The Loch Ness Monster

Doctor Henry Lancaster slowed and then drew his VW pop-top into the layby overlooking the loch. It was his first sight of Loch Ness so he was impressed by the beauty of the calm water framed by the mountains on the other shore. He caught himself scanning the water surface for any ripples or other sign of an unexpected presence. He grinned to himself. ‘If it was that easy, there would be uncountable accounts of sightings over the years,’ he told himself.

                Starting the engine of his old, but reliable VW, he set off on the loch-shore road again until he saw a boat pulled up from the Loch with an old man sat on a stool beside it and a sleeping dog on the beach by his side.

                ‘Boat and boatman for hire, please ask.’ Said the sign propped up against the boat.

Henry stopped. ‘Are you free?’ he asked.

                ‘Aye, I’m free, I’ve been waiting for thee

                Myself and the dog are all agog

                To hear why you want a boat

                We’ve been watching since you were a mote

In my eye to see

                Why you want to float, in a boat, on the Loch?’

Henry was a little taken aback by this. He wondered if this old man with his sleeping dog was quite right in the head or was he just a very bad poet. The man and his boat was exactly what he wanted so he thought he would press on and risk getting trapped in a boat with a nutter – at least he would have the dog to talk to, he liked a bit of doggerel.

                ‘I would like to hire you and your boat for a week. I am a palaeontologist from Brecon University. I am carrying out some research into plesiosaurs. I am trying to prove once and for all that there is no monster in Loch Ness and, even if there was something unusual here, it is certainly not a plesiosaur. As you know, it is difficult to prove a negative, but I feel I have to try. Have you always been a boatman?’

                ‘I used to be a shepherd,

but I kept on losing me sheep.

So I taught my dog to count them.

Then all he did was sleep.’

After a long and somewhat difficult conversation because the boatman usually talked in verse, they agreed that the he would take Henry wherever he wanted on the loch for a week. He introduced himself as Hamish McGonagall, one of the Skeltonic poets. He was proud that he was descended from the greatest Skeltonist of them all, William McGonagall.

                ‘The story of the Tay Bridge disaster

                Was documented well by the master

                It may be too long

                And the language so strong.

                But it just makes you read it all faster.’

They decided that they would leave the dog on the shore, having jointly agreed that they would leave a sleeping dog lie. Henry did wonder why a sleepy sheep dog would tell lies but he didn’t ask Hamish for fear of finding out what rhymes with ‘sheep dog.’

            ‘Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster,’ asked Henry rather bravely after they had been on the water for a couple of hours.

            ‘Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?’ Asked Hamish somewhat Delphically.

                ‘Is that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’’ asked Henry, trying to get away from metaphysics – it was not his subject, he was a simple old bone man.

                ‘Maybe,’ said Hamish

Henry sat in silence for a while, his brain was starting to hurt.

                ‘Have you seen the monster?’ Henry tried again.

                ‘That depends.’

                ‘What does it depend on?’

               

                ‘I call the monster Beauty

And beauty is in the eye of the beholder

But when you have something in your eye,

ye cannae see anything

So I haven’t seen Beauty but I see beauty all the time.’

‘Right, that’s true’, agreed Henry, who was getting somewhat baffled and frustrated about not getting a straight answer to his questions.

‘Do you think there is a monster in the loch.?’ Henry wasn’t going to give up yet.

‘If I think, ‘yes’, does that create a monster or

If I think ‘no’ it blinks out of existence?

Does the life of the monster depend on me?

Am I responsible for its creation?

Doesn’t bear thinking about.

Too much responsibility.

Henry decided that he would give up for the day and change the question. ‘Do many of the monster hunters you have taken out on the Loch believe that the monster really exists?’

‘I’ve found there are three type of Monster hunters – those who believe in the monster and those who don’t.’

Henry waited for the next line, but none was forthcoming.

‘If there is a monster in the loch, do you think it might be a plesiosaur?’ asked Henry, trying a different tack, even though the wind was light and the boat didn’t have a sail. ( He wanted to have a try at this Skeltonic stuff ).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hamish answered with a logical argument.

                ‘The youngest plesiosaur has been found in Cretaceous strata that is about 65 million years old. That works out at 6.5 million generations if you say that the plesiosaur parents are about ten yours old on average when their offspring are hatched. This is plenty of time for dinosaurs to have evolved into something else.  As the youngest dino fossils have feathers on them, we think they evolved into birds and flown away from Loch Ness. But, if they stayed around here, you would have to look for birds.

Remember that there are two great rules of life:-

                1 – Never tell everything at once.

                Did you see that seagull fly past us just now?’

The school reunion

I went through a spell of using the Friends Reunited website a few years ago and through this, I received an invitation  from Tony Malone to a school reunion he was organising for the year’s cohort of which  I was a member. I vaguely remembered him, it was a long time ago. It struck me as strange that I now knew his first name as, at school we were referred to by the teachers by surname only and we continued this amongst ourselves. I don’t know most of the first names of my peers even now.

