coats over, Jo switched the light on and shut the door and resumed kissing Em.

Em didn’t know what to do and found herself thinking, thinking about how she couldn’t think of anything at all, still kissing Jo, quickly, looking closely at Jo’s eyes and seeing the tiny dots of mascara which she had missed. They walked backwards towards the bed, stumbling and knocking the light and its shade, great swathes of shadow bandaging the walls and rocking back and forth around the light, dull enough to cause a headache, motes caught in its sway.

Em felt herself fall onto the bed, on top of Jo, her bottom lip pushed against Jo’s teeth as she pushed away and started to kiss her neck, tiny kisses and snatches of hot breath which made Em tingle in a way she’d never quite felt before as Jo worked her way across from one side of her body to the other, moving up to her ear and kissing that, too, knocking her ear-ring.

Em was aware she was thinking of nothing now; it jolted her back and she willed herself into that null state again as Jo pushed her further back onto the bed and–

There was the sound of footsteps. Rapidly, Jo scrambled across the bed and dived down off the other side, crouching low. Em didn’t have much time to react, catching sight of herself in the mirror and wiping away strands of orange tasting lip gloss as well as her own lipstick, a dull dark purple now slightly smudged. The door opened and Jim walked in.

“Hey,” he said, trying his best not to sound completely shit-faced. “Hey! Emily Winter!”

“Hey, Jim,” said Em, shaking her head with an involuntary shiver, cold now as Jim flung the door wider open and dispersed the heat in the air. “How are you?”

“Yeah, yeah, good Emily, good,” he laughed. “I’m good. How are you?” He had that drunken sincerity, as if what she felt really was the most important thing in the world to him right there and then: and, who knows, maybe it was.

“I am not bad,” said Em, smiling weekly, all too aware of Jo, hiding nearby, as Jim sat down on the bed next to her. She looked away, staring at the open door.

“Why are you here then?” asked Jim, all concerned.

“Well, I was invited by...” Em stopped: shit, what was the host’s name?

“No, the bedroom,” corrected Jim, smiling and letting his heavy head loll onto his shoulder.

“Oh! Here!” Em smiled, panicked. “Here! I, errr, I was a bit ill. Felt a bit ill; just wanted to be alone. In the dark.” She and Jim looked up at the light, switched on and blazing bright, the treacherous bastard. “But not too dark. Want to see what I’m doing. Whilst ill. In the dark.” She stopped. Blimey. “Yeah.” Yeah, well done Em. “Yeah.”

“Oh, no!” said Jim, slurring slightly and throwing himself onto her, arms wrapped tightly around her in a grip which lasted just that second too long to be caring. He let go and got something out of his pocket. “Can I take a photo of you? I’m trying to get everyone’s photograph and...”

He carried on speaking, but Em wasn’t listening. She had to admire him for trying to pull this off; he’d played the ‘take your photo’ trick at the last house party she’d been to, cornering Beth, taking her photo, showing her the picture of her looking like a rabbit moments before impact, and feeding a line about her being beautiful before grabbing her and kissing her, dominating as she fell back a little, lost but wanting this to carry on.

“Ummm....” Think fast, Em. “Oh, god, no, sorry!” She bent over and started to wretch, putting a hand over her mouth and holding out her other arm, waving him away.

“Oh, right, oh, sorry,” said Jim, standing up and starting to back out of the room. “Can I get you, errr, something?”

Em shook her head: “No, no, I’ll be fine, just need space, sorry.”

“Right, no, it’s cool,” he said, already bored with this now and looking elsewhere. He shut the door and lurched off to corner someone else with his camera.

Em looked up and smiled. She moved back onto the bed and propped herself up against the pillows.

“Is he gone?” asked Jo. She popped her head out from under the bed, blowing upwards to waft away a strand of hair.

“He’s gone,” confirmed Em, shuffling over so Jo had room to lay next to her.

Jo went over to the window and opened it slightly, a tiny breeze trickling in and killing the heat dead. She laid her head on Em’s shoulder and held her hand. They looked down at their hands, clasped together, Em’s chipped yellow varnish and Jo’s perfect peach, their fingers linked, thumb stroking the other’s thumb.

The room felt far less warm now, but more comfortable. She could fall asleep; she could not recall ever feeling so thoroughly and utterly content.

How many others had felt like this, here or on other beds, night becoming morning with nothing said, the person you loved leaning against you, the person you loved more than you could understand; more than you thought ‘love’ as a thing was even capable of. How many other people had felt scared that this wasn’t going to be here forever?

And how long would they stay here now: minutes? Hours? Forever? She could stay here forever, Jo by her side, leaning against her, the curtains slightly rippled by the night. She had no need to move, no need at all. She closed her eyes, and felt perfect.

Coriolanus

2012-01-23T22:40:00.005Z

I often find myself musing upon films after watching them at the cinema, but very rarely do anything about such musings unless they stir me into great joy or thorough despair/anger/disappointment (see The Iron Lady).
Coming out of the cinema tonight having watching Ralph Fiennes's take on Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus, I've found myself musing this evening, even to the point where I'm only half-watching Susie Dent talk lexicon on Countdown (and I never do that).
I must confess that Coriolanus is not a play I am all that familiar with, having never studied or seen it before and, from memory, having never read the entire thing either. Perhaps the greatest compliment I have for the film then is that it's made me want to sit down and read the entire thing.
This is (as is in the nature of musings such as this) only going to be brief, but my main drive to read it (aside from it being a work of Shakespeare, which is, always, an exciting thing to venture upon) is that I have the feeling it would almost work better written down, with its concepts laid naked, than performed.
My main reason for this comes from the very end of the play (which I'll now be spoiling, so avert your eyes if you wish to not be spoiled!). It sort of fades into nothing. We have a large amount of build up in which it looks like Coriolanus is going to turn on Rome and lay it to waste... and then his mother gives him a stern ticking off and he decides not to. And that's it. (Unsurprisingly, this somewhat irks his fellow soldiers who were pretty geared up for a fight, and they quickly turn on him and kill him.)
Now, on screen this feels pretty useless. Partly this comes from lengthy scenes of tense stand offs between Coriolanus and his former friends and shunned family members failing to sway him, building up to something truly tragic... only to not. The pay off, such as it is, is so muted that it cannot help but feel disappointing, and the remaining ten minutes or thereabouts limp to the end credits.
I wonder, though, if on paper such things can be ignored. As a tragic figure, bested by his own pride and the arrogance, fickleness and politicized anger of his own fellow citizens in Rome, Coriolanus's end is a sad and bleak one: betrayed by those he fought so hard and so dearly to defend, rescued by maternal love and the promise of his family, pride put aside to try and forge a long-lasting peace, and then killed moments afterwards. No wonder he's prone to getting into the occasional hissy fit given his emotional state near the end. He's a man who has finally done the very right thing to do (so far as the play is concerned, though in fairness to the film, it plays these scenes with a numb air to them, as if Coriolanus's heart isn't really in it and that he is but walking towards his inevitable end and doom, which is perhaps what Fiennes was aiming for) and then he is killed. Then again, is it not his own pride which led to his exclusion from Rome and his eventual death thanks to his rash decision to ally himself with Rome's enemies?
Like so many of Shakespeare's best tragic heroes or characters, it's terribly ambiguous and the sort of thing one could debate for hours, continuously, with no end or glimpse of firm conclusion or belief in sight. I'm just not sure that was really captured on screen. It was a bit more cut and dry here, really. He looks like a man who's finally broken, he gets a bit pissed when people are snarky to him, he dies. His angry outbursts and generally violent tendencies throughout the film never truly endear us to him and so his death is less a tragic, heartfelt waste really than a suitable point at which to stop the film.
So, I want to read it. I wish to read it and delve into that character more, with words alone and all the ambiguity robbed by any sort of performance, as performance by its nature stamps a definitive mark one way or the other in a way that words, so beautifully neutral and expressionless without the reader's expressions, don't.
If nothing else, it will let me immerse myself in Shakespeare for a short while, and that is forever an enjoyable experience.

The Iron Lady

2012-01-12T21:29:00.000Z

Heavily tipped for no small amount of Oscar glory this year, The Iron Lady has, upon first glance, a lot going for it. The cast, the subject matter, the production values and company... there's a lot of good there; I can but wonder where it all went.
Cards on the table first: I'm left-wing. Now, the majority of you reading this will already know that, and indeed anyone who's ever Googled my surname and added '+ politics' will not be surprised to see that's the case. I was once described by someone as being, and I quote, "obnoxiously left wing", and it still stands as one of my favourite compliments. For that reason, and many others, it's going to also come as no surprise that I'm not exactly a fan of Margaret Thatcher and her politics. However, I'm also no idiot, by which I mean that I recognize and admire what she did in becoming the leader of both the Conservative Party and the country. For a woman to do it, and better still a woman in a sea of Tories (not, historically, the most Feminist-friendly party in the world, to put it politely), is a remarkable and admirable thing. It's definitely something worth investigating on film. The Iron Lady is not that film.
The script, to start with, is extraordinarily patronising, flagging up big dramatic moments with a comedy wink or two beforehand or ladening them with such painfully clichéd visuals and/or shot composition that you feel positively mothered. It's the filmic equivalent of someone patting your head and calling you diddums before going on to explain what the nasty man is doing. Indeed, it's very clear who the 'nasty' people are in the film: it's not a script that ever grants you with the intelligence to make up your own mind, and yet despite that, it has almost no politic at all, a pretty incredible thing for a political film.
About half way through The Iron Lady, I realized that I was not enjoying it at all. I wondered, instantly, if that's because I'm, to coin a phrase, a dyed-in-the-wool lefty. I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm pretty sure it's not because I was feeling absolutely nothing: no stirring of disagreement with the film or its political subjects at all, because there was no attempt to engage in any political subject matter whatsoever throughout. It's so politically neutered as to be simultaneously harmless and infuriating for people on either side of the political spectrum. Were I right-wing, I'd be positively insulted that the film has chosen not to celebrate the achievements of Thatcher but to instead fall back on the idea that without a man by her side, she's nothing but a frail old woman. As someone on the left, I felt much the same.
A quick aside now: some good things. Meryl Streep is very good as the Iron Lady herself, and so is Olivia Colman as her daughter, Carol. It's a shame then that they are let down. I'm chiefly thinking here of Jim Broadbent who acts in this film like he's never acted before, a turn of phrase which here is not meaning 'because he was so brilliant' but 'because he was so bad'. It's odd, because Broadbent is a fantastic actor, but everything in his performance here was farce wrapped around parody. It's like he read the script and purposely decided to execute it in as hammy and embarrassing a manner as he could muster. Frankly, I don't blame him. It's not a script that deserves anything more.
What about Thatcher's political sparring and strength, right? What about that? Surely the film shows us that? We-ell... no, it doesn't. Not really. It gives us a handful of brief scenes in which men shout at her and she either shouts back or raises an eyebrow and steadfastly refuses to give in... and, errr, that's it. No, it doesn't work, before you ask. It's a way of glossing over anything interesting. It's the film saying "well, yes, people say she was strong, so we'll have a man go 'rah rah rah' and have her go, 'ah, but rah rah rah' and then have the man go 'oh, yes, you're quite right, well done', and hope that covers it."
It doesn't. It doesn't matter how often bits of dialogue in the film try to say how strong a politician she was, it doesn't work unless they truly show it, and they don't. They shy away from it because it would be too intelligent for a film which smacks of stupidity.
Will the film win an Oscar or perhaps a handful of them? Quite possibly. Does it deserve to? Absolutely not. This is intelligence-insulting filmmaking at its most visible, and to award that will be a crying shame indeed. Whatever your political allegiance, I advise only this: do not make the same mistake as I did, and go and watch something far, far better instead. It won't be hard to do.

2012

2012-01-01T10:02:00.001Z

And so it's 2012. Somewhere out there, the calendar ticks over still, marking the passing of one year to another. All manner of things occur at the stroke of midnight, but whatever is happening to you (or, indeed, happened), I hope it was great.
Somewhere there's partying and cheering as the clock hits 00:00; elsewhere, a glass raised. There's food and walking, running and high-fives, sunshine and rainfall, kissing and sitting alone in a corner, sex and wishing, remembrance and music, hope and sneaking out of a disappointing house party, regret and Love, hugging and birdsong.
Whatever your start of the year was, I hope it proves to be beautiful as the clocks and days tick on by.

Love,
Nick xxx

The Wrapping Paper Child

2011-12-13T16:11:00.000Z

This is the Christmas poem I wrote for my sessions at work: I hope you enjoy it!

I only wish I could draw to accompany my words, but here we are!

Nick x

The Wrapping Paper Child

By Nick Mellish

It was Christmas Day in Toomebridge and the Joneses settled down.
They gathered round their Christmas tree whilst wearing paper crowns
and, one by one, they waited as they opened up their presents,
and smiled with joy as getting gifts all fun and kind and pleasant.
But– suddenly, a rustling beneath the Christmas tree!
The sound of paper wriggling! Whatever could it be?
The Joneses gathered closer still and then, to their surprise,
they found a Wrapping Paper Child with fancy bows for eyes,
and with ribbon for a smile and a gift tag for a nose,
and small strands of silver tinsel for his individual toes!

“Aha!” said Wrapping Paper Child. “I’m hungry!” and he ran
into the Jones’ kitchen, where he smelt their turkey, and
he scoffed the lot, then laughed: “I’m stuffed! And now, to have some fun!”
And, without a please or thank you, he then broke into a run.
“Stop him!” cried the Joneses, but the Joneses were too late,
for the Wrapping Paper Child had now bolted out the gate!

The Joneses dialled 999 to speak to PC Faye.
“Hello!” she chirped. “What’s causing you distress on Christmas Day?”
“The Wrapping Paper Child!” cried the Joneses. “He has fled!
He gobbled all our turkey, then he turned his heel and sped!”
“Okay,” said PC Faye, “I’ll catch this tyke, so brash and rude.
I’ll stop him stealing turkey breast, and other fancy food!”
She donned her hat and jacket and she set out on her way
to stop the Wrapping Paper Child on this Christmas Day!

The wind blew hard and nibbled, and the trees shed all their leaves;
the doors were fully covered with blue tinsel and green wreathes.
The robins tweeted and took flight into a snowy sky,
as the families sat down for gifts and plenty of mince pies.
The Wrapping Paper Child saw all this and, feeling greedy,
he stole their pies and charged away, the thief: so mean and speedy!
He ran on down the high street, causing mayhem all the while.
He pilfered pretty presents with a cackle and a smile!
He stole a Christmas stocking and ripped holes across its foot!
He shoved puddings up a chimney and then covered it in soot!
And all the while, PC Faye was getting angry calls
from children, parents, aunties, uncles: people, one and all!
“Who is this Wrapping Paper Child?” “He’s horrid, mean and moody!”
“I swear he has no clothing on: he’s in the rudey-dudey!”
And speculate the people did about this naughty boy:
“I think he is an alien!” “I’ve heard he is a toy!”
“I reckon he’s part of a prank for something on TV!”
And the Wrapping Paper Child carried onwards, full of glee.

