Not Another Marauder Clerk

My problem was how to get out of this dead machine with my limbs intact. The crazed, leaderless bunch of kids outside - one of the suburban gangs, the Kings or maybe the Crack- would inevitably take me for a marauder clerk. I left that particular profession some time back... no, in fact, they threw me out of the service when the annual audit turned up a few surprises in my biog. Four generations of humanoids in the family being one of them.  I was lucky to be allowed to leave.  So many ex-clerks are rendered on the spot.  I still wonder why they let me go.  Maybe it was because I'd done ten years of loyal service, which was not an ethical problem in those early days.  Demolishing dangerous buildings, scooping up the plague-rats and destroying mugger-pits to make way for new apartments - all of that was fine.  The past year, I haven't been so sure.  The focus has changed.  Clearing the way for the Mesh. Flattening any place that might be used as a temporary departure hall, whether it's inhabited or not.  All wrong.  I can see why these street gangs behave they way they do.  At least, somebody has remove the face-tape and shout loudly.  I'm no gangster.  Just some guy who's feeling uneasy about things and decided to hot-wire his old marauder one last time.

The marauder comes with 360 degree vision.  It makes these bio-machines very versatile.  But judging by the smell in here, this one has seen its last day of action.  My idea was to take the whole damn thing through.  See what would happen.  See what it's like on the other side.  If I wasn't immediately incinerated, that is.  I saw those two kids and I hesitated.  That's when the dog-beam hit us.  Time to go, I guess.  Though it's hard to quit an old friend like this.  Stupid name, I know, but I've always called the marauder Audrey.  Now it's a case of kissing Audrey goodbye.  Who knows - maybe they'll come for her, do a refit and we'll find our paths crossing again.

The Narrator Escapes

It must have been the dog-beam that disrupted the marauder I was using to crack open that abandoned hotel. I lay for a while immobile but freed from the biological shackles that tied me to the machine. Organic systems don't fair well when dogs are in the area. Steering it towards one of the many locations of the Mesh had been an enormous strain. Add to that the draining effect of the controls and I was pleased to be able to count up my physical features and get the right number. It was growing dark outside. I had to get well away from this thing before the Reps cleaned up the streets.

Beware of the Dog

David broke free from the crowd of demonstrators and was confronted by a dog.  'Here, boy,' said David, holding out a hand.  It knew better to be fooled by an empty hand.  Somewhere behind him David's sister was searching for him, calling his name.  He could hear it even though her calls barely rose above the shouts of the crowd.  The dog stood and stared unblinking.  David tried smiling.  Something was going on in the background.  The marauder had emerged from the levelled building.  Five young men jumped on to its roof with their lumps of rock and wooden posts, hammering away pathetically at the impregnable machine.  From the dog's right eye, five lethal bolts of sound disrupted the functioning integrity of the young men's internal organs.  They slid from the machine like cast off skin.  The crowd fell silent.  David ran.

Meanwhile, Janyka finds a sheltered spot between the shadowy pillars of a historical city council building now derelict and hauls out her datapad.  She knows it's no good when it comes to future research data and, of course, there is always the chance of the signal being traced, but, nonetheless, she tries.  Then she tried punching in David's identity code.  And when she had tried, she tries again, and though it's predictive cells have never been adequate, she will try again.  She lets her head fall back against the loose stonework, realising that the data-facility is shifting her tenses.  It's buzzing back and forward with her still attached.  A second or two forward; half a minute back, so that she repeats the whole process, but gets nowhere.

She thumps the pad and it takes her strikingly back to the point when the five guys are eliminated right in front of her.  This doesn't happen.  Data-facilities don't fool around with time-lines.  They might produce the data, but they go there.  Meanwhile, the albatross, her brother, will have to be found and probably given another good slap.

Sticks and Stones Won't Hurt those Drones

Janyka and David found shelter among the coat tails of a crowd of watching protesters.  Others, less inclined to stand by and do nothing were attacking the marauder with bricks, fence-posts and anything they could lay their hands on.  For all the good it might do.  Marauders were first-level, workaday drones, completely empty, like all of their mechanical kind, of human pilots.  Somewhere - no one knew where - their guidance and manipulation was carried out by faceless personnel; some said they operated without any human intervention at all, but responded to some murderous algorithm.  But it was all talk.  No one knew.

'I'm hungry,' said David.  'When will it be my turn to eat.  I't was your turn yesterday.'

'I gave you something.  You didn't like it.  You don't like anything.'

David peered between the stinking rags of the protesters, trying to catch sight of the creature that appeared before the wall collapsed and allowed them to escape, but it was gone.  Perhaps it was never there.  Just something he imagined.  'There is something I'd like.'

'Not that again.'  Janyka shook her head.  'You know I can't take you to see Pa.  It's too dangerous.'

'I'm not scared.'

'You don't understand.  It might be dangerous for you.  It's even more dangerous for Pa.'  David frowned, pushed out his bottom lip and nodded slowly as if he understood.  But he inched back between two women who were still roaring their contempt for the controllers beyond the Mesh who had sent the marauder.  Another inch and then a step.  Janyka momentarily turned away and turned back.  And he was gone.

Approach of the Marauder

The noise grew louder.  Like a dentist taking the scenic route to your molars.  The basement walls and floor began to shake.  The ceiling and the floor above, such as it existed, started to join them.  Janyka and David both noticed that the rats were already gathering up their young by the scruff of their necks and heading out via the incoming sewage.  David looked at his sister and shook his head.  No way was he joining them.

Janyka staggered across the vibrating floor to the derelict doorway through which the two bankers had pushed their way.  But this, their only escape route, was where the whirring, cutting machinery was at its loudest, a vortex of plaster dust, stone and metal debris signalling the approach of the marauder.

'There might still be time.  Come on!' she yelled and grabbed David's wrist.  But David wrenched himself free, returning to pick up his pencils and paper.  The drawing of the angel fluttered to the floor.  Janyka  screamed in frustration, as he stopped to pick it up.  Even then, he didn't move.  Just stared at his picture.  That was when a staircase in the neighbouring hovel gave way, an adjoining wall and the spiralling tip of the marauder surged forward out of its own hurricane of dust.

Something flew out of the doorway over Janyka's head: a bird or a bat or a flying reptile.  It clung somehow to the wall opposite.  David watched Janyka's face, the skin stretched and red with screams of anger, but he could hear nothing for the rumbling of the machine yards only away.  He turned to stare at the creature gripping the exposed brickwork of the opposite wall.  Then the stone collapsed or disappeared.  It fell away to nothing.  They didn't wait for explanations.  They both scrambled out into the greyness of the day, covering their heads and faces, protecting them, not only from the stone chips and metal filings that filled the air, but also from the monitors that were everywhere.    

Anjjelz

Every time Janyka looks over his shoulder, David turns away and curls his free hand like a protecting shell around his drawing.  He spends some time on the details, on the delicate marks, the free-flowing outline, the careful shading and the naming of it underneath.

Janyka turns away, visually assessing the half-underground hovel that's been sanctuary for the last two nights: its plasterwork crumbling, the ceiling caved just above them, the raw sewage bubbling up in one corner.  'That's not how you spell Angels.'

'It's how I spell Anjels.'  He peers this way and that at his writing, a spidery scrawl next to the fine accomplishment of his drawing before forcing in another j:  Anjjels.

'What are those marks?' says Janyka, trying to sound as uninterested as she possibly can.

'Those are scales.  Those are the anjjels' scales.'  Janyka nods and sighs.  She should have known better than to ask.  A beetle walks across David's scrap of paper.  He watches it intently, his eyes occasionally darting in his sister's direction.  As he watches the insect, Janyka watches him.  'Do you have more paper?' he asks.  Its a diversionary tactic and she knows it.  For as Janyka picks up her bag, he quickly snatches the licorice-black creature and throws it into his mouth.  One crunch and its swallowed.  Janyka drops the paper back in her bag, closes her eyes in desperation and runs her fingers through her hair.

'We have to get out of here, David.'

There is a rumble and the wall behind Janyka vibrates so powerfully in unison with the noise that it shocks her into jumping to her feet.  It's the sound of machinery.  A drilling, grinding sound.  One she has heard before.  The unmistakable approach of a marauder.

Unravelling and Brain-smogged

David starts to unravel.  He shakes his head.  Claws at the backs of his hands.  Pulls at the yellow, plastic overall that everyone under sixteen has to wear.  Janyka, still brain-smogged by what she has just witnessed, reaches for his shoulder, but he swipes her hand away and thumps his head repeatedly against the wall behind him.  'Davey, Davey,' she whispers and reaches into her bag, pushing aside the rotting fruit, the hard biscuits, the scraps of paper and datapad to find a red wax crayon.  Still writhing he stares at it, occasionally glancing at his sister's face, searching for intentions.  Then, like a hungry animal, he grabs it from her, curls up around it and slowly calms down.

Janyka's tears aren't acidic enough to melt the tender chains that bind the two of them. Eventually, David's body unfurls and he slides towards her opening arms.  Minutes pass without a word passing between them. 'Don't call me Davey,' says David finally.

'My name is David.'

'Yes.'  Janyka keeps hold of him, takes an apple and rolls it towards where they saw the hole in the Mesh. They both watch mesmerised as it trundles across the angled floor, hesitates among the debris of plaster and regains its momentum to the spot where the two businessmen disappeared.  It doesn't get as far as them.  It's immediately zapped, as if it hit by a heavenly lightning bolt.  'We have to find another place, David.'

Rats and Bankers

Raging tears fill her eyes as she slaps David hard across the face.  Over her shoulder a feeling of remorse is waiting to stem the hot flow of blood in her temples, but she resists it.  David says nothing.  He has grown used to it.  He collects the coloured pencils scattered among the debris.  As he reaches for the vermillion, his favourite, one of the rats snatches it and runs to the far corner where a seething nest of newly-born young tumble over each other.  But before it reaches its home base, an electrical charge flashes across the derelict room.  Both pencil and rat are reduced to two small carbon deposits in the grey dust of the floor.  In a daze, David crawls forward to inspect the remains.

