KNIFE BRAWL DEATH THUG JAILED

I think that's the headline I saw on the way to work this morning. Certainly it was a combination of those words.

All to the good, no doubt.

Last night on the way back from Shoreditch where I enjoyed Mexican food, wine and fine company I was shocked and/or perturbed to see the street (possibly Valentine or Vivaldi or Velodrome?) taped off by pigs (not actual pigs - that's cool indifferent talk for her majesty's policing forces).

How awful to live up to the violent reputation made light of in the "more shooters than Hackney central" gag on the Shoreditch Mexican restaurant's chalkboard.

Anyway, this morning on the way to work - at the top of Caledonian Road - the same again: [Matthew] cordoned off by white and blue ribbons. Had to take a detour.

So it's official: I am being stalked by a serial killer.

Shit.

Camel Riders Came From The East

My favourite blogs are the ones where the writer only updates about twice a month and always apologises for not writing more.

Just saying.

Anyway, apart from being well busy with having something vaguely resembling a life for a change I went on an holiday recently - which is part of having a life, I gather - and found myself in an idyllic Welsh farmhouse for the better part of a week.

Ah: the ideal setting for some good hardcore writing, you might opine. And you might be right. I snatched a couple of hours to myself, interrupted only by cookies, lemonade and the occasional bleating of sheep. (Yes, I'm being spoiled, I know.)

I knocked out a short story, which has some way to go before being a truly inspired work of genius, but as this blog is a testing ground for new ideas, not a soup kitchen for the consumption of groundbreaking literature, I present it to you in its current embryonic status:

The Camel Rider’s Children

Have you ever seen the bonfires spraying their sparks into the pale darkness of the high summer sky over the plains? Have you seen the billowing plumes of smoke exploding behind the latticed pinwheel of silhouetted shards of ash? Have you tasted the bitter tang of cremated herbs infused in the warm air? If you have not, you will never know what it’s like to be one of us.

I grew up in the vast wilderness of the Middle East and spent most of my life journeying through its ever-changing, ever-hostile, faceless, feckless miles. There is no dry heat like the desert’s day and no numbing cold like its night. There is no torment like the deadlands of the tundra with its icy lifelessness and mocking sunlight. Yet only there are my people at home. You will never understand why.

My children are young and still at the age where every new season is a wonder to them. They will be spared the joyless truth of existence for some years yet and I watch them wrestle with a sad smile they cannot fathom. They are twins – a boy and a girl, though almost identical; their skin is the colour of old copper coins – darker than mine, lighter than their father’s, and more beautiful than any I have ever seen. Their hair is black and shiny as the oil we dug for on long summer nights. Their nails and teeth are strong, and their tempers short.

They will never know their father.

I never knew him much: only that he was strong and young and beautiful. And that he was my enemy, my captor and my one true love.

They came on the wind one summer night when the camp was caught between the vast southern desert and the bare savanna of the north. In a rocky, lifeless landscape we had put up our tents and laid down our heads. We never even lit a fire. There were no trees.

They came on the howling winds that swept down the mountains to the far northeast. Their cries carried forth and heralded their arrival: their song on the gale that night sounded like the wailing of the shifting continents of the earth. Their camel’s feet fell upon the land in a dull rumbling thunder. They killed all our men and our girl children, as is their custom. They took away our boys and what women they desired. They took no joy in their tasks – their work was neat and swift and the bloodletting was less than a massacre might suggest. They took what little wealth we had but barely left a jug upturned or a mattress stained. Theirs was a considerate and methodical butchery. They knew exactly what they wanted and wasted no time or effort at all.

I was lucky enough to be taken with them and was soon surprised to learn that they lived much like us. They were nomads and they hated and feared the land they walked upon as much as we did.

But their suits were a different cut, and they swung different swords. The beards they grew were thicker and their skin much darker. They chewed an unfamiliar cud, which was a dark brown mush when spat out. They had another way of slaying their beasts before slicing, seasoning and cooking the meat. They told different jokes and – though I soon picked up their language – I never understood the things that made them laugh.

They were not godless, as we had been told. They offered no sacrifices to their bonfires and treated fire itself as something that was there to serve them. But they sang their songs to the wind. They flew canvas kites in azure cloudless skies and launched elaborate paper lanterns up into wild storms, watching them flounder in the crashing black clouds and singing the praises of the heavens from deep in their throats.

I loved the man who took me. While others treated their women with indifference or contempt my man would sing softly to me as I lay in his tent, pretending to be asleep. He would leave me tiny pressed flowers in paper packets and when he mounted me on the cold earth he looked me in the eye and held me in his great arms and made tiny affectionate grunts as his weight fell upon me. He was almost what you might call gentle.

I traced the outline of a bird of prey on his arm, crudely imbibed into the flesh in a blueish grey and I asked him its name.

He called it an ‘owl’, though it looked like no bird I had ever seen, and he said it was the bird of God. Though I knew he was wrong, I did not argue.

I showed him the pictures on my own skin – on my back, which he had never seen – and he scowled in confusion, trying to wipe away the lines with an oiled cloth. It was unlike anything he’d ever looked upon; even the colours, he said, were alien to him. I laughed, though he did not, and I told him which plants to uproot and which shells to collect so that I might do the same drawing for him.

In the many nights it took for my needle to work its magic he told me of his great sky god – Lady Death, he called her – who stalked the night skies and fell upon the sinners with her talons of justice, showing no mercy but to those who gave up their hearts to her and adored her with their every song and dance. I found his heathen ways difficult at first but came to love the stories he span, for what they were worth.

I told him the name of the one true god, and of her son who walked these endless miles before our grandfathers were alive: who was born as a rich man, lived as a poor man and was sacrificed on a burning cross to reopen the sealed doors of heaven. He punctuated my sentences with nods and half-uttered words cut short by the tiny waves of pain that passed through from the tip of my needle to his nerve ends.

The tiger was my best work, and though its colour was somewhat masked by the pigment of his sun-scorched skin, he was as pleased as I was with the results of my labour. He thanked me that night by planting two seeds in my belly, and some weeks later when I was sure this was the case, I left him lying there in his tent, his torso heaving from his great shoulders down to his bare, starlit buttocks. I touched the bristles of his beard and, though I had not planned to, took out my scissors and took a part of him with me.

I expected I might die out there on my own, if the camel riders didn’t catch me. But I was done with my life and could not offer my children the same endless torment I had known. I wanted them to be born far from this vast sky that weighs down on the land like the lid of a coffin.

If I walked in a straight line I knew I would reach another land some day. It was what we had never done: always moving in circles, scorching the earth and returning when new shoots shot through the parched soil. We limped from one day to the next like a colony of drunks. The camel riders were not much better.

I’d have liked my love to come with me, but he would not have come. And if my children were born in their camp, they would not have lasted long.

I left behind those callous skies. I hope my man found another woman to love him as I did. But I will never know.

I made it to the city one way or another, I quite forget the story: my children were born soon after and since then I have lived with the other ragged runaways in what is thought of as poverty, but is like luxury to me. Beneath the layers of confusion and deceit this place and its people are simple and dull, and I am grateful for that.

The children are growing faster even than the world around them. They are, as I have said, the most beautiful creatures I have ever seen. They are bright and brash and bold as brass.

But they will hear no talk of our gods.

When I tell them of our gods – mine and his – they only laugh.

Bye Bye 8/N8, Hello C2 and other Stories

So that's another bunch of bullshit.

The 8/N8, pretty much my favourite bus route in London, basically doesn't exist anymore because it now only goes from Bow Church (or wherever it goes from) to f**ing Oxford Street. Or cop-outford Street as it's known among bus route connoisseurs (which is nothing like a train spotter).

No longer can I hop on a bus outside the Wicked musical building all the way to a skanky drug party on Fish Island (hi, East London friends). No longer can I cross the motorway after a high-power business meeting at Don Studios IV to jump on a night bus all the way to my haughty abode in fashionable Pimlico. No, not none of it.

No longer can I (this is the last one and quite similar to the first) saunter onto a lazy Sunday afternoon double-decker to meander through the congested concrete plains of London to a Brick Lane market listening to the Look See Proof album (they've split up too, which is bullshit), hoping against the odds that 'Bishopsgate' will come on my SamPod at the same time the bus swings out the front of Liverpool Street station.

Nevermore.

Do you remember an inn, Miranda?

Yeah, I do. It was great, then they bulldozed it to make way for the Olympics or some such bullshit. Yeah my gran had lived there for 750 years but don't worry about it.

Thanks Ken.

(It's still Ken's fault - always. Boris wouldn't do this. He wouldn't even know how.)

Anyway, what's our replacement? What's our pay-off?

The C2, which isn't even a proper number, it's a fucking battleships attack formation or something. And it's shit - it goes between Victoria and Camden, seemingly, just like the bloody 24 does. What's the point?

Two quid to get home from out east now. Fuck that - I'm never going out again. The C2 has seen to it. (HAHAHAH&c.)

Transport for London?

Pile of shit, more like!

(Self-five on that snappy conclusion, I think.)

Turn Again

Good news everyone: I've entered (and therefore won) The Bridport Prize.

From now on (well - from November) you'll all have to pay to read my stylish effusions of wisdom.

More on this later...

I saw Blood: The Last Vampire on the weekend.

"Nice idea, shame about the vapid dialogue and shit characters."

More great blog posts next month!!!!!!1!!

AV

And I Know How I Feel About You Now

Reclaimed folk songs, restraining orders, German hip hop, Weimar cabaret, seductive elves, man-love in a climate of self-loathing, beat generation vignettes and dappy French nonsense.

Its all here, music lovers.

The last podcast for a while

STREAM/DOWNLOAD HERE

That I've Come To Suppose I'm The Only One Who Calls The Valley Home...

Enough of this political gubbins - it's been several days now so the BNP having 2 MEPs is now OLD NEWS and by now a COMPLETELY NORMAL thing.

Phew, eh?

Glad that's over with. This isn't:

(part one here)

Josephine Esmerelda (part two)

As it happens I don’t remember much about that evening. Or the next. Or the next. You may as well ask me to describe each and every gorse bush on a mountainside. From that point on the only days I remember are those that involved him: the man with the barrow and the goat.

It would be wrong to tell you his name at this point because I did not know it and he did not know mine. But we would find out one another’s names soon enough.

I told you he came to the town but once a week – on the weekend to be precise, though not on a Sunday for church, but on a Saturday. I still don’t know whether he was what you’d call a pious man, but I doubt it. Few there were; church was merely another place for gossip, where most were concerned. I freely admit I was one of those, and it was at church, not at work in the bar, where I’d learnt all I then knew about that mysterious man who came and went with the market like so many others, but who had come to remain with me in my rare moments of quiet contemplation like some future promise: a mark on a calendar, perhaps, or a portent of some kind. I knew not what.

The girls said that their mothers said that his father was a good man, as men go, but that he had lost his wife with the birth of that boy many years ago. They had grown up together out there in the valley and owned a great deal of land, though little of it was good for anything much. He kept goats for himself and he grew carnations for the market, as his father had done before him. He was neither as old as he looked nor as young as he seemed. The girls were quite excited when I said I had spoken to him. I put it that way around, though really the opposite was truer. Apparently he had never spoken to any one of them. He came and he stood and he sold his flowers and he went. He did not even man the stall – he sold them to a town trader who had dealt with his father before. He rarely spent more than an hour depositing his wares and making his purchases before returning to his lonely cottage in the valley.

What did he do down there? Had he any brothers or sisters? Did he have friends? A lover, perhaps? Or did he make do with his goats?

These were just a few of the questions they asked. I wondered too but was happy to have others give voice to my curiosity. Above all I wondered if he was the one who would take me away from that place.

I resolved to think of nothing else but this man while I worked: to picture his face, with all its emotion concealed behind that mask of a beard and the eyes half-hidden away between his shield-like cheeks and the balcony of his brow.

Had he chosen me or had I chosen him?

It was only one week later, as I’d thought and hoped it would be, when I saw him again. I went for a smoke by the fountain at siesta as usual and I saw him lingering at the market, talking to one of the stallholders – his goat was wrapping its little jaws around a table leg and grunting. I think he caught my eye, (the man, not the goat), though it was hard to tell with him squinting so much in the low light.

I did not wait for Rafa to remind me this time – I returned to the bar, grabbing handfuls of glasses on my way and exchanging quips with a group of middle-aged men sat under a parasol with a jug of red wine, smoking their pipes and watching the world go by.

It was not much later when I saw him enter. The door was open as always: it was close to summer and the evenings were getting warmer, the sunbeams shot through the wooden slats of the open shutters and the bar was half-full of revellers, families, and old couples waiting for the music to start. Rafa had gone to do what he did when I was at the bar, which was never anything that interested me. One of the girls, Rita, was entertaining some older women by recounting her recent escapades with one of the boys of the village. Javi was busy in his steam-thick fizzing kitchen and the bar was manned by one of Rafa’s boys and I alone.

The boy, whose name I don’t remember, was struggling with the croaked demands of an old man who wanted a drink, but who wanted even more to talk and be listened to, but could barely manage the former and was wrestling with the boy’s patience on the latter.

He tied his goat up outside – to his cart, in fact, which was heavy enough and laden enough that the squat little beast couldn’t hope to move it if for any reason he’d wanted to.

He came in and stumbled on the slight step before the doormat. He looked around but nobody paid him much attention. It was that time of late afternoon or early evening when everybody is very much engrossed in their own affairs: before the real drinking begins but after the period of quiet reflection where those with enough time to spare will indulge themselves with an afternoon nap.

He came and sat down without looking at me once, positioning himself on the stool uneasily.

“A glass of wine, please,” he said.

So he drinks then, I thought; this was more than I had yet learned about him.

I poured it before him from an open bottle and did not wait to see his reaction – I flashed a fast smile and grabbed a basket of fresh bread for a wealthy couple from out of town who were sat in the opposite corner. I deposited it on their table with jugs of oil and sour wine and engaged them in conversation as loudly and as enthusiastically as I could. They were taken aback at first but were soon welcome for the respite from one another’s company, (they were of that age). I pretended to be impressed by the man’s profession and to admire his wife’s gaudy jewellery, and I confess I took some amusement at my visitor’s awkwardness when I turned and looked across the bar, right at him, pretending to stifle the laughter I’d conjured for a bad joke the woman’s husband had made, knowing full well it looked as though we had been talking (and laughing) about him.

He took a long drink from his glass and almost emptied it; I knew I’d have to return or he’d leave his money on the counter and I’d not see him again for a week, if ever. I told the couple to call me if they needed anything, and the man gave me a coin from his purse, and his wife smiled through pursed lips, glad by now to be rid of me.

I returned to my suitor; I’d made him wait long enough.

(Part three coming soon possibly if you're lucky)

Nick Griffin 4 Da UK! (You Get What You Give.)

2 complete cunts are representing us in Europe then!

That's a shame isn't it?

No - it's not a shame. It's exactly what we deserve for having come this far (i.e. not very far at all) in the last century or so. And it's not just us, it's a lot of Europe that's reacted to its little $-catastrophe by wheeling out the racists, so I'm told - and that's not much of a surprise either as we do (despite what Nick "The Cunt" Griffin and his merry men would have you believe) share a hell of a lot in common with a lot of the other European states - an overinflated sense of our own self-worth being high on the list (and indeed there's the very curious and confused notion of identity that lurks behind the use of terms like 'our' - who else do I include when I use this?)

I confess to being massively Eurocentric to the point of racism. Europe could, potentially - I really believe, be a seat of greatness and the helm of progress in the world, ideologically, environmentally, politically, technologically (if we could only destroy Japan - joke) but it's in danger of just remaining as it has long been: one giant sausage festival.

I wasn't shocked when I found out that form 696 was a cackhandedly racist attempt to shut down one of the few avenues of accessible entertainment/culture for our city's black youths, so why would I be shocked to find out that the wilfully-ignorant scum who still make up a decent wedge of our thuggish police force are pretty well mirrored within society (notably the voting public) as a whole?

In fact, I've known there were loads of ignorant and bigoted people in the UK for ages - since I was conscious and able to communicate with others; I've met some, talked with some and drank with some in bars - I've rarely confronted them with how ill they make me feel and how illogical, backward and ill-thought-out is the core of their belief.

Therefore I'm unsurprised by the appointment of 2 BNP MEPs, and I don't feel hard done-by, just a little guilty.

There was that time the members list got published and I didn't invite the local bigots round to tea to discuss politics - hell, I didn't even firebomb their swanky Pimlico houses or piss through their letterboxes.

Before you complain that Nick Griffin doesn't represent you and sign a convenient electronic petition to send to Europe to say this wasn't in your name, please accept the reality of the system of government you live under and the population with whom you share your air.

The BNP appeal to people who do not understand or care to understand politics, and there are many of those around.

They do this quite cynically (as most of them, evil thought hey are - and I don't use that word lightly) are less stupid than their voters) by mirroring the proles' contempt for complex things like 'politics' and 'Europe' and 'the correct use of your 1st (and undoubtedly only) language' - here's the newly-elected Andrew Brons referring to the EU as a dictatorship, for example, (skip to the end) which as anyone who ever had a passing interest in an education on either history or politics will know is an utterly ridiculous thing to say.