On Christmas Day, poor PC Faye was running after him
as he sauntered to and fro, creating ever such a din.
She saw him cracking crackers! She saw him on a roof,
where he found a startled reindeer and bit her on the hoof!
She saw him ruin Winter scenes until they weren’t so mild:
this foul and fiendish, wicked boy! This Wrapping Paper Child!
“Stop, you!” cried fearless PC Faye. “You’re causing lots of trouble!
You’re causing a disturbance! Now, please stop it, on the double!”
“Flapdoodle!” jeered the Child. “I’m having fun!” and, with a wink,
he jumped a queue and off he flew onto a large ice rink.
“Oh, bother!” muttered PC Faye. “This really takes the biscuit!
But I’m not good at skating: should I give chase? Dare I risk it?”

A silence fell on Toomebridge as the people gathered round;
the town as one did hold its breath. No-one made a sound
as PC Faye crept on the ice, and slipped and slopped and skated
towards the Wrapping Paper Child, who laughed and sneered and waited.
She crawled up, ever closer, then he broke into a run!
He laughed, “You’ll never catch me!” and blew raspberries with his tongue!

But, the Wrapping Paper Child had forgotten in this caper
that he wasn’t built like other boys: he was made out of paper!
And paper mixed with water makes the paper really soggy;
the Wrapping Paper Child started feeling rather groggy.
His toes were feeling wobbly! His ankles turned to mush!
His knees and legs began to creak and groan, and, in a rush,
he found himself soaked through and through, all wet upon the ice.
(He felt sorry for himself, for being crinkly wasn’t nice.)
On Christmas Day, young PC Faye held up the wrinkly boy,
and the merry folk of Toomebridge cheered “Hurrah!” with merry joy.

Faye popped him in an envelope and took him on a trip
to her house where, near the fireplace, the boy began to drip.
Warmed by the fire, the Paper Child grew soggy no more,
and when he was dry, she placed the Child upon her wooden floor.
The Wrapping Paper Child sobbed, “I’m sorry, PC Faye!
I didn’t mean to cause a mess: I got carried away!”
And, to prove he really meant it, he left her house that night
and he decorated Toomebridge with a thousand coloured lights.
He draped tinsel o’er the treetops and put puddings on the porches;
he gave jackets to the reindeer and he lit the roads with torches.
The town looked truly beautiful; the people were amazed
as the streets, with festive merriment, stood glowing and ablaze.
They started snowball fights and songs and jokes and jigs and then
they gave the reindeer treats, like it was Christmas Day again.

“Thank you, Wrapping Paper Child!” they cheered, whilst having fun.

“Have a very Merry Christmas: Happy Christmas, everyone!”

Blame It On The Mummy Land

2011-12-06T19:14:00.000Z

Another story I wrote for work. This one's based on an idea my dad had about my sister years ago; she used to gabbage things up and then blame it on me and Chris, so Dad created 'Blame It On The Brother Land'. A quick tweak seventeen-odd years later, and...

Blame It On The Mummy Land

By Nick Mellish

Arthur was a good boy. The goodest, bestest boy you ever did see. He liked singing and rolling, playing and exploring, and all the other things goodest bestest boys love to do. But, sometimes, he liked to be a little bit mischievous. Sometimes, he liked to break all the rules, but that was okay, because went Arthur went to sleep, he travelled to the far away world of Blame It On The Mummy Land.

One night in Blame It On The Mummy Land, Arthur found himself in his kitchen at home, except the sky was pink and there was no-one around at all.

"Aha!" said Arthur. "Perfect!"

He stood himself up, and slowly edged his way around the kitchen until he found a large, round white pot of biscuits.

"Mmmmm!" said Arthur, smelling the biscuits. He could smell chocolate and raisins and breadcrumbs and ginger and all the other flavours he loved the best. Slowly, he reached up and grabbed the large, round white pot, then he sat down on the floor and munched all the biscuits! They tasted delicious; he could taste all the custard in the custard creams, and he licked all the sweet sugar off the garibaldis. The biscuits were soon gone, except for a few crumbs. Arthur stood up and started to walk away, when Daddy arrived.

"Oh no!" cried Daddy. "What is this?" He picked up the large, round white pot and looked inside it. "Someone's eaten all the biscuits!" he exclaimed, and then he looked at his son. "Arthur, was this you?"

Arthur looked up at Daddy and shook his head. "No," he said, "it was Mummy," and Daddy believed him because Arthur was a goodest, bestest boy, and because this was Blame It On The Mummy Land, so Arthur never got in trouble at all.

"Right, that's it!" said Daddy, annoyed. "That's the last straw!" and with that, he walked down the corridor, found Mummy, and told her off. Arthur went back to bed and fell fast asleep, and when he woke up, no-one knew about the biscuits or his trip to Blame It On The Mummy Land.

The next night, when everyone had gone to bed, Arthur found himself in Blame It On The Mummy Land again. This time, he found himself in his bathroom at home, where everything was normal, except there was a big, bright rainbow on the ceiling, with shimmering yellows and fluorescent blues.

Arthur wanted to play, so he climbed up into the bath, and started to pour warm water from the taps. They poured and poured until there was no water left in the house. Then, he poured in all the bubble bath he could find, emptying tiny, thin purple bottles which smelt of lavender and roses and cinnamon, and threw in all the rubber ducks that were waiting to be played with on the side.

Arthur splashed in the bath for ages and ages. He covered the walls in bubbles which felt sticky and ducks which felt soft, and covered the floor in water which was warm to touch, and whilst he did so, he sang loudly and laughed with delight. He was just getting out of the bath, when there came a knock on the door, and the next-door neighbours, Sophia and Henry, came in.

"What on earth is all this noise about?" asked Sophia, smelling the lavender in the air.

"And what is all this mess?" asked Henry, picking up an empty tiny, thin purple bottle.

They both turned to look at Arthur.

"Arthur, did you do all this?" asked Sophia, but Arthur shook his head.

"No," said Arthur, "it wasn't me, it was Mummy!"

Henry just nodded: "I'm not surprised!" And with that, he and Sophia marched out of the bathroom, found Mummy and made her clean up all the mess.

Arthur found his way back to his bed, closed his eyes, and fell fast asleep, knowing that in the morning he would be back in his own house and Mummy wouldn't know a thing about his adventure.

This carried on every night. Every night, Arthur would go to bed, and every night he would find himself in Blame It On The Mummy Land, where he would have such fun.

Who had put all the toys on the floor? Was it Arthur?

No! It was Mummy!

And who had drawn on the walls? It couldn't be Arthur, the most goodest and bestest boy of them all, could it?

Of course not, silly! It was Mummy!

And who had poured all the pepper out onto the table? Who had written all over the newspaper? Who had opened all the windows during a thunderstorm and splashed in all the puddles?

Why, it was naughty Mummy, of course!

One night though, things did not go as Arthur had planned. One night, Arthur found himself in a nightmare, and in the nightmare, he wasn't in Blame It On The Mummy Land at all: he was in Blame It On The Arthur Land instead!

"Oh no!" cried Daddy, sniffing the air. "Who's burnt the toast?"

"Why, it was Arthur!" said Mummy, and they sent him to his room without any breakfast.

"Oh, my!" exclaimed Mummy, knocking over a bag full of smelly old rubbish. "Who didn't put out the bins last night?"

"It was definitely Arthur's turn!" sneered Daddy, and poor Arthur had to clean up all the mess.

It was Arthur who was blamed for throwing away Daddy's razors, too, and it was Arthur who had to go to bed early because the milk was sour. Arthur had broken Daddy's vacuum cleaner and Mummy's car! Arthur had lost Mummy's new wallet and torn a hole in Daddy's new top!

Poor Arthur was upset: this was not a fun place to be; they didn't think that he was a goodest bestest boy at all! Arthur didn't know what to do, so he went to his room and shut his eyes, wishing harder than he had ever wished before to wake up and leave Blame It On The Arthur Land.

Very soon, he fell asleep, and when he awoke, everything was back to normal. He sat up and waited, and before too long, Mummy came into his room. Arthur was so excited, that he gave her the biggest kiss and the biggest hug he could give.

I'm sorry for the biscuits!, he thought, and the bath and everything else! I was just trying to have some fun!

But Mummy didn't mind; she just held Arthur very close and loved him very much, and Arthur never ever (well, nearly almost never ever) went to Blame It On The Mummy Land again.

Love and Other Adventures!

2011-11-23T18:05:00.000Z

Love and Other Adventures!

I like unusual New Year's Resolutions; they're fun. As mentioned several times on this blog, my New Year's Resolution for 2010 was to write a postcard a month to everyone in my address book, which led to me writing 425 of the buggers. I decided not to carry this on into 2011 (mostly because I had run out of postcards of various elephants and pretty cathedrals, if I'm being honest) but wanted to stick to the writing theme.

I'd finished my postcard idea by sending off copies of a short story I'd written, which was quite nice. People seemed to like receiving it, I enjoyed writing it, and it made for a novelty Christmas present of sorts if nothing else. The answer to what to do for 2011 was easy then: write more short stories!

Once that was hit on, I made my New Year's Resolution for 2011: that I, Nick Mellish, would write a short story a month across the year so that I had an anthology to give to people as Christmas presents in December. And I did it!

Presenting Love and Other Adventures!, my New Year's Resolution anthology. Comprising sixteen stories (I'll explain in a minute), the anthology ranges in its size of story, style of story, and form. We have poems, fictional blog posts, newspaper articles, and more, written in the first- and third-person, and sometimes in both.

The sixteen stories comprise the twelve stories written across the year (I cheated slightly; there is no story written in December as I feared I'd miss the last post for printed copies, so I wrote two in November instead) and four others: Train Driving Pigeons (originally written for work, but quite fun so I included it here), The Smugglers of Toomebridge Beach (the no-award-winning short story competition entry), Hello, Mr. Selenium (the aforementioned story I wrote in December last year, which I hadn't intended to include but was asked to by a few people), and Stalled, its sequel.

I knew early on that I didn't want to run the stories chronologically as some months felt rather similar with regards to atmosphere or style, so I've jiggled it about for the finished product. The final line-up looks like this:

These Former Things
Making Endings
Scenes From Parties: The Designated Driver
Hello, Mr. Selenium
Train Driving Pigeons
The Smugglers of Toomebridge Beach
Return to Sender
Walking in Broken Lines
The Birthday Girl from Sussex
The Hair-Raising Fix!
Painful Rainfall
Stalled
Trouble on the Tracks
Postscript
Scenes From Parties: Emily Winter
Write About Love

The titles highlighted are ones I've already put up on my blog. Most of the others have been seen by no-one but myself; one of them is, in my opinion, possibly the best thing I've ever written, or certainly the one I'm most satisfied with. (I'm not going to say which story it is though. So there. Well, not now anyway; maybe after it's been out for a while.)

A couple of them are based on drafts I wrote a long while ago, or ideas I'd been working on but never finished. (And, confusingly, Emily Winter is vaguely based on an idea I had for a story called Designated Driver, whilst The Designated Driver has no connection whatsoever to that original story idea, bar there being a character in it named Janine.)

Rather than hoard the collection, I'd love for people to have it: as I said, it's meant to be my Christmas present to you all (a rather self-indulgent one I realize, but here we are). I printed a few copies for a few people, but I can't afford to make the dozens I would ideally have liked to make. So, how do you get copies, I hear you ask.

Well, you can e-mail me if you'd like me to send you one. My address is: nickmellish @ gmail . com (Sorry for not writing a direct link, but I'd rather avoid spam.)

Alternatively, if you'd like a printed copy like the few I made up, then you can buy one on Lulu for £4.50 plus postage and packaging: ta-dah! (Full disclaimer: I believe I make something like 13p off every copy sold. Scandal.)

I'm thinking that most people will go for the free copy via e-mail though, and that's probably quite right, too. If you do though, it would be lovely if you made a donation to one of the following charities; that would be wonderful: Teenage Cancer Trust, Terrence Higgins Trust or ME Research UK. If you'd rather not, that is, of course, absolutely fine, and I won't be offended at all.

I hope you like the book; I definitely liked writing it. I've listened to a lot of pop music whilst writing it, moved from Lancing back to Norwich once again and moved house twice, been sunburnt in October thanks to the crazy weather, and generally had a really fun time.

A few final things though:

Please don't reproduce any of the stories elsewhere. Please. That'd make you a bit of a dick, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?
There's some swearing in the book, including one use of what is generally regarded to be the worst swear word of them all (and I don't mean Belgium). I just want to give you the heads up, and I apologize in advance if I offend anyone.
This book also contains numerous references to lovely nail varnish... fetish? Oh dear.
If there are any spelling errors, I do apologize. After a while, proof-reading started to give me a headache, so whilst I've tried my best, I'm certain I'll have buggered up several dozen times over. (In fact, I know there's one smack bang on the back cover. Bugger.)

I hope you enjoy Love and Other Adventures!, I really do, even if it does have a slightly rubbish title.
Nick x

There and Back Again

2011-10-23T11:24:00.001+01:00

"An anagram of lemon..." muttered Dave. "Mmm. Tricky. An anagram of lemon..."

"Oh, come on Dave, this is an easy one," said Nick.

"Nick," pointed out Carl, patiently, "this is the man who didn't work out that an anagram of 'English' was in fact 'Shingle' and not 'Shin-Leg' or 'Shin-Gel' for nearly fifteen minutes."
"What, really?" asked Katie. Carl just nodded.

"Yes..." I mused. "Yes... you have a point."

This is the tale of October 22nd, a seemingly harmless Saturday plonked neatly near the end of 2011, and a day which for many will be forgotten. For me, October 22nd 2011 will be the day David Bailey made me go to Thetford because he has no concept of Norfolk's geography.

It all started back in March, when some friends from Worthing and Lancing decided to drive up to Norwich and visit me. I've talked about this day in length here, but to recap: we got rained on, Dave spilt some drink on me, we went Bowling, Will went on a mad spree and spent over £20 in an arcade before farting on my leg, Carl proved himself to be a demon at winning arcade tickets, squirrels can swim (but only if they have to), and Tom Sadler would rather I stopped posting links to this video of him on YouTube talking about plants.