'No, David!'  Janyka grabs him by the ankle and pulls him back.  He kicks her hand away, still seething from her slap, but he gets the message and sits still, just staring at the brown powdery marks.  The once-living rat made of the same stuff as his pencil.  Not that he has any thoughts or feeling for the rat.  But his pencil...

Minutes pass.  'I don't like rotten apples,' he says.  What he means is that he is prepared to travel a little way towards reconciliation, but no further.  Not that it ever lasts long anyway.  His sister resents the responsibility she has been left with. He resents her resentment and the fact that she never takes him with her to the hospital.

They sit staring at nothing.  Janyka forces herself to enjoy an apple, avoiding the canker, the maggots and decay, until an unexpected crashing, shifting of broken furnishings and straining human voices penetrate their thick, heavy cloud of reciprocal hatred.  They shrink back to their nearest wall.  Knees pulled up, heads down, cowering.  Using hands to brush dust from their shoulders and the sleeves of their dark suits, two men, maybe in their fifties, one carrying a dark brown briefcase, push aside what remains of a door and enters the cellar.

'It can't be here.  It can't possibly be here,' says one, replacing the tail of his blue silk tie inside his jacket front.  'My, God.  The stench.'  His companion says nothing.  He shrugs, holds up the locator installed on his phone and walks towards the spot where the rat was zapped.  His friend follows.  This time, there is no sudden electrocution of frail life-forms.  Instead, for a brief moment, the blinding lines of silver light of the Mesh, a finely woven translucent net appears and is gone.  The men, too, are no longer in the room.  

Too Close to the Mesh

Two children sit perilously close to the Mesh.  It shouldn't be here, but it is.  It wasn't here when they scurried in three days ago, out of sight of blackbird drone, but somehow it has shifted and it is here now. Not that they know.  She is fifteen and he might be ten.  There are no records, and, if there is some place where they exist, it is not here.  Not in their ragged pockets.  Not in her rotting leather bag.  Not on a stone-dusted shelf in what remains of a bombed-out basement.  Rats fill the corners, a broken sewer oozes effluent into the lower end of the tilted cellar, and feet shuffle by up at street level.

Her brain is ridden with red mist, having run the gauntlet of the other inmates in the prison hospital, where her father has permanent residence.  On the way back, she clambered over the remains of a shattered house, once grand, lying among its broken trees, to fetch a few rotting windfalls.  These, she thought at the time, could be their food for the next few days.  It was while she was watching the street for hovering militia and carefully picking her way among the blackberry thorns, crackling electricity cables and steaming plumbing that a grenade landed a few feet away.  Instinctively falling down behind an upturned bath had saved her life.

So relieved to get back to their basement, she flew into a fit of anger when David let the apple roll down the sloping floor into the sewage.

Beware the Mesh

Spoonfuls of legal med, skewers of bad cholesterol, brain-damaging unreal TV and measurable schooling are working their alchemy already.  It has spread slowly and imperceptibly like oil rainbowing in a gutter.  It looks pretty but it poisons the water.  It's the most insidious example of life impersonating sci-fi art.  So beware the Mesh.

The Mesh is the invisible plastic-wrapping, spidery filigree through which only bankrollers, inflated pigmen, and nightmare-makers can move.  They are safe inside there, with their hand-shakes, winknods and glad-hand smiles.  It is beyond the Mesh that they can compare and exchange their ill-gotten gains, swap their yachts, hoover up taxes and travel freely without contamination from the outside.

What is it like inside the Mesh?  That is for us to find out.  And it is an urgent cause, because soul-sucking is not against their law.

Glass-shatter World, I've Writing to do.

I can do without all this.  Ok, I think The Badgers of Beechen Cliff is worth reading.  If I hadn't written it myself, I might even buy a copy.  It has a treebender and rattlebang wagontraps aplenty.  But I don't have a body-double or a stunt-writer who can be getting on with the other stuff while I get to the bottom of this furry, alien, underdog thing.  Mysteries and riddles are fine for the train.  I've got stuff to write.

At least, the ursine squatter upstairs seems to have gone.  Probably out hunting for Owen Paterson - one of our members of parliament.

I have a trigger-happy writing finger lusting after a few black marks and punctuation squiggles that can turn a dry eye into a tear, a creaseless face into a titter.  So let me get on with it.

Metaphor, Portents or Magic Tricks

I can hear the screeching of tyres - or is it the terror of fleeing animals - further down the road.  I feel torn, paralysed and yet desperate to go and see what has happened.  I leave the comfort and security of the old, limestone wall, drag my feet before breaking into a run.  The vehicle has gone.  There is an escape route into Lyncombe field down here, with a bolted gate, impassable to off-roaders and pick-ups.  It's an ancient pathway for travellers, herders, dog-walkers, ramblers and other wilder creatures.  The badgers must have gone to ground.

But not all of them.  I find two at the roadside, though they haven't been knocked down.  They've been shot.

All the while, I'm thinking: what's going on here?  Is this a metaphor or is my story of The Badgers of Beechen Cliff the metaphor?  The events aren't exactly the same, but is this truly a case of life imitating art? The story isn't a portent either, because it came to me as a result of the news that the government wanted badgers shot and here I was, every Thursday, trailing through badger country.  All I did was put the two ideas together.

When I get home, the house is empty.  The strange visitor has gone.  There is no sign of anything strange or magical ever having taken place.  Was it something in my head?  An obsession with what is going on around us here in Somerset, UK?

This is not a Waking Dream

Nor is it the result of too much beer.  I've seen badgers most Thursday nights.  It's how I came to write The Badgers of Beechen Cliff.  They were always there on Greenway Lane: one or two slipping under a garden hedge, scurrying under the gate to the school playing fields, or, sadly, dead on the road, like a contorted rag toy in the rain.  But I've never seen this many.

There must by almost twenty of them, shaggy coats shaking as they trundle along.  They never move very quickly, even at top speed, and some are nosing their way under parked cars, behind dustbins and open garage doors.  I'm pressed against an old stone wall as they brush past regarding me with curiosity more than fear; as if they don't understand why I'm not joining in their great escape.  Because that's what it must be.  In these kind of numbers, they must be trying to get away from something or someone.

But what?

Then I hear the thunder or is it quarry-blasting.  Surely not.  Not at 11:25pm.  No, it's a massive off-roader and it's heading this way, stampeding the wildlife in front of it, because there is no escape down the corridor of Greenway Lane until you reach the end.

Escape to Mist-ridden Streets

It's Thursday evening.  I escape my unwanted guest to meet friends at the pub - a weekly commitment or is it something I commit to weakly?  Good evening discussing Scottish independence, proof readers obsessions, the latest films and how they should be given the 'old git review' treatment, as well as who's turn is it to buy a round of beers and a bizarre range of unnaturally-flavoured peanuts.

On the way home, skirting Beechen Cliff, the street - Greenway Lane - is a autumnally damp and misty.  There is a 'jyk, jyk' sound, although the street, apart from a few parked cars covered in condensation, is deserted.  Every time I turn I feel there is something there just at the cranny of my eye, but it's gone.  The sound gets louder, so much so that I feel I need to break into a run.

Then, before the road turns right and heads down toward Lyncombe Hill, I can feel the road surface being pounded by hundreds of animals.  There are so many badgers heading towards me.  I don't know why.  If I stop, will they run by?  Are they heading for me?  Why would they?

Jackdaws are Flapping Round my Head

Black jackdaws with their sooty heads are flapping round my head; magpies line my outstretched arms.  The colour is draining from the middle distance.  The world is black and white.  My intruder is badgering me, spreading its lack of colour throughout the house.  I daren't go upstairs.  Something awaits behind the half-open door.

There's more to this.

Read my own Book Three Times Today

The title of this post lies.  I've read the badgers book four times and I'm still no closer to solving the riddle.  I've been focusing on this word 'crasp.'  What does it mean?  There's an obvious anagram, but that's too simplistic.  Could it be an abbreviation?  Here in the UK, it's getting perilously close to hot chocolate time and Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd, but this puzzle is driving me crazy.  I haven't checked the stats on the number of visitors today.  It was a big number yesterday, but no comments or ideas have followed.

What is...?

What is...?

Aargh!

Badger Intruder Says it's all there in Black and White

Isn't this just an obvious and weak joke?  The conundrum my visitor set a few days ago may be written down in black and white, and we all know badgers are black and white, but what about the answers  My story about badgers living in Bath, in a place called Beechen Cliff, is also in black and white.  But since I'm the one who wrote it, I ought to know what he is alluding to.

There's no one with a name beginning with D - unless it's Death?  What is High?  The cliff, possibly.  But there are definitely no swans.  Or maybe I'm being too literal.

This Badger Puzzle Needs Answers

No takers.  Somebody out there must have the answers.  Please check the questions again.  At least, have a guest.  You have nothing to lose.  I might have something to gain, even if it is only to be released from the demands of mu unwanted, black-and-white guest upstairs in the sitting room.

Please try again.  Share it with your friends.  They might have an idea; might spark something off.  Two of you together could easily come up with something; bounce ideas off each other.  If you have any thoughts, leave a comment.  It may spark an idea in my head - a small lightbulb moment.

D must be someone's name: first name rather than surname.  Male or female?  Darren? Donna?
What follows Swan?  Cygnets?  There used to be matches in the UK called Swan Vesta.  Or Swan song?
What is High?  Lots of things are high; but High is given an upper case H.
'Crasp' as far as I can see is a made-up word, or perhaps an abbreviation, or an unusual name.
NAAFI is the UK name for the military store, but what has that got to do with anything?