The only cure for stubborn, wilful ignorance is education by force. So next time you're watching the football in a pub alone next to someone who turns out to be as shockingly ignorant as people found in such places sometimes are you'd do well to correct them on some of the more outlandish statements/outbursts. (I'm really talking to myself here - not you.)

If they won't listen or enter into discussion with you? Walk away. You wouldn't talk to a brick wall, would you? though you might kick a football at it, or piss on it when drunk.

What's the worst that could happen in confronting an individual like this, in a public place?

And if 'the worst' happened, wouldn't it still have been worth it, so you could actually say you'd done your bit, instead of shaking your head in wonder and bemoaning that the land you know and love is going to bee seen in this light by those abroad.

One should never find one's self 'agreeing with racism out of politeness' as Stewart Lee put it - that's indicative of one of the most shameful characteristics of 'Britishness', or 'Englishness' or whatever you term your own identity/malady.

I voted lib dem and as well as the BNP outperforming in terms of changes, UKIP (the Waitrose version of BNP) actually did significantly better overall. Never more have I felt the need to shout angrily at people in public places.

Still, at least I voted - Griffin got in on less votes than last time he ran (apparently) and it's thought the politicians are to blame for disillusioning the people, or the people are to blame for being disillusioned.

Should you be allowed to complain if you didn't vote? Of course you should -it's a democracy!

Click here to see Nick 'One-Eyed Fat Cunt' Griffin giving his victory speech in which he moans about how nobody lets him celebrate the day of the lizard-poking patron saint of England, Ethiopia, Russia and Greece, and goes on to compare his victory to water flowing over the country (!?) which seems an odd comparison given concerns about global warming.

I think They Might Be Giants put it better than I ever could:

I Come From Down In The Valley, Where So Few Folk Do Roam...

The following is the first part of a short story / novella (what's the borderline word count?) I am working on. It's based on an old murder ballad I wrote but turned around so it's told from the other P.O.V. - I haven't actually decided the end yet and I have completely given up with that way of writing for the moment.

Plots exist, sure - I'm not denying that - but I'll never be one to craft them in that way. It's like building a house... or a car... or a nation state... using a template. Sure it'll 'work' and people will buy it. But what will I learn? Who will I surprise? What will I put on my blog?

Yeah, so, it'll probably just not work at all but I am happy to take that risk because the consequences aren't that dreadful. Criticism or creative input encouraged. I want this to be awesome AND unsaleable, rather than merely the latter.

That picture, by the by, is by somebody called 'Moreno' (José?) and it fits better than any other on the first few pages of Google Images, so thanks 'Moreno'. Please don't sue me. It's called 'Spanish Lady' but this story isn't really set in Spain...

Josephine Esmerelda (part 1)

I heard you were looking for stories.

I have one.

You have never been to my hometown. Nobody has. It is a small town in a small country which lies sandwiched between two much larger countries; it’s of little consequence to anyone, including me. Now.

I grew up there all the same, so I cannot forget it.

I cannot forget the honking of the geese and the taste of the dust and the pine on the breeze and the warm, flat tiles on my hard soles and the fat flies’ buzz and the looming mountains hazy in the rising heat and the cartwheels straining on the slow hills and the sad, slow step of the sarabande and the serious faces of the dancing couples with cheeks dry and wrinkled as parched river basins and the crackle and spit of the slow-roasting hog and the perfume of sage, rosemary and thyme.

I cannot forget it for the remembering.

I couldn’t forget it even if I wanted to.

I was sitting on the edge of the fountain in the plaza when he saw me, and stopped, and stared.

I’d been watching him already – I often did; he was one of the very few who interested me. He came to town once a week with his goat on a rope, wheeling his barrow, his shirtsleeves rolled up just above his elbows, his forearms thick and carpeted with dark hair. His beard was too long for the heat here and his skin was a shade darker than bronze: he looked like a Saracen, but he sold carnations.

He caught me catch him staring, so I smiled and tossed my cigarette to the floor, grinding it against the stone with the ball of my right foot. His hand faltered as he touched his cap.

I sized him up against the familiar canvas of the bar where I worked. It was early and the sun was still floating defiant though depleted across the southern sky; the children who chased one another around the legs of the chairs behind gave him the look of a giant, and the low light halved his features perfectly so that the portrait became two profiles: one statuesque and squinting, honest but cautious: the other shadowed but sedate, unabashedly reading the shape of me with one working eye.

I wondered how I looked to him. Perhaps much the same? I did not like the idea of that so I turned away and ran my fingers through the surface of the clear water in the pool behind me.

On the ground I saw his shadow approach.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

His voice was quiet but still he had failed to hold it steady as he’d intended to.

“I’m looking for a good man to murder me,” I said, and laughed, looking up at him.

He didn’t laugh. He almost never did: I found that out later.

He inhaled deeply and slowly through his nostrils. He touched his cap again and walked back to his barrow. The goat followed nonchalantly, keeping pace as he exited the square to the north: to the barren valleys that skirted the mountains, where his house was to be found, so they said.

I watched his departure as though with interest, aware of but keen to ignore the approaching group that came from the bar.

Why had I said that? It was in my head. It was in one of the songs they would sing at the bar. One of those foolish songs the sailors bring from overseas – or perhaps make up themselves – and which somehow find their way up here.

“Was he troubling you, sister?”

The voice was Rafa’s. Rafa was my brother, partly, but foremost he was my boss.

“No,” I said, not looking him in the eye. Instead I looked at my nails, which were well-bitten and free of dirt.

“The bar is getting busy again. Siesta is over, come on.”

He snapped his fingers in front of my face, and headed back to the bar followed by his teenage henchmen, holding his arms out at that angle he always does: his elbows raised and his fingers extended as though he was about to practice the piano.

I stood and stretched and felt a trickle of sweat disappear beneath my dress and down my side.

It would be a long evening: the days were made up of brief mornings and long evenings. I untied my hair and fought with my fingers to untangle and straighten the curls, and then I tied it again and returned to the bar.

(Part two coming soon)

Every Time Your Hands Grasp My Neck I Feel Saved Like The Christ

First podcast of the summer? Sort of? Kinda?

Dunno.

But:

Creepy stalkers, militant vegans, nihilists, odinists, misanthropists, dead poets, goths and voice coaches - they're all here!

STREAM/DOWNLOAD HERE

And don't forget to ask if I forgot to say who something was by. I wasn't paying too much attention, what with Question Time and voting and all that political jazz going on.

Feminist Fables - Suniti Namjoshi

The oft-quoted quip that the lesbian has "no natural allies" in our society is closer to the truth than its humorous tone would suggest. The implied recognition that straight girls and gay guys get on is a massive generalisation but surely truer than the opposite scenario.

Traditionally the only relationship between lesbians and straight men has been a voyeuristic one, and one that rarely involves any actual lesbians. It's just another nonsensical fetish.

Also, only a dribbling idiot would contest the fact that society is set up strongly in favour of male over female and straight over gay. So gay women don't need to develop a sense of victimhood, it's there whether they like it or not. How many famous lesbians can you name? The fact is that homosexuality is still pretty much a taboo in our society, outside of the easily-identifiable exaggerated form that middle England can swallow.

Gayness is all well and good as long as it remains firmly in its own camp. Part of the true nature of homophobia is the anxiety brought about by not being able to tell the difference between straight and gay: the fear of an open border.

There's also the often firmly-held belief among men that lesbians are man-haters by definition. How dare they eschew what we have to offer? I mean, men are awesome, aren't they?

Anyway I begin with all this kerfuffle because my first reaction to Namjoshi's 'Feminist Fables' (1981) was to be taken aback at how specifically lesbian-based most of these fables are. Lesbianism and feminism are by no means synonymous, after all: although one can imagine there's a great deal of crossover.

My reflexes, apparently, still don't stretch to the basic understanding that everything I write is at least as informed by and dominated by my own sexuality (or lack thereof depending on the phase of the moon). I look forward to the point where such considerations are second nature.

I would yet insist that - unlike the very greatest of authors - Namjoshi does at times allow her message to overshadow her method: her content to smother her style.

But this is not always the case, and for such a focused and driven collection I think we can excuse some of the simpler and less evocative stories in light of the many successful, rich and complex amalgams of myth and polemic. Because Suniti Namjoshi really plays with two particular meanings of 'myth' in these fables, destroying one by embracing the other.

To give a general idea of the content while completely omitting the style, here are a few of my favourite plot lines:


* A lion attacks mouse, planning to eat it. The mouse persuades the lion to spare it in return for a favour in the future. The mouse comes across the lion trapped in net. The lion expects the mouse to chew through net and free it. The mouse decides not eating the lion is favour enough.

* Bluebeard leaves his new wife a set of keys and forbids her entry to just one of the rooms in his castle. She thinks he's entitled to a room of his own and thus obeys him. Enraged that his plan to entrap her has failed, he slays her anyway.

* Two knights battle over an abducted maiden. Her rescuer defeats her captor but finds she has already been raped. He grieves bitterly for his loss.

* A whale must spend her whole life eating plankton to survive. But she always wanted to sing. She decides to sing a little each day and eat plankton the rest of the time. She gets to sing pretty well by the time she's starved to death.


Though the average length of a fable in this book is less than a page, many are too complex to be distilled like this. The language throughout is as simple and child-friendly as the themes are complex and sophisticated - like all good fables.

There are enough people in the world who would have no interest on principle in reading a collection of (very) short stories that combine ancient world fables with (comparatively) modern feminism. For the rest of us, there is much to explore in Suniti Namjoshi's 'Feminist Fables'.

And they do not disappoint.

Walk This Way

I've decided there aren't enough pointless 'personal life' related blogs on here - you know, the sort that you don't give a damn about but upon which I can look back and laugh or cry or at least blink.

So: whole new thing - walking blogs.

Walk This Way 1: My House (Warwick Way) - Giant Freddie Mercury Statue (Tottenham Court Road)

This is a lovely walk because you never have to do it the same twice. There are an infinite number of ways to get from here to there through/past some or all of Pimlico, Westminster Proper, Parliament, St. James' Park, The Strand, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Soho, Oxford Street and all that.

Of course you won't see all that if you want to take a vaguely logical route, and as my own purpose for heading to town is normally to meet somebody I don't take any unnecessary detours except the (pretty close to logical and necessary) amble through St. James' Park in favour of skirting around it to the east.

You still get a lot of flavours of central London in this short space. And you couldn't go back exactly the same route if you tried - trust me: I always try and I always fail. (But at least I try.)

I always seem to end up going by the Duke of York's column on the way back - a.k.a. The Half Nelson Column. (Well - it is now.)

Pictured is the approximate route I took yesterday when off to meet a good friend from school days to drink tea and talk about Busted, tea and old school hip hop. I also had the opportunity to preview the new Akira The Don album in full and I'm not even joking when I say that the volume of emotion it stirred in me made the walk a pretty difficult though all the more enjoyable experience. I saw much of it performed at Dawn Of The Don on Friday (an excellent review of which, courtesy of Zombiehamster is here) but nothing really prepared me for the size of the thing. (That's what she said.)

I recommend you try this walk while listening to The Life Equation some time, (when the time comes): or perhaps an equivalent length of walk and an equivalent class of album. The former you can tailor. Good luck finding the latter!

This walk says it took an hour but it so didn't - it adds unnecessary detours that don't account for footpaths. Still though - good on Google for giving me all the more power to combine rambling with rambling.

More on this later...

Beer & Books

Just a short update to comment on the rather ridonculous ammount of beer and books coming my way lately.

It seems that almost everybody I come across is overly keen to ply me with beer (or alternative alcoholic beverages, often depending on my own choice) and/or books (usually ones which are suspiciously related to my areas of interest).

Of course, neither of these things are a cause for complaint: far from it. I love reading and I love getting drunk; rather often I choose to combine the two, but sometimes it seems like it's all getting too much.

The other night at Dawn of The Don (see picture, courtesy of Zombiehamster) I'm not sure if I bought myself a single drink. People kept on buying them, even if I still had one in my hand.

This was not an isolated incident though - at most of the events I've attended in the last month or so it's been the same story:


"Hi I'm Alex - you might have heard of me."

"I know, we're acquainted - can I get you a drink?" / "I don't care who you are - can I get you a drink anyway?"


Unbelievable.

If I were to pay for all these drinks I'm getting, or indeed return the gesture by buying everybody else a drink, I wonder what would happen? Perhaps I will never know...

It's not that I personally never offer to buy other people drinks (or pay for my own, for that matter), or indeed that I never part with books - I'm sure I've done a bit of both over the years. But I'm worried that there's a karmic imbalance. Perhaps this is why I have a cold again? Or perhaps that's because I typically spend my time on seven mile hikes in the north London wastelands / Wiltshire countryside after drinking?

There is a possibility that these people are trying to get me to lose weight. But I can't be getting into conspiracy theories...

The empty glasses clink around in my dishwasher memory and taunt me with their false promsies, because everyone knows that whatever the benefits of alcohol in a social context, you can't drink yourself slim, or young, or happy.

The pile of books on my desk grows daily.

It is a good thing.

Soon I will know it all.

Tree With No Name

Tree With No Name

It was there since long ago.

I’ll not say since before I was here, for haven’t I been here all the while?

It might have got there while I was asleep or away at the market, so it might.

Never mind that: I’ll not say how because that’s not the story.

But it was there all the while and I always knew it was there. And only that it was under the ground didn’t it bother me.

“Gnaw your meat from your hands and your feet,
But bury your bones in the back of your head,
Careful not to water with the tears,
Else your dinner won’t stay any longer dead.”

I won’t say there were tears with which I watered that rockery you see before you. Why would I cry in the garden? Is that a man’s game? I think not.

But doesn’t it rain so in these parts, and who’s to say that the cold north wind coming down from the mountains doesn’t bring the salt along with it – and isn’t that much the same as tears, when all’s said and done?

First it came like a hand reaching from the soil: all green and yellow, green and yellow, like many’s the poisonous thing. I wasn’t going to have it for my cooking pot was I? I wouldn’t even touch it.

Next it came like a child finding its feet, all up and down of a night and day, and I’d watch it from my window up there and I’d stand and test the frost on the night air with my tongue to see wouldn’t that be enough for to snap the roots? But no, it wouldn’t, and no it didn’t: there’s been none of those winters round these parts for many’s the year now and I don’t mind telling you that I miss them, though I had a hard life.

Soon it was like a near-enough full-grown thing, reaching up: a young one in its spring of life all long limbs and thin, and strong, and bending.

You’ll see though by its bark that is gnarled and cracked that it’s not had the easiest time of things getting to this height.

As I was saying to you before, I knew the seed was there all along, and what does it matter how it got there? Seeds fall and seeds carry in the wind. The animals leave the seeds behind in their droppings. We’ve all done it. Some men plant seeds with a mind to grow something. That would never be my idea – when you put a thing in the ground it’s because you want rid of it.

Now if I’m sitting in my chair there by the window I cannot read the lines of verse on the page for the great branches of that twisting, wretched sight. Look at it; isn’t it in the prime of its life while I am fading away?

I cannot sleep with it there.

I may look healthy enough but I’m as knotted and dank on the inside as that thing is fresh and tumescent at its core. It reminds me of everything I was and could have been, and nothing that I am; it is taller than me now, when I stand before it.

It is coming to fruit at last.

What yesterday were just so many clasped fragments of blossom now grow gross and gaudy, hanging juice-heavy from the branches like beating hearts.

It was good of you to come by, for I can stand it no longer.

Here is my axe.

You know what to do.

Flora Of Andorra

Well I started researching the climate of Andorra to work out if it's a suitable canvas for my new short story, which will be less short than those of late and probably TOO LONG to even fit on this blog if all goes to plan.

Yeah, so, anyway, I was doing that when I suddenly got the urge to write nonsense verse, which I haven't done all year!

I'd never have got into this writing lark if I hadn't taken it upon myself, as the musically untalented one of our never-formed teeange rock band, to make myself a lyricist.

I just find rhyme so inspirational, you know???

So, yeah, it was nice to do this again:

Flora of Andorra

I’ve been getting sidetracked
By your crablike footprints, Flora,
When, like some psychopath,
You sidle off into the water
Leaving little to no trace
Of what expression might grace your face.
You’re the devil’s devious daughter,
You’re my hybrid mega-fauna
And you don’t understand
Why I want to hold your hand,
But I want to hold your hand
And I want to hold it fast.
I want to iconographise you
In a basque, basque, basque.
(You’re basically Basque.)

Flora from Andorra
You’re a fraught flamenco dancer,
You’re a cumbersome cage-fighter
And a charmlessly-chaste chancer:
You flout the law of order
While you flaunt your sordid borders;
Only half Vitis Labrusca,
You’re my hybrid mega-flora.
A. M. Spangler made you mine
But I can’t press you for wine.
Hope my fingers don’t denote
That they’d like to slit your throat,
Because they’d rather work a lather
On your skin with scented soaps.
(I’m not saying you need a wash, though.)

I’ve heard the Flora of Andorra
Is nothing to write home about
But I don’t know about that, baby,
I’d send postcards of your pout
To those who've lost their faith in faces
Being worth painting or writing about.
Let’s deliquidise these vessels,
Then maybe later we’ll arm-wrestle
In the melting candlelight
To see who goes on top of whom tonight.