Seven months, or thereabouts, have passed since that fateful day, and it was decided that a sequel was in order. We talked about where to meet and what to do, since plans had been low on the ground last time and we didn't want to risk a sloppy follow-up to what had proved itself to be a strangely enjoyable day out.

"Dad's Army!" said Dave. "I want to go to Thetford where they shot bits of Dad's Army."

More specifically, he wanted to find the statue of Captain Mainwaring which was erected in Thetford to celebrate the links between the town and the TV show. This sounded like an okay idea, though I worried that there was little to really do in Thetford beyond find the statue. Then again, we hadn't exactly done much in Norwich last time, and that had been a fine day. A date was set (October 22nd) and plans were due to be made.

Weeks passed. Had plans been made? I didn't know. The weekend before, I had been told that people were definitely coming to visit, but specifics such as when and who were thin on the ground. Indeed, they were still thin on the ground on October 21st, when a series of text messages were frantically sent by me to try and find out if we were actually meeting up or not. (They probably came out slightly delirious as I'd just finished a game of badminton in which I managed to whack my head with my own racket, but never mind.)

Yes, came the reply to my delirious messages, join us! The 'us' in question this time was Dave and Carl from before, and Katie, another long-suffering member of the West Sussex group who's fought pub quizzes and lost, and is Carl's girlfriend.
Another reply: Meet us in Thetford!

Fine, I thought. Thetford isn't exactly close to Norwich, but it was easy to get to. There was no Estimated Time of Arrival, so I said I'd wait to hear from them the following day. I was just about to head off to bed, when I received a final text message: I was to meet them in Norwich instead.

Good, brilliant, fabulous, even better! I went to sleep.

I get woken up the next day with a short but simple text message:

And this photo:

It's around now that I start to think that today might not be a simple as I had anticipated...

Thankfully, Dave's car wing mirror was easily repaired, and so our intrepid heroes continued their journey up to Norwich to see me. The morning stretched into the afternoon, and there was still no sight of them, but I let it pass. I walked around a bit, I scratched an especially fiddly itch on my back, I looked through old photos of my face as drawn by Dave, including recent attempts in which I look either like a slightly ill woman...

Or a slightly gaunt Russell Tovey...

Phone calls were made and I found out they were stuck in heavy traffic on the motorway, but that they would give me a call when they were about half-an-hour away from me.
Now, in fairness to them, the 'half-an-hour' bit stayed true, but that isn't the phone call I had with them. The conversation I had went more like this:

"Hello, Nick."

"Hi Carl."

"Okay, we're about half-an-hour away now."

[CHECKS WATCH] "Okay, so I'll meet you at 1:30 then."

"Yep, meet you at Thetford then."

[PAUSE] "Hang on, what?"

"Meet you in Thetford at 1:30."

"Ummm... right. Tricky."

You see, the problem here is that Dave apparently has no idea of geography in Norfolk, or more specifically, he has no idea of whereabouts Norwich is in relation to Thetford. The idea of the half-an-hour warning was to give me enough time to walk down to Norwich Railway Station and meet them there. If they wanted to meet me in Thetford, I'd have had to have started to walk from my house a hell of a long time ago.

I let them know I'm going to run to the station and catch the next train to Thetford. They seem slightly confused that I'll need to get a train to meet them and won't actually be in Thetford until 2:20-ish, but no matter. I get to the station, wait for ten minutes, jump onto a train, and scoff a chocolate muffin as the train jutters along to Thetford (ably driven by pigeons no doubt). In the end, I arrive ten minutes early, and so I call Dave, full of "It's 2:10! I'm here! I'm early!" cheer.

No reply.

I texted him instead: "I'm full of cheer! I'm early! I'm here! It's 2:10!"

No reply.

Fine. I plonked myself onto a squat, concrete pillar and read a book, hugging my top around me as Thetford's wind decided to blow up a treat.

Minutes passed. It soon becomes 2:20 (well, okay, it takes ten minutes to do so, but still) and there's been no sign of them. That's okay, I was early, I let it slide.

I was starting to get worried though. Cars kept on passing me, which is confusing. No, wait, let me clarify: the fact that cars were driving past me is not confusing at all, but the fact that they all appeared to be the same cars again and again was confusing.

At first, a small, box-like blue car approached and I thought it must be Dave and his Vauxhall Agila. It wasn't, it was just another weirdly shaped blue monstrosity. I sat down and went back to my book. A few minutes later, another small, box-like blue car approached from the other direction... that wasn't Dave either. By the time a third small, box-like blue car had passed me by, I was starting to think I had walked in on a convention. I then took note of the car's motorway-induced pockmarks and realized that it wasn't another, different car, but the same car which kept on looping past me.

I then noticed that this seemed to be happening with all the cars: a black one with dirty wheels, a large grey-ish one with a woman wearing a cosy jumper driving it, a white van with two guys singing in it. All of them, circling me, swarming like sharks.

I started to freak out. It was 2:30, I was being hounded. I grabbed my phone, I texted: WHERE ARE YOU GUYS???

I got a reply from Carl: 'Dave took a wrong turn. We're heading into Prickwillow.'

I get the horrible feeling they're going to want me to meet them there...

I replied with the only fitting thing I can think of: 'Dave's a prickwillow'.

It was 2:40 by the time they arrived. I decided to stand on the bridge over the railway lines, just in case they pulled over on the wrong side, decided I wasn't actually there and headed back to Prickwillow instead.

Dave quickly asked me why I tried to call him, given that he was driving at the time. I quickly pointed out that he was supposedly only half-an-hour away from Thetford at 1pm, so calling him at 2:10pm with the apparently crazy notion that he was, in facdt, in bloody Thetford made some sense.

Apparently it doesn't.

We headed into the car and decided to park somewhere in the town itself. It didn't take long for me to read the map wrong and take us down a dead-end street, and for Dave to find two available parking bays, one to his left and one to his right, but to drive straight on, miss them both and end up on a completely different, parking space-free road instead.

We did eventually park though and, paper in hand, Dave walked us round Thetford, taking us on a tour of Dad's Army locations. We passed pretty rivers...

We discovered that Dave looks eerily similar to Bill Turnbull...

We also discovered that Dave had agreed a long time ago that Bill Turnbull would play him if they were ever to make a film of his life, so the likeness is all good.

We purchased and snacked on Ainsley Harriott chocolate bars...

"What are they like?!" Well, not bad, but not as relentlessly cheerful as Ainsley himself is. We also found the Captain Mainwaring statue and posed for photos by it. Now, I'm not quite sure what's going on with my face here, but I do apologize as it looks like I belong in an entirely different photo.

Thetford didn't really provide us with much more entertainment. Katie saw a pair of bright yellow trousers but didn't buy them; I got into a conversation with a charity worker who I had previously got into a conversation with in Norwich a few days earlier (I remembered, she didn't. That probably says a lot); Dave proved that he really does look eerily like a heron if he chooses to pretend to walk like one (and why one would choose to do such a thing is uncertain, but it happened and I can tell you that he does indeed look like a heron); and I saw a copy of Mr. Nosey but failed to buy it as I knew that if I purchased one Mr. Men book, I'd want to buy them all. It was a tough thing to decline though as Mr. Nosey looks adorable when he peeps over walls.

After a bit of umm-ing and aaah-ing and failing to buy drinks at a pub, we decided to head back to Norwich, and more specifically to NAMCO Funscape in Norwich, the place where, last time, we'd ended up spending horrendously large amounts of money in the arcade and winning strange yellow creatures.

We didn't hit the arcade for too long this time, mainly because, a, there were no yellow men on offer as prizes, and, b, we didn't have Will and his infectious love of arcades to keep us there.

We did play a couple of games of Air Hockey though, in which I managed to nearly decapitate Katie half a dozen times and gained a bruised hand to go with my badminton wound from the day before after a mid-game collision with Dave. We then played a game of Ten Pin Bowling, in which no-one was decapitated.

Dinnertime was here now, my chocolate muffin and Ainsley Harriott treat having unsurprisingly proven itself to be not enough to keep me going all day, and so we decided to go for a curry. I called The Clipper, a rather nice restaurant in Norwich, to see if they had seats free, but promptly lost my mobile signal and probably looked like I was prank calling them. Certainly, when I tried to call them again when back in range, they didn't pick up the phone, which was fair enough.

Walking backwards to the Agila (or maybe, just maybe, this is a photo of us walking into Funscape which I am using here because I haven't a photo of us walking away from it. Maybe), we headed to The Clipper, negotiating another car park before doing so. This time, we drove into it worrying that we might not actually be able to leave it again after I mis-read a sign and thought the whole car park closed at 10pm, rather than entry closing then.

The Clipper was found, curry was nommed, and for dessert, I had an ice cream in a novelty penguin holder.

"Please may I have a Punky Penguin?" I asked the waiter.

The waiter looked at me oddly: "It's just Punky. No Pengiun."

I felt like I had infringed some sacred copyright and ate my Ice Cream in silence (apart from the moment where I dropped a load of it onto my trousers by mistake because I apparently still require a bib when dining).

Time was running out though and so we decided to call it a day. We made it to the car park (thankfully open) and started to drive back to my house. Carl decided to tell Katie about the time Dave revealed himself to be terrible at anagrams on the way, asking him what an anagram of 'lemon' was to prove his point.

DAVE: "An anagram of lemon.... Mmm. Tricky. An anagram of lemon..."

NICK: "Oh, come on Dave, this is an easy one."

CARL: "Nick, this is the man who didn't work out that an anagram of 'English' was in fact 'Shingle' and not 'Shin-Leg' or 'Shin-Gel' for nearly fifteen minutes."
KATIE: "What, really?"

NICK: "Yes... yes... you have a point."

DAVE: "Mmm. Le-omn? El-nom? No-lem? [PUTS ON FRENCH ACCENT] Hee hee... 'Me-lon!' Hee... no, wait, 'Melon'!"

CARL: "You're an idiot."

And that's the end of the story, really. We reached my house and they dropped me off before heading back to the South of England, hopefully avoiding Prickwillow, traffic jams and sneaky bushes this time. I put my Punky on my desk and threw my train ticket to Thetford in the bin, deciding just before I did so that getting Dave a map of Norfolk for Christmas may be a good idea.

This will probably be the last time I see them all before December now, which is a shame. Who knows what will have happened by then: will Dave have progressed to knowing that 'la pent' is an anagram of 'planet'? Will the bush return for another stab at breaking Dave's car? Will Katie and Carl ever escape the clutches of the Agila? Will Thetford sort itself out and relocate to somewhere closer to Norwich?

Stay tuned, people, and watch this space...

Skaldenland

2011-10-13T22:08:00.000+01:00

Myths, gods, siblings, love, lazy summer days, music, ice, Box of Delights-style adventure, scarecrows... it's a certain type of book which manages to fit in all this and more, and still be readable, logical and, more over, enjoyable, but James Mortimore has managed to pull this off with Skaldenland, and although not the first departure by Obverse Books from their line of Iris Wildthyme anthologies and novellas (see With Deepest Sympathy), Skaldenland in many ways feels like a significant step for the company, being as it is a full-length novel which will, one hopes, pave the way forward for other such affairs.

All this said, is Skaldenland perfect? No, but there is a hell of a lot to enjoy.

The summer is here, and sister and brother Brun and Chad are enjoying it, Brun busy working on her novel, an ambitious tale concerning gods from Norse mythology, and Chad interjecting with a quip whenever he can (more on that later). Things are disrupted though when music fills the air, and the siblings discover the Symphonion. Suddenly pipes are freezing, words are disappearing, Brun doesn't appear to be herself, and Chad isn't quite certain who 'himself' is any more, which is unfortunate as it looks like it's up to him to save the day...

The start of Skaldenland is fast and breezy, with Mortimore quickly establishing our hero's family set-up and soon throwing us many of the concepts which he goes on to build up, tweak, twist and experiment with in the following three hundred-odd pages. What follows however varies slightly with regards to its pacing, alternating between quick and slow, giving us time to breathe in and digest the notions and concepts which Mortimore paints before sprinting to the next stand-off. Sometimes this works really well, our slight confusion and feeling of mild disorientation mirroring Chad's, and sometimes it fails, feeling like it's grinding the pace to a halt and teasing us with information in a frustrating manner.
It's in the middle of the novel that this really feels problematic. The earlier scenes establishing Chad's home and introducing us to characters such as the wonderful Ellyn and the lovelorn Vincent are suddenly replaced by long ones in which action pieces are bookended by people giving us very vague exposition surrounded by elipsis and meaningful glances. I understand the need to keep some things mysterious, but it quickly becomes tedious and I found that the frustration Chad feels at being kept in the dark mirrored my own. I'm not going to say that this was unintentional, as I'm certain that an author as careful as Mortimore would have fully intended for this to be the effect, but it didn't really work for me.
I had slight issues with some of the dialogue, too, specifically Chad's. Without intending to spoil anything, there are definite reasons why characters speak in the manner that they do. Again it is most definitely an intentional thing, but, again, it at times proved itself to be a barrier for me rather than anything wildly attractive. Quite simply, Chad speaks like no-one else I've ever known or ever expect to know, and that can prove to be a bit too detached at times. A simple test of trying to read aloud some of his lines often failed; he speaks in fractured poetry and broken sonnets. It certainly grabs your attention, but it lacks any believability and, crucially, this distances one from his character, a dangerous thing when you want your protagonist to win, save the day and sort everything out.
That feels like a patronizing thing to write though: Mortimore knows exactly what he's doing with Chad, with his dialogue, with his idiosyncratic patter. As I said, it made me feel distant from Chad, to the point where it was at times hard to fully engage with his emotions and his journey, but, as I also said, there are good reasons for his differences.
In the end, it's that which is important. This is a novel which is rich with its concepts. It takes music and turns it into an enemy, a weapon, a healer, a beautiful thing which outlives us all and follows its own rules; it takes mythology and entwines it with the non-fictional in a way that feels perfectly in keeping with the world he has surrounded us with; and he takes characters which develop with the same depth and thought as his wider ideas. They are all integral to his world, ingredients which are balanced and make up something at times more remarkable as a whole than as a bunch of component parts.
I suppose that what I'm saying is that whilst parts of Skaldenland failed to engage me as a reader, it's made up for with its sheer breadth of vision and idea. I didn't care for Chad's dialogue, but I recognize the reasons for it and that it helps paint this world Mortimore is creating. I think the pacing near the centre of the book was off, but I know that the effect it creates of a disjointing sense of time perfectly reflects the goings on in the fiction. I may not always have been fully immersed and in love with Skaldenland, but I would never, ever fault it for ambition and would never, ever dare to suggest that Mortimore doesn't know exactly what he is doing throughout.
In short, Skaldenland shows an author who is completely certain in his vision and committed to getting that across in no uncertain terms, something which he does with the apparent ease of someone at the top of his game, but which anyone who tries to match it will find to be extraordinarily difficult to get close to. On top of that, we get an interesting story which deserves and requires the page count it has, and which at turns ensnares the reader with ideas and enthrals the reader with action.
I certainly hope that Skaldenland is neither the last we get from Mortimore which deals with a world this vast and deep, nor the final step into full-length fiction which Obverse Books takes. Both should be applauded for this novel, flawed or no. It's a loud, bold and proud stamp which bodes well for the future.