Updating this post to say that no one in the daylight world has any answers so far.  Someone must leave a message.

I should go to bed.

Badger is Bringer of Conundra

As the last Merc-master shimmies off, I hear a roar from my sitting room.  Can't be tea-time already, I think. The big, bad badger has already eaten me out of quiches and earthworms.

'Harbinger of news,' he grunts.  'Conundra aplenty.'  When I begin to suggest it's time for him to skedaddle, he face-tapes me with a look.  These plucky alien-types: they may not have sleeves, but they have a few tricks up them.

'These must be solved,' he says.  All I can do is shrug and moan.

'Who is D?
What follows Swan?
What is High?
What precedes crasp?
Where is NAAFI?'

I'm stumped.

Big Bad Badger gets Restless

I've had to cancel all engagements.  Producers and publishers are ushered into my small but fine-boned china kitchen.  They ask awkward questions about the football noises upstairs.  I laugh and explain there's a giant badger up there practising keepie-uppie with an old, leather football.  They laugh, thinking they know my off-the-wallpaper sense of humour.  But the grunts and whoops of the big, bad badger are unnerving especially when he moves the goalposts to make scoring easier.  As a result, contracts are pocketed and must wait for a more salubrious day.

I show one suit, eager to squeeze out the front door, my Badgers of Beechen Cliff book and show my list of downloads and its reviews.  He's interested but when the walls begin to shake and the welcome mat leaves home, he decides to come back another day.  Or so he says.

What can I do about this unwanted guest.  I daren't tell the authorities.  They'll send a sniper in the middle of the night and my jim-jams are black and white!

The Government Blames Football-playing Badgers

The badger in my living room relaxes on the sofa, feet crashing through the window, his head resting on my Howard Hodgkin print: After Visiting David Hockney 1991-92.  He by-passes the TV remote and switches on BBC1 telepathically.  I say 'telepathically' but maybe he has some other digital mechanism I don't fully understand.  No sooner has he munched his way through my large fries than he's convulsing in laughter on the floor.  The news linkman in his best BBC accent has just said that the government has had to extend the cull of badgers in Somerset because the shooters didn't blast enough of the little blighters.  In fact, the minister has said that 'the badgers moved the goalposts.'  Shall I repeat that for the benefit of those who imagine that the first qualification involved in becoming a government minister is sanity.

'The badgers moved the goalposts.'

Badger, you may remember, are black and white creatures of the night and are not known for their footballing skills.  Otherwise, Barcelona would have an entire squad of them by now.

(I have to say, all of this and the game of badger football was foretold in The Badgers of Beechen Cliff, which describes a game of badger football, and which, if you haven't already bought it, will provide hours of harmless fun for all the generations in your family.)

Big badger picks himself up from my Rajhastani rug and pops some more cheese straws and pecan nuts into his canernous mouth. Now he's channel-hopping for more news of badgers.  But all the time I'm thinking, this isn't real.  This creature is not the real thing.

Alien Shapeshifts into Dodecahedron of Ice

At the end of its exoplanetary message, the alien visitor changes shape and physical composition, like grunge metallixa transforming into Gymnopedie.  Although it is standing four metres away I can feel my skin beginning to freeze.  Then wham, bang, no-thank-you, ma'am!  He is Mr. Badger - only he has to stoop to avoid crashing through the high ceiling of my Georgian sitting room.

I spread out my arms to reassure him I'm not packing a kalashnikov or have any intentions or desire to start a cull, despite government, bovine health warnings.  While I'm wondering how he's going to manage to leave this room and how to cope with any of his lavatorial requirements, I can see he's struggling with the language.  The process of transmogrification has obviously not gone so well, the transferral of linguistic facilities and telephone contact list having been delayed by a poor satellite signal.

He talks nonsense:

spout radioactive burlesque
triplicate plague-rat franchise
acrylic wallbanging ghost train
hand-me-down macrame burger-knitter

HOLD ON A GODDAM MINUTE THERE, BOY!  This isn't randomese.  He's reading my mind.

It's a Bad, Bad, Badger Future.

My alien intruder, disturbed by the poor UK soap scripts on TV, zaps the screen and frisbees the badger from one side of the room to the other.  I catch it in my teeth - a lifetime's training in the park and at Ravenscraig Beach has been invaluable many times in my worthless life.  I try to explain I'm a struggling writer.  He , she or it is not impressed.  In fact, his fixed eyeballs never blink, never roll, and never look up at the ceiling.  The optical nerves at the end of his seventeen fingertips show more emotion, occasionally getting twitchy, scratching the sofa and rubbing themselves together with deep joy.

They caress the flattened badger still between my teeth.  Again, I hear the alternating falsetto and bass tones of his communications.  'Future is bad... bad... badger.  Things no longer black and white.  Human race will shift.  Must absorb whole pantone range of different views.  Humans will embrace rational thought.'

Can it be true?  Surely not.  Not in a million years.  And yet...

Badger Astrology

The alien takes his feet off my coffee table rather reluctantly, I thought.  I mean - who does he think he is?  Travels several thousand light years through space using hypertechnological molecular-phasing parallelisms just to stick his muddy feet all over my wickerwork!  Come on.  There must be a greater purpose here.  But, with the kind of breakdown in communication we're used to seeing in agony advice columns, what can you expect?   Anyway, chatty he or she (or they - because this entity might actually embody a community of beings) is not.  I get a perfunctory glare now and again, but I notice he, she, it or they has not touched the Lavazza.

Then, without warning, the badger reappears.  Unfortunately, transmuted.  It is badger-like, but in a two-dimensional sense.  It's more of a black and white frisbee or a drinks mat: what we call a 'coaster' in the UK.  What could I do?  What is the polite, alien, hands-across-the-galaxies thing to do?  Well, naturally, I put my empty coffee cup down on Mr. Badger.  I'm not happy, but this is a tricky situation.  And, given it's current transformation, it's probably better than the UK government's current policy of shooting anything black-and-white and not called a zebra.

I'm not an unfeeling person.  So I do it with a heavy heart.  Now, my visitor picks up the two-tone drinks mat and scrutinises it sideways.  'Future,' he, she or it says.  'Future.'

Aliens Ate My Badger!

I know what you're all thinking: he must be nuttier than a nutburger covered in nuts and wrapped in recyclable nut paper.  Ok.  Get this.  Last night, gigging with mates, start off well, which is unusual because we normally begin at rock bottom, stagger towards worse than pretty good, then plateau around not bad and wonder if we should take up knitting reindeer sweaters instead.  No, last night we started well with an easy blues in A and gradually plummeted to mediocre, which just goes to show how versatile we can be.

Departing after only one beer - this is important - I left the amp to be fetched another day and, carrying my guitar case, shortcutted down through Beechen Cliff.  At that time of night, it's usual to see or, at least, hear a badger or two snuffling around searching for worms.  (Because they don't eat cows, you know.)  Anyway, right in front of me, on the path sprinkled with orange, leaf-dappled light was a badger.  He stopped in his tracks, as did I.  Could he smell the beer on my breath, or the drops I spilt on my jeans?  It didn't matter. The question wasn't about to be answered.

There was a woosh.  Not the kind of woosh you get when the bus driver ignores you and goes flying past the stop.  This was more of a whistling woosh, followed by a grinding sound, which hurt the eardrums more than any of our numbers earlier in the evening.  This became a pulsating silence.  Something tall and shiny appeared between the badger and me.  I could see the 'oh, shit!' look on its face before some panel in the front of Mr. Shiny opened up and hoovered up the badger.  Nothing was said.  No unearthly communication.  The shiny guy turned to me, but luckily, as you see from my pathetic keyboard skills, I'm still here.

Now I'm a rational person.  No belief systems worth mentioning.  You might have a load of questions you want to ask.  Fair enough.  I'll make a list.  After all, Mr. Shiny is sitting with what might be his feet up on the coffee table in my living room.

Or, is this all rot and I'm still tangled up in the middle of some nightmarish lead section in B flat minor?

A Conundrum in order to Locate One-time Friend

I have an apology to make.  An apology that is around 30 years late.  Something I've wanted to do for about 25 of those years.  It is to a teenage friend who I joked with, taught to play guitar riding together on a bike, skipped lunch with, followed to Aberdeen, and then let down when he was going through a difficult time in a relationship.

I would like your help to facebook this, tweet this, or use whatever method you have to let as many people as possible know about this message.  There is no reward for you.  Only some peace of mind for me.

To avoid a bunch of freaks and nutters contacting me and claiming to be him, I've devised a series of questions that only he will know the answers to.  Here they are:

What follows Swan?
What is High?
Fill in the gap: _______________  crasp.
What is the second and second last letters of your middle name?
Where is the NAAFI?

Thanks for your help.

12 Taxidermists in Every Village

I heard this during a cosy, feet-over-the-arms-of-the-soft-furnishings chinwag on the radio today.  I thought at first that someone had carjacked my ears and replaced them with desiccated marshmallows.  There was a wireless chat about taxidermy as art - all very interesting, until the nameless pundit made the unprovoked statement that, not so long ago as the crow flies, there used to be around a dozen taxidermists in every village and small town.

Can you believe that?  What's the population of a small village, taking into account that it's hard to find one that isn't manacled to  some city via a suburban sprawl?  Ok.  Forget sprawl.  Just think demographically of a country yokeltown about, say, 40 or 50 years ago - 1963.  (Well, I'm old enough to remember that a pre-decimalised pint of beer cost seven and a half pence in Kirkcaldy before I left.  It's now around 40 times that much!)  So I was there.  I don't remember being offered a career in taxidermy then.  Perhaps the career officer thought there were far too many of them as it was.  But a dozen ... in every village?

