Monday 30 January 2012

Avon calling

The fecking phone rang just as I was skiing down that delicious, sweet slope towards a Sunday morning lie in. I ignored it twice but it came back like one of those itches by your shoulder blades that lets you off for a while but then sends you a three line demand for a scratch. I stretched an arm out into the cold air and picked it up.
      ‘Hello’
      ‘Hello, can you speak up please, I can’t quite hear you.’
      ‘Can you hear me now?’ I said, louder, ready to hang up.
      ‘Is that the Samaritans?’ asked the voice which vied with mine for timidity. I had been afraid it would be another of those bullies who demand you change your gas or electricity supplier, but it was just some eejit winding me up.
      ‘No, this is a private number,’ I said, about to put the phone down.  The quiet weeping from the other end of the line dissolved my anger at being woken up as I rubbed my throbbing head. I waited for a moment then said ‘Can I help you?’
      ‘I’ve got no one to talk to. I can’t do it on my own and now I can’t even call the right number. I’m useless, I’ve had enough, I’m going to end it for both of us.’ I recognised the desperation in the voice. I’d been there myself. How could I now just hang up with a cheerful ‘Sorry, wrong number’ and then get on with my life?
      ‘Who is there with you?’ I asked.
      ‘It’s just me and Eleanor.’
      ‘Who is Eleanor?
      ‘She’s my baby.’
      ‘You can talk to me if you like,’ I waited. I now suspected the telephone was the only tenuous lifeline this poor soul had left and I knew I should choose my words with care. My gaze became fixed on my favourite set of darts, left on the hall table after returning from last night’s victory at the Hen and Chicken. I noticed then, just outside the window to the side of my front door, that the drain at the bottom of the stone steps was covered by leaves. That would mean a flood during the next rains unless I remembered to clear it. Rats, how could I think about trivial things like this when a life was at stake? I sighed and then …
      ‘My name’s Susan, what’s yours? ‘said the shaky voice.
      ‘I’m Mary. Can you tell me what the problem is Susan? I promise I won’t tell anyone or do anything you don’t want me to.’
      ‘Hello Mary. I can’t talk for long. I’m in a phone box and I haven’t got much change.’
      ‘That’s no problem, give me the number and I’ll call you back.’
I rang her back, quickly, would she still be there? Had she got the right number this time?
      ‘Hallo Mary,’ said Susan.
I sighed with relief.
      ‘Can you describe yourself, Susan, so that I can picture you while we talk?’ I asked
      ‘Well, I am sixteen, quite short, I suppose, at about five foot two, slim err, well apart from a bit of a bump, with long blonde hair. I’m five months pregnant. I went for the tests and a scan last week and everything is OK. I asked them and they told me I’m going to have a little girl. Her name is Eleanor.’
      ‘Why are you so upset then, Charley, sorry, Susan? It sounds like everything is fine, both you and Eleanor are healthy and you obviously mean to keep the baby or you wouldn’t have given her a name.’ I could hear Susan crying at this.
      ‘Of course I am going to keep Eleanor. How could you possibly think I could kill her?’ she said ‘ I’m upset because, when I told my Mum and Dad about Eleanor last week, they kicked me out and told me they didn’t want to know me any more. “How could you do this to us?” They said. They even took my mobile. They said I wasn’t their daughter any more.’
      ‘Erm, I’m sorry Susan, I didn’t mean to upset you. Where have you stayed since then?’
      ‘I’m sofa surfing with my school friends at the moment, but I can’t do that for ever. I need to find somewhere permanent’.
      ‘What about Eleanor’s father, can’t he help?
      ‘He’s a complete waste of space so forget him. He just took off when I told him and I haven’t seen him since.’
      ‘That sounds just like what happened to me, men are useless aren’t they?’ I said.
      ‘What do you mean? What happened to you?’
      ‘Err, well, I was seventeen and still at school when I fell pregnant with Charlotte. My boyfriend, Kevin, disappeared and I haven’t seen him since.’
      ‘How did you manage then?’ asked Susan
      ‘Mum and Dad were great. They really helped me and made sure we had everything we needed. It was still difficult but I worked part time in Boots while Mum looked after Charley and I managed to buy a small flat and save so that she could go to university if she wanted. The hardest part was being totally responsible for someone with no one to share the load with.’
      ‘That is exactly how I feel, but at least your mum and dad helped you and you had someone to talk to.’ I realised then how alone Susan must be feeling. I was starting to feel responsible for her now, or perhaps she was beginning to fill the gap in my life which had been there since Charley had left?
      ‘Well, err, perhaps you would like to come around here one evening? We could have a chat and a cup of tea.’
      ‘I would really like that, Mary, you are so easy to talk to.  I’ll have to go now, there is some guy hammering on the glass again’
      ‘OK,’ I said, ‘but please ring me tomorrow evening or anytime during the night if you need to talk. Promise me. Please.’
      ‘OK, I promise,’ said Susan.
      I went through the rest of the day in a brain fog. I still don’t really remember what I did  but the day passed and hunger came so I made a scratch meal of cheese on toast as it was too late to prepare any complicated food and I had missed the buffet at the darts practice. I sat there in my tiny kitchen, thinking about Susan’s story and her desperation. She was all alone. The cheese grew cold, unnoticed, as I relived part of my own life twenty years ago, when I had fallen pregnant. How different it had been for me.