Train Driving Pigeons

2011-10-07T22:49:00.000+01:00

This is a story I wrote for the children at work. It's based on an idea I had too many years ago to accurately recall that the only reason that pigeons sleep in cold, pokey and frankly smelly railway stations is that they secretly drive the trains. I've tried to use this idea in different stories over the years, but I think this is probably its final, and best, home.

I hope you enjoy it! x

TRAIN DRIVING PIGEONS

Go to the Station and there you will find

pigeons of all different sizes and kinds.

Look! There’s one now! It’s up on the roof,

pecking and cooing and looking aloof!

They bathe in the sunshine and hide from the rain,

then fly down to clock on and drive all the trains.

Now, pigeons are great at driving trains

through muddy and lush green and spooky terrain,

But ask them a question and they will look distant

for train driving pigeons aren’t known for their wisdom.

They just turn their head to one side and coo,

‘cause that’s what train driving pigeons do.

One day on the train though a crisis emerged:

the train was attacked by a rampaging bird!

The terrible, jabbering Blee Blah Bird– oh!

With its chattering beak and its feathers down low!

Its smelly green feet! Its angry eyes, too!

It pecked at the babies and swallowed their shoes!

But a girl on the train declared, “I’ll save the day!”

And brave little Evelyn went on her way.

She walked to the front where the train driver sat,

and knocked on his door with a thundering TAT!

“Oh, train driving pigeon! We all need your help!

The Blee Blah Bird’s making the girls and boys yelp!

It’s pecking their pigtails and stealing their sweets!

It’s leaving its feathers all over their seats!

It’s licking their ears and nibbling their knees!

Oh, train driving pigeon, can you help us please?”

But he just turned his head to one side and cooed,

‘cause that’s what train driving pigeons do.

Evelyn said, “That’s not helpful! No!

But I must save the day, so back I must go!”

She walked to the front where the train driver sat,

and knocked on his door with a thundering TAT!

“Oh, train driving pigeon! We all need your help!

The Blee Blah Bird’s making the dads and mums yelp!

It’s pecking their jumpers and nibbling their coats!

It’s wrapping their scarves far too tight round their throats!

It’s scoured their pockets and swallowed their keys!

Oh, train driving pigeon, can you help us please?”

But he just turned his head to one side and cooed,

‘cause that’s what train driving pigeons do.

Evelyn said, “That’s not helpful! No!

But I must save the day, so back I must go!”

She walked to the front where the train driver sat,

and knocked on his door with a thundering TAT!

“Oh, train driving pigeon! We all need your help!

The Blee Blah Bird’s making the grandparents yelp!

It’s pecking their peppermints! Eating their knitting!

Chomping their headscarves until they’re ill-fitting!

It’s dived in their shopping and eaten their cheese!

Oh, train driving pigeon, can you help us please?”

But he just turned his head to one side and cooed,

‘cause that’s what train driving pigeons do.

Evelyn said, “That’s not helpful! No!

But I must save the day, so back I must go!”

But the train driving pigeon was not help at all;

it cowered and blinked and looked terribly small.

Brave little Evelyn said, “Okay! Fine!

If you won’t save the day, then the day saving’s mine!”

She marched down the train until she heard

the pecking and squawking and squeaks of the bird.

“Stop!” shouted Evelyn. “You’re being a pain!

Stop this at once, and get off the train!”

The Blee Blah Bird stopped!

The Blee Blah Bird started!

It opened a window and swiftly departed!

“I’ve done it!” cried Evelyn. “Hip hip hurray!”

The passengers cheered: “You’ve saved the day!”

“Thanks!” said the parents and grandparents, too.

“Thanks!” said the children, and suddenly– “Coo!

Thanks!” said the driver, and he doffed his cap;

he returned to his seat with a hop and a flap.

And he turned his head to one side and cooed,

‘cause that’s what train driving pigeons do.

Stalled

2011-09-12T22:36:00.001+01:00

So, it's been a bit of a weird day today. I had a job interview (internal) and didn't get it, so I decided to commiserate by writing (you see, sober folks can have fun, too, right?).
Ever wondered what happened to Ashley and Alex after the shenanigans with Kate Bush, David Bowie and Bono, King of the Rabbits? It's alright, neither did anyone else, but I thought a good use of ninety minutes would be to find out, so here we are. I hope people like it.

Stalled

By Nick Mellish

The night was creeping in, the familiar noises of London during the day replacing themselves with the familiar noises of London during the night. Ashely’s phone began to beep, an alarm going off with a simple message: ‘TRAIN ABOUT TO ARRIVE! GET READY TO LEAVE!’

Ashely sighed, putting down a novelty postcard in the shape of the River Thames, and called Alex.

“Hello?” came Alex’s voice, crackling over the line.

“Hey,” said Ashley. “Thought I’d let you know that I’m about to make my way back now.”

“Cool,” said Alex. “Nice day?”

“Lovely, thanks,” replied Ashley, and it was true. Given how nothing had been purchased other than lunch and most of the time had been spent walking around aimlessly, things were surprisingly good. It had been a fine day in London: the weather good, the stalls interesting and varied, the atmosphere peachy. Ashley had spent most of it browsing the various stalls, looking at shirts or smelling strange cheeses, feigning an interest and going through the games everyone in these situations plays. It was good to take a break from University, from Toomebridge, from everything, even Alex.

“You still there?” asked Alex over the phone.

“Yes, sorry,” said Ashley, grimacing at an ugly toby jug. “I should be back just after ten. Meet me at the Station?”

“Sounds good. Do you want me to grab you any dinner?”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll get something on the...” Ashley trailed off and frowned.

“You okay?” asked Alex.

“What?” Ashley blinked. “Oh, yes, sorry, just seem to have lost the exit...”

Surely this had been the way in? Ashley looked around: yes, a second-hand book stall, a trinkets stand (one of at least ten), a rubbish bin.

But then there were the things Ashley hadn’t noticed before: people, cowering in the corners, a heavy atmosphere hanging in the air, grey faces on grey and tired people.

“Must have taken a wrong turn,” said Ashley. “I’ll call you back when I’m on the train.”

“Okay,” said Alex, “I’ll talk to you then...”

Half an hour past, but still no exit. There were stalls aplenty, salespeople at every corner, seventy-eight variations on London Underground logos on t-shirts, but no way out. Ashley started to panic.

It took another hour for the truth to sink in: this was getting silly. It was then that Ashley noticed all that was hidden before: people, cowering in the corners, a heavy atmosphere hanging in the air, grey faces on grey and tired people.

Ashley’s phone started to buzz again: Alex calling. Ashley ignored it and tapped one of the grey people on the shoulder. A wheezing woman turned round and gazed in a distant manner.

“Excuse me,” said Ashley, “I don’t suppose you know where the exit is, do you?”

“The exit, dearie?” croaked the wheezing woman. “Ha ha ha ha ha! Hey, dearie, hey! This one here wants to know where the exit is!”

Another grey person, a croaking man, turned round and wheezed a laugh in response: “Foolish fool! Does the foolish fool not know?”

“Not know what?” asked Ashley, but the answer was a predictable one.

“There is no exit,” confirmed the wheezing woman. “No exit at all.”
Alex called again and, numb, Ashley answered it this time.

“Alex?”

“Yes Ashley?”

“There’s something very, very wrong here...”

Alex went into overdrive, Googling everything there was to Google on the market and finding nothing, pacing up and down the carpet until there were scars in its weft, tearing out hair Alex hadn’t even been aware was there until it was pulled. With an air of reluctance, Alex called Ashley’s phone once again.

“Any luck yet?” asked Alex pathetically for the eighth time that ninth hour.

“No,” came Ashley’s reply. “Just another newspaper vendor with out of date sweets and free newspapers.”

Alex frowned: “You don’t think this could all be an elaborate revenge on the part of Bono, do you?”

“That was my first thought, but I found him scrabbling beneath a pile of real leather jackets with a shrew a couple of minutes ago. He’s been here for months.”

“What was he doing with the shrew?”

“Eating it.”
Alex snarled: “Will that man’s evil never end?”

“Now is not the time for Bono,” said Ashley wisely, “now is the time for answers.”

“Pssst!” came a voice, cutting through their conversation: another salesman. “Sir! Sir!” The voice stopped. “No, wait, is it Sir or Madam?”

Ashley frowned, indicating the phone, and walked away, trying to ignore the tempting fragrance of scented candles. That was how it started according to the grey people: you’d go to buy a snowglobe or find yourself sat by a booth eating a cheap bowl of Chicken Chow Mein and before you knew it, it had been years and you were... well, even more stuck.

“Never give up!” pleaded the grey people. “Fight on, Ashley!”

Ashley resolved to do just that. Besides, Alex wasn’t going to let Ashley do anything but, screaming down the phone even now about having something and... no, wait, that sounded useful.

“What was that?” asked Ashley. “Sorry, I was miles away.”

“An answer!” screamed Alex again. “I’ve found an answer!”

“Go on,” said Ashley, smiling. Excited Alex was cute; it was why Alex was so easy to fall in love with.

“Well, it’s simple,” said Alex. “You’re trapped in a non-existent marketplace and there is no possible way to exit it, right?”

“Right.”

“So, it’s easy. If there is no possible way to leave the marketplace, you simply need to think of an impossible way to leave it.”

There was a silence more silent than the silence which so inspired wordsmiths from eons back to devise the word ‘silence’ in the first place. It was a silence so inspirational, that said wordsmiths would have ignored even trying to label such a feeling or passing of quiet time and instead retreated and devised a rhyme for ‘orange’ instead. It was a silence during which other silences came into being and underwent momentary crises of identity such was the relative noise which they possessed, and indeed their very being was soon replaced by the noise of wind sobbing in the ether. It was a silence women wanted to be and men wanted to shag, and vice versa.

“Alex?”

“Yes, Ashley?”

“I love you, but please piss off.”

“Yes, Ashley.”

Dear Diary,

Day Fifteen trapped in the market.

The grey people have been kind today, offering me scraps and sticks of gum to stave off my hunger. I still haven’t yielded and purchased any food or trinkets for myself yet, but as the days blur into weeks, the lure of ‘I LOVE LONDON’ sweatshirts grows ever stronger.

I am trying to recall a time before the market, but it becomes harder with every passing heckle. Sometimes, I can block them out– the tempting offers to browse fine scarves, the hushed anticipation as someone looks like they may buy a paperback copy of About A Boy– and sometimes I hear every utterance: the “I have a lovely shirt, Sir”s, the “Come, smell this perfume, Madame”s, the distain in their voices as they see me scribbling this diary entry with a tiny freebie pen from a bookmakers onto what used to be a hat shaped like a stoat which I found discarded by some bins.

“Maybe later,” I say, as always. “Maybe later.”

The games we play.

I miss Toomebridge. I miss Alex. I miss having battery power on my phone so I could actually connect to the world outside. I miss not having to write on hats shaped like stoats.

I want my bed; I want to be asleep next to the person I love.

May I find an exit; may I find it soon.

Three weeks passed. The stoat hat grew clogged with ink and had to be discarded (Ashley cried) and hope dimmed to a distant flicker.

Ashley considered stealing something and waiting for the Police to come, but the grey people advised against it, pointing to a stall comprised entirely of helmets, truncheons and lost whistles.

Ashley tried tying a ball of string to one leg of a table and making sure that steps weren’t retraced, but quickly ran out of string.

Ashley tried to pretend that the market was but a metaphor for the confusion which would arrive when graduation occurred in a few weeks’ time and walked around with a determined and superior air, but it made no difference: the market was still there, and Ashley was still trapped.

Ashley tried to be clever and ask people where the entrance was instead of the exit, but they were not stupid and rescue remained an elusive goal. By the end of the month, Ashley found that the grey people were less reluctant to talk, probably because they recognized another grey person in the making.

One day (the thirty-eighth by Ashley’s reckoning), the sun was beating down hard and Ashley found another stall selling pick and mix stood in the centre of the path.

“Hey! You!” cried the woman behind the stall. “Bag of sweets to take the glum away?”

Without thinking, Ashley turned round and snapped: “No.”

There was a pause.

“What?” asked the woman.

“No,” said Ashley. “No, I don’t want to buy your sweets. I don’t want to buy anything here.”

“Not nothing?” popped up another voice, that of a man selling Country and Western CDs.

“No, not nothing,” confirmed Ashley. “I don’t want to buy a thing. I want to get out of here. I have no intention of buying anything.”

“Oh,” said the woman. “Are you sure?”

“Yes!” fired back Ashley. “Sod etiquette! No, I’m not going to browse. I’m not going or look interested or promise to return later; I’m not going to think a postcard commemorating the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales and shaped like her head is a tempting option.” Ashley nodded. “I’m not playing anymore.”

“Oh,” said the man. “Well, that’s no fun.”

“Yeah, you’re boring!” said the woman. “And rude!”

A chink of light appeared between her stall and a nearby lamppost.

Ashley walked towards it, hardly daring to believe: an exit?

“Well, go on then, bugger off,” said the man. “If you’re not going to play, what’s the point?”

“I...” started Ashley, then stopped. “Hang on, this was just a game?”

“Well of course it was,” said the grey wheezing woman, appearing from nowhere. “We’re all actors. This is just an elaborate example of Street Theatre.” She waved jazz hands at Ashley. “Like it?”

“No.”

“Bloody critics.” The wheezing woman paused. “I did think you were heavily into it, but I wondered if you were just a hardcore, Stanslavskian method sort of person.”

Ashley stared at the exit. “You know, I can’t help but feel that this is an anti-climax of sorts.”

“Bit of a cop-out ending?”

“Sort of.”

“Yes, well, that’s the trouble with this sort of thing. Best to just write it off as post-modern or some such pretentious gubbings and claim you were making a comment on the predictable nature of storytelling.”

“I see.” Ashley walked towards the light, but stopped. “Look, you won’t tell anyone, will you? This is all a bit embarrassing.”

“I won’t tell a soul, dearie,” smiled the wheezing woman, getting back into character. “But I can’t vouch for the stoat hat.”

Ashley watched as the hat, actually a trained stunt stoat in disguise, tutted and scrubbed at its tail.