Who would be left to do the blacksmithing, midwifery, baking, butchering, fishmongering, building, farming, teaching, doctoring, cobbling, knot-tying, etc., etc?  And if you ever had the slapdashery to suggest a short, debonair jaunt in the family Roller to some neighbouring community, you'd never get out past all the stuffed animals.  And if, before sundown of the following Tuesday, somehow you did manage to escape, you'd have to confront a similar assorted menagerie, of the cushiony variety, as you approached the freaktown of your destination.  All those staring, glassy eyes, stiff tails and surprised expressions.

It doesn't bear thinking about.  I wish I hadn't. I won't get to sleep now.

Turandot and the Irregular Patchwork of my Brain

Last night, watching a live transmission of Turandot from the Royal Opera House to several hundred venues round the world, I was under no duress.  It wasn't like being a kid pushed into the girls' toilets; forced to wear a hand-me-down cardigan with reindeers stampeding across it trying to get away from their own aesthetic; bullied at the age of four-and-a-half to stand in the middle of the community hall and sing a verse of A Gordon for Me.  No, I went there voluntarily.

And it was splendid.  Everyone taking part was magnificent and at the height of their artistic abilities.  The sets, props and costumes bathed me in the colours of a 1950s sweet shop.  The musicians and singers were outstanding.  Turandot and Liu sang beautifully.  Nessun Dorma was delivered effortlessly.  The audience were ecstatic.

But I just don't get it. No.  I don't get it.  I'm very conscious of the fact that I was brought up among coal miners to believe that opera was for posh folk.  A place to be seen in best frock as much as a musical experience.  Being reasonably self-reflective, however, I haven't sandbagged my mind, blocked its intrusion with ashlar bagfuls.  I have seen quite a number of operas now: La Traviatta, Salome, La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, Barber of Saville, Falstaff, etc.  And still, I don't get it. I can appreciate the art, but I'm not pulled in.

Those formally-trained voices push me away.  The baritones do nothing for me; the quavering sopranos are icy cold.  The notes they have been given to sing, the chord transitions (the rarity of a Nessun Dorma is an exception that illustrates my point) and the unexpected phrasing and melodic leaps that stab you in the chest are few and far between.

I suspect it's my flinty heart and the irregular patchwork of my brain that is to blame.  Oh dear!

When even Angels Utter Profanities

'When the corners of the landscape press in ever closer and angels utter profanities...'  I heard this on the bus, or else I'm starting to talk to myself.  'When that happens,' the voice went on, 'it's time to get off.'  So I got off.  The vehicle was chockful of pirate grins and understudies for villains for the next audition.  There was also a screenwriter writing pages of action, by which I mean there was nothing on the page apart from a few rudimentary pen-scratchings.  What would prehistoric cave-dwellers made of them?  Evidence of the intelligent life to come.  I peered over his shoulder as the bus made no provision of leper-squints.  I couldn't see any drawings of mammoths at all.

The pavement cracks were wider today.  Just makes the likelihood of being eaten by bears so much the greater.  It would give me an excuse for avoiding my talk on Grammar and Creativity.  Sorry, I'm being digested by Bruin.  But pavement life is full of canoodling pigeons spattering everywhere and crooning their half-finished numbers, trying to invent jazz.  Something flew overhead.  I could feel the wing flap and the bad language.

Flashbacks Without the Lights

I'm sitting in the cinema.  Seat at an angle.  I expect the previews, but the picture in my head whirs into focus instead.  The six other Monday-nighters think it's the big movie.  The summer blockbuster.

There's my Dad, the square-jawed film star, and me, the cheap sidekick, taking a greyhound for a walk. Early Ealing Studios perhaps or maybe one of John Grierson's slices of black and white grit.  We pass a heap of rubble on a stretch of waste ground.

Life is hard without technicolor.  Our house was condemned as unsuitable for human habitation, escapist humour or grace before the war was even a twinkle in Adolph's eye.  A damp and dirty infestation fit for heroes.  My mother cooks on one iron ring that swivels reluctantly over the open coal fire.  The production values are good.  Her dream, she says, is to have two iron rings so that she can boil potatoes and worry some stew at the same time.  This is so authentic.  The portrayal of life on a raw, broken-glass edge of a wall, with nothing worth stealing on either side.

The black and white flickers into colour tints.  For on this waste ground there grow a few lupins.  Purple spikes that drain to yellow and then cream at the tips.  The scene goes fuzzy, goes grey, out of focus.  The sound falters, out of sync.  All seven of us stamp our feet.  I look round at the other six.  Whose film is this, anyway?

The picture becomes clearer.  The words are struggling out of pre-Dolby time.  Does someone speak?  'Let's pick some and take them home.  Nobody will mind.'  Who says that?  Does my Dad read his script with feeling?

'Would your Mum like these?'

Maybe he thinks the two rooms are so dingy, a gas mantle glowing desperately onto the central fly-paper yellow and sticky with with black flies, that a few flowers will brighten up the place.  What is the motivation here?  Coal mining - dirty and dangerous - poor pay - demoralising - here is a free gift of nature.  Does he think he can make amends for the nights my mother and I, as a four year old, turned the sharp corner into the dark, empty, midnight street, wishfully thinking that this would be the moment he might return from his drinking and womanising with some money still in his pocket.  Perhaps the director wants an act of kindness here.  Remorse flitting across hardened features.
Audience reaction: wet popcorn.

I cry tears for the boy that was me - the child actor who needs protection from this harsh script, from the absence of love in this man's method acting.  I need this man, this Kirk Douglas chin, this Robert de Niro darkness to say: 'Yes.  Let's pick those for your Mum.'  Even at that age the child star knows that people have flowers in their houses.  He has heard it talked about on the radio and seen it in a cartoon at the Palladium.

The scene is re-taken, re-edited, like some false memory,  Get it right.  I can't stand this.  My chair flips up.  I move back a dozen rows.  The cinema has emptied.  Now, I can hear more clearly.

FATHER:  I think they're called lupins.

BOY:  Take one home for Mum.

FATHER:  (Pulling back on the greyhound's lead)  Don't be stupid.

Harald the Merciless is such a Bad Boy

Forgot to mention that The Bullying Of Harald Ruffsnape is free for a couple more days.  It's one of several backstories to a futuristic medieval story in progress.  I say in progress.  What I mean is that this mammoth, epic spectacularum began its squeaky, wooden-wheel journey through the time-slip of my head about 10 years ago.  But then it is a big project:  The Reptile Wars.  I want to make a few backstories available for the avid fantasy digester in need of escape therapy.  But, of course, other zingers throw themselves suicidally in my path.  'Take my life!' they say.  'Set me free of your brain-chains!'

Other immediate work includes: promoting The Badgers of Beechen Cliff and completing the formatting and illustrating of an imminent series of English books about to be published by LCP, as well as the ongoing labour of lyric-writing.  After that, languishing and attempting to attract attention by waving a tattered Scottish saltire is a modern, realistic novel for adullts - all adults; not just the Scottish variety.  But I've yet to pursue publishers with that.  I'm sure it's got legs enough to run off and find its own publisher, but it's still in short trousers and requires some sustenance and maintenance through puberty.

The English books are calling, so more in a few days.

Skyhookers are back with their Thieving Grimaces.

Skyhookers with their acrobatic climbing skills keep scaling the walls of the authorial citadel.  They should get their own ideas, but, then, ideas are thin on the ground, don't you find?  Presumably, that's why they've been employed by my network of competing publishers, i.e. to get their kid-glove mitts on the verbal treasures.  They come at me from all directions: scam-touches, cracked-whippets exploited in hungry messenger form, unrobed fatales of all three genders, cat-squatters and armed piglets, which, when you think about it are the worst.

Have you ever had that experience?  It's dusk and you find yourself for no good reason at the far end of a wrongtrack street when, out of the gloom of burger and fried chicken joints steps some tinkling spurred sub-species of the swine family, an armed piglet.  He knows there's the price of a book deal on your head and he wants it for his paymasters.  Who faces down first?  In my case, I run like billio!

My current problem, however, are the men on the scaffold.  I didn't order a single one of their stupid metal tubes, so their only motive for this vile erection can be my scribbled notes in the drawers and cupboards of the ramshackled filing system I call home.

Or maybe it's just the window cleaner.

Street Party with Rollercoaster and Hunters

Beautiful evening.  Rollercoaster and Hunting Fraternity in the sky as close as ceiling paper.  Fires are burning in the back lane, because we know how to enjoy ourselves.  They asked me to buy wine.  The budget should not exceed, so I got together several boxes of Chilean red and Sauvignon Blanc to the tune of £498.60 - Bargain!  We left some for Christmas, but managed to put away enough to keep my wine society in credit for a few months longer.

Nobody played guitar but I was dying to be asked.  Instead, I conversed about stepping into the black anti-world of non-work, the I-Ching of dry-stone-dyke reconstruction, the wondrous world of the American car-driver, pediatry and its unfathomed benefits, the mistakes one can easily make while twittering, especially with multiple accounts, the experience of being taught by shit teachers that you cannot draw, and various other topics while standing holding a glass of the finest red and juggling a vegi-burger, a pasta salad and other unidentifiable edible substances.  Great evening!

The Black and White Monster Show

Switch on your irony headsets, because everything is laughable about what we're doing here.  This is what I think, but remember to take into account the writer's paranoia, the free-roaming imagination and the 5 miles of perma-ice we call logic in my shed.  This is what's happening.  Britain is not Top of the Pops anymore.  Hasn't been for eons, but instead of letting the padded shoulders drop, kicking off the elevated heels and hammocking the afternoon of our imperialism away with a sparkling G and T, we've decided to kalashnikov the poor dumb creatures called badgers.  We've monstered them into public enemy numero uno - prime suspect of the spread of cattle TB.  The scientists can't make up their mind.  I sympathise with farmers - it must be heart-break hotel time for them, but if badgers are not the cause, the problem won't disappear.