                This invitation got me thinking about the teachers and fellow pupils from so long ago that I had not thought of for many years - life before memories. I attended Worthing Technical High School until I left on 4^th August 1962 and joined the Royal Navy on 7^th August, just three days later the same year. This was after a major row as my teachers and parents wanted me to stay on for the usual route of ‘A’ levels and university. I disagreed as I couldn’t wait to leave home and school and get out into the wide world. I had planned on joining the Royal Navy since I was about six. I was obsessed by the sea and read everything I could about it. I could soon name the different styles of bows and sterns and knew the name of every sail on a square rigged ship. I left school with one GCE, Maths, that I had taken a year early. I later got the results of passes in six more, after I had joined up.

                The irony was that, as soon as I joined, instead of going to sea as I had intended, I ended up spending six years doing an Artificer Apprenticeship with only the fifth year at sea in the Persian Gulf – from one classroom to another, the frying pan into the fire.

                This was the new style of vocational technical schools so we did the first three years together and then chose the Artisanship, Arts or Sciences for the last two years up to GCSE. I enjoyed wood and metalwork so wanted to be in the Artisan group but was persuaded to take the Sciences instead. This being 1960, the group consisted only of boys, ‘You can’t have girls doing science’! There were fifteen of us in our group and, while I got to know them very well, it also meant that I lost touch with my friends who had been through primary and secondary education with me. I was very sorry to slowly lose touch with my best friend, Jack, who I lost to the Arts stream as he wanted to be an architect.  He became a very successful architect and started and built up his own practice but, he sadly died in 2009. We kept in touch over the years with Christmas cards and the odd letter but I got to see him in 2006 when he and his wife had a holiday in Bath. They came to see us for a day and it was good to see him after so many years

                There were some real characters in our group, I suppose these days they would have been characterised as mad scientists and geeks – I was the only one who was normal, of course.

                Brooks was undoubtedly teacher’s pet as he soaked up the knowledge without any problem and could effortlessly regurgitate it in exams so inevitably coming top in all exams and tests etc. His favourite subject was maths and he left us all standing. What made it worse was that his parents were rich and so bought him one of those three wheeler bubble cars while he was still at school, it was one of those strange ones with the one passenger sitting behind the driver. It was called a Messerschmidt. The rest of us could only run to second-hand bikes so we were very envious even though we didn’t show it, much.

                The teachers were very strict and all wore their academic gowns every day. Mr Bush took us for chemistry. He was fearsome and insisted on everything being ‘just so’. ‘There is only one way of doing things,’ he used to say. ‘That is my way, which is also the correct way.’  He had pet hates, one was the use of the word ‘amount’. ‘Do you mean mass or volume, boy?’ he thundered. ‘Amount means nothing, it has no units. If you want to describe a quantity to me, it must have units, preferably SI units of grammes or cc. Now, try again.’ By this time the poor student would be a red –faced, stuttering wreck, but the message got home. If you want to do science, you have to be precise. His other bête noir was describing something as a ’chemical’. ‘Everything is a chemical. Everything is made of atoms that are on the Periodic Table, they are all chemicals’.  I still think of this all these years later when people say there are too many chemicals in food. I am very tempted to agree and then say that, à la Bush, ’if you took all the chemicals out, you would have nothing left.’

 In spite of the rigor, I liked Mr Bush and enjoyed chemistry because, even at that age, I could see that he was driven by the enthusiasm for his subject, he just wanted to share the wonder of it all with us. I do laugh when today’s schoolchildren talk about health and safety as none of us had goggles, there was no fume cupboard, even when handling bromine, we used to play with mercury and float coins on it, on wooden trays. At the end of each term, Mr Bush used to play tricks with reagents. This might be pouring sulphuric acid onto sugar and seeing the resulting, writhing black snake or mixing two clear liquids and making a rich dark blue solution and then making the colour disappear with the addition of another clear liquid.  After enjoying all this magic, we of course, had to write the equation of the reaction and then get told off if we got it wrong.

                Hubble was the quiet one who always appeared to be rather stupid and gave wacky, way out answers to the teacher’s questions. On one famous occasion, when asked a fairly simple question and getting it hopelessly wrong, albeit in a funny way, the exasperated teacher asked, ‘How on earth did you get to this school Hubble?’ Hubble answered artlessly, ‘By bicycle, Sir.’ This question and the response was all around the school by lunchtime. Hubble was not stupid at all, he always got good marks in exams.            

                Miss Davis took us for Maths. We did Ordinary, Applied and Additional Maths as three subjects and some days we spent all day on maths. I really struggled with this until we started differential calculus and I could see the beauty of it and it all seemed to make sense. Then we did ballistics and Newton’s equations of motion and I really enjoyed all that as I could see some future applications of that in my secret dream to go to sea with the Navy. She was really the favourite teacher of our group as she seemed to be easy going, but in reality she knew how everyone was doing and managed to get us through the exams with little trouble.