“Sorry,” said Ashley.

“He’ll get over it,” said the wheezing woman. “Now, be off with you.”

“Right,” nodded Ashley. “Right, Goodbye.”

Ashley walked out of the market, across the road, and onto a train. There would be a lot of explaining to do, a lot of excuses, probably a lot of grovelling and apologizing, but that was okay: there wasn’t a home-made dream catcher or half-price shoe rack in sight.

Contrary to the wheezing woman’s insistence, the stoat never did get over it, but that’s a different story (or would have been had the stoat ever bothered to act on his whims. Such is the nature of stoats). He scuttled the remainder of his days with a grudge in his heart and the words ‘I want to be asleep next to the person I love’ upon his tail like a tattoo. Not the best words to have marked upon one’s person, but far from the worst.

Ashley’s train pulled into Toomebridge. Alex was sat at the Station, waiting.

For the first time in weeks, Ashley smiled.

The King of the Jungle

2011-09-06T16:56:00.000+01:00

One of the sessions I help to run as part of my job is arts and crafts. A little while back, I was asked if I could present people with a "here's one I made earlier" affair at the start of each session, to give the children an idea of something to make. I'm not terribly creative in that respect, but I'm not bad at writing, so...

For the past few weeks, I've created a page of a story every session. The story itself, The King of the Jungle, is the tale of one person's quest to find a face. I hope you all enjoy it. Sorry the photos here are just photos of pages; I don't have a scanner.

THE KING OF THE JUNGLE

THE END

Les Contrebandiers de la Plage de Toomebridge

2011-08-06T12:13:00.000+01:00

This is my attempt at creating a French translation of The Smugglers of Toomebridge Beach for India Desjardins, who wanted to read it. It is probably terrible, but I tried my best! (I used Google Translate, dictionaries, Internet forums and every scrap of French I could recall!)

Les Contrebandiers de la Plage de Toomebridge

(pour India)

Il a commencé par un livre. Sorte de. Le livre en question est contesté. Certains jurent c'était La Mite Superflue, le livre final en une trilogie au sujet animaux et angoisse existentielle écrit par Jacob Beasley. Certains jurent c'était La Bible. Certains que c'était la récent collection d'essais de fan obsessive, Fan de Twilight: vengeance définitive. Un agent péteux déclaré que c'était Une Absence de Justice, un récit à suspense écrit par un client féminin à lui, qui était étonnant pour elle car elle n'avait pas fini de l'écrire encore.

Le temps, cependant, est étrange et ainsi telles choses sont possibles et, en effet, pour apprécier pleinement la conte reculer dans le temps, parce que lui n'a pas complètement commencé par un livre; seulement partiellement.

La conte met en marche le lointain au milieu du XVIIème siècle en Angleterre, un pays plutôt accroupi placé sur une planète plutôt accroupie dans un univers si vaste qu'on peut éternuer à une fin de lui et garantir qu'il amassera assez de débris pour créer une apocalypse à l'autre fin.

La conte fait participer trois contrebandiers traipsing autour de la plage de Toomebridge, une plage peu impressionnante dans à l'est de l'Angleterre. Ceci allait être une grande nuit pour les contrebandiers ; ceci allait changer leurs vies. Joe Édenté N'aurait pas perdu ses dents en vain. Harry Sans Mains serait heureux. Marc mort était toujours mort, mais de telles choses seraient ignorées ce soir, parce que le soir était la nuit du grand contrebande. Après des mois de la planification soigneuse, une grande cargaison de thé avait été passée dans le pays et cachée sous un monticule énorme de bardeau et de pierre. Ce soir, les contrebandiers allaient la creuser vers le haut et la vendre pour un bon nombre d'argent sur le marché noir. Ceci allait être le grand ; ceci allait faire leur nom.

Malheureusement, la vie n’a jamais été connu pour sa charité et un blip chronologique dans le tissu même de la temporalité signifiait que les contrebandier s ont été accidentellem ent tiré hors du temps et poussée vers l’avant prés de trois-cent-72 années dans le futur en l’an 2008. Ils étaient, pour employer un euphémisme, confondu.

Cependant, ils étaient trés pauvres et done qu’ils ont commencé à creuser la pierre et de galets, où ils avaient initialement laissé leur thé et, par incroyable, il la été encore assis là intacte. Thé dans la main, ils ont commencé un voyage dans la ville voisine et a essayé du pour vendre leurs marchandises.

Malheureusement, ils ont été accueillis avec pitié, de la confusion et de rires en quantité à peu près égaux et un rapide voyage dans le dépanneur du coin révélé juste pourquoi cela a été: thé partout! Thé en sachets, le thé dans des bocaux, le thé pour les charges de l’argent et le thé de l’argent presque pas du tout. Thé, partout.

Ils étaient endifficulté: ce n’était pas une bonne chose par un effort d’optimisme. Ils sont allés à un pub voisin et a commencé à boire de un avocat entendu les contrebandiers se plaignent de leur malheur. Après beaucoup d’indiscrets, ils lui racontèrent leur situation et dans ce qui fut un coup de maître d’ingéniosité, il a obtenu une audience à la cour, où ils ont déclaré leur intention de poursuivre en justice les majeur sociétés de thé pour la perte de revenus plus le passé de trois cents ans.

Remarquable, le tribunal a accepté de les laisser poursuivre. Encore plus remarquable, ils ont gangé et les contrebandiers se trouvèrent bientôt la grande vie à l’Hôtel Fabuleux à Londres alors que thé se trouve au milieu d’un boom de publicité qui a fait suffisamment de profits pour le procès d’avoir été la plus de succès campagne publicitaire l’industrie du thé avait jamais fait.

Aprés beaucoup d’allers et retours-tion, les contrebandiers ont réalisé qu’ils étaient effrayés par ce monde et nouvelles bruyant et a donc décidé de mettre en place la résidence permanente dans cet hôtel. La vue depuis les fenêtres donnaient sur une vaste forêt de bruit et de béton, et les odeurs qui a frappé leur nez étaient mauvais, mais les lits étaient confortable et personne ne semblait se plaindre quand ils ont attaqué le minibar pour l’alcool et friandises au fromage.

Ce fut une couple de mois plus tard que tout s’est mal passé. Un des contrebandiers ont découvert que la grande boîte noire dans leur chambre pourrait en fait être allumé et quand il a été, ce serait montrer des images animées et des personnes saines. Douze télévision fracassé se couche plus tard et ils avaient constaté qu’il n’y avait pas chez les personnes vivant à l’intérieur de la télévision, mais la télévision était vraiment quelque chose d’assez merveilleux. Ils se sont contentés de passer des journées entières juste à regarder les images diffusées sur l’écran, mais plus que toute autre chose qu’ils ont été fascinés par Sophie Aschwanden.

Sophie était une jolie femme dans la tretaine, et elle était magique! Tous les matins, Sophie serait jeter des sorts sur la météo. Elle leur diraus que ce serait la pluie et il pleuvait. Elle leur dirais que les nuages se couvrent Londres et les nuages se couvrent Londres.

Cela a été incroyable: Sophie a dû être une sorcière, et si elles allaient échapper à ce monde terrifiant et le retour au XVIIème siècle, ils auraient besoin d’un magicien. Ils auraient besoin d’un présentateur du météo magie. Ils auraient besoin Sophie Aschwanden.

Mais alors, catastrophe: Sophie ne figurait pas sur leur écran! Et c’est ainsi, quelques instants plus tard sur ce même matin de Novembre 23rd 2008, les trois contrebandiers faufilé hors de l’hôtel où, à leur insu, ils étaient réellement tenu et observé par une multitude de scientifiques, de psychologues et les producteurs de télé-réalité essayer de briller sous un angle attractif sur leur situation. Ils doivent avoir été vus quittant l’hôtel en par le réceptionniste, un jeune homme du nom de Tom Sadler, mais il n’a pas été remarqué que Tom était plutôt assis derrière son bureau en lisant un livre assez fascinant: La Bible? Une Absence de Justice? Fan de Twilight: vengeance définitive? La Mite Superflue? Dans le grand schéma des choses, il ne compte pas vraiment tant que ça.

Et il a commencé avec un livre: le licenciement rapide et douloureuse Tom Sadler de l’indistrie hôtelière, une diminution de cinquante pour cent dans l’utilisation minibar à l’Hôtel Fabuleux, et la chasse à l’homme de haut en bas le pays pendant trois échappés contrebandiers du XVIIème siècle.

Les passeurs restés complètement indifférents à tous les tracas et se promenait au lieu et a pris des taxis différents dans leurs tentatives de trouver Sophie. Après des jours de recherche, ils ont découvert à partir d’un objet magique appelé un journal que Sophie était actuellement en vacances à Huddersfield.

Ils montèrent à bord d’un navire puissant appelé un train et ont fait leur chemin jusqu’à Huddersfield. Une demi-douzaine des sandwiches et une poignée de correspondances manquées plus tard, et ils étaient arrivés.

Ils ont commencé à chercher pour elle, demandant dans les bars, les kiosques et restaurants, pour se faire dire qu’ils ne savaient pas où elle était, et si elles n’allaient pas acheter n’importe quoi, ils devraient probablement quitter et arrêter déranger les autres clients.

Ils sont allés au cinéma (une version plus grande de leur télévision aimé), mais il n’a pas aidé (même si ils jouissaient du pop-corn). Ils sont allés à une pub où ils ont obtenu extrêmement ivre, mais n’a reçu aucune information sur l’endroit où Sophie était. Ils sont allés à un opticien et ont été forcés de lire les lignes de lettres minuscules en plus, laissant là avec une paire de lunettes plus de lunettes de soliel gratuitement mais aucune connaissance supplémentaire concernant le lieu de Sophie.

Il était cinq jours plus tard qu’ils frappé c’est la chance et vu son errance dans une bouquinerie à travers la route. Ils ont mis sur leurs lunettes de soleil et a couru à travers la route pour arriver jusqu’à elle, seulement pour être tué à l’autre bout de la route par un bus contenant les scientifiques, les psychologues et les producteurs de télé-réalité qui avait finalement trouvés à Huddersfield.

Ce fut très frustrant pour les producteurs de télé-réalité qui venait de succès aigus un spectacle où les passeurs se trouveraient dans une variété de chaussures et d’avoir à descendre un podium à la fin de chaque épisode.

Les contrebandiers sont morts comme ils avaient vécu: perplexe et peu surpris. (Qui était maigre consolation à l’Hôtel Fabuleux où ils ont pleuré la perte de leurs meilleurs résidents.)

Les producteurs de télé-réalité éditée ensemble un programme célébrant leur vie et leur perte, les psychologues a déterminé qu’il était possible suicide comme ils ne pouvaient pas faire face à comme ils ne pouvaient pas faire face à ce monde, l’industrie du thé avait un autre pic dans les bénéfices, et les scientifiques songeait que les contrebandiers ont probablement été joyeusement danser dans un univers parallèle, et bien vivante.

Sophie Aschwanden attendant quitté la bouquinerie avec une copie battues de La Mite Superflue, le même livre que l’ex-réceptionniste Tom Sadler, se trouvait à la lecture, aussi, sur le chemin du retour de son nouvel emploi à Huddersfield. Ils ont commencé, et avant trop longtemps, ils se sont retrouvés ensemble dans un magnifique chalet avec deux enfants et un chien nommé M. Apollo.

Qu’il sorte d’a commencé avec un livre et qu’il sorte de fin avec un livre. Dans un monde plein de bêtise et la stupidité et de chaos où peu de sens, qui est probablement le meilleur que nous pouvons espérer, si nous sommes des passeurs du XVIIème siècle ou de quiconque.

The Smugglers of Toomebridge Beach

2011-08-05T20:55:00.000+01:00

Last year, I wrote a short story when I should have been writing an essay. It went on to spectacularly fail to win a short story competition. I thought I'd post it here on this old blog of mine.
The only thing I've changed from when I first entered it into the competition is the name of the beach in the story and, accordingly, the name of the story itself. It used to be called The Smugglers of Chesil Beach; it is now called The Smugglers of Toomebridge Beach. (Toomebridge is a fictional town I made up years and years ago, which I've been using a lot in my new year's resolution anthology (I'm writing a short story a month; that's where this came from), and in last year's silly Christmas tale.)
It's been over a year since I wrote this story, and I'm stilI proud of it. I hope you enjoy it, too.

The Smugglers of Toomebridge Beach

By Nick Mellish

It started with a book. Sort of.

The book in question is hotly disputed. Some swear blind that it was The Superfluous Moth, the highly anticipated final book in one Jacob Beasley’s animal angst-orientated trilogy. Others state that it was The Bible, some that it was the latest collection of terrorist fan essays, Twihard with a Vengeance. One especially vocal agent declared that it was most certainly An Absence of Justice, a crime-centric Thriller written by a female client of his, which was especially surprising to her as she hadn’t finished writing it yet. Time, however, is a strange thing so such things are possible and, indeed, to fully appreciate everything that happened we need to go back in time, for it didn’t completely start with a book; only partially.

The story starts far back in the midst of the 17^th Century in England, a rather squat country atop a rather squat planet in a Universe so vast that one can sneeze at one end of it and guarantee that it will amass enough debris to create a veritable apocalypse at the other end by the time existence has redefined itself half a dozen times.

The story involves three smugglers traipsing round Toomebridge Beach, an unimpressive conglomerate of pebbles, surf and seaweed in the East of England. This was going to be a big night for them though; this was going to be the big one. Toothless Joe would not have lost his teeth in vain. Handless Harry would be vindicated. Dead Marc would still be dead, but such things would go ignored in such a moment as this, for tonight was the night of the big smuggle. After months of careful planning, a large cargo of tea had been smuggled into the country and deposited beneath a huge mound of shingle and stone. Tonight, the smugglers were going to dig it up and sell it for a pretty healthy profit on the black market. This was going to be the big one; this was going to make their name.

Unfortunately, life was never known for its charity and a chronological blip in the very fabric of temporality meant that the smugglers were accidentally pulled out of time and thrust forward roughly three-hundred-and-seventy-two years into the future into the year 2008. They were, to put it mildly, confused.

However, they were also poor and so with their eyes still firmly fixed upon the prize they began to dig up the stone and shingle where they had originally left their tea and, by an incredible stroke of luck, they found that it was still sat there undisturbed. Contraband in hand, they began the trek into the nearby town and tried to off the tea to whoever would take it. Sadly, they were met with pity, confusion and laughter in roughly equal amount and a quick trip into the local convenience store revealed just why this was: tea, everywhere. Tea in bags, tea in jars, tea in boxes, tea in tins, tea that smelt and tea that whiffed, tea for loads of money and tea for almost no money at all.