Anyway, the Badgers of Beechen Cliff was inspired by all the hoo-ha, and of course, if there any furry creatures around for me to be on their side, that's where you'll find me.

Buy the paperback here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_11?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the%20badgers%20of%20beechen%20cliff&sprefix=the+badgers%2Caps%2C145&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Athe%20badgers%20of%20beechen%20cliff

OR, THIS WEEKEND, you can download the ebook version free.  Take a look.  Let me know what you think.  Write a review.

Maverick Drummer and Baffled Pianist

Another one of those gigs.  Ventured forth with the Lookalike song - big hit, convulsive beer-spillage among the befuddled fans.  But I know they liked it.  Almost singing along, making up their own words since they don't yet know the originals.  I managed to skewer my own bottle of the golden stuff before it attached itself to the free hand of the drummer.  Did a few hand-me-down blues ditties with the old Epiphone strings taking a battering.  Spent the rest of the evening trying to bend them in tune.  Didn't matter.  We were all on our seventh round by then and the palm-slapping became ecstatic.

So, readers, what would you like?  Anybody out there need some lyrics for their band?  Sometimes they come with chord structures and tunes, if you're lucky.

Soundlickers and Hot Water on the Side.

I knew a man, now lifted up on angels' tails to the great distillery in the sky, who said, when offered a glass of water: 'Oh, I never take it neat.'  So much better than the soundlickers, spam-scammers and verbage pushers who insist on everything just so with a little hot water on the side.  They squat mid-sentence ready to pounce with blah blah opinions and words so weary the very syllables are yawning as they tumble from the lips.  They are the walking abattoir of speech and  thought.

Example:  'I've known Sue since college.  She got a poor third.  Went out with Tom after me. Tall bloke. Nice Italian shoes from Dolcis. Not there now.  Built a block of flats.  Just a mile from the housing estate. Same as where Daphne lives.  But her kids got into drugs.  Hard to believe it could happen there.  The people are good stock.  You know.  I mean... drugs, when they've got car ports and everything.'

That old man I mentioned would have got up and soft-shoe-shuffled round the table with a glass of the golden nectar in his hand, accompanying himself to a whistling version of Sunny Side of the Street.  Better things to do.  And when the time came for the trigger-happy mouth to leave, he would have said:  'I guess you'll be having a fox's breakfast...  a pee and a quick look round!'

Let me know if you'd like an explanation of hot water on the side.

Who's Reading this Stuff?

There is a cellist with bad knees, an outpost of literate marsupials, a ghost-train full of twitching corpses, an assemblage of mugshot cowboys waiting for the chorus, and maybe one lonely guy on the island of St. Kilda left behind during the Great Evacuation and has inexplicably got a wireless signal, thanks to a beam ricocheting off a piece of passing space debris.  Yes, these are the people reading this author's paranoid mental exposee.

Is there anybody else?  Yes?  I know you are out there in the States, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the UK, and Russia.  A whole crowd from China one day obviously stumbled across my twitching, typing cadaver by accident and swiftly moved on.  So who are you?  Leave a little hello, hi y'all, guten tag, bonjour,  or whatever.  And then maybe I can get you to persuade your friends to drop by as well and we can have a global literary whammy!

Almost forgot - and who was the one person from Serbia who dropped by?  I saw Djokovic during the first week of Wimbledon and I did megaphone a soundtrack of my blog address at him, but I'm sure it wasn't him... most likely... almost certainly...

Pushing back the Cuticles

Do you ever find yourself in that situation.  You let loose a word innocently out into the smoggy, smoggy world and the uber-conversationalist opposite immediately, through some associative process or malfunction of the social gene, hooks it up in their me-me-me claw and tells your their life story.  This kind of practised lexical-drone can gun down every word you say and in return bless you with an infinite number of life stories.  So you sit, pushing back the cuticles, developing embarrassing itches, tugging at your cheek which has suddenly mutated into some kind of rubber mask, so that you can yank that skin out about three feet.  You develop x-ray vision, you hear voices in your head as well surround sound, and your fingernails have never been so clean.

That's what's happening to me today -  which is why I can't think of anything to write about.  Sorry.

On the other hand, I've eventually sold my flat (USA = apartment) in Bath.  Didn't rake in a security van full of oncers (USA = greenbacks); mainly, because it was quite elegantly small.  You know... not big... like a shoebox with a door and a toilet.  Nonetheless, out tonight to get bubbled up.

HUD YE ON MA CUDDY!

World is full of feet-draggers and stool-sifters.

I have a modus vivendi.  Some stuff requires rational thought and near-as-dammit reasonable solutions. Other stuff is all about immeasurable, abstract nouns - sympathy, kindness, appreciation.  In between, there is a very civilised path called benefit of the doubt.  This way allows for logic and romance.  It encapsulates the human, so why be one when you can be both?

Yet, you look around and you see the planet is walked on by a whole bunch of feet-draggers, stool-sifters, candy-bombers, tick-tock-watchers, love-manglers, psycho-entrepreneurs, scrotum-straighteners, hotscreen-addicts and warthog-followers.  They want to pull you down, push you around, persuade you to their way of walking and talking, force you to think this and swallow that.  For J. H. Slaggenbottom's sake, give yourself a break! Give us all a break!

A Penny Whistle in the Wrong Mouth

A skirling, screeching sound-scar is inhibiting work.  It's a penny whistle in the wrong mouth.  The melody-wrestler is adept enough; it's the repetitive swirls, twirls and pavement burls that are having a blocking effect in the cranial area, as bad as some kind of radio signal jammer.  I'm tied to my machine and can't slope off.  All the ideas are jumping up and down to be noticed but communication between hemispheres is as dead as a hairpin.  If I could afford it, I'd give the whistler some dosh to find a spot further, say, half-a-mile, from my window.

Ping!  Cartoon, low-energy lightbulb!  I'll invite him in.  Opening the bronchitic door for the first time feels like an audition; it hasn't been my routine recently, my pathway of desire.  The light, sharp as a razor, is a pleasant experience but smacks the pale blue and yellow eyeballs like a torch on a cro-magnon cave-wall.  Is it my face screwed into a crumpled newspaper full of bad news or possibly my staggering gait?  Because, for some reason, he backs off, grabbing his bag, pocketing the instrument, and declining my offer as if he were a stretcher case suddenly reincarnated as a whippet.

Oh, well.

What do I know about Cowboy Songs?

I don't feel qualified.  Country and Western in the UK is some bleak moorland on the outer, unreachable reaches of west Wales or the most westerly point in Scotland - Ardnamurchan Point.  C & W is about shooting the dog because your girl loves him more than you.  And can you blame her?  You've been two-timing and five-and-diming with her for too long, you no-good, sliming, outrageous rhyming son-of-a-gun.  I don't even know what a son-of-a-gun is!  I can face-tape a fair few chords together, however, and I have a verse or two.  Here is a sequel to the first:

Your smile is catching light from a star
I could be reaching out too far
All I need is the touch of your love...

Oh no!  I need a last line.  Help!

Avoiding a Guilty Reflection

When you walk the back streets, expect to step into a roomful of backbiters.  No mirrors - all avoiding their guilty reflections - who snatched the lyrics?  Some hug the walls, faces like irregular patchwork, stitched together by apprentices; others browned with macaroon bar skin; some just pram-free but learning the trade as fast as hot laxative.  Such a relief to escape with my minor blemishes intact and a wallet full of memory sticks.  Without them, I'd be like a bride without a trousseau, a satanic figure perched on the Isle of May without a blue stane to chuck at Crail kirk.  The words aren't just a livelihood.  They're also an identity, a contact with the parallel country you call home.

Touchkeys, black cables and all ports are on call.  A graphic pad and a source of energy are essential tech.  I broke the tender chains so many years ago and stepped, rock by rock, into a waiting body double.  Luckily, he was exactly my size and had been hanging around for half a century on some hammocking porch waiting for me to swing by.

But punching out the nicknames, the word-topiary, the hound's-tooth paragraphs are fine until someone throws a contract across the table.  Merc-masters, overdogs and muscular stand-ins barricade the doors and apply the mind-screws and stubs of legal documents.  And all I want to do is write and live.

Edinburgh: Land of Georgian Granite

Heading north and hands will be too full to blog.  Edinburgh and beyond.  Like many UK cities, there used to be so much fagsmog (UK English: fag = cigarette) the men, with their ashlar voices and honeyed fingers, were able to create topiary out of it, or take it home in bagfuls to be shared with the bairns. (Scottish English: bairn = baby / child.)  Nowadays the bronchitic and bedridden sing in a flinty way and dance rustily in the street to the sounds of the Festival and Fringe events.  It's a sparkling city at any time, even through the mesh of wet, grainy greyness that lashes off the North Sea.  But in the middle of August, it dresses up in its best frock and boogies.

So, all packed, apart from finding another suitable case for all the notebooks, scraps of paper, pens and backup pencils I'll need in between trigger-happy conversations, squeamish one-person shows in which the act often outnumbers the audience, and exhibitions that are just the cat's pyjamas.  You better get there yourself some day.

 Another couple of sleepless nights to get over, however, ever since the drawling approach a week or two ago of the stetson guy with the hand-me-down look.  That suggestion of his that I do a country-and-western lyric.  I've been trying to avoid it, but at around 3:00am last night - I mean, this morning - into my unsuspecting head came: A major, a rising bass to D flat minor, followed by A7 and the wailing words:

You are an angel on a highwire
Am I in danger of aiming too high?
All I need is the touch of your love
And, Baby, I will learn to fly.

There's more, but does that sound like c-and-w to you?  If so, send your favourite band my way and they can have it.

So have a lovely time while I'm away.  Check back in a week.  Adios!  Hasta la vista!

OK, I'm up!