Makin His Mane

Rufus (part the second) (part the first here)

I followed her inside, secretly feverish in a somewhat childlike way now I was faced with the prospect of seeing inside the home of one of my most fascinating, and of late, troubling pupils. We sat down on comfortable leather armchairs, stuffed with horsehair, which protruded at the seams. Alas, I was denied the pleasure of examining the interior of the place by my own foolish excitement, coupled with the necessity of beginning the conversation with the boy’s mother.

“Now, I am sorry to be the one to report this matter to you, as your son has been such a kindly-mannered and studious boy in the past. However, of late he has not only been interacting very badly with the other pupils, who, it must be said, do jibe him and provoke him somewhat: he has also been causing chaos of his own accord both in and out of the classroom. He is confrontational in his attitude to pupils and teachers, he vandalises school property, he pays no attention to his superiors and he has no respect for any of the school’s rules. Just recently he instigated a to-do in the very corridors of our school, in which…”

She frowned at me, her hands held together at her knees: “Instigated a…?”

“Forgive me: a fight.” I had forgotten she was foreign to those parts, inasmuch as anyone is a foreigner in their own land. I am quite sure she was not from further afield than myself, but evidently I had picked up the colloquialisms of that corner of the land in my few years of residence more readily than she had in hers.

“Now, I understand that it must be difficult for the boy, him being… different and all, but I really must insist that you endeavour to do something about his attitude, lest we are forced to take the obvious step, and exclude him from education in our institution for all his future years.”

The lady had been looking at me through the same honest, unassuming, dark eyes that her son used to when he first joined us.

“I must say, sir, that this all comes as a very sorry surprise to me. I had some idea that my boy was not getting on so well with the other boys at your school, but he had always taken that in his stride as far as I knew.”

Here she stood and began to pace up and down slowly, looking at her simple cloth shoes as she did so. I could not take my eyes off her: despite her superior years she was really quite beautiful. It was not often that I noticed beauty in a woman and I had grown quite used to the rustic charmlessness of the common villagers in the years since I left the city.

“Sir, you may know that I don’t get out very often, that being for my own reasons, but I always thought I would know my own son’s mind better than any other. And it pains me to think that Rufus is having a bad time of it at school: even more so since he has been giving you a bad time of it.”

Her concern seemed genuine.

“Does he not act up at home?” I asked.

“Why no: not a bit. He’s been a perfect little angel since… well: he always has been!”

She walked over to the window that looked out toward the village. I had to crane my neck to talk to her:

“I have seen cases like this before, Ms… I’m sorry, I forget your family name.”

“Silene. Mrs. Silene,” she answered, with emphasis on her title. It was a name I had never heard before and nor have I since. I have an idea where it comes from and it’s nowhere near these parts.

“Sorry,” I said again, “but I know a thing or two about children. And while I do not want to be presumptuous, what usually causes – and indeed cures – the problem in cases like this is discipline, or a lack thereof. I mean, perhaps the lack of father figure…”

“Ah, you know then?” she said, turning suddenly and crossing the room, standing to face me, her hands at her side – clutched fists trembling. I had obviously touched a raw nerve.

“I suppose news does travel fast when folk have double tongues.”

I stood then too. I was not quite sure to what she was referring, of course. I thought it best to be honest:

“I do not understand what you mean Mrs. Sile... I’m sorry, I only presumed that…”

“Ay well,” she said, clasping her hands and averting her eyes from mine as though she knew not what to do with them: “Presuming is what causes half the problems in this world. Sit down.”

I nodded, and sat, and she did likewise.

“If you want to know, the boy’s father is out the back, buried beneath the soil with a wooden cross of his own making.”

A cross? That was unusual enough, but…

“I am sorry. How awful. You mean he… he took his own life?”

“No, you simpleton!” she glared at me then, and I now had to avert my eyes. She had a fearsome look about her when she was angry – much like her son: “He was a craftsman. He died before young Rufus was born and I finished that cross out of the first and last pieces of wood he brought home to this god-forsaken cottage.”

“Oh, er, how awful,” I said again.

“Yes well. Rufus never knew his father so it can’t harm him.”

She was quiet then. I felt I was losing the path of this conversation and had to direct it again if I was to fulfil my purposes here: both official and unofficial.

“I’m sorry to ask this but, did his father look like…”

She cut across me:

“His father was a handsome, honest, hardworking man who never deserved what happened to him. We never should have moved to this place. My mother always used to say there’s strange folk up here. That poor boy was cursed by this place I swear…”

“So his father…”

“You’ve heard enough of his father, or ‘of my husband’, I might be more inclined to say. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but let me tell you: my poor boy was born almost a year after my husband was murdered!”

“Murdered?” The significance of this remark escaped me at the time, I confess. I was preoccupied with the change in her manner, and her use of that final word.

She was trembling now and looked horribly frail, as though her entire body had been seized by uncontrollable grief. I was reminded then of her age, and she looked less beautiful as she began to cry, though she kept her composure well. I just looked at her, not knowing what to say, and she met my gaze with a look of defiance:

“Oh, come on! If you know half the story skewed surely you must know the other half of it right? Are you people stupid as well as evil? If you really need to know, which surely no honest person does my poor husband was murdered most horribly in the woods by your people.”

“My…” I meant to tell her I knew nothing of this, and that they were not ‘my people’ as she said, but I was in shock, and she went on, twisting her lips as she imitated the local accent, which sounded strange on her soft tongue:

“‘Don’t go in them woods, southerner, trouble will come of it’. How could a people grow so cruel and bigoted?”

She had stood up again by now, her hands clenched and shaking and her face, which I had thought quite pretty and youthful, was now contorted like some nightmarish vision.

“Please, calm down Mrs…” I had forgotten the name again, and having risen also I now found myself stammering, unequipped to deal with the conflict: like a gloveless boxer.

She came close to me, glaring in defiance, right into my eyes, and speaking softly between her teeth:

“We came here to hide from the evils of the world and found them all waiting for us. We built this house and they told us ill would come of it: we followed their every stupid stipulation on the materials and the fashion – we wanted to be accepted. And still they kept coming back with their complaints, talking always to me as though my man was a ghost.”

She choked back her tears and gasped for breath. I reached out to hold her but she shoved me roughly away.

“When I buried him here, all they had to say was ‘We warned you’. The brazen cowards – they would not even admit their deed. And then… he came back that night to give me my boy… I don’t know… was it him or… some witchcraft of theirs?”

(Her words at this point rambled to the point of incoherence but I hope I report them as faithfully as I can.)

“When they found out I was with child they pelted my house with eggs for days. They are quite mad. They drove me mad, almost. But he was born, my Rufus, and there was nothing they could do. I don’t know why he looks like he does. I have my ideas but why should I tell you? We live together; he has grown up here with me – just the two of us beneath this roof my husband built. But I cannot keep him here forever can I?”

She looked at me then as though she actually wanted an answer. By this time I considered her quite insane and thought nothing of the behaviour of her son, though I was still as clueless as ever on the subject of his appearance. It could not end like this. But I knew not what to say to comfort her.

She took a knife from a hidden fold in her gown and held it up before me:

“Be out of my house now, I have said too much to you already.”

“But I must know where your son came from,” I blurted out; completely aware as I spoke the words of just how improper they sounded.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said simply, now looking at the floor, but still quivering, a tear trickling from her eye: “I don’t know. We always wanted children. I thought I was barren.”

“I…” Of course I had no idea how to react to this and was fully aware that whatever had been said, I had gone too far.

“Please, leave me,” she said softly.

I left the house, staggering dumbly like a drunkard, and I stumbled down the path in this way, then tripped and landed heavily on my knees.

I felt a stinging pain and saw that I had grazed them and torn small holes in my trousers too. I blinked and escaped from the strange trance I was in, fumbling in the grass I came upon a few rusty nails, flecked with clean, red blood.

I muttered curses under my breath and was soon up and on my way back to the school, forgetting to avoid the pretty red flowers that were dotted about the floor. I was dissatisfied with the meeting and unable to make sense of it in my head. Neither did I look in any fit state to report my findings to the school master: my knees were torn and my hands were red with blood and rust. Shaken though I was by my experience in the house of the boy’s mother, nothing could have prepared me for the sight that was to greet me back in my classroom.

There was a large crowd amassing at the school as I approached. The villagers were all there and there was an unusual clamour in the air. I heard the heart-stopping moans of mothers and saw cold, stern silence on the faces of fathers. I did not stop to ask; fearing the worst, I pushed through the crowd towards the school building and ran past those standing guard towards my classroom.

I dashed carelessly into the room, slipped on the tiles and fell upon the body of the young teacher who had taken my place that afternoon. I recoiled in horror and let out a cry. He was barely distinguishable. Only the clothes he was wearing revealed who he was: he had the look of a discarded rag on the floor of a butcher’s shop. His face was a ravaged mess.

I looked up at the cold faces of my fellow teachers and knew not what to say. I returned to the yard.

Outside I saw children screaming, blood speckled across their shirts, men arguing, bellowing in each other’s faces. All the important people of the village were amongst the crowd too, pushing, shoving and shouting. In the tense fury of the crowd the shouts were beginning to outnumber the moans: fights were breaking out between the men and I did not like what I overheard them saying.

I turned and fled back the way I had come, shoving one man aside in my haste toward the gates: I ran down the hill and back through the village, my calves burning with energy they had not felt in years. I was going back to the cottage. I had to go back.

When I got to the point in the path close to where I had fallen I found the boy lying there. I knew it was him, despite the change that had come over him. He was lying still in the long grass amongst the flowers and the nails, all the peculiarities of his appearance had left him; his arms and legs were smooth and thin, his ears were pink and round. His bare feet, though slightly worn and grazed, were perfectly formed and his open mouth revealed tiny, blunt milk teeth, edged with blood. I picked him up easily and was about to carry his body to his home when I heard a dim roaring, thundering, stampeding sound from the village not far behind me: hundreds of feet on hard stone.

I took the boy and ran to hide in a thicket by the edge of the woods. The house had been so close but something told me all was not right. I laid the boy on the ground and patted him gently on the side of the face. He did not move. I realised finally that he was already dead. His pale features were cool and peaceful. From what he had died I could not tell: there were no injuries.

For a second I thought the wind in the trees behind me was an eerie sniggering, but I turned and saw nothing but the dense, dark woodland: nobody had seen me escape.

From my hiding place in the thicket I saw a huge crowd march up to the house with torches and fuel at hand. Such a strange sight in the lingering light of the afternoon.

I don’t know if she even tried to escape. Maybe she did not want them to have the satisfaction. Maybe she had been waiting for years for them to do it. I hadn’t considered what she said about her husband’s murder to be true when she told me – the people she accused were my friends! I had lived among them for years and grown to love and respect them. But just an hour later I saw something that shocked me into belief. I decided there and then to leave the village and never return. I looked down at the poor, strange creature that lay dead at my feet and noticed for the first time an odd discoloured patch on either side of his trousers: there were two conspicuous orange stains. Curiosity led me to turn out his pockets, which I found to be empty, but which were also dyed that same colour, and had large holes worn away at the bottoms of each.


End.

Cambion, Campion, What's The Difference?

Rufus (part the first)

The tale I am about to tell you is not my own as such, but it is one in which I have or had a degree of involvement which makes it significant to me: unforgettable even. Further to this, I do not believe that any other living person is willing or able to tell it in its entirety as I can and as I wish to. And I do believe it is important that this tale be both told and remembered: remembered for many years to come.

I do not mean to tell you much about myself, but that I was a schoolteacher in a relatively small village in the remote area of our country’s centre: a village that lies (for it still exists to the best of my knowledge) below the mountains in a natural bowl or valley, surrounded on three sides by dense woodland; indeed, although I have not looked upon the place for many years it occurs to me now that it is just a matter of a few day’s walk from where we now sit. To the north, as you may deduce.

Being the third son of a wealthy father who owned land quite near the capital it was thought fitting for me to take a position in either the clergy, the army or one of the great universities to the south. But as I have always had a fondness for children, though never had any of my own, I chose to end my studies at a relatively young age and take up residence in one of our country’s new schools.

It was not quite a controversial choice, but it was by no means the best my father could have hoped for, so I chose a remote location so that I would not draw attention to myself or to him. After a short while practicing in the capital I moved to that village in the foothills, my new home, and I became a teacher of languages, literature and arithmetic in a respectable grammar school for children from the ages of seven up to fourteen.

I was twenty then.

The events I am about to relate to you occurred in the early summer of some sixteen years ago. I had already been at the school a few years, and by that time – I flatter myself – I had become something of a favourite amongst the pupils and the older teachers alike. Being somewhat above most of them in social standing my very presence there was considered an act of philanthropy – I was a pillar of the local community and well thought of by all.

This tale particularly involves a certain young boy by the name of Rufus. It is a common enough name in these parts – if hardly fashionable – but his name was the only common thing about him, poor child; he was very peculiar indeed: as bright and amiable a character as one could hope to meet, yet disliked and mistrusted by his classmates and by the inhabitants of the village in general.

Now it is true that many of the children – even those as young as seven – boarded at the school, for they were not all common villagers and many were the sons of merchants and lesser landowners. But Rufus was one of a few whose home was there in the village.

Perhaps this was part of the reason he did not fit in? you may think. Well, hardly. Although I admit it could hardly have helped.

His mother, since her arrival in that place some decade and a half previous to that time, had lived aloof in a small cottage up a hill to the north of the village. She rarely came to the village itself and never to the school and there were whispers of her practicing witchcraft. The boy’s father was a mystery to all; nobody had ever seen a man about their house and, to make matters worse, the boy’s birth had been witnessed by nobody in the area. In fact, I recall the men saying – and I would not repeat such base and idle bawdry but for the fact that it sheds light on the woman’s situation in the village – that not only the birth but also the conception of the child had been undertaken in secret. Suffice to say that nobody there knew from whence the boy had come. I had heard it mentioned that the woman came to the village with a man, but that he had died tragically and unexpectedly. The circumstances of his death were as much of a mystery to me as the rest of the missing details of this family’s history. Though they spoke at length of her they never spoke of him. It is not a custom in these parts to speak at any length about the dead, particularly if you have nothing good to say, and none of them knew him so how could they?

To add to these somewhat suspicious circumstances, Rufus was physically very strange indeed.

His legs and arms were covered in thick brown hair belying his tender years (for he was only eleven or so). Even his cheeks had begun to sprout a cultivation of a long fur-like covering. He looked less like a child and more like a beast of the woods: a bear or a wild boar perhaps.

This, though, was not the limit of his deformity; his feet too were strange, the toes on each numbering only two and those most hard and wide – like cloven hooves some said. His ears were pointed at the tops rather than rounded, (though the same size as common ears) and finally, perhaps most curiously of all, his teeth were somewhat longer and more pointed than normal teeth.

This final difference, though the subtlest of them in that it was easily concealed, was in effect rather frightening, giving the young fellow a truly bestial appearance that upset his classmates and teachers alike. Although he was in actuality a very good-looking child – healthy, handsome even – these physical traits were too much for the other children to overlook as I’m sure you can imagine.

I have learnt over my years as a teacher that the way children typically react to a difference like this is to act with suspicion, at first, and soon to move on to mockery – as long as they feel secure in their own safety. Worst of all, in the more extreme cases, the children will resort to hatred.

This progression can be gradual but it is imminent. As long as the subject of their ridicule reacts – and how could he not? – the other children will pick on this weakness as a way to ignore their own fears and insecurities. With the unity the subject’s differences create in them they have their own strength and the stronger and more secure they feel the more any weakness and notable exception in one of their own kind will come to be despised.

It is a curious and terrible fact of human nature. For without the differences where would we be? How could we shine? How could we develop? How could we love?

When Rufus first came into my class he was new at the school. He had begun several years later than the others, having been taught at home for some years. Again, this could not have helped his chances of fitting in. The poor thing had everything against him from the beginning, but was at first oblivious to all this and thus he was a sweet and studious child who initially found joy in being around others.

Unfortunately others found no joy in being around him. As the months went by they began taunting him and excluding him from their games. They called him names: “rat boy” and “beastie”. They would trip him and pinch him and push him: even throw stones – all the cruel things that ignorance and fear bring out in a child.

No longer would he rush into class in the morning with a nervous smile on his face. He began to arrive late and was usually sullen and quiet: only hissing and spitting at the teachers when they spoke to him. This included me, even though I had always tried to be a friend to him since he arrived; though I thankfully share none of his deformities I know a little of what it is like to be seen as different from others.

His behaviour soon demanded discipline: it was not a task I relished and was only used as a last resort, our school master favouring words to weapons where possible.

But when struck across his hands with the cane he only wrinkled his nose and bared his teeth in silent defiance, as though daring us to do our worst. When my time came and I struck him he hissed and gasped, never once looking me in the eye. The other children sniggered and were silenced, but he said nothing: never an intelligible word passed his lips anymore.

He became, by degrees, the naughtiest boy in the school, now starting fights with anyone who dared tease him. And he knew no rules of conduct when he fought: he would scratch and bite and kick – he would even tear out hair if he was given half the chance. Put simply, he would do anything to win.

There was one such instance of an afternoon, in which a lad had tripped him in the corridor and run away, laughing.