I had thought my boyfriend, Kevin, was my soul mate and life partner but he disappeared as soon as I told him the news. I was closest to Mum but I broke the news to Dad.
      ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Dad’ I said ‘I’ve been trying to get the nerve to tell you all this week.’
      ‘What’s up then love,’ said Dad, ‘have you got some problems at school?
      ‘I, I, I’m having a baby, Dad.’
      ‘Wow, that is a surprise. That’s wonderful Mary, I’ll be a Granddad.
      ‘I love you Dad,’ I said, through my tears.
      ‘I love both of you,’ said my hero, with a hug.
      ‘But, you and Mum will be ashamed of me now, won’t you.’
      ‘I’ll show you how ashamed I am,’ he said, ‘we’ll go and have a chat with your Mum, tell her the good news and then you can come down the Hen and Chicken with me and we will have a drink while we play’ I had forgotten it was practice night for  Dad’s darts team, The Clifton Arrows. ‘I can tell all the lads I’m going to be a Granddad.’           
      It was a good night at the pub, several toasts were drunk to Declan’s forthcoming promotion to grandfatherly status. I was even allowed to have a go and was acclaimed as having a natural talent on the oche.
      Kevin wasn’t seen again but I wrote his details in my baby diary as I wanted her to know who her father was, perhaps even meet him one day. Yes, my baby was a girl. I named her Charlotte, after my favourite Gran.
      I bought the tiny two bedroom garden flat in a cheaper part of town so that I could save for Charley’s future. It was facing up a hill so the front door was in a basement but the kitchen door led out into a garden I called my sanctuary. I filled it with marigolds, foxgloves and phlox.

It was difficult without her now she was away at Southampton studying environmental science. I enjoyed life although, of course I missed Charley, but I had always known my beautiful daughter would one day grow up and leave.
      My social life has been mainly based around the weekly darts practice down at the Hen and my membership of the pub team who still call me ‘Declan’s lass’, even though Dad died nine years ago. I sometimes wonder if my team mates even know my real name.
      It was getting dark now in the flat so I roused myself, placed my untouched meal on the side, ready for the birds in the morning and made a mug of cocoa. I would have trouble sleeping tonight because of all the emotions Susan had stirred up and the memories running around my head. I fetched a blanket from the cupboard in my bedroom, wrapped it around me and put the phone nearby on the coffee table so I would be certain to hear it during the night. Susan didn’t call.
      I managed to get through the next day at work although my heart wasn’t really in it and my thoughts were elsewhere. I got home early and wondered what time Susan would ring. I waited by the phone to make sure I would hear it. When it got to ten o’clock I started to wonder and by midnight I was very worried. I eventually dozed off in the chair by the phone and awoke, stiff and cold, at six next morning. What could have happened? Susan had promised and I was certain she would have called if it had been at all possible.
      I struggled to get ready for work and eat some breakfast, hungry after missing my meal the previous evenings. I set off for the twenty minute drive across Bristol to the Avixa insurance offices. I listened to the news, as usual, on Heart FM. The second headline was a local item. A young woman’s body had been found on the river bank far below the Clifton suspension bridge, a ‘popular’ suicide spot. She was described as five foot three , slim with long blond hair. There was no mention of her being pregnant but I thought they would keep that private until she had been identified. Her clothes were also described but by this time I had stopped listening, stopped the car and stopped worrying about Susan.
      I knew she was dead, Susan had no troubles now. All my talking and listening had been a waste of time, I had failed my new friend. I had thought I was a good listener but now I knew I was useless. I should have persuaded her to stay with me last night, she could have slept in Charley’s room. She had died because I hadn’t helped her. I couldn’t face work now so I turned the car and  meandered home.
      I made a mug of tea, took it out to my sanctuary and just sat there in the morning sunshine. I could smell the phlox as I watched a bumble bee make its rounds.  Susan would never enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face again. Eleanor would never have a chance to enjoy these delights. What had made her do it?  The stupid, stupid, girl, why hadn’t she called me or rang the Samaritans from one of the special phones on the bridge? She had seemed quite cheerful when we finished talking. She was thinking of ways to deal with her problems and could even see a future for them both. What had changed after she hung up? What a terrible waste of two  lives. She hadn’t given Eleanor a chance of a life by cutting her own so short. I had failed them, let them down. It was all my fault.
      The phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it but I knew they would only keep on pestering me about my gas supply or some such nonsense so I answered it.
      ‘Hello?’
      ‘Hi Mary, it’s Susan, sorry I didn’t call last night, it all got a bit hectic yesterday, sorting things out after our talk, then I couldn’t find the piece of paper I had written your number on until this morning and I knew you wouldn’t  mind if I left it until today, it was wonderful talking to you, you really made me look at things differently and helped me see a way forward, you are a real life saver, I’ve found somewhere for us to live, will you be Eleanor’s Godmother,  you’ll never guess what I have done now after your advice …’
      I couldn’t speak, the tears rolled slowly down my cheeks.