                Monnery was the typical nerd. He just worked and worked and understood everything. He was in great demand to explain the parts that no one else understood. He was friendly, not standoffish, like Brooks, so he was very popular in spite of being the class swot.

                Mr Baxter took us for Physics. He was a geography teacher but as there was a shortage of physics teachers in the school, he would have to do. He was honest with us in saying that he was only a day ahead of us with the learning before teaching us and sometimes we would have to learn together. It all worked though as there was an overlap with some of the maths we were already learning. Sometimes he got stuck and we would have to help him out.

                                Cooper was probably in our group by mistake. He was a big lad and an athlete. He could just about cope with the science and maths but his real joy was to get out on the field during PE and join in some game or other.

Of course we couldn’t just do science and maths, we also had to learn a language. We thought anything that wasn’t science was a bit of a waste of time – we were all rapidly becoming embryo lab rats. I chose French as I thought it would be the easiest. Mr Martens got the unenviable task of trying to teach us French. He was Flemish. He spoke English very well but his teaching method didn’t suit us. We were scientists, we inquired, checked and challenged! In French, we had to listen to Mr Martens, accept what he said and learn regular verbs by repeating the conjugations in time with the tapping of his wedding ring against a desk top. We didn’t like him, or his subject, or his country, very much.

*

‘Wake up. Richard,’ said the nurse,’ it’s time for your medication, I’ll help you sit up.’

                The ghosts from more than fifty years in the past slowly faded as they walked off into their futures and out of my life. I didn’t want to see them as old men or hear about the ones that had died so I never did go to that school reunion. I think of Jack most days – a conflict between all the happy adventures we had growing up together and remembering him before he died as a sick man with a wife and four children he would soon be leaving.

 I still think of them all as enthusiastic teachers and bright young boys, looking forward to their lives. I think it is better that way.

Alien

Jared left the party that was busily transferring from the lounge to the kitchen for drink top-ups and nibbles. He walked through the open patio doors out into the warm velvet evening with the cooling zephyrs whispering as they gathered up and shook the dust from the curtains. He lifted his eyes to the blackness of the night sky and focused on the disc of Venus rising over the horizon to the West. He was strangely drawn to Venus but couldn’t really understand why. He was vaguely interested in astrology and cosmology but not more so than most of his peers so he could find no reason or anything special about Venus to explain it. It had been the subject of much ribald banter from his best mate, Joe, when he had mentioned it so now he kept it quiet and just looked at her when he had a few quiet moments to himself, as now.

                Joe came up and tapped him on the shoulder, he was always the life and soul of any gathering he was at. ‘Come in and join the fun instead of moping out here by yourself,’ he said.

                ‘OK,’ said Jared, ‘I wasn’t moping, I was just relaxing away from the crowd for a minute.’

                ‘Whatever, get this down you, ‘said Joe, thrusting a glass full of suspicious liquid into Jared’s reluctant grasp.               

Jared slowly followed Joe towards the noise of the throng inside He wasn’t very good at parties and hadn’t wanted to come until Joe had persuaded him. He always felt like an outsider, an observer, never really part of the crowd, just like Colin Wilson, not part of the mainstream, a little bit different. He didn’t manage to lose himself in the enjoyment of the moment, he thought of himself as a Bristolian, ‘sleeping with one eye open.’

*

They had grown up together and got on well because they liked the same things, football mainly. They supported the same team, Bristol Rovers, and lived close to each other in South Street, Bristol. They were nearly inseparable, so much so that everyone called them ‘the JJ twins’ as no one really knew which was which.

Once they had both saved up enough to buy a bike each, they could set off on expeditions of adventure, across the River Avon by the old railway bridge now carrying the cycle path, through Victoria Park and the tunnels of the Cumberland Basin road system and out into the glorious country of the Ashton Court Estate – now owned by Bristol Council and so open to all. They both enjoyed these trips as they could play in the woods, look at the herd in the deer park, run up and down the grassy slopes and race each other as they swooped down the steep grass slopes on their bikes and then get an ice cream, if they were flush with cash, from the van, parked by the side of the car park. They then often lay in the grass while licking their 99’s telling each other what they were going to do with their lives. Joe was going to join the Royal Navy and travel to all those exotic places he had heard about while Jed didn’t have any idea of what he wanted to do, he just wanted to find out more about the world – and Venus, but he kept that part to himself, he was a little weary of his peers saying he was obsessed with Venus. He was secretly certain that a different destiny awaited him, different to anything that Earth could provide.