It was a foolish thing to do.

Rufus caught him by the ankle – diving at his legs and bringing him down on the hard stone: he clambered on top of the boy’s back, sitting on his spine with his own legs splayed either side of the struggling body, his feet on the other’s arms, and he took the boy’s short hair in his grubby fingers and pulled the head back roughly.

Struggling still, legs flailing in vain, he screamed like a girl and Rufus smacked his forehead against the cold tile. I heard that noise too as we wrestled him from atop the boy: he was crying, was Rufus. Tiny tears were smeared across his furry cheeks and he panted though gritted teeth. The boy on the floor wailed and sobbed softly, clutching his head and staring in bewilderment at the tiny red puddle and his reflection therein.

Had we not got there in time, Rufus would surely have killed him.



It became clear that we would have to discuss the matter with his mother before he was permanently excluded.

I volunteered myself for this task as I had had the most contact with him of all the teachers in school and, I admit, my curiosity for what had caused his descent into such condemnable behaviour matched my curiosity as to his origin.

I was determined, though I realised the ethical impropriety of it, to find something out about his father, or at least, which I thought was an inevitable consequence of my visit, his mother. I believed there must be something more than his physical freaks and the children’s reaction that led him to his recent flurry of unmanageable behaviour.

I elected to visit his mother during the last hour of school one Friday toward the end of the summer term.

We had a new teacher: the eldest son of a successful merchant had recently joined the school and was eager to begin with as many classes as we would allow him to take. I liked the fellow, though I never knew him well. He reminded me of some of the commoner boys at my own school, who I confess I often favoured to those of my own social standing. He was enthusiastic and optimistic, and he was the first teacher to whom I was senior. Though wary of the class being difficult of late, I allowed him to cover for my absence that afternoon for he felt he was up to the challenge and, in truth, few of the others would have chosen to take the task.

I descended the great road into the village, saying my hellos to the locals as I passed. I knew many of them by name now as it was such a small place and though I lived in the school I often came down in my time off simply to pass the time, take the air and discuss matters of local importance with the villagers.

I took the winding dirt path that passed the baker’s and ascended the hill to the north, towards the woods. Small red flowers of a sort with which I had only recently become familiar fairly peppered the grass on either side of the path like stars in the clearest summer sky. I recalled a local boy had told me they were used to treat snake bites and that their name was ‘cambion’ or ‘campion’ or something similar.

I crouched down to inspect the colour of these blooms – it was somewhat redder than the light purple I’d seen further down in the village. It was then that I noticed a number of old nails were dotted here and there amongst them, lying at angles between the stems like dead, felled trees.

The dusty track – orange of hue as is all the rock around these parts – gradually faded to a trail through the grass. Though the longest blades were pushed aside or trampled here I noticed with some pleasure that all those little flowers whose name I knew not were intact and so I endeavoured to keep them that way as I trudged up the slope towards the cottage, which was not as far from the village as I had imagined; indeed I had often looked up at it from outside the baker’s and thought it much further away. Foolishly, perhaps, I had always thought that it was both larger and further away than it turned out to be.

The cottage was built in the same fashion as all the local houses – from fine white bricks imported from quarries to the south, not from the soft orange sandstone that was peculiar to that area. The wooden shutters and chimney pots were from foreign woods also, as were all the building materials in that village for one reason or another. Nothing much has ever been taken from the earth in that picturesque hollow where that village is situated: the industries that thrive in that place are of other kinds.

The doorstep was littered with sprigs of dried flax and there was a U-shaped horse shoe nailed to the flat timber of the door. This wad not unusual in itself but I noticed on closer inspection that there was dried blood smeared across the rusted metal. At least, it looked like blood – but I could not really be sure. They had, after all, said that this woman was a witch.

I shook such thoughts from my head and adjusted my neck-tie to better present myself before a stranger. I knocked upon the door with my fist, as there was nothing to serve this purpose fastened to it: only that iron horseshoe, fastened in the way that is still common all across our land.

The woman who I took to be the boy’s mother opened the door swiftly, catching me adjusting my shirtsleeves. Her countenance was somewhat severe but she looked well – her dark eyes, pale skin and long red hair gave her a look bordering on exotic in those parts.

The following is, I trust, an exact account of the conversation that took place, in meaning entirely, if not quite so word for word:

“Good afternoon to you, madam. I am Mr. _________, your son’s teacher. I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I am afraid I have come to you today to report an unwelcome change in your son’s behaviour at school these past few months.”

“Oh dear,” she said, her eyes betraying a genuine surprise and concern: “please, do come in.”

(Concluded here.)

British Goblins: The Realm Of Faerie – Wirt Sikes

Growing up in Wales I don’t recall the folklore of faeries being as oft-explored as one might imagine it to be. Of the folkloric tales of the land the grand romantic narratives of the Mabinogion were much more valued by the schools, and the dim memories I have of Catholic Church don’t include any allusions to that particular element of the supernatural.

Perhaps that’s no surprise. One would hardly expect the stories of the common folk to be taught in schools alongside the quasi-historical tales of ancient wars between the Celtic nations: they were all written down on paper, for one thing, (or whatever papery equivalent they had in mediaeval Wales). And the modern church has an oddly-scientific approach to its doctrine.

100 years (give or take a month or two) before I was born, American journalist and writer Wirt Sikes died in London. In 1976 he had been appointed by president Ulysses S. Grant as United States Consul at Cardiff: a post which he held for seven years until his death. During this time Sikes wrote extensively on Welsh history, archaeology and social conditions.

‘British Goblins’ was one of his lengthier publications, including four volumes:

1. The Realm of Faerie.
2. The Spirit World
3. Quaint Old Customs
4. Bells, Wells, Stones And Dragons.

The first of the four is definitely the most readily-available today; the full volume seems hard to come by, and although many editions aren’t sold specifically under the 1st subtitle you can generally tell by the length of about 130 pages that it’s not the full four-part collection. (I assume Sikes did in fact complete the collection, but I can only find scans of the contents online, never the full folio.)

Dodo Press republish out-of-print books such as this and the newfangled affordable Forgotten Books (which seems to be some bizarre team effort involving Google, Amazon, and some presumably-rich benefactors) also reprints the first as well as housing its entire contents online for free, though I have noted complaints about the ‘low production standards’ from one Amazon user: these books are all retyped from the originals so mistakes are inevitable, (though my own copy of Hyde's ‘Beside The Fire’ was fine).

My edition of British Goblins is subtitled with the first book’s name and has a yellow cover with one of T. H. Thomas’ fine illustrations printed in dark red. I can’t find the exact same image online and I have no camera, but I can tell you it was reprinted in 1991 (from facsimile – so no room for error) by Llanerch Publishers, a small Somerset-based publisher specialising in out-of-print books. The image I took from their website, though blue, is the same one, and the book itself is very fine-quality (though I picked it up 2nd hand) and quite a lovely thing to hold.

Anyway – the introduction is rather dry and exactly what one might expect from a 19th century scholar: Sikes makes sure to distance himself from the belief in any of the topics he discusses, quite unlike the new-age, rediscovering-their-inner-child authors one might associate with this field of study, and while he comes across as a tad awkward and humourless at first, once you get used to the style and presentation the authorial comment and anecdotal additions which this format allows become a very pleasant and even useful addition to what is otherwise a collection of well-researched folktales and fairytales from across Wales.

There are a few mentions of Anglesey, which I found unexpected and pleasant – but much of the faerie mythology herein (and unsurprising, given Sikes’ location in Cardiff) comes from Glamorgan, the mining communities, Neath and Brecon.

There’s some groundwork on separating and categorising the Bwbachod, the Coblynau, the Gwragedd Annwn, the Ellyllon and the Gwyllion, (all of them Tylwyth Teg), which again makes for a slow start, but once one gets to chapter 3 (about 30-odd pages in) the pace picks up and the sheer volume of research and collected stories becomes apparent.

There’s the constant theme of loss throughout many of the Welsh stories; many a Welshman loses his fairy gold after revealing to his friends its origin, or indeed his fairy wife (usually the lake-based Gwraig) due to a lack of understanding of her ways: one can spend years shovelling cheeses and loaves into a lake to win her just to lose her after a little domestic violence.

At a christening one faerie wife weeps, saying:

“The poor babe is entering a world of sin and sorrow; misery lies before it. Why should I rejoice?”

Her husband pushes her away in anger. When later she laughs at a funeral and weeps at a wedding between an old rich man and a young beautiful woman her husband reacts similarly, forgetting his vow never to hit her and it’s a quite literal case of three-strikes-and-out.

While the lake faeries are often these incompatible but highly-desirable females whom Welshmen cannot resist but cannot understand, their mountain cousins the Gwyllion are more often than not troublesome hags who lead wanderers to their peril and/or shapeshift into goats.

Further to the study of faerie types and recurring stories there are in-depth explorations of important aspects of the lore, notably changelings, disappearances and fairy rings.

The former shows the Welsh have much in common with the rest of Europe in their technique of tricking the ugly child into revealing its age and wisdom. This section also details the numerous horrific ways in which children would (apparently) be tested and (if found to be changelings) disposed of. One wonders (and indeed Sikes wonders) at the extent of all these missing children and the cause for it and the explanation of it assuming (as we have already assumed) that nobody believes this stuff. The mythology of the Tylwyth Teg must surely have been used in Wales as elsewhere to explain the disappearance of children as well as to excuse infanticide: these are, after all, eternal problems.

But they are not only used to explain the disappearance of children: Shui Rhys, a beautiful young farmer’s daughter, would blame her lateness and lack of work on the Tylwyth Teg. She clearly showed no love for the life that was laid before her in rural Wales and when she disappeared (even in light of vague reports of sightings in far away cities) it seems the locals were happy to believe she had been taken by (or indeed willingly gone to) the ‘fair folk’.

There are detailed accounts of men and women on countryside walks who are drawn to harp music (always harps in Wales - unless they have captured a violinist), only to emerge from the dance into a world 100 years older, and then to collapse into dust on learning this:

Sometimes snippets of sheet music recounted by those who strayed into the faerie realm are included:




The oft-explored connection between the mythologies of Christianity and the seemingly-pagan folklore of rural places is highlighted wonderfully here with the study of a (real) character called Prophet Jones – a man of God who was insistent on the place of the Tylwyth Teg in the Christian way of thinking, even drawing on scripture to prove this. (Which goes to show you can prove almost anything with scripture.) He includes his own experience of seeing some little folk amassed in a sheepfold as a child with the many, many collected stories he harvested from his parishioners.

Further to Jones’ inclusion is a fairly comprehensive and illuminating section on the theories (old and new) for the origin of these strange people and their proliferation in Wales – they are souls awaiting judgement (like water babies?), descendants of earlier ungodly folk (similar to the 'Lilith's children explanation for Norway's Huldra), or even sent as a punishment for Wales’ acceptance of Christianity (similar to the Hungarian ‘Curse of Turan’ perhaps?)

There aren’t really any conclusions, of course, as Wirt’s purpose in amassing all this information was (we assume) simply to paint a picture of the Welsh people and their beliefs, customs and stories. In doing that he does so very well and while I have read that this was done better and more comprehensively in later decades there is a quality to Sikes’ prose and an ease of navigation within the order of information that makes his work a delight to read.

Indeed, his position as a cynical but interested outsider is perhaps an ideal one to write from. And what he lacks in personal experience he makes up for in journalistic integrity and academic learnedness: it is a pet hobby of his to flag up connections with the text of Shakespeare plays whenever he can, and – as we know from Sikes’ commendation of Shakespeare in his introduction – the bard took most of his allusions to the folkloric and supernatural from Wales, and was faithful to the original sources in his poetic rendering.

So where are the other three books?

I Can't Get Down And I Won't Get Down

Genesis (A Draft)

And God created Adam from Hydrogen
And he created Lilith that way too:
Both were formed in his own image,
Just like Jesus, figs and spinach,
Formless voids and dwarfs and droids,
(Because God's in everything).

When their yin-yang embryo was segmented
In the belly of some ancient ape
They'd no idea the further pain they'd face
When light years after their escape
Forces out of their control
Would build and break and drive them further
And further away from the unity they had
In their nativity to a dismal judgment day.

They cavorted for a while
And enjoyed the kind of innocent idyll
That most children still enjoy today
In civilised Western lands
Provided they stay away from drugs and thugs
And predators, hip-hop, porn and Islam.

But Adam felt uncomfortable
With loving something so much like
But yet unlike himself.
Mirrors had not been invented yet
So he couldn't stand to look so often
On a face he hadn't helped create.

He couldn't wear her like a glove;
He couldn't fit his fist in her,
And she could hit him back
If he kicked out against her.

He shivered sleepless nights
Imagining she'd perhaps catch fish
Which were bigger than him, or learn to hate,
Or slip snugly into some other animal's skin,
Or sit on top of him,
Pinioning his arms,
And look him in the eye.

He had a word with God
(Who was a man, back then, after all)
And with a wink and nod
He ripped a rib from Adam's side
And beat her half to death with it.
Indicating her shaking form,
He bade Adam spit.

So Lilith's life, like this poem, was cut short.
But she crops up now and again
In the oddest circumstances
To remind us of what we can’t or won’t remember.

His other lover, Eve, was better
Equipped for the life he had to offer
And soon doomed him to his own exile,
Forever keeping the secret
Of procreation to herself.

Ariel - Sylvia Plath & Old Stories From Mols w/ Illustrations by Axel Mathiesen

As much to keep a record as to prove to nobody in particular that I have been reading in the last few weeks, this post briefly deals with the above two volumes, which have very little in common other than being part of my recent haul of second hand books.

As it happens I'm in the process of (very slowly) reading about 5 books at the moment and I'm yet to discover whether it makes me read better or remember better, though it obviously makes me read more slowly.

Anyway:

I've barely delved into Plath's body of work since I read and thoroughly enjoyed (if that's an appropriate word) The Bell Jar at 17. Why? Not sure - I was never a keen consumer of poetry by volume until a couple of years ago when I read about half of a Robert Frost collection during a summer holiday and realised there were poems beyond his handful of famous and oft-exchanged numbers that could affect me as much or more.

Similarly I suppose, a coupe of poems in this collection - i.e. 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Daddy' - have cropped up in anthologies before and the latter at least gradually wore down the defences I'd long maintained against poetry that shunned the traditional constraints of regular rhyme schemes and metre.

T.S. Eliot single-handedly broke down that barrier really, though, with the might of Prufrock and (to a lesser excent though no less mighty) The Wasteland.

But my first experiences of Plath's verse were around the same time and I've since found few others can work so well almost entirely without a sense of order. Plath's internal rhyme and constantly-vivid imagery more than make up for her shunning of rhyming couplets, and her several pet-obsessions (The Holocaust, Greek mythology, the moon and apiculture, notably) serve her well in terms of forming her poetic character and setting her apart from others, although they do often suggest strong links between poems which otherwise might not be readily associable but for their common author.

There's still a large proportion of her poems which near-enough pass me by, leaving behind them just a few affecting lines, a ghastly or wondrous image and a sense of a greater part hidden but too hard to reach at this time, with these tools.

She totally did my head in some months ago when my iTunes shuffled upon an almost-comprehensive collection of her own readings - she's a great voice but it demands attention that simply cannot be given when turning the cogs of industry.

I'm fortunate enough, though, to have got beyond the need to understand and explain everything I read, and have found that my enjoyment (particularly of poetry) has increased because of this.

I must confess, however, to being mostly drawn to those grander poems: usually more famous - and recognisable by lines pilfered by (mostly male) songwriters down the years; the "confessional" poems that deal with the poet's own state of mind are by far my favourites. (Which is rare, actually: I normally favour narrative stuff.)

Those who are drawn to Plath's work are often very protective of her and I can see why: regardless of whether you truly empathise with her or "feel her pain" as it were, her skill as an arranger of words is worth celebrating: worth defending, even. For the feel of the words forming and taking flight, few poems are as good to read as 'Lady Lazarus'.



As for this Mols thing... it's a collection of Danish short stories I found hidden away in the 'Mythology' section of Black Gull Books in Camden. It's a real curio and is sold (though probably not bought) for over $100 dollars on Amazon, which makes the £3.50 for a small volume seem a bit less steep than I'd thought. Still, it was cute and curious enough to convince me of the necessity for my purchase.

It's an illustrated collection of "Molbohistorier" or stories about how stupid everyone from Mols is. Apparently they are still big business in Denmark!

Mols is a peninsula to the north of Aarhus and apparently its folk are famous in Denmark for being slow-witted and countrified. Amongst Danes, eh? Wow! That's saying something...

The stories are English translations of 20 child-friendly sly digs at the poor unfortunate Mols folk, and this volume was published (presumably for tourists?) in 1952 with accompanying illustrations in full-colour by Axel Mathiesen, whose work has/had also adorned the pages of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, if my brief Internet research is to be believed, (which it is, if you please).

These vignettes are daft, eye-rolling, groan-inducing, and ultimately a lot of harmless fun. The closest equivalent in English would be the oft-explored jokes about Irishmen, though I have no recollection of any written tales of this sort being in existence. If they were they would probably choose people from Norfolk as the butt of the joke. Or Somerset. Or Cornwall. Or Kent. (Or anywhere in Zone 6, really.) Actually, it would probably work better as an inverse look at Londoners. If I was inclined towards humour I may be tempted to try my hand at an adaptation.