Writing challenge 26th January 2012


The Solar Storm
Ceres paused Arthur’s Fountains of Paradise that was slowly scrolling down the screen. She wanted to watch the predicted display as she passed through the Van Allen radiation belts. It should be spectacular tonight, especially as the sun was throwing out Corona Mass Ejections – CMEs – at irregular intervals during this eleven year solar maximum.
      She wasn’t supposed to be on this trip but had swapped her place on the duty roster with Sergei as she still enjoyed the work and couldn’t imagine anything better than seeing the expected display. This had to be her last trip as it would bring her up to mandatory retirement as she reached her radiation dose limit. This is why the astronauts, or lift operators as they were disparagingly called by the ground staff, were so well paid for their short working life. She sometimes thought of herself as a trucker, especially when on a supply trip like today. Her plan was to retire to her native Norway and make bread and babies. With a name like hers, how could it be otherwise? She had called her boyfriend, Nils, last night and was looking forward to seeing him again when she got back after this trip.
      The day had been spent in preparation, loading and checks at the space port in Ecuador. She had found the altitude a bit of a problem at first but now she was aclimatised to living and working at 6,000 m on the high shoulder of Chimborazo, a dormant stratovolcano. Not the easiest place to get to but as it is the highest point on the equator and the place that is furthest from the centre of the Earth, it is ideal for a spaceport that operated as the base station of the space elevator, or The Sky Hook as it was known.
      The theory of the elevator had been known since the nineteenth century but it could not be built until the twenty first as the available materials were not strong enough. The breakthrough came with the developments in material science and the invention and manufacture of fullerenes, specifically Buckminster Fullerene. This allotrope of carbon 60 is two hundred times as strong as the best titanium alloy. The final design used woven strands of graphene and the cable reached its maximum diameter at geosynchronous height of just under 36,000 km above Chimborazo.
      Her payload today consisted of hydroponic chemicals and repair parts for the outpost at Port Lowell on Mars. There were to be no passengers, just Ceres and the payload.
      The lift off was very gentle as the laser energy transfer system worked against full Earth gravity. The accelaration increased slowly but inexorably until it reached a maximum of five G. Ceres didn’t enjoy this part much as it was very uncomfortable even with her inflated pressure suit but she exulted in the feeling of speed. The drag to the West felt a little strange as the climber gained angular momentum from the Coriolis force.
      This elevator cabin, or climber,was going all the way to Mars and would be return to Earth, with Ceres, after using the elevator near Port Lowell.
      Ceres passed through the inner Van Allen belt with little display and no problems but  after that a series of events combined to form the tragedy.
      It was ironic that all the solar observing satellites had been shut down for the duration of the predicted solar storm so no one saw an enormous CME that was the biggest since the famous Carrington event in 1859. Previous CMEs had cleared the way so the burst of protons would only take 18 hours to travel the 150 million kilometres to Earth.
      The wave front hit Ceres in her climber as she was entering the outer Van Allen belt at an altitude of 13,000 km. The shielding was nowhere near adequate for this onslaught so she quickly exceeded her lifetime allowed radiation dose and her hopes of ever having a child were destroyed during those first seconds. The interaction between the highly charged protons and the Earths magnetic field produced a beautiful, ever changing rainbow glow around her. She felt like an angel flying up to heaven surrounded by an enormous halo.
      Then Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction kicked in. The highly energetic protons passed through and around the graphene cable so inducing a voltage. C60 is, of course, an excellent electrical conductor so an enormous current started to flow in the cable. It rushed down the cable and came up against its weakest point where it was anchored at the space port. The current was too great for the cable to carry here so it heated up and eventualy melted. The cable, complete with the climber with Ceres inside was now free so it obeyed Newton’s first law of motion: The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force.’ so it no longer rotated around with the Earth and set off in a straight line which just happened to be towards Alpha Centauri. The effect was similar to an athlete letting go of the hammer after spinning a few times on the circle.
      Alpha Centauri is about 4.37 light years from Earth so it would take Ceres over 20,000 years to get there, after a very lonely journey.
      She would be forever remembered as the first human ever to leave our solar system.