*

One day they cycled to the end of Beggar Bush lane, intent on getting as far as the old quarry that they had heard about. Their intention was to explore the quarry and then return home via Brunel’s suspension bridge. They knew that if they got off their bikes and walked across, it would be free. They hid their bikes in the hedge and then, after crawling carefully through the wire fence, they clambered down the quarry benches, past the signs that stated, This is a dangerous quarry, not a playground. KEEP OUT. They were young so, of course, nothing would happen to them. They had the carefree feeling that they would live forever. It was easy climbing down the benches as vegetation had taken hold on the rock faces, giving hand holds on the way down. They were soon on the quarry floor and could see into the tunnel that went under the road to where the old crushing and coating plant has once produced the material for surfacing the nearby M5. They wandered around for a while, exulting in the freedom to be in a space that was once under many metres of solid rock and where a very rare sample of Rhodocrosite had been found by the Russell Society.

They tired of exploring after a while and sat in the sun to unpack their rucksacks to plunder the plastic boxes of marmite sandwiches and swig from the plastic bottles of fizzy drinks. They had a rest for a while and then climbed up the benches to emerge at the road where their bikes had been stashed. They cycled back along the road, past the traffic lights and were soon at the Western abutment of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. They dismounted to save the cost of the toll and to look at the magnificent view down along the Avon Gorge. It was a Wednesday so there were very few people around and almost no traffic. The Samaritan’s free phone was unused – no one was keen to kill themselves on a sunny spring afternoon when the birds were singing.

*

‘I want to explain something to you,’ said Joe.

                ‘Wassat?’ asked Jed, not really interested in talking, his eyes were on a group of jackdaws circling in the rising air currents near the cliffs, probably looking for likely nest sites.

                ‘Please listen to me, it is very important,’ said Joe. ‘I am not what I seem, I am an alien.’

                ‘OK,’ said Jed, going along with the joke. ‘Prove it to me then.’

Joe climbed up on to the parapet wall and started to climb over the anti-suicide wires.

                ‘Stop,’ said Jed, I believe you’

                ‘No, you don’t, you are just saying that to get me down. You have to really believe me.’ He climbed down the other side, the outside, of the suicide wires and stepped out into space. He stood there on a column of seventy five metres of fresh air, the tide was in.

Jed looked at him with his mouth open, ‘Wha, wha, what are you standing on?’

                ‘Nothing but air,’ said Joe. Now do you believe me while I tell you a story?’

                ‘Well, yes,’ said Jed, but will you please come this side of the wall and sit down with me before you start, you know I have no head for heights.’

Joe climbed over the parapet wall again and then sat down with Jed on the kerb.

*

‘It’s a long story but it goes like this. I am a member of the Space Guard. There are about three hundred and fifty of us around the world and I just happen to be here in Bristol. The reason I have to tell you about it is that I know that you have been having visions and a strange attraction to Venus. This is because our communication net with our area headquarters on Venus has been leaking a little and infecting you. We had to hide our office in the methane clouds on Venus because you humans are getting to know Mars and so we would likely be noticed.

                Our job is to see if you survive the predictable crises that life goes through on any planet and to see if we can learn any lessons by watching you cope with them. We have monitored the near extinctions through history that would have sterilised most planets but there was always just enough life left to repopulate – sometimes in greatly different forms as evolution filled the available niches. The recent wars and famines have decimated the human race but you struggled through. You got through the nuclear age without starting an atomic war and now you are facing climate change as you burn the Earth’s stores of hydrocarbons. The leakage of the communication between Earth and Venus was responsible for the Internet being developed by the way.’

                ‘OK, so say I accept that all this is true, where do you come from?’ asked Jed ‘what is the answer to climate change?’

                ‘I cannot tell you where I come from and also cannot tell you the answers, we are watching you to see if you think of different ones. There would be no point as you could not comprehend the data but let us just say that I come from a long way away in space and time.  Fermi got his paradox wrong. There are many trillions of us from billions of galaxies and the second part is not true only because you haven’t been able to see us – except for the occasional error in communications such as happened to you. We have been checking your race through your development and think that, should you survive the coming challenges, you should be ready to join the human family in about three hundred years of your time.

                Now I have to blank all your memories of this, and your obsession with Venus, so that we can both continue with our lives where we left off.’

                ‘Will you at least give me an hour to think about all this before you do that and will you answer all my questions?’

                ‘OK,’ said Joe. There’s no harm in that.’

They spent the next hour with Jed asking and getting the answers to all sorts of questions, including nuclear fusion, climate change and if the laws of physics as understood, we correct. He even asked if ‘42’ was the real answer to everything. He also got the answer to the puzzle of the unified field theory.

*

Jared stepped outside the party for a moment to get a breath of fresh air. He idly glanced up at the clear night sky and wondered if there were other people out there and if he would ever see one of them. He didn’t think so.

                His friend Joe, called him in to the kitchen to join him in a beer.