Examples of stupidity:

* Mistaking lobsters for Norwegians.
* Hiding a bell in a lake, then marking the location by cutting a notch out the side of the boat before rowing to shore.
* Ensuring a man's tread through the cornfield does not ruin the crop by getting six other men to carry him.
* Sentencing an eel to death by drowning.
* Accidentally decapitating a friend. (Yeah, that one's a bit dark.)

Stupid Mols folk! Learn your lessons!

It's a quaint book and a lovely one for a collection but, to be honest, if someone actually offered me a hundred dollars for it I'd probably take the money and run.

But I'd fax it to myself first.

Eh?

Eh?

Who's got me?

As I Live And Breathe, You Have Killed Me - My Top 30 Murder Ballads

Top 30 murder ballads, give or take a few I forgot or found out about after compiling. Thanks for suggestions.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD HERE.

If you don't

want to know

the playlist,

look away now.

30) THE CURSE OF MILHAVEN - Nick Cave

"Oh fuck it, I'm a monster, I admit it."

Say what you want about Nick Cave's wilful revelry in the macabre and grisly - at least he's up for shaking it up a bit: teenage murderesses and psychopathic school kids, crucified dogs &c. Nick Cave brings a fiendish imagination to all of his Murder Ballads album, and this is my personal favourite from the self-penned number thereon. The creative sadism, the jaunty organ, the middle-aged man channeling a psychopathic young girl - it's all good.


29) I HUNG MY HEAD - Johnny Cash

"I felt the power of death over life,
I orphaned his children, I widowed his wife."

I guess Johnny Cash has done a number of similar songs in his time: covers, quasi-originals, staples &c. but as unlikely as it may seem this particular exploration of the human condition is by far my favourite of Cash's murder songs; the heavy-hitting piano and forefronted old-man-voice that go with most of his 'American' recordings are the perfect presentation for this vivid and somewhat surreal expose of the cruelty and curiosity of man.


28) THE BEST EVER DEATH METAL BAND IN DENTON - The Mountain Goats

"If you punish a person for dreaming his dream,
don't expect him to thank or forgive you."

A work of inspired genius by anyone's standards, this story song is as much a character sketch as a narrative. But it had never even occurred to me to think of it as a 'murder ballad' as the outcome of the tale is so ambiguous. It's all in the "plan to get even" line though. Once you have the idea in your head of that "plan" being mail-order ammunition and an adrenaline-fuelled high-school massacre you can never really laugh at the whimsy of the song again - it's just so sad.


27) THE WOUND THAT NEVER HEALS - Jim White

"Blinded by their memory,
seared by their pain,
she'd like to kill 'em all,
yeah: kill 'em all again."

Jim White is the master of gothic country, and his inventive use of subtle production techniques and oddball angles on the dark sides of life. This is a sympathetic, even tender, character study of a troubled young female serial killer whose psychopathic ways are viewed with curiosity and (perhaps) pity by the distant narrator. A sublime work.


26) HENRY LEE - Dick Justice

"Lie there, lie there, loving Henry Lee,
till the flesh drops from your bones."

The oldest recording on the podcast? I have many 50s and 60s versions of folk staples and many I enjoy privately but few seem really distinct enough to hold their own amongst a sea of modern interpretations, originals and genre-transcending contemporary compositions. This version of the classic tale of jealous lover-turned vindictive killer is purer though in its narration, in its pastoral beauty and in its brutality than the (admittedly excellent) version by Nick Cave and Polly Jean Harvey - there's also an extra verse including a tell-tale bird.


25) MARY HAMILTON - Joan Baez

"I put him in a tiny boat
And cast him out to sea
That he might sink or he might swim
But he'd never come back to me"

Joan Baez has one of the best voices of anyone. I can't think of someone with a better voice offhand. I actually heard her own rewritten spin-off of this tale first: the wonderful 'Michael' from '77's underrated 'Honest Lullaby'. She's also written another song possibly about the doomed child in this tale, 'Georgie'/'Geordie'. Clearly something about this story of the Scottish servant woman impregnated by the king struck a chord with her.

The murder here is apparently infanticide - the mother disposing of her unwanted baby boy - but she herself is executed for this act, the result of a sexual crime in which her own part was not necessarily wilful. It's a vague and really quite nasty little story and like all great folk songs the chosen details of language and music give the sordid events themselves a transcendence which romanticises and (almost) celebrates them.

Note: a mother's infanticide is also the subject of 'The Cruel Mother' and its variants - sung by Baez and Steeleye Span amongst others.


24) BUTCHERS - Slobberbone

"His voice says 'ladies' but his mind is thinking 'bitches'
But his pitch is just too much for most of them to withstand"

These three short stories in song form say a lot more about the town and the time than they do about the individuals involved (two of whom are murderers - one a serial killer, one a one-time killer(?) the other a slaughterhosue worker): they remain half-faceless as they move through the shadows of this number, itself disguised as a cow-punk country rawk foot-tapper. Lyricist/singer Brent Best is never one to waste a song on any 'la-de-da' outpourring and seemingly fills this particular musical frame with a vision of literary macabre rarely matched by those whose praises are sung far more often than his.


23) NEBRASKA - Bruce Springsteen

"I guess there's just a meanness in this world."

The Boss' take on Charles Starkweather's 57/58 killing spree in the titular state does a good job of humanising a pretty dehumanising crime - but that's not really the point is it? This album more than any other by the usually-optimistic (is that fair?) rock 'n' roller-laureate truly wallows in the miserable, the hopeless, the stuff that does well to convince one there is no God. It borders on nihilism, self-destruction, blind-eyed misanthropy, and this bleakly-gorgeous opener is the song that clasps your hand and walks you into the darkness. The idea of the (supposedly-intended) band versions of these songs being workable seems ridiculous, but who knows? Unlike many murder ballads though, Springsteen's 'Nebraska' does not wallow in evil for evil's sake: it isn't that gratuitous - this really feels like a window into a dark place, but via Bruce's narration, we are not so much passing through the gloom on the ghost-train as pressing our faces up against that window looking into the blackness for any sign of a light switch.



22) CRUEL SISTER - Rachel Unthank & The Winterset

"The eldest she was vexed."

It's only a matter of time before Lady Sovereign or somebody like that does a modern update of this tale of sister-on-sister crime - because though the Unthank sisters' version is my favourite, it is very much steeped in tradition, down to the curious pronunciation of words like "stone" and "vexed". Also known as 'Binnorie' and 'The Twa Sisters' this traditional (Scottish?) tale of sisters turned jealous lovers is doubly great as it moves from the all-too-well-known to the 'eh, what the hell? Some dude made a harp out of her dead body now it's playing itself' in a matter of minutes.


21) EXCITABLE BOY - Warren Zevon

"He raped her and killed her then he took her home"

Zevon has a knack for saying odd things in classic sounding songs - so much so that you could blink and miss it and barely realise what the song was about. The amusingly surreal way in which the 'excitable boy''s crimes are surmised in those two words is sort of reminiscent of the blindness of the world to Bateman's state of mind in American Psycho. (I admit I have only seen the film.) One could go to great lengths to analyse just what Warren was trying to say about society's treatment of criminals here but one imagines he just thought the song was funny. It is.


20) ARLENE - The Handsome Family

"This long dark cave will always be our wedding bed."

Rennie says that her husband Brett was having trouble writing lyrics (the trouble being he wasn't very good at it). When presented with his latest country love song she applied what she had learned from such great traditional tales as 'The Knoxville Girl' and offered the following advice: "Well, he could kill her." And thus a writing partnership was born. This wonderful little number is still in their live set over a decade later.


19) DIANE - Therapy?

"I'll put all your clothes in a nice neat pile"

A horrible song, really - who'd have written this? Well, Hüsker Dü apparently. Though I always knew it as a Therapy? song - they were a band drawn to darkness, though usually with tongue in cheek. This single, conspicuously free of electric guitars, and with strings aplenty, is an altogether more serious affair. I remember my brother Marek saying (quite rightly), "you've got to be a weird guy to stand up on stage and sing 'masturbation saved my life'." You've probably got to be even weirder to sing this murder ballad from the point of view of murderer/rapist Joseph Ture. But there you go.


18) JULIAN COPE IS DEAD - Bill Drummond

"The records weren't selling
and Balfie was drooping
and Gary had a mortgage to pay"

In this song Bill imagines himself as the pragmatic murderer of the Teardrop Expoldes frontman during the height of said band's fame and presents the events in cute nursery-rhyme form, even resurrecting "J.C." ominously in the last verse. Hardly vindictive - more of a playful stab at the rock 'n' roll god complex. Interestingly, Bill really was their manager at some point. Where's the melody from? That question bugs me still...


17) MOLTEN LIGHT - Chad Van Gaalen

"I found you and I killed you."

A mysterious and indeed haunting number that has the feel of a feminist fable. The murder is (seemingly) committed at the end AND the beginning - it's a rare example of a modern number that has the sense of catharsis many old folk songs did include (see 'Cruel Sister' and (some versions of 'Henry lee'). Nice.


16) YEAH, OH, YEAH! - The Magnetic Fields

"I die, I die, I die -
so it's over, you and I.
Was my whole life just a lie?"

Merritt conquered the love song with his 69 of the buggers and this was his stab at the genre. No token gesture though, this stands up as one of the best - a vivid and detailed (even believable) storyline with darkness, sadness but definitely humour. And, most importantly of all, an inimitable knack for songwriting.


15) SADIE - Alkaline Trio

"You tried to set them free,
but they've thrown away the keys."

With a similar need for understanding as was shown on Springsteen's Nebraska, this particularly awesome song also lays bare the singer's admittedly weird obsession with the morbid, the awkward and the impossible-to-empathise-with. And it's sung as a kind of love song: trying and never quite managing to explain the crime, even to excuse it. This is the closest thing to a Beatles reference on this podcast, by way of Charles Manson, and stands some miles deeper than 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' yet will be taken seriously by far fewer. We live in a strange world and none are more aware of that than these folks.


14) WHISKY IN THE JAR - Thin Lizzy

"I jumped up, fired off my pistols
and I shot him with both barrels."

The Dubliners' version wasn't a murder ballad. This one is. Thin Lizzy were an amazing band and managed to borrow so much from America while retaining an identity very much there won. Perhaps this was never more explicitly illustrated than in this song - a supposed traditional but really their own creation.


13) HUMAN(E) MEAT (THE FLENSING OF SANDOR KATZ) - Propagandhi

"Let me the fuck in!
I just want to 'fully relate'!"

Few bands display the intelligence and inventiveness when it comes to lyrical content as these dudes. This is one of their finest moments. They are imagining killing a real person because of his choice of diet and his comments about theirs. It's nuts, but it's awesome.


12) SAWNEY BEAN - Sol Invictus

"Some are haunted by the tolling bell
Some by the fiery pits of hell
But what haunts me is what we did see
When we entered the larder of the Sawney Bean"

This is as grim as things get and the vocal from (I think) one-time Sol Invictus member now Fire + Ice main man Ian Read works so well with the eerie trademark minimalist percussion and dismal tones of Wakeford & co.'s dirge. When I first heard it I was convinced it was an authentic folk song and murder ballad. It is - it just happens to have writing credits. The reality/fantasy/intrigue surrounding the subject only adds to the veil of menace around this tale of Scotch cannibals.


11) TWO DAUGHTERS AND A BEAUTIFUL WIFE - Drive-By Truckers

"Is there vengeance up in heaven
Or are those things left behind?"

The best of these songs - as with most art - ask questions, rather than simply transfer information. This very sensitive and reflective take on the murder of musician Bryn Harvey (not Brian Harvey) and his family does just that, and is one of the best songs the band have produced, amid competition from some of America's greatest contemporary songwriters


10) CRAZY MAN MICHAEL - The Fairport Convention

"His eyes they are sane
and his speech it is plain
and he longs to be far away-oh"

Both Sol Invictus and Kutna Hora perform excellent dark folk versions of this ballad (the latter's presumably based on the former's) but I feel the Fairport Convention version with its off-kilter levity has a conflict between tone and content that suits the story of the song. It's a sad and a cruel tale.


9) AGAINST POLLUTION - The Mountain Goats

"A guy came in, tried to kill me, so I shot him in the face"

Wow. The murderer in this song appears to show a lot of remorse, which isn't common. He holds on to his religion desperately, obsessively, as a way to cope with... is it guilt? Or simply the pain of life and the things we must do to survive? One is almost convinced he is either mad or falling apart - yet in his self-searching he describes his crime with such simple language, and the mundanity of the world around him with such sublime poetry, and really only concludes with this: "I would do it again."


8) LAS CRUCE'S JAIL - Two Gallants

"I shot one man on the county line, took his dime and I blew his mind"

For those who appreciate their works there is really a sense of this impolausibly-young and awkwardly-trendy duo teaching their grandfolks to suck eggs. The raw energy they channel into their music creates a rambling wreck of a thing, spilling over with ideas: drums, guitars, words and delivery all falter at the brink of perfection and all threaten to fuck up or fall in on themselves at any point. As far as story songs go there are few who can compete at this level.


7) THE RAKE'S SONG - The Decemberists

"I guess you think that I should be haunted, but it doesn't really bother me"

Good old Colin Meloy really embraces the genre here, not so much breathing new life into it as raping its corpse and shitting on it with this happy-go-lucky tale of remorseless infanticide by a restless bachelor and unwilling father. It's by far the best rock song they've ever done and brimful of the colourful storytelling they've come to be known for.


6) HENRY MY SON - Andrew King

"Who gave you those eels?"

Andrew King reels out murder ballads like nobody's business - not only does he sing them better than most, he's also one of the world's foremost authority's on the history of folk songs. There are numerous versions of this song - including a bizarre cockney music hall version and 'Lord Talbot' - but Andrew's recordings are stark, simple and full of menace. He also inserts extra consonants into words seemingly at random. It works wonders.


5) STAGGER LEE - Nick Cave

"She saw the barkeep, said ' God, he can't be dead'
Stag said "Well, just count the holes in the motherfucker's head'"

Wilson Picket, Modern Life Is War, Taj Mahal - they all do great versions of this classic (based-on-a-true-murder) American blues number. But Nick really goes to town on it. If ever you want to clear a room of old people, or girls, or lefties, or... faggots!!! for any reason, playing this would be a good start. Really though - you can't be offended by this gratuitously violent, sexual, sexually-violent, ridiculous song once you know it back-to-front, because it's so bloody groovy. Nick's reimagining of the title character as a throbbing lunatic whose world is his bitch is a singular achievement.

4) NATASHA - Pig Destroyer

"I put her in the ground like a flower"

This song, with its evocative soundscapes, horrible violence and tender, awkward exploration of the mind of a murderous lunatic was the song that gave me the idea for this collection, so good work Pig Destroyer. Usually knwon for their 36 second outbursts of unbearable noise, they went the other way this time and recorded an EP over half an hour long that owes as much to prog as it does punk, and (I would argue) as much to folk as it does metal. With sadism, poetry, retribution, tension, lots of screaming and all sorts of well-executed techniques woven into the (barely-discernable) lyrics, this song has so much in it that it manages to be both more and less evil than many easily-excused but really just unpleasant and relatively-dull murder ballads.


3) THE GERMAN - Naevus

"He didn't think it was too much to ask
To be separated from his past."

As soon as he walks into the bar there's a sense of menace in the word 'like'. He is not "made of the place he was in". What is he doing there? What will happen to him? This song is so uncharacteristically breezy and light for Naevus that one fears for 'The German' as soon as one hears him mentioned - perhaps even before that, when one reads the title of the song. And there's so much rare menace in the casual use of the F-word when the punters in the pub ask "Do you think we're fucking blind?"

Quite what it is that The German has done we are allowed to wonder, and our own conclusions no doubt say more about us than they do about him or them or the others. It's such a sad song because there is - on the surface of things - so much promise to begin with: the promise of a new beginning, and it's soon torn down by anger and hate, and by whatever it is that has come before. It's the story of everything and always, but it would be a fantastic creation if it existed in a bubble, because the ditty is as good as ever was whistled, and the words are chosen more carefully than they ever are in real life.


2) EDWARD - Sol Invictus

"It's too pale for your greyhound's blood..."

Probably my favourite traditional murder ballad sung by probably my favourite non-traditional folk singer. There are other variants of this song (one of whcih involves incest and KAte Bush span-off for 'The Kick Inside') but I love the simplicity of this: the repetition and the growing sense of dread echoed wonderfully by the faded-in-and-out guitars and the laconic delivery of Wakeford's ambiguous vocal. Is he emotionally attached? Is he sympathetic? Is he an artist or a medium? Whatever he is, he's damn good at it.


1) LESS THAN QUEER - David E. Williams

"You are a son of this town,
You are soon to be a dead son of this town"

I want to quote the entire lyrics in the introduction but you can read them here.