Thursday 19 January 2012

Writing challenge 18th January 2012

The Night School

Norman wasn’t happy. When Norman wasn’t happy, everyone knew about it because he whined, whinged and grumbled about everything. The milk on his cereal was too cold. His favourite jumper was too tight and, probably worst of all, he was going to have to meet his new teacher today. Norman secretly suspected he was a vampire. He wasn’t really sure yet but there was definitely something of the night about Mr Howard. Why did he have to go to school anyway when all he really wanted to do was to hang with his mates?
      Eventually Clarice, his Mum, managed to get the moaning Norman ready and they set off for school. Today was the first day of the spring term of Norman’s second year. There would be all sorts of changes since last autumn and probably higher expectations of him. He would be expected to tie his laces on his own and, horror, start to read some of the stupid books they had in the classroom. Some of them were about big creatures, bigger than Norman, and he sometimes had daymares about being chased by them.
      He said a tearful goodbye to his Mum, until she was out of sight and then he changed into the happy school Norman playing with his friends, nothing like laying a load of guilt on your parents. He got out his bat phone and started checking his Facebook account although he really preferred Twitter, it seemed more Chiropteratic to him to be tweeting. 
     He heard a tweet from his best friend Sydney so he flew over to him to have a chat. They compared notes about their respective caves and how their long hibernations had gone until the bell went and they all trooped into the classroom where the well dentured Mr Howard was waiting for them.
      Night school had started at the bat academy.

Tuesday 17 January 2012

See fever


I must on with the poems again, to work on the meter and rhyme,
And all I ask is a thick pad and a pencil to write in time;
And the clock’s tick and the word’s wrong and the white page waiting
And a red mist before my eyes, and a lliteration grating.

I must on with the poems again, for the call of the coming test,
Is a tough call and a clear call where I must try my best;
And all I ask is a clear cut say with the helpful feedback coming,
And the hung line and the thrown word and the short syllables humming

I must on with the poems again, to the lonely writing life
To the poet’s work and the author’s work where the chair’s like a snagging knife;
And all I ask is a cheering word from a smiling fellow author,
And clear rhyme and a clean line when the long edit’s over.

Crossing the channel

Crossing the channel
Foul fumes fly free from the funnel,
diesels drum from down below,
winches whine to wind in the wires.
The siren sounds, the ship set free.

Leaving the lee of safe harbour,
through the heads, across the bar.
Ensign snaps in the breeze,
we feel the swell, flex the knees.

Faster now the engines thrum,
propeller thrashes, bulkheads hum.
Spume is flying, seagulls crying,
MS Wild Rover leaving Dover.

Changing course, away from land,
windward white cliffs on the port hand.
Steering South, wind waves in the hair.
Was the sea, now la mer.

Thursday 12 January 2012

Activity 13.5 Alliterative love poem


Climbing on Dartmoor.
The tor stands tall against the sky,
The granite grates the hands that grasp
the rock. The wriggle up the crack,
broken by ice, bridged by feet braced hard
against the wall, across the gap.
Sliding a jot, sucking a breath, slurping a gasp,
of air, of oxygen, inflating the lungs, enriching the blood.
At one with the rock, at peace with the world.
This is the way it all should be, this is what it means to me.
To struggle, to climb, to overcome
gravity, granite, weakness denied.
Feeling strong, feeling good, feeling moor.
The tor stands tall against the sky.
Indifferent.