                 

Greener Grass

‘Dzień dobry, jak się  pan miewa? Good morning, Sir. How are you?’ Said the security man as he leaned out of the security hut window to greet Paweł.

            ‘Bardzo dobry, dziękuję, a ty? Very good, thank you, and you?’ Replied Paweł automatically, slipping into the ridiculous Polish formality that inevitably accompanied every chance encounter with another human being. He had just stopped walking, to be checked in at the entrance to the eponymous brewery in the centre of Leżajsk. He had walked to work today, pushing his bike, as it was January. The local river San was immobile, locked in its icy phase until mid March and the only road clearing was shovel-full’s of sand scattered randomly across the road by bored men riding on the back of flatbed trucks. Salt was too expensive while the sand was free from the local pit. This may have helped the grip of the tyres of trucks and cars but it did nothing to assist bikes as they struggled over and through the ruts.

            ‘Tak, bardzo dobry dziękuję, yes, also very good, thank you’ the security man completed the social dance, glad of a small interruption to interrupt the boredom of his twelve hour shift.

Paweł walked on through the forbidding, rusty steel gates to his allocated space and carefully locked his bike to the steel railing before entering the brew house, and climbing the concrete steps to the malting floor where he worked, spreading the sprouting barley out across the floor, checking the growth and then collecting it together to get it ready for the kiln. He was happy with his job because, although it was poorly paid, he worked in the warm malting room so he was kept warm all through the South Eastern Polish winters at no cost to himself.

His first job today was to finish clearing the malting floor then sweeping it clean, ready for the next batch of barley but he was called into the brew master’s office by Wojciech Dutko before he had a chance to get started.

            ‘Come in and sit down,’ said Pan Dutko. Paweł’s stomach lurched, he knew there was bad news coming, he had only been in the office twice in the five years he had worked at the brewery and he had never been asked to sit down.  ‘The sales of the brewery have dropped, partly because of the hard winter and the difficulty of getting the trucks out so we have to make cutbacks in the labour force. I am afraid we will have to let you go.’

            ‘But I am not paid so very much, Pan Dutko, so there will be little savings by getting rid of me and anyway, who will do my work in the malting room?’

            ‘That is not your problem now, we will find someone,’ said Wojciech, ‘now go over to the office, they are expecting you. Pick up the money owed to you and you can have the rest of the day off.’

Paweł knew this was not the real reason as he had seen no drop in the amount of malting that had come through his room, he suspected something else was going on. He slowly cycled home but stopped at the sklep, shop, on his way to buy something for his tea. He morbidly looked at the new steel grill over the front display window that had some curlicues designed in to try to make it look like a work of art rather than the functional anti-theft device that was its real role in life.

He chatted to old man Skrzypczak, after the ritual of asking after each other’s health, behind the counter. He was full of the news that his nephew had got a new job at the brewery, the wages were good and he would be working in a warm room on the malting floor. Apparently it had all been arranged by the old man’s son in law who worked at the brewery, name of Dutko. This was not corruption, Paweł knew that, it was just that, if you had any sort of power or influence, you were expected to use it to the advantage of anyone in your family . This was Social Darwinism in action – Survival of the Best connected.

Paweł was very unhappy with this news but was determined to get another job quickly. The next day he pushed his bike and cycled where possible, along the familiar route to the same industrial estate and talked his way past a security guard by saying he had an appointment at the Personnel Department.

            He was in the personnel department of a factory belonging to Hortex, the largest fruit juice manufacturer in Poland and now had to talk his way into a job. The deputy Personnel Manager, Andrzej Stefanek was one of his neighbours so he shamelessly claimed that, ‘Andrzej had told me that there was a vacancy on the apple juice line.’ By coincidence, there was and he got the job on a trial basis and on very low wages. It was now up to him to prove he could do the job and to work his way up in the company to earn more money. He also had to keep clear of Pan Stefanek for a time so that he wasn’t asked any awkward questions.

            Paweł was kitted out with rubber boots, overalls, rubber gloves and an apron as it was dirty, cold work in the factory. His job was to stand at the conveyor and pick out the rotten or damaged apples as they were unloaded from the tote bin and carried to the crusher where the Soc, juice, was extracted.

            He was quite happy doing his twelve hour shifts in spite of the cold and poor money until, one day Andrzej Stefanek found out that he was working there and had got his job by deception. He was sacked immediately. He was out of work again with no contacts and so little chance of another job. 

            He was in the karczma, pub, one night drowning his sorrows with Żubrówka, his favourite buffalo grass vodka, with his friend from the village when Jakub suggested they go to England as he had heard that there were plenty of well-paid jobs there. ‘We could go together, ‘ Jakub suggested. ‘It must be better than staying here with no job or money.’