Bad night and noisy morning, the seagulls pressing the corners of the aural landscape ever closer.  Still, daylight is a wonderful adventure, full of sleepily optimistic ideas to be sifted through and discarded or embellished.  It's always the same with these mental scribbles flashing through the velvety fuzz of semi-consciousness in the middle of the night.  Wonderful abstract edifices rise up and colourful men and women pull themselves out of the prosaic sludge of the world to make themselves credible, only to open the curtains at daybreak and reveal the whole shambles as utter crap, as meaningless gab.

Still, at about 5:00am I did get a useful conversation, that has been able to brave today's morning sunshine, out of Wull Ritchie and Jimmy Fens, two guys from a Scottish story.  Tonight, I hope that any afterthoughts on their part are continued in a whisper.  I need to catch up on my sleep.

Too many imaginary characters keeping me awake.

It's just a snailtrail after 4:30am here in the UK.  I should be tucked up in bye-bye land with my plasticine face squodged into a pillow mould, but I've been matchstick-eyed awake for the past 2 hours.  Too many imaginary characters inside my head are keeping me awake.  Loud-mouthed conversations, arguments about killing them off in chapter 6, counter-arguments by their mates suggesting they should have been killed off sooner - who needs enemies?  The worst of it is, at this time in the morning with synapses clicking away like the old telegraph system or the points on Casey Jones's railway lines, people from different books are starting up shouting matches like neighbours across a fence.  Help!

If I get some of these conversations down on paper, instead of writing this blog, perhaps I'll crawl back to bed before the pigeons start crooning their half-finished melodies down our Georgian chimneys or the seagulls, which come up-river only because there are so many (lovely) tourists here they think it's the seaside, begin their first-light squawk concert.

Just don't expect too much of me tomorrow - I mean, later today.

A Friend is Bored on Saturn

It's not possible, is it?  Nobody could be on Saturn.  If they were, they wouldn't be bored for very long as death would be immediate.  Thirdly, who writes and has friends?  Also the phrase is nonsense - an anagram of boundaries and frontiers - and so is arts on the underside of brain.  I can't help playing dodge-ball with words.  But no apologies.  The boundaries and frontiers of words is where I want to go.  You can stumble over the cliff-edge into nonsense, I know, but foxtrotting on the crumbly edge is fun.  Is that what you do as a writer?  Push at the door?

What I do is bang at several doors, at an entire corridor of doors, at once.  There are the grammar books  to be published in October; The Badgers of Beechen Cliff  which might require the use of a megaphone; the rock lyrics calling out to the world in a tiny voice but with a driving bass line; as well as two adult novels half-finished, two children's stories complete and a picture book series.  I'm also in the process of having my rights reverted on some long-forgotten children's books, published eons ago by Orion and Barefoot Books.  What I will do with them then, I don't know yet. (Little Eagle Lots of Owls, The Emperor Who Hated Yellow, etc., etc.)

I never have writer's block.  I don't know what that is.  My displacement activity is to abandon one story until Jim, who lives in a parallel creative universe, sorts it our for me and whispers the new coordinates, while I get on with another story or a bit of illustration.  Perfect set-up.

Jim, I can't thank you enough.

HaHa-time for Illustration

Neurons are on the warpath, fighting for attention, because I've just been cajoled (as if I needed cajoling) into producing colour (yes, real, Rajasthani Georgia Brown COLOR!) for a series of English books.  I thought they would have to be black-and-white to keep costs down.  It means more toil, but without the hardship.  What can be better than being handed a modest shedload for what you like doing anyway.  So, this weekend, I'm filling pantomime slippers with bubbly, aim the flame-thrower at a regiment of candles, draping the patio with fairy lights (I once designed for Quandt Originelle in Hamburg - look up their Wild Animals and other designs by Jim Edmiston) and inviting my partner and some people I optimistically call friends for a small period of assimilation of alcoholic moisture.

Still casting half a tearful eye at the orphaned lyrics at the end of the table, but maybe some kind foster band will rap at the door and whisk them off to happy-ever-after land.

Have a lovely weekend.

Yippees all round.

A bit of a jolly day yesterday.  A toffee popcorn kind of day; a day when you get all of the stratacelli in your mouth before it melts on to your sneakers; a day when some of the fragmented pieces fall into the right jigsaw spaces.  This is not about the lyrics contracts - all that: in accordance with instructions, your reference dated as per section 5, and reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation, blah, blah, blah.  No.  All of that is still an Eton Mess floating with a bird's eye view of my head, like some culinary drone yet to be invented.  (Have you noticed the blueberries in the muffins watching you as you walk around the deli?)

No, this is another worthy project stuffed deep inside the back pocket. It suddenly appeared like a magician's rabbit, wide eyes popping because straitlaced backer numero uno suddenly pulled out of concordat because of a financial injury - asked for a bank loan and the manager socked him on the nose. Now lovely, handsome but serious with intentions to match and with a fine sturdy leg, backer numero deux has stepped in jauntily with a shiny offer of a deluxe publication and sufficient moolah to market the thing. Yippees all round, I say!  It's what's known as a silver lining.

Blogless Tomorrow - Encounter with Moneybags

I doubt I'll be able to blog tomorrow.  Possible first step in getting inky mitts on a new contract with new company.  Meeting set up (possibly through this blog), expectations kept down.  It's a long-shot as the tic-tac men used to mime.  More harrowing temper tantrums on Friday.

Hit the Zeitgeist Right on the Nose

Gigged last night with beer buddies, minus percussion section on philandering leave and rhythm guitarist either in France or drowned at sea.  First public outing for new song.  Feels like putting head in stocks during a glut of summer fruit, but got to the end unpilloried and with fingerbones intact.  Broke a nail thrashing away at the E / A / D strings but never mind.

Then an unheard-of thing happened.  (Well, that's not true.  The last time it happened, I was sixteen and my friend, Dave - still need to apologise to him, by the way - and I had climbed into the church through the toilet window for the afternoon rehearsal; we played our own compositions in the evening; he stopped playing acoustic guitar halfway through a song because a girl he fancied offered him a polo mint and nobody could hear his strumming anyway because he wasn't amplified, which brought that earlier career step to an abrupt ending; then a member of another band came up to us and asked if he could buy some of our songs, but we said 'I should coco' because we were going to hit the big time in a matter of nanoseconds, not that those existed in those days.)

The almost-unheard-of thing that happened was this.  A guy in ankle wellies and a stetson made of straw walked over and said he appreciated my lyrics, especially I'm a lookalike companion...etc., as it 'Hit the zeitgeist right on the nose.'

Naturally, being a gentleman, I smiled bashfully and apologised.

Then he suggested, with unconstrained enthusiasm, I write some country and western numbers.  Knew there'd be a catch.

A Fire Risk Survey Confirms I'm Unlikely to Self-combust

Fire Risk Survey: all writers should have one.  You can spoon your words into a bucket from the moment the lark rises until some fool shoots it with a Colt 45, and that is fine.  Unfortunately, your harmless, imaginary eavesdropping of your fictional characters' conversations and your stroll into their landscapes will soon overstep into the boundaries and frontiers of the real hardnuts.  You start to write smiles in the wrinkles of your publisher.  You picture taking the editor's jowls in both hands and shaking them like crazy.  And, heaven forfend, you begin to see yourself living by direct debit.  But that's the outposts of reality, John.  That's not your desk, your biro and your post-its.  That's the parallel, bleached universe of colourless bottom lines.  You're just a maker of stuff.

Now the lyrics are homeless and contractual etiquette and guys with big hands insist that they stay that way. Shame!  Self-combustion, it seems, is not an option.

In Limbo but not the Dancing Kind

Would it be easier to choose an alternative life path?  Burger knitter, for example.  Back end of a pantomime horse; that is, a non-speaking part.  The trouble is the words keep coming.  Drag a comb through my hair (not that I have any) and verbs tumble out.  There is punctuation in my muesli.  And I never even go near alphabetti spaghetti.

Now I'm holding a couple of pages of sweet lyrics, written with a particular guitar acrobat in mind and they are no longer required, no longer fit for purpose, no longer jumping and jiving off the paper.  Cruelty, thy name is broken promises.  All the loot I was planning to blow on worthless items: perhaps squander some of it on a timeshare in a pacemaker - the heart sort, not the old Gerry variety - or buy a macrame set, you know some rocking, edge-cutting thing.  Have to consider options or find another client.

Suggestions, please, on a postcard or some currency of high monetary value.  If my back wouldn't give out, I'd limbo to the front door and pick it up off the mat with my teeth.

I Fear I may have Blown it

Impersonating respectability is hard without your own accountant.  Picture an offstage amoeba about to shapeshift into a politician, or a sponge insisting it's not spineless - that's me.  I write.  I only sign contracts; I don't necessarily know what to do when the go-to man goes for the get-out from the get-go - whatever that means.  So a late-in-the-day phone call from the publisher says she hasn't eyeballed enough fat to part with the breakfast vouchers.  Assurances that the lyrics are complete and that they are perfect for her client aren't enough.  But where's my advance?  The question behaves like glue on my fingertips preventing the final adjustments leaving home.  Raging doesn't appear to help.  I try swearing therapy - it's helpful but not in the business sense.  The conversation ends strangely, with the sound of plastic hitting a wall.

The second section is here.  What am I going to do?

I heard a husky saxophone

Between the street talk and the drone

Mugged by a school, I am a runner with no shoes

Crowbarred a waiting window – welcome city blues

Whether, Baby, you stay or leave

You’re better by yourself

If you find some air to breathe

Don’t tell nobody else

I’m a digital companion

I’m a passport with no place

I’m a double of an old friend

I’m a copy of my face

A Seagull Ride to a Dream Buggy

Seagulls and buggies - that's what it feels like.  Gliding into dream.  Everything slides, more trombone that garbage chute, into place.  The lyrics have been hammered like rock on steel, put through a scrapyard crusher, ripped to pieces and jumped on and still something remains, because it's true and hits some spot or other.  Don't ask me whose or which one.  But it does.  I'm happy because it now exists.  Will it feed me?  I don't know.  I'm beginning to wonder.  No silhouette on the horizon.  No pigeon has come from the publisher who has seen the first drafts.  Here is the first of three parts.  Be nice.  Don't crumple the paper.  No coffee rings.