Ostensibly a song about getting back at a childhood bully, this is also my favourite murder ballad today. David E. Williams is not like other songwriters - he's not even much like other singers, or keyboard players. He's a genuine weirdo and not the cool type that sits in corners pouting. That really comes through in this song. The sadism here is none of Nick Cave's hillariously brutish "I'm gonne £$%& you in the £$&$" type business. Here, Williams' narrator is so moved by (or rather 'to') hatred that his retribution against the adjudged perpetrator of the world's wrongs involves really fucking scary methodical torture: soldering irons, mutilation, and... well...
I know of no other song in which the protagonist toys with the idea of starving their victim to see if they will eat their own excrement.

The juvenile yet somehow truly elevating taunt, "If I am queer you are less than queer", is one that you want to sing or shout along with - perhaps print on T-Shirts or write on pencil cases if you were still into that sort of thing. It is to his credit that he does not overstate or needlessly repeat this or anything else in the song. The use of repetition in this song is very, very subtle and very, very powerful.

And the delivery is incredible too: the melody is more suited to a lilting love song, yet whatever the subject one imagines David E. would sing it in the same croaking, playful, menacing and quasi-casual way, as though he were awkwardly reading the lyrics off some crumpled notepaper while thumping the keys of a wobbling keyboard in a dingy club with about eight people watching.

This song is truly sadistic, curiously appealling and weirdly cathartic, like some others. Unlike any others, it presents a criminal in a truly unhinged state of mind - one who is breaking many of the rules of... polite society, shall we say, and one whom I find myself fully behind. It's like the hypothetical ending of the first of The Mountain Goats' songs combined with the just cycle of Chad Van Gaalen's number, with the added word-perfect skilfulness of... say Naevus, or Two Gallants... but even better than that... it's presented in this frail, half-baked genius-like manner. Like your favourite Bob Dylan bootleg.

Hats off.

The Girls In Their Summer Clothes

Playing catch-up on bits of paper with half-written verse on them. None is spared.

Walking Through Westminster On May 2nd, 2009

The city unfolds underneath my feet
In slabs of bold historic concrete,
Pockmarked with moldy medicated gum,
Chewed to death by a million dumb.

I was so high
I wasn’t thinking when
I was drawn magnetically
Into the calm of Vincent Square
Its cool walls containing a cricket match
Spread across its open sandwich turf.

I stood and stared
And, after some minutes, saw
They were all Pimlico schoolboys.
It wouldn’t do to be seen spectating them
So I left under the watchful eyes of pigeons,
War-torn, suspicious, silent and bored.

At crossing the road I am visibly nervous,
Stood at the centre of a spinning compass
With synaptic flashes of past car crashes,
Sensory flooding in the parched plains of now.

How now? Why here? What for?
Where to? When Ever? Who knows?
Compare this moment to another
Find it a place in the database
Behind my kind face:
Behind my latex, Botox, Sta-Pressed skin,
Covering that grimacing unconvincing grin.

I fail to find a park uninhabited
I fail to find a park uninhibited
I fail to find a park concinving
But I do not fail to find a park.

He Should Have Passed The Ball...

Hello, hello. New podcast to listen to for pleasure. I'm very proud of the cover for this one. It looks hot. It makes me want to reclaim my country. (No offence.)

This lot: new wave, no hope, folk rock, gypsy punk, country, hip hop, soft rock, c86 and esoteric excellence.

Yes!

DOWNLOAD/STREAM HERE.

Now Is The Time For An Iron Hand

Against my better judgement, which told me to do some Wikipedia scouring on Christina Rossetti's brother (the painter)'s various squeezes and how they all looked like the same person, I have done this, for Marjorie:

A Verse For The Averse

The muse, the muse who used to hue my blues,
The muse who used to choose my don'ts and dos,
Who used to help me find right words and lose
The wrong ones from my poems and my songs,
Has gone, has donned his (or her) shoes and split,
Has quit, has buggered off, and won't come back.

Alas, alack: lack of inspiration
Is all that follows my perspiration
Now, my pencils are blunt, my paper's blank
And my back aches from hours hunched over black,
Plastic keys with white capital letters,
I'm no better than the gaps between them,
Where dust collects and maybe mates with crumbs.

I succumb to something I've heard bemoaned:
Something studies have shown strikes artists down
Like a common fever: a snapped lever
On a runaway train, or a dry rot;
The Writers like to call it 'writer's block'.
(Note the apostrophe - all me, me, me.)

I wonder what the painter calls it, though?

Anyway, once upon some times like these
I'd sojourn mournfully and talk to trees
Or else thumb through embarrassed diaries:
Try kissing back to life a younger me.

But now - in my finite wisdom - I sigh,
Laboriously blink dry sleepless eyes,
And theorise my self-diagnosis,
Causes, symptoms, treatments and prognosis:
Could hypnotism help end this schism?

Who cares? I come over all laissez-faire,
No longer grind my teeth or tear my hair:
I stare dog-dumb at walls, dial old close-calls,
Ask questions I'm not sure I want answered
And find them all as useless as ever
Whether more or less patient or clever.

One doesn't want to write for the needing:
Sometimes one doesn't need to write at all.
But mostly one can't write for the thinking:
Thinking one need cast light over it all.

I thought on till I'd tied my mind in knots.
I expected an answer. I found lots.

Now I amuse myself by searching for
The muse in me: try to inspire myself,
Because no one else will line my book shelf
With what I could have written had I not
Been smitten with that concept of the muse.

Though the world is filled with many fine feet
Each prowling their own beats, completing feats,
No four are the same: none can fill my shoes.

Al Stewart & Laurence Juber @ The Lyceum, London

I first and last (but not always) saw Al with Dave Nachmanoff in Bilston five years ago. Glamourous times they were, and Al did not disappoint; we were up close and personal with the ageing not-quite hippie and his half-historical half-romantic balladry.

The Lyceum gig was my second experience of Al and on a par with the first.

Certainly it was more comfortable than standing for a couple of hours, and the inside of the Lyceum is well worth a look, though I did have strange mumbling bearded fellow sat next to me. (You know who you are.)

The support came from Al's second (well - more like lead) guitarist, the esteemed Laurence Juber, who is undoubtedly proficient - nay, excellent - in his field of fingerstyle guitar playing, but whose noodling and musicianship is at odds with the appeal of Al's own music to me, which is very much to do with the storytelling.

Not to say Juber's work gets my goat: I've found his style takes some getting used to, but ends up being the perfect accompaniment to the songs on Al's recent albums (which Juber produced and co-wrote many songs on), and as such, live, Juber's touch works very well on 'Night Train To Munich' etc. but perhaps not quite so well on 'Carol', 'Lord Grenville' and other oldies.

That said, it's amazing how much one doesn't miss the 'band' sound that would be there on almost all of Al's albums - the only accompaniment tonight (and at the average Al Stewart gig) is the complimentary guitarist and (in this case) a couple of supporting voices (I can't remember the names! Gaby someone or other? And a dude with a band that's the same as his last name,) who are both strong in their own rights, though in possession of voices both markedly different to Al's own distinctive nasal tones.

It's my earnest belief that you could perform Al's songs on nothing but a synthesiser and you'd loose none of the depth and love therein: look at his 80s work. Or... The Pet Shop Boys! They're alright...

Anyway, a few gig-related facts:

Most hilarious heckle was the guy who asked for 'Nostradamus' right after 'Roads To Moscow' (itself a request acquiesced to), after which Al observed that he could probably play a whole gig in just four songs.

He's right:

Trains
Modern Times
Love Chronicles
Nostradamus

That's 45 minutes right there, and he spends half the gig talking anyway.

(Which is no bad thing at all.)

Also, amongst the other gems of information about himself, the world and everything, Al explained the "churchill's Hiccup" reference in the excellent 'League of Notions', which was a far more significant aspect of the song than I'd thought and absolutely typifies the jovial tone and very serious underlying concerns of the subject matter - admittedly Al is rarely preachy when it comes to his historical songs, but he is more emotionally involved than a good historian would be: and you'd hope so - he's a great songwriter.

He also taught me who Jean Louis Chave is, and explained that one afternoon in his (Californian?) home he was presented with the unexpected (and dubious) pleasure of playing the song he'd written about the man himself in JLC's presence! Ha! But fortunately it went down well and thus can nevermore be argued with on a lyrical level.

NICE.

Out of interest, here's the representation of songs from each 'proper' album - though, naturally its accuracy is subject to my powers of recollection, which are average at best:

Bed-Sitter Images (1967) -
Love Chronicles (1969) -
Zero She Flies (1970) -
Orange (1972) -
Past, Present and Future (1973) - II
Modern Times (1975) - II
Year of the Cat (1976) - III
Time Passages (1978) - I
24 Carrots (1980) -
Russians and Americans (1984) -
Last Days of the Century (1988) -
Famous Last Words (1993) -
Between the Wars (1995) - II
Down in the Cellar (2000) - I
A Beach Full of Shells (2005) - I
Sparks of Ancient Light (2008) - III

And it's based on my own recorded tracklisting of the gig, which is this (from memory):

Angry Bird
Lord Grenville
Roads To Moscow
Gina In The Kings Road
Night Train To Munich
A League Of Notions
On The Border
Down In The Cellars
Soho (Needless to Say)
(A Child's View Of) The Eisenhower Years
The Dark And The Rolling Sea
Carol
Hanno The Navigator
Year Of The Cat

Almost Lucy

Something like that. (Corrections always welcome.) And though there are many others I'd love to hear I can't exactly fault it. I mean, look at it!

Unsurprising that there was no representation pre-PP&F - at the time Stewart referred to it as his "thesis" compared with the "apprenticeship" of his former albums. No doubt he has as much affection for some of the earlier work as his fans do, but with a back catalogue as substantial as Al's and a companion whose association with him only began with Between The Wars, I was impressed by the 50/50 spread of modern Vs. classic Al in the setlist.

80s Al generally gets all but forgotten in the context of what modest fame he enjoys, which is a shame, because the brief variation in style relinquished none of his quality and/or integrity. But one can appreciate how 'King of Portugal' might be hard to translate to Juberism.

I recall my first (and so far only) encounter with Mike Scott's Waterboys live, when a drunk enthusiast at the back repeatedly yelled for 'Be My Enemy' from the band's early 'big music' period; eventually, after about 45 minutes of this, Mike Scott indicated the modest and mainly-acoustic-oriented backing band and hissed into the microphone through his mop of thick hair: "Do we look. Like we're about to play. 'Be My Enemy'?"

Great artist are always moving on, and we should be grateful for that.

Al's latest album, 'Sparks of Ancient Light', is available from http://www.alstewart.com/ NOW. (And it's ace.)

Al Stewart - what a guy...

Loafing Oafs In All-Night Chemists

Hello and... hello.

This seems to have taken longer than it recently has but then one cannot realistically set one's self a twice-weekly goal for an hour's worth of good music when one (I mean me not one, why do I keep saying that?) has been walking myself to death, having indigestion, hanging out with family and spilling read wine on their furniture, watching Al Stewart live in concert and mourning the loss of a beloved family pet.

So here is the 13th podcast of lovely (partly) new music from me this year.

In this edition: modern classical, synth-assisted soul, C86, miserable old men, Xfm fodder, UK hip pop, brit pop death folk and more*.

DOWNLOAD/STREAM HERE.

* More may equal less, depending.

The Sword Of Damocles Hangs Above Your Head

(Part 3 here)

The King Who Lost His country (Part Four: Druscylla / Epilogue)

It was ten years before he left the castle to travel the world for the fourth and final time; ten years he spent watching his youngest two grow up into happy and playful children, with companionship he had never known and a love for each other which could not be harmed even by the deep and hurtful envy the boy harboured for his sister’s relationship with her father, the king: himself.

He allowed them to visit their brother once; an adult now of twenty years, the goat-man lived as a shepherd, taming and tending the great wild creatures of the mountains, living with them as both their master and their equal. The king was pleased to see them return that evening in tears, still shaken by the cold and callous reception the wild man had given them; his ignorant inherited rage still built into his very bones, he could not love them and he did not even know why.

The king decided to bring about the arrival of his fourth and final child, though by now he could barely remember and did not much care why he was doing it: he just knew it had to be done to satisfy some pact he had made with a part of himself he no longer knew.

He set off for the mountains of the northern lands and there he hired a flying machine to scale the heavenly cliffs of the Polar Ice Shelf. He half-blinded himself on the dazzling reflections that mirrored his ascent, and he could have swore he saw a man twice his age staring back at him through the bright lights of oblivion – but it was only the sun’s rays gleaming on the ice and distorting his vision; and his black-glassed goggles were steaming up from the moist thermals that wound their way to the top of the world from the tropical southern seas.

The balloon began to hover and waver some hours into the ascent and he knew the fuel must be running low. The pilot told him they had to return to earth, so he shoved the pilot over the edge so that he may return to earth himself, and then the balloon rose still higher.

When the fuel finally burnt out he brought the craft to rest on a ledge. The cliffs were higher than he had imagined even in his childish fantasies – he would have to scale the rest by hand, using only the simple pick and rope he had packed in his haversack.

Hanging high above the world there he dared not look down, but struggled on with the aching single-mindedness of one who does not think as others.

He pulled himself over the edge and staggered and clambered his way through the waist-deep snow towards whatever he might find up there in this brilliant, desolate wilderness.

In amongst the great glass boulders that lay scattered across the still white plateau he found her nest. The eggs already lay there, each one bigger than a human head and wrapped in what looked like threads from the worried fibres of cirrus clouds. He looked at them now and felt old, and cold, and weary and utterly ambivalent toward the task at hand. Where was the monster who begat these boulders? How big was she and how long were her talons? The king had bested all sorts of unimaginable beasts in his journeys to date, but all of a sudden he felt old and scared and perhaps it was that tiny portion of his soul that remained – that downtrodden remnant of his long-scorned humanity – that told him enough was enough, that he should go home and eat, and sleep, and read, and sit down by the fire and rest his broken body.

He knew now he was a much older man than he should be. And what did he have to show for it?
Hardly knowing why, he reached down into the nest and took up the smallest of the eggs in his arms.

I can not have come all this way for nothing, he thought. And quickly he made off with the stolen prize, retracing the path he’d ploughed through the snow, the egg cradled in his arms: hardly knowing what he would do with it when he got home.

When he came to the brink he heard a sound like a slow thunderclap and felt the air above his head blast so powerfully that it pushed him down into the snow. He tried to scramble to his feet but could only roll onto his back with the great creature – the Sky Goddess: Lady Death – looming above him as she sank her feet into the snow and shook her wings, glowering at him with those great glassy, darkly-shining , gold-rimmed ocular orbs: again he saw his own pathetic reflection, this time in those world-sized eyes, and he knew not what to do or say, he just held the egg tightly to his chest and felt numb with terror and cold.
Well? Said the sharp, feathered face – the beak moving, he supposed, but not so much that it should have sounded that shrill, that deep, that loud and that soft.

He stammered for words but could find nothing: it was enough for him to gasp for breath at this dizzying height, and the shell of the egg he held clasped to his chest split, and a crack snaked its way across the smooth surface.

Aren’t you going to fuck me? asked the owl woman, nudging his ribs with her mighty foot, the claws of which alone were the length of his forearms.

My… my soul… he stammered. But whether he was pleading for mercy or offering her a penance, she dismissed his words with a flap of her wings, as big as ships’ sails, and took off again, as the shards of shell shattered and scattered, and the filmy feathered head of her offspring sprouted out, silently snapping at the air, swallowing its first cold breaths of life.

The creature flapped helplessly in his arms, discarding its shell and pawing at him with pink toes, piercing his flesh with its tiny talons: she was… part human, somehow, but almost all beast: much like himself.

How he got home he never new, nor ever spoke of again, but the child of Lady Death came with him: with those big dewy eyes in which he saw his mortal self, and those cruel, curved talons whose sole purpose was to punish the living with the pain of death, and that curious look of concealed humanity she had about her – like a little baby girl in a monster costume.

He called her Druscylla, a made up word: a mutation of a pretty feminine name that was fashionable at the time and the name of an ancestral princess of his own line who had betrayed her own father by stealing his immortality.

He could barely remember what he had begun all those years ago when he sailed to the mountains of the east, but he knew that now he had failed, and this adopted child was not a prize, but a curse he had to live with.



When finally he collapsed in his chair by the fire this owl child looked up at him as a dumb animal looks at the sky, and he decided he would share this punishment with the world somehow.

The family was now complete: two sons, two daughters, all children of the gods and all but one sprung from his loins. It was no small achievement when compared with the works of his recent ancestors.

Some time later his first daughter – his favourite, Lucretia – informed him that his countrymen wanted him again; they needed him to decree a punishment for the worst of the criminals: for the crimes of the people had grown with the crimes of their king, and thieves, murderers and rapists now walked among them.

He let his countrymen in and saw them then, for the first time in years.

Have the people of the towns build poles twice as tall as the tallest house, he said, and tie the offenders up there so that they can look down on the world they have forsaken. And they will weep before its glory, which is no longer theirs to share, he said – He could think of nothing worse.

He looked at the silent owl child, Druscylla, whose strange cold gaze troubled him so, and who with her adopted humanity could not relate to the children he had raised with him in this castle, who would be man and woman before too long, and who were closer now than ever before.

My daughter – my Druscylla, here – she will deal with the criminals.

And she did, but the execution poles were not so readily admired and emulated by the country’s neighbours as had been the system of government the teenage king dreamt up all those years ago.