            They spent a month doing research, borrowing money for the fare from the family and contacting Jakub’s Uncle in Peterborough for some temporary accommodation. They could fly by Ryanair from Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport which was only forty miles away near the steel town built by the communists at Nova Huta. This would take them to Stansted, or they could use the much cheaper – but longer coaches and ferries. They decided to take the coach to save money. They got the first coach from the Rynek Starego Miasta  in Leżajsk, the  old town square, for the six hour trip to Warszawa, Warsaw, and then another on to Berlin, London, Peterborough and Boston.

*

It was cold, very cold, and Paweł’s back was aching from constantly bending forward with both hands to grab the next one and separate the  flowering head from the stem before dropping the head, carefully into the constantly-running conveyor. He looked over to Jakub, level with him but cutting a different row; grinned to show that he felt just the same, cold and aching.

            It was 3 am, dark, cold. They were both in a sort of crude tent rigged up on top of a long trailer pulled slowly across the never-ending field by a tractor. The only respite they had was when the tractor reached the end of the field and had to manoeuvre around, ready for the return trip and also when the other trailer came alongside to take the loaded crates away to the warehouse where they were to be collected by the ever – hungry supermarkets.

 Paweł and Jakub were seated right at the back of the trailer, on a bench just above the ground with their feet on a cross bar just in front of them. Their job was to cut the cauliflowers with one chop of the machete they each held in their right hand while lifting the head with the left to deftly drop it into the next vacant conveyor bucket. The conveyor took the cauliflowers up to the body of the trailer that was kitted out like a production line where the heads were inspected, weighed, wrapped in film, labelled and packed into crates by several women. It was cold, back breaking work but the job was secure, there were potatoes, brocoli, cabbage and the hated sprouts to harvest as well as the cauliflowers and the pay was regular and good.

            ‘Trawa jest bardziej zielona, co? The grass is greener, huh?’ said Jakub.

Paweł just grinned in reply and carried on chopping.

This story was written as a submission for the Special LOVE edition publication on the WordBohemia web site.

http://wordbohemia.co.uk/            or             https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordbohemia/

The Flame

It is in my heart, at the centre of my knowing and being.

It loves, therefore it is.

It is at the now of every day

It is the first at the waking and the last at the sleeping.

It casts a true light without shadows and changes what I am

It has no knowing of the how of itself

It has a spirit that needs neither fuel nor air.

It will abide in my heart as long as there is breath in me.

It cannot be quenched by words or deeds,

It has a knowing of the spirit that transcends talking and doing.

It wants nothing but your love.

It is the flame that is my love for you.

This story was written as a response to a challenge on the WordBohemia web site.

http://wordbohemia.co.uk/            or             https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordbohemia/

The challenge was a photo of clouds.....


Clouds

Here in the desert in Western Australia we don’t get many clouds and even less rain, so when the clouds showed up in a pinky sort of turquoise sky, everyone stopped for a good look at them. They were the grey, puffy sort with the flat bottoms. The sort you could imagine scudding across the sky above the African plains before the rains of the wet season started.

                ‘You won’t get any rain out of them,’ I averred.

                ‘No,’ agreed Bruce, ‘and, if you did, it wouldn’t rain cats and dogs here in Cue, more like scorpions and flies.’

                ‘With maybe some dust thrown in.’

                ‘Yup, there’s always dust.’ said Bruce as we joined the queue in Cue.

*

There was only Mrs Brown and the vicar from St Martin’ sin front of me so it shouldn’t take long to get what I wanted. I could have them without gift wrapping, that would save a bit of time as I didn’t want to be late for the match at the snooker club.

                I tried not to listen to what they asked for, it was none of my business but what would a vicar be wanting at this time of night and why hadn’t he gone straight to the event horizon anyway instead of here at the five corner shop?

                ‘I’ll just take a sermon please Mr Patel,’ said the vicar irritably. I think he was a little cross with himself, which he wore on a silver chain, bouncing against his chest, with his belly shelfing enough to catch it if the chain broke and choked the monkey.

                ‘Mounted, reverend?’ asked the shop keeper.

                ‘Always, we don’t want to hide our lamp under a bushel do we?’

                ‘Err, whatever you say, that will be thirty five beatitudes please.’

                ‘Bless you my son,’

                ‘But I haven’t sneezed yet.’

                ‘Well, just keep it in your bushel until you need it then. Thank you, good night Mr Patel.’

The vicar stomped off up the hill to deliver his sermon on horseback.

*

                ‘Hello Mrs Brown, we haven’t seen you around here for a while have we? I hope you haven’t been disloyal and doing your shopping at Nouns-R-Us or up at that new gerunds place?’

                ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, it’s just that I haven’t been too good lately so I’ve been making do with adverbs, just treating myself to the odd coincidence on Sundays.’

                ‘Only teasing Mrs Brown, what can I get you this evening?’

                ‘I’d like two wins and a coincidence please.’

                ‘Any special medium you prefer?’