They were in trouble: this was not a good thing by any stretch of optimism. They went to a nearby pub and started to drink away their sorrows when a nearby hotshot lawyer overheard them bemoaning their situation. After much prying and bribery, they told him their grim situation and in what was a masterstroke of ingenuity and loophole-buggery, he quickly got them into court where they declared their intention to sue the heads of the major tea corporations for loss of income over the past three-hundred years. Remarkably, the courts agreed to follow through and let them sue. Even more remarkably, they won and the smugglers soon found themselves living the high life in the rather swanky Hotel Grandiose in London whilst tea found itself in the middle of a publicity boom that gained enough profit for the court case to have proven itself the best money-making venture the industry had ever encountered.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, the smugglers realized that they were frightened by this loud and new world and so decided to set up permanent residence in this hotel. The view from their windows overlooked a sprawling woodland of noise and concrete, the smells that hit their noses were musky and foul, but the beds were terribly comfortable and no one seemed to complain when they raided the mini bar for alcohol and cheesy titbits.

It was a couple of months after this that everything went wrong. One of the smugglers discovered that the large black box in their room could in fact be turned on and when it was, it would show moving pictures and sound and tiny people and vehicles. Twelve smashed television sets later and they had ascertained that there were not in fact people living within them but, still, television really was something quite wonderful. They were content to spend whole days just staring at the images broadcast on screen, but more than anything else they were fascinated by Sophie Aschwanden.

She was a rather pretty woman in her mid-thirties, but their fascination stemmed not from anything so aesthetic. Every morning, she would appear on their screens and start her magic. She would tell them that later on it would rain and, lo and behold, rain would fall later that same day. She would declare that sun and clouds would cover London by that night and without fail that would indeed happen.

This was amazing; this was incredible: Sophie was clearly a witch of some sort, working her magic over the weather itself every morning. And, clearly, if they were to escape this hectic and troubling world and return to their own in the dim and distant past, then they were going to require the aid of such a woman.

But then, disaster struck: Sophie did not appear on their screen one morning, her friends informing all and sundry that she was busy on holiday. And so it was, just moments later on that same morning of November 23^rd2008 that the three smugglers snuck out of the hotel where, unbeknown to them, they actually were being held and observed by a whole host of scientists, psychologists and reality television producers trying to gleam an attractive angle on their whole situation. They should have been observed leaving the building by the receptionist, a young man by the name of Tom Sadler, but instead their exit went unnoticed as Tom was instead sat behind his desk reading a rather fascinating book: The Bible perhaps, or The Superfluous Moth. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter all that much.

And so it started with a book: Tom Sadler’s swift and painful dismissal from the hotelier industry and journey into the world of cutlery manufacturing, a fifty percent decrease in mini bar use at Hotel Grandiose, and the manhunt up and down the country for three escaped smugglers from the 17^th Century.

The smugglers themselves remained completely oblivious to all the fuss and were content to walk the streets and take various taxis in their attempts to find where Sophie was hiding. After days of fruitless searching, they eventually discovered from a rather knowledgeable Aschwanden-obsessive man that she was currently based in Huddersfield, a place that he himself could not go to thanks to a mystic force known only as a ‘restraining order’.

They crossed his palm with gold by way of thanks and hopped aboard a powerful vessel known as a train and made their way up to the land of Huddersfield. Seven delayed trains, half a dozen sandwiches and a handful of missed changes later, and they had arrived.

They began to search for her, asking in bars, newsagents and restaurants alike, only to be told that they didn’t know where the hell she was, and if they weren’t going to buy anything then they should probably leave and stop bothering the other customers.

They went to a cinema, a contained larger version of their beloved television, but they got no help there (though they rather enjoyed the popcorn). They went to an off-licence where they got remarkably drunk but little in the way of information. They went to an optician and were forced to reel off streams of increasingly tiny letters, leaving there with a free pair of prescription sunglasses but no additional knowledge as to Sophie’s whereabouts.

It was five days later that they struck it lucky and saw her wandering into a second-hand bookshop across the road from them. They put on their sunglasses and ran across the road to reach her, only to be killed halfway across the road by a bus containing the scientists, psychologists and reality television producers who had finally tracked them all down. This was especially frustrating to the producers who had just successfully pitched a show where the smugglers would find themselves in a variety of different footwear and be made to parade down a catwalk at the end of each episode.

The smugglers died as they had lived: in a state of bewilderment and mild surprise by everything. The producers edited together a moving hour-long programme celebrating their life and loss; the psychologists determined it was possibly sub-conscious suicide as they could not deal with this world; the tea industry had another spike in profits with the subsequent publicity; and the scientists mused that quantum mechanics determined that if they had been left unobserved in their room with just the TV, they would just as likely have died leaving it in this manner as they would have survived, and indeed they were probably happily milling around a parallel universe somewhere complete alive and well (which was, admittedly, of little consolation to the management at Hotel Grandiose where they keenly mourned the loss of their best residents).

Sophie Aschwanden meanwhile left her bookshop with a rather dog-eared copy of The Superfluous Moth, the very same book that one ex-receptionist, Tom Sadler, happened to be reading, too, on his commute home from work. A conversation was struck up, a relationship began, and before too long they found themselves living together in a rather natty cottage with two children and a dog named Mr. Apollo.

It sort of started with a book and it sort of ended with a book, and in a Universe full of general stupidity where everything tends to entropic chaos, this is perhaps the best that any of us can hope for, 17^th Century smugglers or otherwise.

Tyger Tyger

2011-07-28T17:32:00.006+01:00

Hello, my name is Nick Mellish. I am twenty-five years old with the receding hairline of a man far older. I like reading, writing, chocolate, Moomins, playing board games and going to the cinema. I identify as a Feminist and my political beliefs are to the left. Je ne parle pas français, but I wish I could. I studied English Literature to masters levels at University and would one day like to be a Doctor. Oh, and I work at a SureStart Children's Centre in Norwich.

I often get asked exactly what it is I do at work, and it can be a bit tricky to explain. At our Centre, we support families, offer adult education classes and also run activity/play sessions across the county. My job title is 'Crèche Worker', and it is true that I co-run the crèche facilities we offer, primarily looking after children aged five-years-old and under; mostly they are under the age of three, and often not even twelve-months old. (We run free crèches where we look after the children under the care of the adults in their classes.)

However, I spend most of my time around the county instead, helping to run play sessions or running them myself. It's a lot of fun: one day, I'll be doing drama in a village hall, the next I'll be playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on my guitar, the day after that attempting to speak Polish (very badly) to groups of mothers and their babies. I'm one of those awful people who really enjoys their job; a good example of this came today.

It's summer here in England (though for the most part you cannot tell) and most of our crèche sessions have been cancelled as the schools, and consequently the adult education teachers, are on a break. As a result of this, we're running sessions we wouldn't usually do, and this afternoon we decided to run a Story Café.

A little while back, a few of us workers went on Story Café training. As the name suggests, these are relaxed sessions where stories are told and food and drink possibly eaten. You can then add other activities: craft, role play, art, music, and so on.

So, we planned. We were going to make cakes! We were going to run around! We were going to do a bit of role play! We just needed a story... step forward Judith Kerr and her book The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

We got the book, we got ingredients for cakes, we spread the word about the session... and then we hit on a GREAT IDEA, the sort which warrants capital letters. What if The Tiger was actually there at the session? I mean, of course, not a real tiger, but what if we hired a tiger costume and one of us dressed up in it? Or, to put it more bluntly, what if Nick ended up in a tiger costume and... ah, okay.

I looked into hiring a tiger costume, but it was rather pricey for a session where we weren't sure on numbers attending. I was then told that Primark sold tiger Onesies for adults.... What's a Onesie? It's a full-body suit, an all-in-one bit of clothing. I was a bit sceptical by the claim that, a, you could get them for adults and, b, that Primark sold them, but I cycled over one morning any way and snouted around for one.

After a short while with no success, I found someone on the shop floor and, a bit awkward, said, "hey, okay, this is going to sound really weird, but do you sell tiger onesi--"

"Upstairs, at the back," replied the assistant before I could finish my sentence. This was clearly something she was asked a lot.

I traipsed upstairs and, lo and behold, there on the racks sat dozens of tiger-print Onesies, alongside what looked like bear ones, too. I found the smallest size and shuffled into a changing room to see how I looked. The result was nothing short of stunning.

Well, okay, not stunning, and the mirrors did that weird "a thousand little Julias" thing, but it was a snug fit and, sure, it was extremely comfortable. I'm not about to buy one for myself, but I can see the appeal. I'm content with my Snuggie for now.

Anyway, I purchased the Onesie, happy with its look. I didn't really look like a tiger though, did I? I mean, my face looked like me and not a tiger's at all.... And so it was that I had my face painted to look like a tiger's face just before the session started. I'm going to be honest, the dressing-up-at-work thing is all part of the fun for me. The result? Incredible.

A lot of people were busy or attending a trip to a local farm also run by the Centre, and in the end only two children turned up to the session. They had a lot of fun though, so it was all worth it. I like that you can have thirty babies or just one four-year-old and it's still immensely satisfying when they enjoy the hard work you've put in.

We made our cakes, Nick Tiger being very naughty and trying to eat all the chocolate chips, and then we ran around outside for a bit, Nick Tiger chasing everyone. Afterwards, we sat down to eat our cakes and drink some milk whilst listening to The Tiger Who Came To Tea. I jokingly lapped at my cup of milk, pretending to be a cat, when one of the children pointed out that cats drink from bowls...

I figure that since I was already committed to this one, what with the face paint and all, that getting on all fours and lapping at a bowl of water wasn't going to harm any reputation and/or dignity I may have. I can tell you here and now that lapping at water is bloody tricky. The session ended soon afterwards and I washed the face paint away. It had been a successful day.

There we have it: a day in the life of Nick at SureStart. I love my job; I love working for SureStart and believe that it's a vitally important service for children and families, even when I'm not being stripy. The fact that we are able to not only provide this sort of activity, but to do so with no charge to the families attending, is a beautiful thing, and a rare one in a world where people are obsessed with earning, owning and saving money. They forget that all the money in the world cannot buy a child happiness and fun, and that however daft it may look, cakes and books and face paint all add up to a happy childhood.

My name is Nick Mellish, and this is my life.

Postscript: A 'Making Of' Post

2011-07-17T10:00:00.000+01:00

DECEMBER 8th 2010

[Upon having writing around 425 postcards across 2010]: "I doubt I will ever do it again, mostly because it's extremely time consuming."

JUNE 29th 2011

How did it come to this?

Well, sadly, I had an idea, which I've already explained here. Oh, it was a fairly simple idea (write a story in the format of letters, and send it as letters to people, handwritten for 'authenticity') but it was going to require a lot of planning.

First up, I sat down and worked out costs. This wasn't going to be a cheap thing to do, so I drew up a list of people I was going to send it to. I planned to send it to a select few people, and then put the story up on my blog (day by day) for those who hadn't received it.

I soon worked out that I could only afford to send one copy overseas: fair enough; I'd never expected it to work out differently really. I had however wanted to send the postcards to people in England and Scotland first class, but this too proved far too pricey, and so it was back to second class stamps. I had to make the decision not to send it day-by-day to friends of mine in Norwich, too, as it was just to pricey. A shame, but never mind.

My list drawn up, I went and purchased a load of postcards and stamps and set to it. I'd already written Postscript on my computer, so I knew what I was writing and how long each entry was. I sat down and started to write out an introduction, to be sent as a prelude to everybody getting a copy:

I then scribbled out a schedule for sending the postcards. My friend Phil lives in Scotland, and from previous experience I know the post to be slower there than it claims to be, so I sent out his postcards a day in advance; everyone in England was sent post two days before it was due to arrive: so, Tuesday morning for delivery on Thursday for example. Those in America had them sent a whole while longer, to account for the overseas delivery.

Over the next few nights (about ten of them), I copied out the story by hand twelve times. I then 'announced' on Twitter what I had done, only to have a fair few people asking me if there were any copies going spare.

We-ell...

And so it was that I ended up writing another ten copies and, including re-writing postcards to correct mistakes where needed, ended up writing 291 of the buggers.

By the time I'd finished, I was proper exhausted. I decided to take a 'victory' photo of myself: it took three attempts to get one...

All I wanted to do was post the last of the buggers. For these final copies, I sent them all in a package, at once, rather then day-by-day, purely for financial reasons. I'd written a slightly different introduction for them accordingly:

Fun though it was to write, I was glad to see them all go.

As for the story itself... it started in February. I was thinking about Religion (specifically Christianity) and the idea of a Heaven. I should say here that I'm a card-carrying atheist. I have been ever since the age of twelve or so, when I had stopped for a couple of moments and actually thought about the stuff I was being fed in assemblies and at church once a month (I was a Scout, and monthly attendance was part of the deal for admission). As soon as I did, it all crumbled. Of course there wasn't a God or Heaven or anything like that; it was all waffle.

I still believe that; I think it's all medieval claptrap. That doesn't stop me having a respect for something that has managed to survive for hundreds and thousands of years, or for the huge numbers of good people who believe and do right as a result of their belief. I just don't buy into it at all.

Anyway, with that in mind, I thought about what Heaven would actually be like if there really was a Heaven. I reasoned that it would probably be a bit dull really. For a start, everything would be perfect, which in itself would get dull quickly. Secondly, if people live there forever, then they have the time to become perfect at everything, so every piece of music you hear played live would be stunning, every passage of fiction writing an exceptional example of the writer's craft... and so on. Again, it would be a bit dull.

I moved on and thought about Heaven and its occupants, and why if there is a Heaven they never let us know they're up there. I came up with three plausible answers to this:

They cannot let us know; it's against the rules.
They can let us know, but are too happy (or, selfish) to spare a few minutes to give us the thumbs up or say, "hey, dudes, it's fine, I'm fab and safe."
There is no Heaven.

The third reason was counter-productive, so I thought more on the others. I then thought more about the idea of people going there where they believed in God and Heaven and the whole deal whilst their partners or close friends didn't... and suddenly it all seemed very bleak. How could you be truly happy in Heaven if not surrounded by your best friends and the people you truly love? The answer is surely either "you can't", or that something happens to change you: you no longer care about these sorts of things. And if that really is what happens, then frankly Heaven can piss off and leave me alone. I'm happy being flawed and human thankyouverymuch. I don't want to lose my personality and be changed; I don't want to just be a soul bobbing around in the ether.

It was an interesting idea though, and one which I wanted to write about. I sat down and wrote a short story, which I then re-drafted several times, which played with these concepts. There was a man in Heaven, watching everyone down below, happy because he is forced to be happy, with no tangible substance.