He could not love the child of Lady Death, so, like his firstborn, he let her away from his side; she would patrol the skies of his land and strip the meat from the bones of the sinners he had raised in this, his family’s kingdom.

He had to keep his dear Lucretia close, for she best brought out the flickering remnants of his soul. But to regain her full attention he knew he had to banish young Harlequin from his kingdom, which he did that day.

It broke her heart when her brother was taken from her, and it broke the boy’s heart to leave his sister – his only love – and the castle, which was the only home he knew.

The king went back to reading his books and summoning and banishing his devils; he had done what he set out to do. He had found his four little demigods: his four children.

Four children with just one thing to connect them – that hollow, broken, spent and maddening wreck of a man: four children rudderless in the changeable currents of the world.

And they all lived to tell the tale.

END

Adios

Hau Ruck The Harlequinade

(Part Two here)

The King Who Lost His Country (Part Three: Harlequin)

In his twenty sixth year the king braved the geysers of the Meditar plains – that vast and hostile cauldron, ringed by molar mountains spewing molten rock and plumes of flame into the ash-black sky.


Down into the centre of that basin he crept, choking on the acrid winds that scorched his cheeks. By the time he climbed the vulcan tump that some still call the centre of the earth his hair was all singed from his body and his skin was red and hard as a lobster’s. He didn’t like to do it, but hearing the ancient winds whistling from within, taunting him with their warm song, he took off his clothes, lay them down by the brim, and clambered down into the fiery funnel of the volcano’s throat.


When finally he found the chamber, his third target was waiting for him: resplendent she lay on a bejewelled island that rose from a lake of lava, dipping her hand into the mound and letting pebbles of gold slip through her fingers: flicking at little rubies that disappeared into the glowing pond with a “plop”.


You know what I have come for, Urodela, he told her. And she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. She stood then, brandishing her barbed tail and spreading her jaws wide. Her long, sticky tongue flashed between her tiny teeth and beneath her feet the stones spilled and fell into the lake as her claws dug in.


They fought for hours as the flames raged around them and he was weary and worn when finally he wrestled her to the rocks and wrenched her tail from her body. She lay there in a state of paralysis – a broken bronze statue, unable to further resist as he fell upon her and set to work.


He left his seed and a half of his remaining soul in the fiery chamber of her belly. He did not wait for her to shed her skin or for her tail to grow back. He left her lying there in that fiery chamber and went back to his castle to wait for the child to come, as he knew it would.


The sorry thing that crawled up to the great gates of his family home some months later was a slithering wretch compared to the fierce monster who had birthed him: he was the runt of the litter and she had boiled the rest of them in the lake of fire – this much the tiny creature communicated to him. He was a frighteningly quick-witted thing but his skin was a monstrous mosaic of black and red: of port-wine-stained human scar-tissue and a matt-black lizard-like hide. He was weak and awkward and slow to his feet, but his sister cared for him as his father could not, or would not. She was delighted with her new playmate and would take him to swim with her in the lake, carrying him while his limbs were still too weak and his skin too ill-adjusted for him to walk properly.


The king tolerated his presence, but losing the formerly-undivided attentions of his devoted daughter brought out the child in him: the cruel creature who he had kept hidden away for much of his adult life; he was determined to show the boy none of the love he lavished upon his Lucretia.


He called the boy Harlequin: a cruel reference to the patchwork of his skin and the slapstick awkwardness of his early movements, the latter being the only pleasure he gave his father...

CONCLUDING PART COMING SOON

Hybrid Megafauna, Toast Of Botswana & Part Two of 'The King Who Lost His Country'

TOP TEN HYBRID MEGAFAUNA - counting down:

EDIT - almost EXACLTY THE SAME blog but better is HERE.

10) Marlot

Hybrid betwixt Margay (no MARgay - haha) and Ocelot (sexiest cat award - thesvenhunter.blogspot.com 2008). Only one of these ever happened and was annoucned by the Long Island Ocelot Club. I wouldn't want to be in any Ocelot club that would have me as a member. EXCEPT that one. (NB Not to be confused with "The American Mystery Cat". Or that thing in Falmouth, whatever that is.) Could have been called 'Ocelgay'. Isn't.

9) Zonkey

NTBCW Zorse/Zony(!) The zonkey is a... well you can guess what it is, and it is mainly here by virtue of its truly ridonculous name. Thanks.

8) Pumapard
A politically incorrect cross between a Puma and a retard. (Gone mad.)

7) Cark / Shat

Not a real animal - but looks cool:

6) Tigon
The lesser known but equally impracitcal version of the Liger. This way around = male tiger and female lionesses, which is better because male lions are shit. Hardcore. But no good at breeding. Like most of these poor foolish creatures.

5) Wholphin
Half "False Killer Whale" half Dolphin: real killer whales are as bogus in this mix as, for example, granulated sugar in a Delia Smith cake recipe. The wholphin is a fairly boring but cute fish-mammal and has an amusing name.

4) Cama
A pun-prone re-acquaintence of the camel and llama genres of irritable beast of burden, bred specifically (and artificially) for the purposes of combining the better points of the two animals. (So in my experience that would be the fact that there are none of the former in England and the fact that the latter sneeze in my face and bite my shoulder.)

"This first Cama has been a disappointment behaviorally, displaying an extremely poor temperament."

Drag.

3) Squeagle
Still can't believe I searched for this and there WAS one. Not a real animal - but looks cool:

2) Grolar Bear
Not to be confused with the pizzly bear, this is the meeting/mating point of the world's mightiest ursids. The naming convention for this mighty beast is all up in the air. 'Polizzly' has even been suggested, which - at the risk of sounding like a shit washed-up 90s comedian - sounds like something Snoog Dogg might call a bear, if he had one, which he probably does. Being a large beast this chap has the double-bonus of having been "reported AND shot".

Haha. Awesome.

Double-lame.

1) Toast Of Botswana
What is this? you ask. Well, it is either a geep or a shoat - a hybrid with an odd (in both senses) number of chromosomes - 57.

"Although infertile, the hybrid had a very active libido, mounting both ewes and does when they were not in heat. This earned the hybrid the name Bemya or rapist. He was castrated when he was 10 months old because he was becoming a nuisance."

Is rape funny when it's commited by a sheep-goat hybrid called 'Toast'? It's simply not for me to say.

Anyway...

(Part one here)

The King Who Lost His Country (Part Two: Lucretia)

The king was twenty two when he finally located his next target. The Lady of The Deep (or The Deep One, as she is sometimes called) resided – as you may well expect – at the bottom of the ocean, and her palace was in the Cave of Echoes, where all the world’s tears came to rest. She had heard of his dealings with her sister, but could not help but be impressed when he arrived there in the inky gloom of her suffocating kingdom, dressed head-to-toe in his finest suit of ancestral armour and presented her with the beak of a gigantic cephalopod, which was so immense he had used it as a tent to sleep in when he grew tired on his journey.

He had walked for five whole years across deserts of blue sand and through forests of coral to find her, so she could not then refuse him an audience. She banished the herd of seahorses that stood sentry in her chamber with their snail-shell helmets, crab-skin shields and razor-clam swords. And he got her drunk on damson wines, which he had brought with him from the dry land she had never seen.

They lay together on the seabed and he crawled out of his shell of metal, letting his fingers flicker across her silver-scaled skin. She was as cold as her sister, but her leather-like tendrils reached all around his naked, puckered skin and bound him to her like a barnacle until she felt his seed sink into her fresh-formed eggs and she unwrapped him, like a present, and gave him one of these shining orbs as a gift, shedding no tear as she waved him goodbye, because all the grief in the world was hers already, and she had a quarter of his earthly soul to keep her company in that thick and distant kingdom that was forever to be her home.

The child hatched when he was halfway home and became a bright young slip of a thing with silvery skin much like her mother’s, but full-formed limbs and oily eyes and a smile as sweet as daylight. She would swim circles around him as he laboured on, singing him siren’s songs to tempt him back to salvation.

And they say that clutch of hers comes to the surface now and again to taste the air their father likes so much – they call out to sailor men, wondering which one of them is him, and bring them back sometimes to show their mother what they’ve caught, and does it look like him? But it never has yet.

His own girl he called Lucretia, because she was his shining light and his unearthed treasure. She grew up curled on his hearth half-eel, half-cat, and wet herself daily in the vast black lake his home overlooked. She was happy enough there, though she grew lonely in the castle, whose staff had all deserted in his lengthy absence, and wanted a playmate of her own age.

Not keen on introducing her to that wretched kid that wandered his country's snow-capped peaks, the king knew it was time to make another journey...

PART THREE COMING SOON

Holla Back Girl Decoded & Myths Of Creation

For years the song 'Holla Back Girl' by Gwen Stephanie (who suffers from the same multiple-first name disorder as John Terry) has baffled and infuriated critics with its apparently meaningless lyrics and inane catchiness.

The former issue I can now Decode, for I have solved it:

When Gwen Stephanie sings "A few times I've been around that track / So it's not just gonna happen like that" she is letting us into the secret of her age: that she is much, much older than she looks and indeed claims to be. Probably over 100.

This means she must be either a witch (unlikely - witches rarely pursue careers in pop music) or a faerie creature (for time moves differently for these people).

When she says "I'm ready to attack, gonna lead the pack" she clearly warns the listener that her breed of elf hunts together, which narrows it down somewhat.

Her repeated claims that "This shit is bananas" refers to the fairy folk's capability to deceive us humans by disguising base objects as treasure. Indeed, goblins pass off all sorts of horrible things as "fruit", and Goblin fruit, like faeces, can be addictive once you get used to consuming it.

Finally, though - in the title of the song she insists, repeatedly: "I ain't no hollaback girl / I ain't no hollaback girl".

Research has led me to the conclusion that this is American slang for "I am not one of those hollow-backed girls," referring, of course, to the curious deformation found in the huldra or huldrefolk women of Norway and other north countries. The huldra are also known for being easy lays so with Gwen and her "pack" it's not "just gonna happen like that."

This leads me to conclude that she belongs to the enemy clan of the huldrefolk: the trolls.

Gwen Stephanie is a pop troll. Case closed.

BONUS:

For those of you who are long-term Alexander Velky fans you will know of the land of Gyor and the four children who live there (or further afield) and who are heirs to the throne and children of the gods. Their story has never been told until NOW.

This four part (not equal parts but who cares? Not me, that's for sure) "adventure" details the king of Gyor's earlier life, before the so-far incomplete novel 'The Missing King' and it is called: 'The King Who Lost His Country'.

The King Who Lost His Country (Part One: Prologue / Sebastian)

Everybody has a favourite story, and this is mine:

Once upon a time, exactly one hundred years ago, there was a prince born in the smallest country in an area of the world remarkable for its small countries. There was an old story about a king in those parts whose country was so small he used to carry it around in his pocket; one day it slipped out while he was walking and he never found it again, though he searched for it to the end of his days.

But this is not that story.

The parents of the newborn prince were delighted with his arrival. Who wouldn’t be? They’d had five stillbirths and three children die in infancy, but they knew this one would survive; you see, this child – the prince – was the seventh son of the king’s, who was himself a seventh son. You know what that means.

No? It means the child was favoured of the gods, (they like numbers, do the gods), and would grow up to be what we northern folk call a ‘sorcerer’, which is one who can commune directly with the gods – and their lesser counterparts and representatives, namely those you call ‘devils’.

For such a boy child to be born into this tiny kingdom whose power and influence, once so great – so they said – was now so humble; this was cause for a celebration indeed.

The king announced a week of festivities to mark the birth of his son, and it began with a great feast in the castle, where revels went on throughout the evening, long into the night, through to the morning, and all the way into noon of the next day. The king died from his excesses and his wife the queen dutifully flung herself from the battlements, as was customary.

So the boy prince became king on his second day in this world, and had to be raised by the old nurse, who – while a decent enough woman by all accounts – could never give him the love that can be got from two doting parents.

The king grew up to be a strange sort indeed – they say these sorcerers usually are. In his youth he was mean and malicious: he would torture small creatures he found in the woods and catch fish from the lake just to watch them flipping about on the grass, fighting for breath. He kicked his own dogs and beat his horses and was a frightful pest to all the staff but his nurse, whose stern reprimands and chiding words of advice were the only he would heed without interruption.

In his adolescence he mellowed somewhat – he became more bearable, by all accounts, though he still had a temper when things didn’t go the way he wanted them to. He began to experiment with his powers, reading his way through half of the castle library, which was one of the world’s foremost collections of grimoires and tomes on the subject of the dark arts.

He summoned and banished a number of useless devils before one of them burnt down much of the west wing, at which point he was banned by the nurse, and though he was now fourteen years old, and a king too, he obeyed her, and turned his attentions for some years to learning the affairs of state.

He was a sorcerer at heart, though, not a statesman, and so he soon grew tired of weighing corn and drawing field borders and choosing sentences for petty criminals. He delegated the rule of his lands to a host of elected representatives in each major town: it was a system born of his laziness, one might say, and yet it was the first of its kind in the known world, and its success was noted and admired – even emulated – by countries far and near.

His nurse died that summer and with her went his only connection to the real world around him, and indeed to the parents he had never known. He showed no particular signs of emotion on the news of her death, but ordered a week of mourning and commissioned a statue of the frail old body to be erected in her little hometown in the north of the country.

The king returned to his studies, and the world around him continued to turn as it always had done: “and the sun rose, and the sun set, and the man awoke, and the man slept.”

The great library of the castle held many secrets and he meant to learn them all before he died. He was making reasonable headway towards this goal when he came across an old volume of history concerned with the royal line of his own country. Having been taught relatively little about his ancestry he was immediately taken with this vast and long-forgotten volume: soon noting that for several generations the family tree had not even been updated. He spent some days carefully copying the antiquated style of the lettering, completing the diagrams, and entering the details of his parents (dead), his grandparents (all dead), and his great aunts and uncles (also dead). When he had filled in the blanks, (even entering his own name and birth date, leaving an unadorned line to sit below the numbers that dated his death), he began turning the pages over, tracing his lineage further and further into the unremembered centuries of yesteryear, observing how the names grew stranger and stranger.

This was how the king first found “evidence” of the common boast of the peasantry: that their royal line stemmed from the gods themselves. Here he found, at the beginning of the line, some thousands of years ago and penned in the faintest of inks, dyed to an unfamiliar shade of brown, that the man who first sat on the throne of this tiny kingdom was a sorcerer just like him. The sorcerer had taken each of the four gods of the earth as a bride, and had one child by each of them, one of whom had ruled in his place when he died.

For years the offspring of these four had bred with common men and women of the earth: those demigods had created quartergods, and those who followed on were less god, more man; and so it went on.

How little god am I? he wondered. And yet that he was god at all was enough to persuade him of his calling; the king decided it was time to restore the glory of his royal line, and wasn’t he just the man to do it, being a sorcerer as well as a king?

The king was only sixteen when he sailed to the islands at the end of the world and found the Mountain of Mountains’ Birth where he demanded an audience with the Earth Mother herself, who you may know by another name. She was amused by his presence, him being sixteen years of age and her being the very notion upon which we base our word ‘age’. But he was family, so she let him in to see her, and he knew then what to say because he had read it: he offered her one quarter of his earthly soul if she would lie with him.

Now, the souls of most of us are not worth so great a prize, but he was a sorcerer, and his ancestors were the gods themselves, herself being one of them: so there was family in it.

She was sad then, but she let him lie with her the once, and he felt the cold hard touch of her skin against his, and the rough surface of her as old as life itself, and he sowed his seed deep in the warm earth that was inside her.

What came of it was a horned baby kid with cloven hoofs, who limped from the very mountainside and bleated for his mother, his tiny slit pupils as yet unable to focus on the world around him. The king took the baby and left, for that part of him that was yet god was more god than one, and he could blind her but for a moment –long enough to escape with the child.

For years they say the earthquakes in that part of the world were terrible: no man lives now on those islands, and those that did were crushed to death or fell into the sea and drowned.

When the king took the baby home, he named him Sebastian, which was an old word for one “of noble birth”. But he soon grew bored of the mewing thing, for the kid was always trying to escape up to the mountains. After a year of this, the king tired of trying to find his son and left the goat-child to wander as he would...

PART TWO COMING SOON

I Still Try Holding On To Silly Things

The rule is that I make one when I have an hour of new music (new to me, at least) that I want to share with you (the world).

So you are lucky this time that it happens to be following on just DAYS after the last one. Will this controversial technique mean more or fewer listeners? Will I care?

Tune in next time to find out, or alternatively, don't bother.

This time: folk pop, ambient folk, ambient jazz, ambient trance, trance pop, hip hop, pop punk, shoegaze, A.O.R. and all or none of the many points inbetween.

Enjoy (without - as I should have pointed out earlier - the need to install pointless software) here:

STREAM/DOWNLOAD.

Incidentally, the titular lyric always makes me think of hot saucepans, hedgehogs, electric fences and the like. How about you?

This Is Where The Party Ends

Yeah, that's right: new look.

This new look will dramtically improve your listening experience.

Guaranteed.

So: the usual - Canadian punk, MOR, Belgian art punk/sludge, esoteric folk, Swedish avant-pop, leftfield hip-hop, indie and GOTH.