                ‘No, it doesn’t have to be a medium, I don’t really do paranormal, just standard is fine.’

                ‘OK, I’ll just drop a little telepathy in the brown paper bag then, OK?’

                ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have said that, it’s really not necessary.’

                ‘I know, but I enjoy telekinesis, BBC2 mainly’

                ‘And what’s wrong with Emmerdale then?’

                ‘Well it’s not Corrie is it and it never has that nice prof Brian Cox in it.’

                ‘That’s because he’s a physicist.’

                ‘Could still leave BBC2 now and then couldn’t he, even if he is a necromancer. There’s no art blacker than Emmerdale to my mind.’

                ‘OK then, I’ll arrange it for you, but it will cost extra you know, plus VAT.’

                ‘That’s fine, just take it out of my paradocs’

                ‘OK, ’Night Mrs Brown.’

                ‘’Night Mr Patel, see you next week.’

*

It was now my turn but, before I had a chance to step up to the plate, a saucer landed just in front of me and demanded the cup that he had just one so where was it? Mr Patel had to admit that he had swatted it, thinking it was a fly. It was not one of the main characters in the story, just an extra…terrestrial. I knew then that I would have to charge him with cuppable homicide.

                Swatting flies soon becomes a habit with anyone who lives here in Cue. The town makes its living from exporting flies and dust by rail to Meekatharra and then on to Perth. You can’t see the flies because of the dust of course. The gold mines closed at the end of the war. A few men work at the Crosslands iron ore mine to the west. So iron or flies and dust just provide a living for this forgotten town of 328 people.

                ‘G’Day Bruce’ I said to Mr Patel as I arrested him.

                ‘Don’t you want to get your shopping done before you arrest me?’ he asked – always the salesman.

                ‘Ok, I’ll take an infundibulum then, I don’t want to be late for the barbie do I?’

                ‘D’ya want the chronosynclastic or the antediluvian model?’

                ‘I’ll take the chronos, don’t try and fob me off with one of those old models that don’t work during the Wet. Can you deliver it to the snooker hall for me?’

                ‘No worries, mate,’ said Mr Patel as he struggled with his sled dog.

                ‘Wooof,’ coughed the husky, who was feeling a little horse, as he lit a cigarette.

                ‘Could you throw in a paradox please, I don’t think Occam is on duty tonight?’

                ‘OK, mate, that’ll be twenty seven dollars but, of course, it will all be free.’

Excellent service I thought, right on cue.

                I looked out the door to see if Mrs Brown’s coincidence had turned up yet. She had. ‘How nice to see you Mrs Brown,’ said Lydia. ‘I havent seen you for years. I didn’t know you lived here, you were the last person I expected to meet. How is your daughter doing, I believe she went off to Perth to marry that nice miner? How long ago was that…?’

*

I walked up main street after dropping Bruce off at the sheriff’s office to be charged, he was getting a little dim. The snooker hall was on the left and the barbie was just being lit in the fire pit.

                That was my cue from the infundibulum, which had clearly done its job well, to join the queue to use the only available cue in Cue to take my shot before setting off down the pit to the barber queue for a burger, a cold tinnie and a short back and sides in the latest fashion.

END

Cue house lights and curtain.

               

This story was written as a response to a challenge on the WordBohemia web site.

http://wordbohemia.co.uk/            or             https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordbohemia/

The challenge was a photo of a station clock above a platform.....



The station

The station lies with its back to the river, wedged in between the buildings and roads. Sphinx-like it sprawls across the concrete desert as its blackened glass roof winks and glints in the morning sun. One end has many infibulating rails lines emerging, crossing and changing as they route the trains out to their different destinations. The other end terminates in a cliff of red brick. Behind this cliff the offices of the railway managers hide. ‘ This train terminates here,’ comes the voice from the loudspeaker system, what else would it do? Join the managers in their plush offices for a drink of tea or posh coffee in the senior manager’s rooms? Why is this move called a terminus? Do Penzantian people think of Paddington as their London  terminus, or terminator?

Why is a station called that when it is all about moving to another place? Stationary is the opposite to moving so why not call it a move to give a better idea of what it does?

Encyclopedia Ricardia

Move – n. A place for passengers to board and leave trains.

                I will call it ‘move’ throughout this story. The man pushes the broom along the platform of the move. It is early morning, the diesels stand waiting, their haze of blue power panting up through the morning sunlight to the soot- stained glass panels of the roof. It is the opposite to a cathedral, they have stained glass in the walls with a dark roof. The move is a temple to travel. The roof is supported on pillars, they are in compression so they must be made of cast iron – I think back to the metallurgy classes all those years ago. The crossing, horizontal tie rods are in tension, so they must be steel. Abraham Darby would have recognised the structures as he designed and made his Iron Bridge.