The story was shit.

It took a few weeks before I remembered this idea of sending a story in the medium of letters or postcards, and a few days more before I put two and two together and realized that, actually, this story idea I had about being 'trapped' in Heaven wasn't actually too bad after all...

I had a few rules for this format. Firstly, it couldn't be too explicit or rude as people would be reading it when handling it (or at least, they could easily do so). Secondly, the entries couldn't be too long for space reasons. I ended up with a limit of around 210 words; this meant I had to lose a few lines here and there but nothing essential by any means (though I miss a part excised from Postcard Five, I think, where Mary talks about monks and nuns and how they are ticked off that they've been pious all their lives and then atheists end up here in Heaven, so no-one is especially happy in the afterlife).
I'm not sure when I decided to punctuate each postcard with a song quotation. It's a rather cheesy thing to do really, but sod it, it was fun. Choosing the songs took no time at all; the only ones I quibbled over were the Sparks one (we nearly got this or, perhaps more appropriately, this) and the Pet Shop Boys's one (we nearly had this, but Being Boring is... well, it's just better). This song nearly got a look in, but Scissor Sisters won the day.

The plan was for the postcards to arrive one a day over two weeks, starting on a Monday and working through until the following week's Saturday. I planned the 'instalments' around this structure. So, the first couple of postcards are rather short as I didn't want it to be very heavy from the word go: you ease yourself into the story and its concepts. As you go on over the week, they get longer and the concepts/detail grow.
Postcard Six is purposely a bit lighter in tone than how they've been recently, or rather it has bits that feel lighter. I didn't want the last thing in people's minds over the weekend to be "well, that's a bit sad". (Of course, the underlying thing is sad really-- she is dead, he is alive, both feel down-- but hopefully it's funny in parts, too.)
Things in the second week are a bit more playful. Now the concepts were out of the way, I wanted to play a bit more with everything. Hopefully, it feels like you've earned it by then, as a reader and, for me, as the writer. I think that by now we've worked our way to a point where you can poke around.
By the time we reach the end, you get a good idea of the situation. You realize that Mary and John didn't actually know one another all that well at all, but despite that, they're still writing to one another; they're still looking out for each other; they're still in love.
The very end is hopefully sweet rather than corny or vom-worthy. I don't know; I like to think I pulled that off but you never can tell. I mentioned earlier how I'd mused on the idea of everyone ending up in Heaven because Heaven is everyone you love, and once that was there as an idea in my mind, it was clear how this was going to end. It fitted well.
I really do believe that all you need is love and that love is all you need. I don't care if people find that dull or idealistic or boring to read about; I'll never stop writing about it. Hell, even the silly story with Kate Bush and David Bowie stuck in towers ends on that sort of note.

So, Postscript then. I hope you all enjoyed it.
Nick x

Postscript: 12 of 12

2011-07-16T12:10:00.002+01:00

I found that cat, John.

It was ‘stolen’ by an old man with salmon. (Basically, the cat switched allegiances, the capricious git.) Oh, and the posters have been stolen by the owner’s housemate who secretly hates cats. Bloody students.

A year has passed now since I died and even here, 365 days is a long time. Enough moping though: tonight, I saved a sparrow. Well, ‘saved’ is a bit strong since it cannot die. Again. Cannot die again. Look, the point is that Barcelona went to get him but I dived in and saved the bird. It flew back to its nest where it waited for its mate.

That’s it, isn’t it? I’m waiting for you. When you arrive, it really will be Heaven as Heaven is spending forever after with the person you love. (Some things are the same whether you’re alive or dead apparently.)

I think everyone is saved and ends up in Heaven regardless of your own belief or lack thereof, because there will always be people out there who think that Heaven is spending eternity with you. That’s nice. (Nauseating?)

I’ll miss your letters John but you’re right: time to live. I’ll sign off here, too. Besides, I promised a wandering nun that I’d use my teeth to help her stargaze and she’ll be here soon. Nuns are remarkably fussy.

Goodbye, John. Beard or no, I still and will always love you.

Mary xxx

"All you need is love; love is all you need."

The Beatles

Postscript: 11 of 12

2011-07-15T12:10:00.002+01:00

Sweet Mary,

It’s been raining since I got back from church. I must confess that I’m feeling awkward there right now as one of the congregation, Gillian, seems to be flirting with me. I must confess, too, that I flirted back. I’m so, so sorry my love. I think I may pack up my guitar, shave, and leave before anyone gets hurt or upset.

I think also that maybe it’s time for me to stop all this writing and be alive. I’ve a life to live, something I need to keep doing to get myself ready to meet you again. You used to cry over films where they come down from Heaven and say goodbye for good. You used to write about people getting that second chance. You never believed it though; you said it was a fairy tale to keep us tucked in at night or when we were upset. Well, you’re wrong Mary. I’m coming to get you, just you wait. You’re there, I just know it, safe in Heaven, happy in Paradise and its perfections.

I’ll keep on praying, even if you pretend to not be around to hear it.

All my loving,

John xxx

"We'll meet again: don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

Vera Lynn

Postscript: 10 of 12

2011-07-14T12:10:00.003+01:00

Hello John: I’m watching you!

When I was at school, I got told off for asking whether God ever watched us in private or not. I’d been told He was at and in all places, that He was watching and listening everywhere, and it freaked me out. My mind ran wild: did He watch us making out with the boy next door? Watch me try to light a cigarette with a flaming Ace of Clubs and lose my fringe? Watch me on the toilet?

I lost those thoughts later on, thinking them as ridiculous as God Himself, but I was wrong: I CAN SEE YOU! I can watch you shower or laugh or ‘accidentally’ brush against Gillian at church or yawn. This place is freaking creepy sometimes– maybe that’s what you get from hanging around the dead? Maybe that’s the sort of thing I’d write in one of my ‘conceptually odd’ books. Ahem.

In other news, no sight of your missing cat. I’ll keep ‘em peeled.

In, errr, other other news, I accidentally swallowed a phosphorescent diamond today whilst swimming in the Lake of Immersive Bliss. My teeth now glow, which makes it impossible to go to the cinema. I may pass a decade as a human disco, for kicks.

Mary xxx

"You'll never walk alone."

Gerry & The Pacemakers

Postscript: 9 of 12

2011-07-13T12:10:00.002+01:00

My Mary,

I seem to have wandered into a situation not unlike one of your... shall we say ‘more conceptually odd’ novels. A cat went missing in the neighbourhood about a month ago now and many ‘MY CAT IS MISSING’ posters were put up. They then vanished and then appeared again, and then vanished again and then I saw someone putting one up again this afternoon. Sort of.

I got talking to them and casually suggested that they blocked their cat flap, to which they replied that the cat hasn’t actually returned yet but someone keeps on stealing their ‘MY CAT IS MISSING’ posters. In fact, they were currently in the process of hanging up a sign reading ‘MY ‘MY CAT IS MISSING’ POSTER IS MISSING’. I wonder if someone has stolen the cat and that the same person is now stealing the posters to try and cover their tracks....

If you were here, I bet you’d investigate, but I’m going to let it slide. Curiosity and cats don’t mix.

All my loving,

John xxx

"Life is demanding without understanding."

Ace of Base

Postscript: 8 of 12

2011-07-12T12:10:00.002+01:00

You did what?!

John, you thorough bastard! I now have that bloody dog running around my feet the whole time. It’s even more annoying now it’s dead; it chases ghost cats through my essence and goes to the toilet all over my ethereal self. It’s a pain, John, I shall not forget you’ve done this: hell, I’ve got eternity to not forget and it’s clearly going nowhere, no matter how many sticks I throw off the edge of the Waterfall of Effervescent Splendour or over the Hills of Frantic Joy. (Who named these places? It’s like walking round the magical world of candy– which I could do by turning left at the Fractured Crossroads of Intrigue. Gak.)

Oh, and I saw the way you ‘helped’ Gillian with her shopping the other day, ‘accidentally’ glancing down her top at her bra and everything else. Pathetic.

And another thing! I knew exactly where I was driving the day I died: just because you haven’t heard of shortcuts doesn’t mean I need a map. Heck, if you’d been driving you’d be up here now and I’d be the one down on Earth, all alone with only the stupid dog. OH WAIT.

Great, Barcelona’s thrown up.

NOT FORGIVING YOU, JOHN.

Mary.

"The ties of love are strong but they can be undone."

Teddy Thompson

Postscript: 7 of 12

2011-07-11T12:10:00.000+01:00

Dear Mary,

I am terribly sorry to have to inform you that Barcelona had to be put down this morning. I know how much he meant to you. He was acting unwell over the weekend and I took him to a vet today. It was over very quickly; I stroked his head until the very end.

I’m going to have him cremated and scattered across the beach where you were scattered, too. I think it’s what you would have wanted. (Distastefully, the radio was playing Dog Days Are Over on the way back home. I switched stations.)

Maybe your best friend will visit you now; I think that would be nice. I will pray tonight and see that God sorts it out.

All my loving,

John xxx

P.S. Found the remote. It was behind the sofa.

"I've lost my friend and now I can't be found."

Scissor Sisters

Postscript: 6 of 12

2011-07-10T12:10:00.003+01:00

Mary. My Mary.

If you had let me read the map, you would not be dead. You would be alive and not scattered over a beach. Where did you even go? The wind took you; you probably got in people’s hair or in seagulls or sails (perhaps) and all because you wouldn’t let me read that stupid map.

You would have gone straight ahead, not right. You would have not died.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. My therapist says it’s common to be replaying this sort of thing, that it’s natural. She then charges me a lot for saying so.

I’ve been going to church a lot, too. They’ve asked me to help with the music on sundays, so I’ve dusted down my guitar and grown a suitable ‘guitarist’s beard’ beard. I look like a new man; I feel like a snapped one. I only hope you hear my prayers and I don’t just end up on a celestial answerphone.

All my loving,

John xxx

P.S. Have you seen the remote for the TV? I can’t see it anywhere.

"We cover distance, but not together."

Röyksopp

Postscript: 5 of 12

2011-07-09T12:10:00.000+01:00

What?

Hang on, you don’t like the dog? I bloody hated the dog: I thought that you liked it? Jesus wept. I know we weren’t big on talking, but that’s ridiculous. I only ever walked it and looked after it because I thought you liked it. Poor Barcelona.

I’m bored, John. It’s dull up here. Heaven’s just too perfect– every meal, every concert, every sonnet– because here you’re eternal and so you have everlasting time to practice and become perfect. I don’t want to be perfect. To be a better writer? Sure, but to be the perfect writer? No. I want flaws; I want a bit of a disaster, but it’s not to be.

We were never meant to be eternal. We come, we blaze, we go, but the gods felt sorry for us and thought our blips of life should keep on blipping and so they made infinity our reward: but they were wrong. We were not designed to live forever; we haven’t the capacity for eternity. They screwed up and now I’m stuck here in perfection. You should get up here, stat, and start making a mess of things.

Mary xxx

P.S. Oh, and get rid of that hideous beard. You look drunk.

"Mark my words, I might be something someday."

Tegan and Sara

Postscript: 4 of 12

2011-07-08T12:10:00.013+01:00

Beloved Mary,

The postman delivered a package for you today: a writing magazine you were subscribed to. I called the publishers and cancelled your subscription. I then cancelled the papers, the milk: the things you used, but that I’ve found I never do.

When I got back, Barcelona was asleep on the magazine. I went and found all of your manuscripts, even the parts you wouldn’t let me read. I read them, Mary. I read them all. They haunted and amused and confused me and made me cry like no other. You always were a great writer; I should send them off and see if you can have the luck now which you deserved before the accident.

Barcelona then started to whine and so I had to take him for a walk. He misses you. He waits by our bedroom door at night, lays on your side of the bed when I’m out of the house. I must confess though that I’ve never cared for the dog and he doesn’t care for me either. I don’t hate him, but it was really only ever for you that I tolerated him.

It’s just started to rain hard. I should bring the washing in, but it’s too late.

All my loving,

John xxx

"I just thought I'd let you know goodbye," said the hero in the story. "It is mightier than swords. I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words."

Belle And Sebastian

Postscript: 3 of 12

2011-07-07T12:10:00.005+01:00

Hello John,

I see you are writing to me, too. That’s sweet. I don’t dribble though, that’s a lie. You do snore though, so you should maybe sort that out before you make stuff up about me dribbling.

Anyway. Since I’m stuck here for the long haul (ha ha ha), I figure I should fill you in on how things are up here. (Why am I even here? I didn’t believe and that’s sinful, so... I don’t know, I guess there was an administrative error.)

Things, then. Things here are white. Very, very white. ‘Gleaming’ would be a good word to describe it, or maybe ‘antiseptic’? They really have taken the purity aesthetic and run with it. I mean, each to their own but there’s only so many shades of blank a girl can take before it makes her frown.

Everything is perfect here, and I mean that in a very real sense. I can go on perfect walks, drink perfect drinks, laugh at perfect jokes. Nothing breaks, nothing falters, nothing stalls, ticks follow tocks. This is a Heaven as you read about it at school; it’s a place where all is well and perfect. Except it isn’t, because I’m dead.

There lies the elephant in the room.

Mary xxx

"No alarms and no surprises."

Radiohead

Postscript: 2 of 12

2011-07-06T12:10:00.012+01:00

Dearest Mary,

I have been told that putting pen to paper is a good way to speed up the grieving process and help me heal: it’s cathartic and will help me clear my mind.

It’s been over eleven months now since the accident; nearly a whole year since you were taken from me. Not a day goes by where I wake up and am not surprised to find that you’re not lying next to me in bed. Dribbling. (Sorry my love, but I have been told to write it all, every detail.)

I can, and do, but pray you are in that blessed place whose very existence you so lovingly denied.

All my loving,

John xxx

"I thought, in spite of dreams, you'd be sitting somewhere here with me."

Pet Shop Boys

Postscript: 1 of 12

2011-07-05T12:10:00.009+01:00

Well, this sucks.

So, it turns out you were right. Congratulations, John. Guess I owe you those five dollars. Yes, there is a Heaven. No, we are not alone in this infinite vacuum: there is indeed ‘something else’.

Guess I have a lot of apologizing to do– except I don’t as they’re pretty big on forgiveness here. Worryingly so. I tripped over this morning and before I could get up, a shoal of virgins had appeared and pardoned the man in front of me who’d failed to catch me as I fell.

Talk soon,

Mary xxx

"The one who has made us all can't be seen even if you're tall."

Sparks.