Love it, here:

STREAM/DOWNLOAD.

If I am Queer You Are Less Than Queer

The Incident In The Rose Garden (Part One)

I never wanted to be a sexton. I’ve no problem with the dead, of course – unless they have a problem with me! It’s the living that bother me, and there are plenty of those even in this job. True enough that in the day-to-day running of the yard there is not much call for communication with the living. And mourners are private people. Most of them are anyway; and when they’re not they’re hysterical. The recently bereaved are an unpredictable bunch, that’s for sure. But I’d sooner comfort a young mother sobbing on my shoulder or a hard-faced middle-aged man who’s had to welcome his son home in a box than haggle with mercenary punters over a counter or serve cups of ale to lecherous moustached men from out of town whose eyes never meet mine but who are more than happy to stare down my top and talk to my chest. (Not that there’s much to talk to, and yes, I am speaking from experience.)

There aren’t so many options for a girl with no connections and no name. My family lives elsewhere and I left them. I knew what I was letting myself in for. I did not expect great things, only better things. In fact, I was lucky to get in here. I am lucky to be here; it was only because the half-blind verger couldn’t tell that I was a girl.

The work isn’t too hard, but the team is seven-strong and we tend to be sent out in pairs. (I’m aware of the discrepancy in numbers. It’s a flawed system.)

I don’t like working with people. I don’t work well with people. The boys are alright but they’re all younger than me and in the throes of adolescence. Being groomed for lowly church callings they’ve been kept away from girls their own age as much as possible. And now they are in day-to-day contact with me – eating together, sleeping together and supposedly washing together, though I managed to persuade them otherwise and, in fairness to them, they all took it well and a rough schedule was agreed.

I’m the first woman that most of them have talked to, except Nikolas who has sisters and Gregor who… isn’t quite as obedient as the rest. They all have mothers of course, but mothers are not like other women. Mine certainly wasn’t.

It’s not good for them to be alone with me – I can see that. And I have no desire to be alone with them either. I only like being alone with myself, so far.

We are odd-jobs folk for the main part. Fixing this that and the other, be it stone, wood or metal. There are professionals for the real trade work, we just maintain and repair. And we dig the graves, and cut the grass, and make up the numbers at scant funerals.

We specialise too. Peter catches rats (and we eat them, sometimes). Gregor climbs the trees and prunes the branches and, (it must be said), scrumps from the nearby orchards by night. Wolf keeps the books in the library in order – an order that only he understands, but an order nonetheless. (Wolf cannot actually read, but has a frighteningly-accurate memory for the spines and the lettering, so I am told.)

Tilla cooks wonderful stews and suchlike from the paltry ingredients available to us – scrapings from the palace kitchens, mostly: cabbages, roots and hundred-year-old bundles of dried herbs. Never meat, but sometimes we get butter and flour for pastry pies. Nikolas does the events, because he’s been here the longest, and Little Gregor is the fluffer (as opposed to plain old ‘Gregor’, who is still persevering with the removal of Little Gregor’s reductive label, if only so he can be called ‘Big Gregor’. It hasn’t caught on yet).

A ‘fluffer’ is a position taken by the youngest of the boys and involves following at the heels of the old verger and fetching and carrying for him. The role used to be part of the verger’s assistant’s remit, but I refused the tasks as beneath me. I do it all when we travel, but here in the grounds I am allowed to do the ground work with the others, though preferably not actually ‘with’ the others.

He finally cottoned on that I wasn’t a boy some weeks after I came into his employ. It was shortly after he found out I could read and write. That was a shock enough, but when he found out I was a girl (“nay, a woman”: his words) who could read and write I thought he might have a stroke and drop dead on the spot.

He didn’t, but since then he’s made a show of keeping me away from the boys when others are around, and of hiding me altogether from the presence of his superiors, those ‘of the cloth’ proper, lest they discover his clerical error in employing a female sexton. It’s not my fault; it’s not as if I lied, I just didn’t mention it. Why would I mention it? You normally don’t announce such things.

Now I’ve been afforded that dubious privilege of being his ‘assistant’ and doing the rounds with him. It’s no more money, but the meals are better because I get scraps directly from his plate.

I’m not supposed to speak, in case somebody guesses by my voice (as he did not) that I have no testicles. The truth is that most people can tell and nobody cares. Perhaps some think I’m gelded, like Little Gregor and Wolf? Perhaps they think I’m the old man’s bedslave? I don’t care what they think. I’m here for the money.

And I’m here because I’m not there.



We are staying tonight in an inn by the pits of Twice South-Westerly, in the third quarter. This is as far from the palace itself as I’ve been since I came here.

The journey was a slow one as the traffic is always slow and tiresome on the roads that wind down along the bottom of the cliffs to the workers’ quarters. The place is a mess, with plenty of new buildings half-built and even more old buildings half-collapsed. You can still see parts of the palace in the distance, but its turrets and towers are veiled in grey, and the lush gardens that surround its walls almost seem to have engulfed it.

The inner walls of this building are a mess of cracked plaster and sticky, glazed beams. There are spiders here as old as the verger I imagine. The whole place smells of boiled cabbage and none of the windows will open. (Though one is cracked and lets in a little air.)

We will share the same room tonight, but we have different beds separated by a deep red rug, thick with decades of dust from a thousand pairs of feet. I look from his empty bed to mine and I shudder at the thought of him trying something by night. But the idea is ridiculous really and perhaps more comical than frightening. I am young and I am strong, though I am slight; I could easily snap his neck. Or any other part of him, for that matter.

I’m not even sure he has those feelings though: he may well have been a Little Gregor himself once upon a time. It’s hard to tell when they get to that age.

We are here to hear and take down the final request of a pit worker who wants a burial in the palace district: in the rose garden, specifically.

A pit worker, of all people! I may as well demand that I get a burial in the king’s rose garden. With a marble tomb and a life-size statue too, perhaps.

It’s a strange case from what the verger tells me, but then it would have to be strange for us to be this far from home.



I am to record what this dying man has to say. I haven’t his name and he won’t give one. He says they’ll know it at the palace. Perhaps they do – otherwise why would we have been sent?

The landlord has given him a room at the inn free of charge: the room below ours. This is where we sit now – the master and me. The landlord comes in a second time to ask if we want for anything and he is dismissed a second time, and the door is shut.

I stare at the fungal face of this old working man and see his body straining quietly for each breath. His head is like a polished rock and his beard flows from his face like a pale saltwater weed. He is the oldest man I have ever seen – it is true then, that they live longer down here. He makes my master, the verger, look positively youthful by comparison.

With strained movements he sips from his cup of ale and cares nothing that half of it dribbles down his chin and into his beard, never to be seen again. He is well thought of in these parts, said the landlord, but, surprisingly, I thought, he is not well known. He has worked until today they say. Until today, and look at him! He is age itself.

Tell me a story old man, I think as I watch him adjusting the sheets around his paper-brown chest. You must have a good story.

I am ready with my ink and my metal-tipped quill when he begins:



“I am told I will be dead by the morning. I welcome the news. Many people say life is short, but I know differently. My life has been long and laborious and for all my pains I have only one story to tell.

“You probably know that I am not a popular man. People say terrible things about me up there, but none of them knows the truth. I have never told my story before. I was sure nobody would believe me. Now it does not matter. It must be told anyway.

“As a boy I had no family, but was lucky enough to find work in the palace gardens. I became fascinated by all the particulars of gardening and I was in absolute awe of nature. Work was my only passion. I vowed that my love for Mother Nature would replace the love for a mother I never knew.

“I became so esteemed there that the King himself bestowed on me the great responsibility of tending to the royal rose garden. The roses were the King’s pride and joy and people travelled from far away to marvel at their beauty. They grew in all the colours of the rainbow and towered proudly above all other flowers. I spent every moment striving to give them the love they needed. They were my sole concern.

“One afternoon I saw a girl standing in the garden, staring up at my most handsome red roses. As I approached her she heard my footsteps on the gravel path and turned around, startled. And she was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

“Are they not the finest roses in all the land? I asked.

“They are pretty, she said, although they are slightly pale.

“I was taken aback by her response. I had always thought my roses were the deepest red that existed.”



He took a long breath through his wide nostrils here and stared at the beams of the ceiling. He had not looked at the verger or myself so far and seemed almost to have forgotten our presence. I could see my master, who was not a patient man, was about to prompt him, but his pause was only momentary, and he soon went on, still staring up as his shrunken lips opened and closed like those of a fish on a riverbank:



“I contrived to learn more about this girl. Her name was ‘Amaranta’. A name I had never before heard. She came to my garden regularly and I grew to love her very much over the following weeks. I clipped roses from the garden by night – shearing them at the neck with my old blades and collecting them from the ground, then disposing of the bald stems, making sure not to leave the garden untidy, of course.

“I’d leave them on her windowsill with clumsy poems I’d written, comparing her beauty to theirs. When the time was right, I found her one evening in the garden and presented her with the reddest rose that I could find – indeed, that I had ever grown – and I asked her if she would lie down with me.

“She pricked her thumb on a thorn then, and the colour of her blood made the petals of my finest rose look like common clay. She could say nothing. Not a word. Not a sound. And I knew why at once: love is a wild thing and only a wild flower can tame it.

“I had heard her talk of a rose that grew in the middle of the old forest to the north: a forest which had never, in those days, seen so much as a road pass through it. The petals of this rose were the colour of blood, and its name – Rosacea Amaranta – was the same as hers. The stem, they said, grew thorns as fine as the hairs on a child’s arm. And yet each plant grew just one flower, and this flower, they said, was the last. If I could find that flower, she would be mine.

“I did not hesitate. I took my sword from the shed and headed into the forest, deeper and deeper, no light to guide me: hacking at vines and creepers. The forest grew denser as I continued; the limbs of low trees contested my every movement and the vines and creepers swirled and netted around me until I was chopping my way through brambles as thick as tree trunks; my bones ached with unnatural heat: my flesh glistened with sweat and I was panting like a boar. I was beginning to wonder if the forest even had a centre when my sword bit through a bramble with a sound like the tearing of flesh.”



The volume of his voice had been steadily increasing. He paused now, long enough for me to look at him; he was panting and sweating now, and he remained transfixed on the ceiling above him. His eyes were protruding and a faint wheezing emanated from his weary, hollow throat. One tiny cough, and he went on – quieter now:



“There was a small clearing there, carpeted with soft, wet grass, where a single flower grew alone in the centre. I staggered towards it, letting my sword drop to the ground and falling to my knees. I grasped its tiny stem eagerly with both hands.

“I cried out and recoiled – my hands were as red and sticky as a butcher’s. I couldn’t tell why, but I took my blade and I lashed out in anger at the cause of the injury. Gently this time, I took the flower by its severed stem and departed. The blood that left a trail behind me was exactly the same colour as the petals of that most wild and rarest of roses.

“When I returned at last to the garden I found my dear Amaranta sprawled on the flagstones beneath the roses, her clothes tattered and bloody, her skin bruised, and her body limp and lifeless. My cries awoke half the palace.

“By the time they came the wild rose was already dead and I thought I should die too, but I had no such luck.

“Of course, most people suspected that I was guilty and in the following week I was expelled from the palace gardens and sent down here to the pits to work as a common labourer. I have worked here ever since.”



The full stop was a circle so small that it had no centre, and the ink soaked in and dried to a dull finish. Beside me the verger moved in his seat, waiting for a moment till he was sure the old man was done, and inhaling sharply.

“Thank you, is that all?” he asked.

The polished head that lay on the pillow nodded and the great white beard shifted a little as the old man closed his mouth, his inward-drawn lips meeting in an almost imperceptible slit. The tears and sweat mingled on his mottled cheeks and he never once looked upon us as we gathered our things and left the room.

Of course, there was much I wanted to ask him, but I knew he would not answer me. He had said his piece and I doubted he would ever speak again.

We left the inn and the Twice South-Westerly the following morning after a night of half-sleep, interrupted by the intermittent and muffled explosions from the nearby pits, which would rattle the windows at their frames.

True to his word, the old man was dead that morning. But his body would have to remain here. For the time being, at least.

Part two here.

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

Somebody recommended I read this about a year ago but I can't remember who.

Being a collection of 'rewritten' fairytales (tricky subject - all fairytales are rewritten. That's sort of what makes them fairytales), the only thing that put me off was the fact that it wasn't readily available in shops and that, essentially, fairytalesque or not, this is a collection of short stories. And I don't have much experience with those.

What's more, I don't know any of the fairytales these are based on. Well - that's not strictly true: I know them all, but have not read what I would consider to be 'original' versions of any of them. (Not that there can definitively be an 'original' version of a fairytale, obviously.)

'Beauty and The Beast', 'Little Red Riding Hood' and 'Snow White' are all such high profile examples of the genre that the stories are embedded in our consciousness, and usually as sanitised Disney or Disney-style children's versions.

The idea of a "children's version" of a fairytale may seem tautological to you, and if it does then you don't know fairytales. Interestingly, Angela Carter took exception to these stories being marketed as "adult versions" of fairytales, and rightly so. Of these stories she says (I prefer paraphrasing to quoting because it's a more reliable way of communication my own understanding, which is after all what I am doing here anyway) she was trying to extract the essence of the tales - to retell them (in her own rich and evocative prose) with their deeper meanings brought closer to the surface.

Something like that.

The collection has also been identified as providing feminist perspectives on the stories, and while this may at times be true there is no over-riding sense of an agenda or of "writing back" here, which is surely for the best. The writer's prejudices are kept below the surface.

'The Bloody Chamber' itself does this best of all, perhaps, with its depiction of the terror of the young virgin bride and the curious and abhorrent power balance at play between the rich, powerful, mature groom and his impoverished, innocent child-like bride.

It descends nowhere near the depths of morbid depravity that the (apparnetly related) Gilles de Rais "history" (fantasy is more likely) does, but contains the same very French idea of the inherent corruption of aristocracy, despite being set centuries later than its direct source material - Bluebeard. It's an excellently-conceieved piece and second only in the vivid gloriousness of its prose to the (more-or-less) self-penned gem 'The Lady Of The House Of Love'.

The following pair of aces in 'The Courtship of Mr. Lyon' and 'The Tiger's Bride' could have been (but presumably was't) written as one story whose centrepiece was a two-way mirror. Both retell 'Beauty and The Beast' and both do so with style and purpose. But the second, in which Belle's father loses her to the beast (a masked Italian nobleman) in a game of cards presents the father-daughter relationship as the polar opposite of the loving and mutually-respectful one in the former. Indeed the former is as close to Disney as this collection gets, but Carter's craft[wo]smanship ensures it strays away from cloying self-indulgence.

I'll refrain from entirely spoiling the ending of 'The Tiger's Bride' but suffice to say that the 'alternate ending' is a technique Carter uses playfully, unpredictably and sometimes shockingly throughout these 'versions'.

A few of the more meandering pieces such as 'The Erl-King' and 'Wolf-Alice' tend towards the more 'magical' side of magical realism, which I find it hard to get my teeth into, but the inclusion of 'The Snow child' (based on an obscure variant of Snow White) vignette is most welcome; this expertly-crafted and almost bafflingly-brief foray into an absolutely classic distillation of the sex/death/magic thematic triptych, (reminiscent of Douglas Hyde's translated Gaelic story in its surrealist tone), suggests Carter's work - while quite wonderful - could have benefited from further exploration of brevity.

That said, my favourite of the ten stories in this collection is undoubtedly 'Puss In Boots', which is a mid-legth exploration of the well-known variant of the 'cat as helper' (or even 'magical familiar') fairytale type, which was made famous by 15th Century Italian chap, Giovanni Straparola.

There is no ogre nor stolen peasant workforce in this version. In fact, it's an unusually urban fairytale, focusing on the wily adventures of the booted tom as he endeavours to secure the affections of a woman for his master. The man, a (sort of) reformed libertine is well-used to using his cat as a pimp, and the cat himself plays the role to perfection, enlisting the help of an adoring tabby to arrange unlikely situations in which his master can get his end away with the desired 'lady', the wife of an aged impotent and very rich landowner.

As the Wikipedia write-up notes, "if there is a lesson to be learned from "Puss in Boots" it seems to be that trickery and deceit pays off more rapidly (and handsomely) than do hard work and talent, or that clothes make the man."

Never has this been truer than in Carter's version, where living a life of idle lechery is rewarded with untold wealth and the undying affections of a young, beautiful and sexually liberated heiress.

As well as being a successfully (and deservingly) modernised fairytale, Carter's 'Puss In Boots' is a farce, and a most refined one: the crowning moment of an excellent collection.

As They Should(n't) Sound

This is me with a cold reading and commenting on 6 poems chosen from my 92 volume opus 'Goodbye Misery Hello Joy'.

Like everything I have ever done, this is more for my own benefit than yours, but feel free to listen in if this sort of thing interests you.

The main reason I'm uploading this is to prove I'm not spending my time glorifying terrorism or anything like that.

The recording comprises 25ish minutes of me reading poems then complicating them by way of explanation. One from each of the 6 parts of the 6 part, 92 poem collection. Chosen at random, for reasons of laze.

Enjoy!

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What Will I Do To You / Now That I've Paid For You?

New podcast is here.



You can stop starving your cat in protest.



Enjoy.



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