                The broom glides more easily across platforms 1 and 2. They have had the makeover, upgraded to a surface of French limestone.  It is Rocheret Jaune, an Early Cretaceous limestone that comes from Belley, near Lyon. Beautiful sections through fossil shells, especially high-spired gastropods, can be seen in places by looking down at the floor, not where you are going. Fossil watching in the Mouvre.

                I look at the panting beast of the diesel, crouched, waiting to unleash its power to speed the train through Old Oak Common then on to Penzance. I think back to the days of steam when a trip on a train always started with a walk to the engine to stand in awe looking at the Merchant Navy, West Country or Schools type of beast. Less power than a diesel, less efficient, dirtier but altogether better. Diesels have no soul, they don’t talk to you with the same language or have the BO of warm, escaping steam.

                The Penzance train is leaving Bristol. The driver, official title, motorman, checks around his darkened cab. Dials on the dash have a muted gleam, he leans on the dead man’s handle, notches up the throttle, checks the speed. Looks out the windscreen at the reds and greens of the signals. Heading to Reading, up to full speed insoulated from the outside, cosy in his cab – motorman’s trance setting in. Shakes himself awake, cannot sleep on this job – he is responsible for more than four hundred lives. 
             

A clatter of shutters opening from WH Smith – the news concession on the concourse. A bored woman starts heaving in the bound lumps of newsprint holding the ephemera of the day – so Kyleigh has a new hair style – so what.

                A submarine noses out of the door of the sandwich shop, they have found that cooking bacon and leaving the door open doubles sales of food and who doesn’t have a cup of coffee with their bacon sandwich. Manipulative huh? You betcha, everyone in the move is on the make!

                The derelicts cautiously raise their White Lightning hungover  heads from the seats at the edge of the concourse, the transport police having taken pity on them over this cold night and not moving them on until the morning commuter flood tide starts to rise.

                The first in train of the day edges cautiously in to its daytime home, the red terminating buffers reaching out their welcoming arms. It stops, doors open and the human cargo spills out, the first off running down the platform – to get to work early? Bankers, plonkers, graphic designers, girls in short skirts hurrying to their appointment with their computer screen, boys wearing their first suit, tie in pocket for later dressing. Across the concourse, down the steps, on to the waiting underground – no way to live, to earn a living. The train sits there, job done, all doors swinging open. The driver steps out of his cab with his airline pilot’s bag and walks along the platform to the back, now front of the train.He gets ready for the trip out to commuterland for the next load of human detritus. The train adjusts its psychology for the change in direction
.

                The sun gets brighter, glinting off the rails that go from these buffers in an unbroken line to Penzance, stretched and welded to their optimum equivalent expansion of 21 degrees Celcius – no fishplate joints now with their hypnotic rhythm.  Rails of steel, a compromise between soft toughness for strength and hard brittleness for minimal wear. How many sleepers between here and Penzance? A good question for a pub quiz.

                Ten minutes before lift off, the barriers open, the concourse people hurry through, clutching their tickets – some without, hoping to sneak through. The train has been cleaned, fuelled, maintained, washed – all overnight. Now it is ready, whistle, green flag, the clock ticks, it moves! All twelve coaches accelerate in a terrible symmetry, heading for Cornwall, grockles on the way to Penwith.

                Jed is sipping his third cup of coffee, he has been waiting for three hours, eager to meet the overnighter from far-off Penzance, eager to meet his love, eager to start the rest of his life, eager to start their life together.

                Chloé only left him three days ago, just enough time to visit ’ her-now-ex’ in Penzance to tell him, finally, that she will not be back. She has left him, she has found Jed, Jed has found Chloé, they have found each other, they will be together for ever – they are sure.

                He tries her number again, again no answer, is she asleep on the train, the ‘fone on silent?

                He finishes the coffee, tosses the paper, ‘this coffee may be hot’ tautological cup into the nearest empty bin, he transfers the bouquet to his coffee hand and checks the clock again. It hangs suspended from the roof. A cube with six faces, only four have clock faces. He reduces it step by step - cube, square, line, dot, nothing, he oxidises it to a tesseract – what is next? A tesseract has fourteen faces, an expensive clock for one more dimension. He has checked the Chloe train is on time, twenty three minutes to go, he finds it hard to cope now that the clock has slowed down. Another coffee – no, he is already jittery from the anticipation of seeing Chloé and the caffeine. The seconds tick by, the hands on the clock crawl to the train-in time.

                The Penzance train arrives – all the way from the cornubian granite of Cornwall.

                It tiptoes to the buffers and then stops and relaxes with a sigh. The doors open, the Kernow people debark and look around. Where is Chloé? Jed strains to look – there is a Chloé sized gap on the platform. He waits, no Chloé. He calls, no Chloé. He waits for another hour, no Chloé.

                He checks the date, 14^th February, no Chloé.

                He trudges home from the move, no Chloé

    He lives his life, without Chloé.