Writing challenge 11th January 2012

The New Year's Resolution.
There I was, sat in the lounge bar of the Strangled Whippet, minding my own business and enjoying my first pint of Old Mouldy with the Sun crossword when Dave, who lives just across the road from me, had to go and spoil it all.
      ‘Made any New Year’s Resolutions for 2012 John?’ he asked.
      ‘Apart from not talking to strange men in pubs, you mean?’
      ‘I mean deciding to do something to change your life for the better, improve your health, take more exercise, something like that.’ He said with a smirk. I knew what was coming. He had obviously taken up some extreme sport such as crown green cribbage and wanted to boast about it.
      ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will never make another New Year’s Resolution as long as I live. Not after that fiasco last year.’
      ‘Why, what happened,’ he asked unwisely, I had now got him off his boasting theme so I could hold the floor and tell my story.

‘It all started just after Christmas last year. My wife, Janet, had mentioned tactfully that I seemed to be getting a little chubby. She was just being kind really as I was then five foot three tall and weighed twenty seven stone, I had been rejected by Lard Lookers© as their scales only went up to twenty one stone. I knew I was very fat and something had to be done.
      I had got in the habit of calling into the newsagents on the corner on the way to work each morning to pick up a copy of the Sun and a small bar of Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate, the small one with just eight squares. I enjoyed the brief craic each morning with the owner, Colin, who made lugubrious seem like the height of optimism. He was the sort of pessimist who had prunes with his All Bran and if you mentioned what a lovely, sunny day it was, he would complain about a plague of locusts in Timbuktu three years before. If you talked about the pleasure of hearing the birds singing in the morning, he would whine that they kept his cat awake.
      When I got to work, I carefully put the chocolate in the fridge and the Sun in my desk drawer until lunchtime, when I could enjoy both of them still sat at my desk. I always tried to finish the Sun crossword at lunchtime but it was very difficult and I often had to finish it in the pub after work. Take seven down today for example. ‘Three letters, ruminant quadruped, often kept for its’ milk.’ I told you it was difficult, a real cow of a puzzle sometimes.
      I resolved to do something about my weight so I stopped buying my daily bar of chocolate from Colin and took the Sun into the park at luchtime each day where I walked briskly for half and hour before sitting on a bench by the pond to have a go at the crossword. I figured that this would gradually make a difference to both my weight and fitness.
      This went well for the first three months of the year and then the dreadful news started filtering out of Poland and The Ivory Coast.

Let’s take Poland first.
You may remember that a large tranche of Cadbury’s production had been moved to Poland when Kraft shut down the Somervale factory in Keynsham? The Sales Manager for the UK had noticed a drop in Bournville sales and had, in fact, been sacked for his poor performance. He lived with his wife and three children in a house in Wieliczka, near Krakow. He now had no income so the bank foreclosed on his mortgage and repossessed their house. Because of the recession the house stayed empty and fell into disrepair. The rain got in and drained through into the basement where it found a crevice and made its way through to the underlying salt mine where it dissolved away a lot of the remaining salt. The Cadbury factory had been built above the salt mine to provide jobs for the miners when the mine closed so the factory collapsed into the gaping hole in the ground left by the dissolved salt.
      This factory had been funded by the Polish National Bank which now became badly exposed, not a good idea in a Polish winter, and so had to ask for help from the European Central Bank. This caused a run on the bank and so started the Eurozone crisis.

Now the Ivory Coast.
      With no chocolate production at the Cadbury factory in Wieliczka, there was a drop in demand for cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast which produces about 38% of the world supply so several farmers were ruined and stopped growing cocoa beans. With no cultivation there were huge mud slides when the winter rains came and several towns were inudated.

I lost my job at the London branch of the Polish National Bank, Colin had to put his business into administration and we closed our book printing company due to lack of sales. ( Janet and John book printing Co. plc..)
      So you see Dave, when you asked me about New Year’s Resolutions, I will not even think about them this year.’

I opened my jacket and showed him my tee shirt, printed with the words. I started the Euro crisis, ruined the Ivory Coast, lost my job and closed Colin’s shop.
      ‘But how could your not buying one bar of chocolate cause all that damage?’ asked Dave.
      ‘It’s all part of chaos theory, it’s called the butterfly effect,’ I explained.
      ‘If you’re a butterfly now, I wouldn’t like to have met you when you were a caterpiller.’ Dave can be quite hurtful at times.
      He then started telling me about how he had taken up the new sport of outside darts using humming birds for darts and the problems they were having with the pesky birds who would insist on hovering just short of the board before deciding which number to stick their beaks in and how they had to remove the bull’s eye as they were strict vegetarians.
      I quickly got bored listening to this and so went to get a couple of pints of Old Mouldy for Dave and myself and a few sips of the amber nectar for his birds.