I left the boy of nineteen years

Melting the tender chains with my own acid tears

Walked past the women buying bread and making tea

Brushing crumbs from their mouths and babies from their knee

Whether, Baby, you stay or leave

You’re better by yourself

If you find somewhere to breathe

Don’t tell nobody else

I’m a lookalike companion

I’m a trick of time and space

I’m a double of your best friend

I’m a copy of my face

Lyrics as Rough as a Gravel Drive

Polishing awaits but the lyrics are almost on the road.  No monkeys at the door and no one chiseling away at the painted bricks on the windows.  Brow-sweat at a minimum.  But palpitations are never more than a fingernail away.  You only need to look at the scratches on in the wallpaper.  An advance on royalties should have hit the welcome mat but I'm down to thin yoghurt, sour dough crumbs and wild raspberries.  Perhaps the publisher didn't overtake the monkey.  Perhaps all that imagination has slid off her lap and fallen into file 13.

It's rock 'n' roll poetry - a bit of Byron, a lot of Zappa and a hint of Incredible String Band, without the comfortable cardigans.  Starting to doubt everything now.  Just an email, a text, a smile, half a smile, anything you can spare.  My empty hat is on the pavement and shoes are hurrying by.

Art on the Underside of Brain

I'm jumping between hemispheres this morning.  Like some unlucky tongue-tied parrot, can't quite formulate the last few lines of lyrics, while, at the same time, I'm trying hard not to add up the fame, fortune, media minutes and pointless, carbon-footprint-laden, material possessions that will surely come my way.

You feel like a castaway when the postman doesn't even knock once.  With publishers, no bad news doesn't mean good tidings.  And news is considered good-ish when the readies are in the bank.  Even then they can send round a pair of heavies, a lawyer and a pick-up truck, enter the vaults and snatch it out of your cheque book (or check book if you have money stashed you-know-where.)

So I'm dredging the underside of my brain to see what treasures lurk.  There is a pile of nasty stuff here: mildewed ideas, broken promises, embarrassing comments.  Then I spot something.

I left the boy of nineteen years
Sidestepped the catcalls and the jeers
Jacked myself a car and danced around with my big mouth
Pointing to the north star, turned the wheel and headed south

Whether, Baby, you stay or leave
It's better by yourself
If you find some air to breathe
Don't tell nobody else

I'm a digital companion
I'm a passport out of place
I'm the double of your old friend
I'm a copy of my face

A Love Match but What About the Monkey?

Is it the fact that badgers and prickly fleabags kept me awake all night with their arguments over gastropods and territorial rights.  'Quoting Carlyle will get you nowhere!' I want to shout from the bedroom window. But there's another stalemated picture in my eye.  The first non-digital meeting with the publisher has unraveled me.  My heart bursts at the thought of the creases in her neck, the sweetness of the turn-ups on her trousers and the absence of metal parts.  My cactus clock is ticking away.  She'll realise about now that she doesn't have the full lyric.  Saved by the monkey.  What a driver!  And cute to boot.  The question is: can romance blossom while missing words and an attractive monkey stand between us.  Better to stick a password on the door and paint bricks on the windows.

I'm balancing a hod full of terracotta acrylic and on my penultimate row of bricks, parrying insults from the local muffins, when it comes to me:

Jacked myself a car and danced around with my big mouth
Talked about the north star, turned around and headed south

Publisher's Monkey with Jemmy

The publisher shoehorns a monkey under the door, which gets jemmied from the inside.  Oblique strategy - has to be admired.  Would be if I weren't a hadron and a quark away from the wire.  She - the publisher man - is of an uncertain age and temperament.  Sunbeams and carwax on the outside; eels and bolts on the inside.  The crinoline creases of her neck twist and vibrate like a quaking jug in a Richter 8 tremor as she arcs over my writing shoulder.  'I have a studio on my back,' she says.  'The studio has guitar boy on theirs, and the boy has a contract on his.  We haven't squeezed him dry yet.  What we need from you has to come straight from his heart.  And the moment is now.'

So I whine and fake and shrug and sigh in different vocal ranges, fold the words into a paper aeroplane (or airplane), seal it with ground glass and cattle hooves, scribble NOT TO BE OPENED TILL I GET THE BUCKS and fly it through the open window of her loitering profitmobile.  The monkey revs up and shoots off, leaving her to dilly-dally after it.

Some time has been won.

Lookalike Companion

The tea leaves are dwindling without providing a rhyme.  A pigman with wasp features and a streak of enemy bacon starts to hassle at the painted-shut, knowing full well I'm vegetarian.  (I apologised to the fishes yesterday.)  I guess who he's come from.  The man, himself, won't waste time wearing down the discarded pavement gum.  I suspect he has greed-scopes aimed at his own coccyx.  No doubt the crane fly drone the other day was one of theirs.  I need a brain mirror to bounce off - the trampoline in the garden doesn't do justice.  Besides, outside is what is known as 'open space.'

Then it hits me with the grandmother of all smacks.  Like the sound of the morning newspaper slapped on to the table.

I'm a lookalike companion
A trick of time and space
I'm the double of your best friend
I'm a copy of my face

Lining up the Wallbangers

Bargain-basement wallbangers have made their presence known to my internal organs, but they may have raided a few neurons instead of the wished-for effect.  Gossip in the street is that the bailiffs have doorstepped me, the building is condemned and my house has become an outpost of huggermuggers and inarticulate bafflement.  I'm blank as a page, coiled in a corner, letting the rumours exaggerate exponentially in triplicate. Play for time.  Raid my stash of courgettes and nan bread.

Then it happens.  They send in the social media crane fly - nothing more than a thumbnail insect, but with a loud message:  'What in John's name is a Weather Baby?'  Hope is plummeting like a fat McDonald by the side of Loch Tummel.  Desperation reworks the last verse.  Maybe reconsider the chord sequence over a filled pitta.

I heard a husky saxophone

Between the street-talk and the drone

Mugged by a teacher – I’m a runner with no shoes

Crowbarred the whining window welcome city blues 

Brain Parked on the Double Yellows

The writing brain, which lies somewhere on a smogbound street-view between the left and right hemispheres, is parked beside a fish head on the double yellows and is being towed away by a man in a suit.  He leaves a postcard.  On the front, there is a framed Renoir with a speech bubble that says, 'Not to be turned over quite yet.'  So I top the blackcurrants.  They're so happy they do a little, healthy vitamin C number.  I airbrush the aubergines.  They're delighted and sing: 'I am the Eggplant... Coo Coo Ca Choo!'  It's no help to me, especially now I've run out of purple fruit.

On the back of the postcard, it says, 'I've come to collect.'  I hear the crunch of a snail on the doorstep.  I fumble the stash of papers.  There's something here somewhere:

Em, D, AM6

Mugged by a teacher, became a runner with no shoes
Crowbarred the open window city blues

The pinstripes trickles the keyhole.  'The man doesn't like concrete!  Do something!'

Word Franchise

The grim arm of the word-reaper carries a scythe for culling those who have not paid for the franchise. There's smog at the door and a picture in crayon is spooned underneath into the waiting embrace of my tinplate toy.  'Tell me the worst,' I say.  'Rent's spent!'

'Then it's plague-rats for you,' comes the voice as he hobbles off on his perky spine and dog boots.

I might as well try writing on washing-up water.  There won't be any more lyrics tonight.  I could play a fingerbone fanfare on the sax, try a few newspaper ladders, throw darts at magazines, but I can't see a sleeve trick that will do the job.  I have the next array of chords and even a suggestion of a riff, but there it ends. Mavericks and lookalike husks won't do.  Not from the heart.  Not from the collective soul.  Can only wait for the publishing boss to come pounding with his jemmy.  Let him do his worst.

A Fake Smile and Puberty Pills

A fake smile and a fin holding a skewer whine at the acrylic of the cat-flap.  'Let me in, you word breaker!' The big publisher man has his methods.  If it isn't an ex-wrestler with charity wristbands, then it's some kid on puberty pills and lawnmower blades.  The German Shepherds are never far away with their skinned raincoats and rifles stuffed with dummy bullets.  All this before lunchtime.  Nowhere to relax and few places to breathe now that they've nailed down the frames and gun-filled the floorboards.

'All right, all right,' I say, ' next verse or maybe the chorus.  Will that get you off my back, you leech with ocean-deep eyes?'

Bm, F sharp m7, GM7

Whether, Baby, you stay or leave
You're better by yourself
If you find somewhere to breathe
Don't tell nobody else

All through Bill Evans and beetroot and lemon zest, I'm tormented by the double negative.

Coffee, Personality-mime, Coffee

Coffee, personality-mime, coffee - complete the sequence.  Radioactivity floods the street so take a grin-break inside.  Too many hazards to the bedroom, with a beartrap on alternate steps; a bear on every other one.  Settle into the unravelling kitchen, harpoon another mug and rustle up the Les Paul.  Gotta a lyric to write or else slow death by quintet.  A swordfish kills cleanly, leaving no trace but a whiff of ozone.