Postscript: An Introduction

2011-07-04T10:40:00.001+01:00

It's been a (very) long time now since I last posted anything on my blog, for which I apologize. The reason is simple: I've been very busy, writing. Back in February, I wrote a short story as part of my New Year's Resolution, but quite frankly it wasn't very good.
About three years ago, I had hit upon an idea. I'd always wanted to write an epistolary story (that is, a story written in the format of letters) but I hadn't been very good at them when I'd tried. My idea was to continue trying to write such a story, but that rather than just writing it, I'd handwrite it on postcards and send it, letter by letter, to people: so, a story unfolding as mail would be sent to be people as mail.
It took me a little while to realize that the idea I'd had back in February would be perfect for this format. I'd taken a (reasonably) good idea and written it as a pretty bad short story. Now was my opportunity to re-write the story, in this new format, and hopefully make it something (reasonably) good.
So, I did just that. Over the course of four weeks, I re-wrote the story and then copied it, handwritten, onto several postcards. I sent copies of them, day by day, to a select few people (mostly because it was quite costly); a few people received it all in one lump in a padded envelope round about the time people would have had postcard twelve, the final 'chapter'/instalment, delivered to them.
I promised that I'd put the story up on this blog after I'd sent it to people, so here we are. Starting tomorrow, I'll be posting a 'postcard' a day. I hope you all enjoy it.

Coming soon...

POSTSCRIPT

A tale of here and the hereafter in twelve postcards.

The L Word: Season Six

2011-05-23T18:12:00.001+01:00

Y'know, I was dreading this season, I really was. I had felt that the series had grown sillier and staler after Season Three, that the quality had really dipped: and, let me be honest from the start, there is a lot that irked me about these final eight episodes, but... well, you'll see. It's not perfect, but it's far from as bad as I had expected. So, one final time...

FIVE THINGS I HAVE LEARNT FROM THE L WORD, SEASON SIX

Heterosexual men are crap! Yes, this again. I'm not even going to start. For a series with acceptance at its heart, this recurring notion of men who identify as heterosexual turning out to be corrupt, cheaters, bastards, shits, liars or a combination of them all has gone from irritating to irksome to insulting. A real shame.
When you get angry, you get homophobic. At least, that's the case with Max: which, of course, goes against his whole character and... actually, I'm going to save my breath and not bother. Just take it as read that I screamed with frustration at the idiocy of that moment.
Helena is sometimes interested in discussing rubber trees. No, really. At one point, she quite clearly states that she "isn't interested in rubber trees right now", implying that there are times when she is. Crazy Brits.
Anyone can be a murderer: anyone. Apparently. This is how the season works: nigh-on every episode begins with Jenny pissing someone off chronically which results in them storming off into the camera and wishing death upon her. These reasons range from the dumb such as Jenny telling Max he is a woman (a crassly insensitive and completely implausible moment that completely goes against all of Jenny's support for Max throughout the series as a whole) to the more typical and believable (Jenny steals Alice's idea for a screenplay: a selfish, self-centred act typical of Jenny). The trouble with this is that to really buy into this, we have to believe that one of the characters is actually capable of murder, and... well, that's just stupid, isn't it? I don't believe it. I can believe that someone would be fuming, especially given how awful a person Jenny is, but murder? To actually go and kill her? No, I don't buy it, and given how the season ends without anyone of us knowing who killed Jenny, I'm going to keep on believing that it was an accident and that no-one did kill her, because to believe otherwise is rather upsetting, really.
You really can save the best for last...

... yes, it's true because (deep breath) I enjoyed the final episode a lot. Is it perfect? No, mostly because it has a completely unique style, which for an episode wrapping up an entire series feels like a silly thing to do, but despite that, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it because it fixes a lot of the problems that have gone before.

If you had asked me to write this list before watching the final episode, I'd have cited the ridiculousness of Shane and Jenny's relationship as a real flaw: and it is, but one of the worst aspects of it is that once again we're led into 'Shane is going to be monogamous... OH NO, WAIT, SHE ISN'T!' territory, which is repetitive, done to death and dull: except this doesn't happen. The point here actually is that Shane really is ready to settle down and stick to one woman, and she would have done with Molly but Jenny got there first. Their relationship is still dumb and unbelievable, but in the final episode it's made heartbreaking, too, when Shane realizes that she's been denied happiness with Molly, someone she really, truly loved. It's a really upsetting moment and a really affecting one.

The final episode also helps cement Bette and Tina once again. Now, I still think the handling of that storyline was fucking appalling: poor Jodie. (How dare everyone treat her as a nuisance after she's broken up with Bette because Bette cheated on her?!) However, getting them back together gives this season an excuse to show how their type of relationship is in fact damaged by the small community in which they live, and so when they announce that they're going to leave... well, it makes sense, it makes for a neat, natural end to the series. It started with them trying to have a child and make a life for themselves, it ends with them leaving LA, happy and secure. And, of course, Jenny goes and dies and becomes the centre of attention in her usual self-obsessed way. But of course.

The episode gives Alice and Helena nice mini-crisises to fret through, miniature versions of plot threads that usually span five or six episodes, which makes a nice comment on how their sort of drama is the sort Bette and Tina are trying to leave. Seen here, there are silly, easily resolvable (happily or unhappily) and overblown.

The final episode is less successful in its treatment of Max (after weeks of umming and aahing about his pregnancy, he is okay with it all, mainly because it's the very last episode and they want to quickly wrap the storyline up) and Kit: her showdown with Bette is brushed over and a bit silly as a result, which is a shame but given how badly Kit has been written for these past two seasons, I'm fine with less Kit time.

Despite it all though, I really enjoyed it. It's the most solid episode Chaiken gave us viewers for years; perhaps she really was trying to save some of her very best for last.

And there were are. Oh, The L Word, how you have veered from excellence to the dregs of terribleness. You should have dealt with certain issues more sensitively, or at all; you should have stopped hating on heterosexual men; you should have never included Jenny. But you existed. You gave homosexual women mainstream visibility in a successful way that quite simply hadn't been seen on TV before in this way: for better or worse. I can never fault you because of that. You were crap at times, but, by god, you were important: and for that, I kinda love you. I wish you'd had a theme tune that wasn't completely shit mind you, but you cannot have everything.

Love/hate, eh? Much like most of the characters in the series itself, and perhaps that's the best reflection there is. Bless you, The L Word. You have entertained me, annoyed me and frustrated me, but my word I'm glad you existed.

Rambles

2011-05-19T20:32:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I last posted anything on this old blog of mine: apologies; life has been busy. I thought I'd write a little diary about my life as it is right now make up for it. It's okay, this isn't going to be an "I'm so single and lonely, woe is me!" post (at least, not this time).
But, yes, eight things. (By its very nature, this is going to be a very egocentric post, isn't it? Ooops.)

My writing is going well, though my letter writing has somewhat faded away: sorry everyone! I guess I'm still suffering burnout after sending out thirty-four postcards every month for a year. Phew. My story writing though continues apace. My New Year's Resolution this year was to write a short story a month, so I end up with an 'anthology' I can give and/or e-mail people at Christmas. I've yet to write this month's tale, but it's going rather well so far. In fact, the story I wrote in March is close to being the best thing I've ever written, in my opinion. So, yes, happy times.
I watched Hall Pass a few weeks ago. Don't do it; it's shit.
I have never been to Paris. I feel I should rectify this over the course of 2011.
I said a while back that I'd be blogging about narrative theory (or rather, that I'd be writing about my thoughts on it). It hasn't happened yet, but I still plan to do so somewhen. Not sure when, but somewhen.
"I love you more than words can wield the matter" may well be my favourite line from Shakespeare. I'm not sure though as this changes every couple of months or thereabouts.
I've been pondering a lot about identity, gender vs. sex, the usual once again. Do I have to identify with anything? I'm not sure. I like the idea of ticking both 'male' and 'female' boxes when asked what my gender is as I'd like to think I have decent enough facets of them both.
I have started to run; I am now a runner. This evening, I managed to run six miles (9.65 kilometres) in 52 minutes and 47 seconds, which I feel pretty damn good about: better still, I felt pretty good on it afterwards, so I reckon I can start pushing seven miles soon. Norwich is proving to be a nice place to run around, especially the lake at UEA which is gorgeous. My plan is to run four half-marathons next year, each one for a different charity (NSPCC, ME Research, Terrence Higgins Trust and Teenage Cancer Trust). I donate monthly to all of these, and each one means something special to me. So, yes, wish me luck!
I'm still enjoying my job a lot. It allows for me to wear an awful lot of hats, which is terribly exciting.

That's about it, really. I'll try and blog more often, I promise.

...

Oh, and whilst I did keep my promise, the fact of the matter is that I am single and lonely, so if anyone, anonymously or otherwise, fancies declaring their love or telling me that they fancy the pants off me, then that'd be fab.

The L Word: Season Five

2011-04-25T20:21:00.001+01:00

What do you do when you see something you like slowly destroy itself, crumbling away, replacing its highs with lows and its positive attributes with a continual series of mistakes? I asked this of myself several times during Season Five of The L Word. It's not all bad; it has moments that are truly very good. Its glory days are long behind it though, and it has problems aplenty. When I have watched the sixth and final season of the show, I will no doubt type up a series overview, so expect more details then, but for now, five things this show taught me in its fifth year:

FIVE THINGS I HAVE LEARNT FROM THE L WORD, SEASON FIVE

Men are rubbish! Yes, this old chestnut again. We have male producers unable to see what a precious commodity they have in Les Girls, we have a male solider who needs his wife to show him how unjust Don't Ask, Don't Tell is, we have a complete absence of Mangus now with no mention of this whatsoever despite a reunion between himself and Kit very clearly flagged up at the end of Season Four... seriously, after five seasons of this, it's getting very tiring. The show goes out of its way elsewhere to promote and celebrate equality, but does so in a world where no good heterosexual men exist, or they at least need a woman to get them anywhere if they do. It's getting insulting now.
Max is not an interesting character, or at least the writers don't think so. He vanishes mysteriously for whole episodes at a time for no good reason. Heck, even Dawn and 'her lover Cindy' get more attention this season. And then there's Helena who isn't in the series at all for the most part and yet still makes more of an impression than poor Max. Guess being all techo-savvy and knowing what a podcast is just doesn't cut it anymore. Sad times.
A good soundtrack does not a good episode make. Just look at Lights! Camera! Action! for example: even The Pipettes and a sex scene to the gentle strains of Love And Affection couldn't save it from being completely shit.
Infidelity is wrong, unless it's Bette and Tina, then it's fine. Oh, sure, we'll act outraged on Jodie's behalf, but we'll quickly get over it because, hey, they're meant to be together, so that's okay then. Poor Jodie; any pretence on the writers' behalf of sympathy towards her quickly vanishes when it becomes clear that, really, we're not meant to care as we're meant to be more emotionally invested in Bette and Tina as a couple. It's sloppy.
The most unlikely of people may be killers. Look at Kit: the harmless owner of a coffee shop, or a potential murderer with poor gun control who needs to see a loaded weapon in the hands of a four-year-old girl to see the error of her ways? Ummm, both, apparently. If there was a plot strand which summed up everything that was shit about the writing throughout the majority of this season, it's this plot strand. Terrible, truly terrible.

Yartek Says...

2011-04-23T09:55:00.000+01:00

YARTEK, LEADER OF THE ALIEN VOORD SAYS...

"I don't need a parachute baby when I got you [...] You're gonna catch me when I fall down, down down."

The more I listen to Cheryl Cole's lyrics, the more I don't think that she actually knows what a parachute is. That's more of a safety net or trampoline, surely? Foolish Earthling.

The L Word: Season Four

2011-03-28T21:23:00.000+01:00

Four seasons in now, but what have I learnt about the way, the way that we live, the way that we liiiiiiiiiive, and loooooooooooove? Let us find out.

FIVE THINGS I HAVE LEARNT FROM THE L WORD, SEASON FOUR

I don't care about Bette and Tina in any way shape or form. I especially don't care about their on/off relationship since there is no hint whatsoever in Season Four that they will reconcile until the writers think that maybe they should and the characters then undergo a complete u-turn in their attitudes towards one another in order to try and fulfil it. Will they?/Won't they? only works when they don't veer from killing one another to lusting after one another between episodes depending on who is writing the scripts. It's especially odd as they seem to really be pushing for Bette to find love elsewhere: indeed, when she steals the metal sign in the last episode in order to steal a girl's heart, it's the first time I've ever warmed to her.
Some people find criticism hard to take. I mean, look at Jenny: someone points out that her writing is narcissistic and shit, and she goes and kills a dog before splitting up a relationship as an encore. And then we are sort of meant to feel sorry for her. Christ, I hate Jenny. (Mia Kirshner is still a better actress than Daniela Sea, chiefly because she can act whilst Sea can't.)
OMG, gay people and straight people are, like, SO TOTALLY DIFFERENT, MAN! Look at that scene at the party where THEY DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT EACH OTHER because OMG, THEY'RE SO DIFFERENT!!!!!!!!11111 and so on. You want to make a point about the different 'scenes', lifestyles and habits of heterosexual and homosexual people? Fine, but please do so in a way that's not so cringeworthy and shit as the party scene. Indeed, 3a of what I've learnt is this: Ilene Chaiken cannot write for heterosexual characters. They're almost all duplicitous, sexist, homophobic or all-out assholes. The exception to this was Angus, and then she makes him have an affair. (Then again, fidelity isn't exactly the priority of anyone in this show, so perhaps he's just conforming after all.) Seriously though, it's borderline insulting.
This show can still surprise me. It's not big on subtlety, but then we have Max, which could have been handled so badly but is instead executed with care, and we've also the surprisingly subtle theme of Shane, Bette and Tina having to sell-out their beliefs slightly in order to look after children. (Tina works on a film she hates, Bette tells an artist to hide her work in order to keep the money coming in, Shane does her photography.) Sometimes, just sometimes, I'm surprised that it can have this sort of subtle plot but god knows there's not much sign of that elsewhere. On a related note, big issues can either be swept aside or pushed into the spotlight. For example, the morality of the war in Iraq will get episodes' worth of dialogue, but a discussion on what being 'lesbian' is as an identity or lifestyle or label etc. will get fobbed off in a short scene before a basketball match. It means that when anything is discussed in any real depth, it's a great surprise. It's not always a good surprise in store though: check out the way Alice's secret relationship with Lara, which is suddenly not a secret in the first episode of this season because... actually, I'm not sure why. Perhaps they ran out of plot.
Having no money sucks. It sucks for the show because part of the show's appeal is to do outrageous, and outrageously expensive, things. How to solve that? Easy, draft in a rich character. Ooooh, but you've taken her money away. Oh noes! How to solve that? Easy, make her hook up with an obscenely rich woman, and then make her fantastic at gambling. But of course.