So strum an A, G, D and back to G:

I left the boy of nineteen years
Melt the concrete shoes and chains with acid tears
Walked past the women buying bread and making tea
Brushing crumbs from their mouths and babies from their knee

Revelation Zone

A streak of Monday cracks the pain for the seconds it takes to rise. The pen is a fingertip away. Playful, it runs for the cliff edge of the table split by varnished years when tiny people couldn't reach for the crumbs and the later days of singalong champagne.  Brain smog baffles the words that queue to straddle the bone-white page.  An idea vaults the chasm, knuckles the page and its done.  Curtains hardly filter the seagulls so listening to the follow-up isn't easy.  There's a revelation close by, plastic-wrapped, unable to break out, calling to be scissored free.  A conversation or even an exclamation by an unknown character in headgear might crash-helmet out, it could be mugged, tricked into the open.  The ending is within reach but the ground to that outpost is protected by a burlesque of clicking spoonfuls, a mob of ringtones, the tongues of floorboards, the swish of buttonless clothing.  I need to find the silent zone.

Grammar Books

Being kept busy.   Not only exploring ways of publicising The Badgers of Beechen Cliff, recently out in paperback, but having completed the final drafts of four grammar books, for Years 3 -6, I'm working on some cover designs.  Not quite there yet, but on the right you'll see the sort of thing I'm working on.

Badgers at St. Marks

My route to and from a friend's house at the top of Beechen Cliff takes me up and down the steps depicted on the cover of The Badgers of Beechen Cliff.  Tonight, on the way there, the sun was setting, creating fiery red splashes on the trees and the ancient walls.  Coming home, I half expected to meet a badger on the path.  It's happened before.  But not tonight.  The route takes me down Holloway and eventually past St. Mark's Church.  The footpath passes between two graveyards no longer used or consecrated.  On the right, by the railing, there was a sudden scuffling among the leaves.  I froze.  I could see two badgers, one only a few feet away which was quickly reacting to my scent  - hopefully, my human scent, not just the cheap aftershave.

I stood stock still for about five minutes in the light of a waning moon as they snuffled among the leaves, grass and wild flowers, stopping every now and again to examine things more closely.  Eventually, one came within a metre of where I was standing, scrabbled around, stopped and peered up at me.  If, you could read my mind, I thought, you'd realise I've written a story about you.  But it scurried off and I left them to it.

Writing Time

Some of the decks are cleared.  The singing group won't meet until September; the cupboard under the stairs is not only tidied, I've re-plastered the walls and re-painted the shelves; the allotment is pretty much looking after itself now and is starting to bear fruit; the paperback version of The Badgers of Beechen Cliff will be available on Amazon any day now; and my four books on grammar have been written and are now with the publisher.

So, maybe now, at last, I can have some time dedicated to other writing projects - stories for children and adults - that have been haunting the pages of my notebooks and corners of my brain for some time now.  I am able to write anytime and anywhere, but what a luxury to be able to indulge completely in ideas and words.  It's not something I'm used to.  I'm sure I'll be able to cope.

The Badgers of Beechen Cliff - Proofs Arrived

It's always exciting when the proofs of a book arrive.  It's also a strange experience: here is a cover, font, layout and content that you know inside out.  You dug it out of your imagination, worried the sentences until the rhythm felt right, solved plot problems and imagined characters sufficiently to illustrate them, and enfold the whole thing inside sympathetic cover.  But when you sign for it at the front door, open the package, and hold the object in your hand, you realise it has left you (in a good way) and is ready to live in the world on its own.  It has an appealing unfamiliarity.

And I have to say it's a modest, little book, but perfectly formed.  So - not long now.

Tourists - Hidden Bath, UK.

There are many fascinating parts of Bath in England that the 1000s of visiting tourists never see.  There is Beechen Cliff, bombed during World War II, and, by the side of it, Holloway, the ancient Roman route into Bath, which continued as a main road during medieval times.  It explains why the pavement is built up so high above a road that would have been mud churned up by horses.  Up Prior Park Road, there is Abbey cemetery, the final resting place of many who fought in the Crimean and Boer Wars.  If you continue out the back gate of the cemetery, you will follow the favourite walk of the poet, Alexander Pope.  It takes you up Fox Lane until you reach Prior Park College, whose grounds are open to visitors.

So Bath is the Roman Baths, Royal Crescent, the Circus and Pulteney Bridge, leading to the Holburne Museum.  But it is also much more.  Take a look.  Dare to wander off the beaten track.

USA and UK

How do USA and UK readers compare when it comes to attitudes to, and stories about, wild animals and the environment?  Disney, despite some of his dubious methods in the creation of wildlife films, turned a lot of people on to caring about animals.  He may have had a big hand in anthropomorphising them, but that process began a long time ago in the form of fairytales, myths and fables.

The Badgers of Beechen Cliff falls into the same tradition of animals chatting to each other, displaying human emotions and trying to get themselves out of impossible situations.  But it's not just a 'cuddly' story.  I hope it has a rawness and a reality to it at some level.

Badgers, here in the UK, are in the news because the government has made it legal, within some restrictions, to shoot them,  fearing that they spread TB to cattle.  Whether this is appropriate or effective, when there are other more humane solutions, remains to be seen scientifically.  My book, however, isn't a tirade against this particular stance.  First of all, I hope it is just an exciting and funny story.  But it also comes from a strongly-held belief that, when we treat other creatures in an offhand way, we diminish ourselves as human beings.

I know the UK is often portrayed, probably wrongly, as a nation of animal-lovers.  Is this true of the USA?

Wimbledon, Andy Murray and Xenophobia

Andy Murray is Scottish.  I am Scottish.  A mere coincidence.  An acquaintance, who happens to be English - let's call him Mr. X -  keeps referring to Andy Murray as 'your man.'  How is he 'my man?'  On Saturday, Mr. X said, 'I guess you'll be supporting your man, then.  I'll be supporting the other one, because Murray doesn't give good interviews.'  

I said, 'I hope he wins, but I'll be watching it on TV.  How is Andy Murray going to experience any support from me?  And I think you have to be a good tennis player to win the Wimbledon final - giving good interviews doesn't really come into it, does it?'  There was a lot more that was too boring to go into.

Today, Monday, after Murray's exciting win, I smiled and said to Mr. X, with obvious provocation, 'Your man lost then.'

'I couldn't really support a Serbian.'

'Why not?  He's an amazing player.'

'Well,... '

Physical Book

I've just started working on a paper version of The Badgers of Beechen Cliff.  I thought an ebook would have been enough, but perhaps not for children.  So, hopefully, within the next week or two, it will be available for sale alongside the digital version.

Facts and Fiction

Being a rationalist at heart (though not always behaving in a rational way) I strongly believe in the importance of facts, evidence, logic, causality, fair-testing, etc.  When it comes to persuading people to think and feel in a particular way, or just draw their attention to some new way of looking at something, fiction wins over facts.  It's the head v heart thing.  All the facts in the world won't always make people shift their strongly held position, but a simple story that presents characters and life in a different way is very affective and effective.

When I wrote The Badgers of Beechen Cliff, I wasn't necessarily trying to change hearts and minds.  It's the classic set-up of the too-powerful against the weak, Goliath encountering David.  See for yourself.  Let me know what you think or write a review.

Free Kindle App

Just a reminder: you don't need a Kindle to download The Badgers of Beechen Cliff.  The Kindle App, which enables you to download books to your own phone, PC or other device is free here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=dig_arl_box?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

Do Bath Badgers Travel Well to USA, Canada, Germany and Brazil?

Local interest in my latest children's story set in Bath, The Badgers of Beechen Cliff, is increasing with Bath Mums acceptance of an article. (http://www.bathmums.co.uk/news.php/2251.htm) and the possibility of a review in The Bath Parent magazine.

Do other countries and cultures feel the same way about animals in a fictional fight for their own survival?  How do I extend interest to USA, Canada, Germany and Brazil?  This is, after all, one of those 'underdog' stories that might have wide appeal.

Wimbledon

No time for writing today.  Off to Wimbledon tomorrow for the first time.  Centre Court should be exciting, even though we won't see Murray play.  There is a chamce of Serena Williams or Laura Robson, however.

And while I won't be doing any writing, nonetheless, I don't walk around without my eyes and ears.  There are always characters and conversations to observe and make a mental note of.

Very happy to see my first ever review of The Badgers of Beechen Cliff  has 5 stars.  It's a start.

Rock 'n' Roll and Badgers

I'm not usually in the Beechen Cliff area on a Monday night, but it was my singing evening.  A few of us get together to sing old rock 'n' roll numbers - anything we can harmonise to.  Choir isn't the correct collective noun; it's more of a bunch of friends having a good time singing.  Last night, the venue was Bear Flat, which means, afterwards, walking home down the steps through Beechen Cliff woods.

Just after ten last night, there was still a bit of light in the sky, but dark enough for the badgers to be out.  I could hear quite a bit of scuffling.  Every time I moved, of course, the noise stopped.  They were listening to me as much as I was listening to them.  I didn't think I'd see any, until I got to the end of the steps.  A badger was sitting right there.  Practically on the spot where I have one on the front cover of my book.  It didn't hang about for long, of course.  Gave me a bit of an old-fashioned look and waddled off - in no great hurry.

Bath Wildlife - Badgers, Peregrines and the rest

We're very lucky in Bath.  For such a busy, tourist-packed city, it's full of wildlife, if not in the centre, then only a short walk away.

The peregrine falcons of St. John's Church, of course, are city-centre dwellers, sometimes gracing the sky over Widcombe and settling on the weather vane of St. Matthew's Church.  We often see one from our back garden.  Round the corner, along by the canal, the allotments have been home to a small group of deer.  Whether they'll still show up this year, since the felling of a small copse, I don't know.  But there are a few around.  I did see one strolling down Rosemount Lane in broad daylight as casual as you please.

Along the top, Greenway Lane, round about Devonshire pub closing time is where to see badgers.  You might argue that on the way home from the pub is when you're likely to 'see' all sorts of things.  But it is where the Lyncombe Vale and the Beechen Cliff  badgers rendezvous.  Luckily for the Beechen Cliff crowd, at least, they are well away from farm land, so should face no threat from the cull.