Cedilloid

The Leaf and the Lump of Mud

2012-01-23T03:41:00.000-08:00

It was quiet in the forest, except for the blowing of the wind and the pattering of the rain. The forest grew when the rain fell, the soil became moist and thousands of leaves sprouted from the ends of the twigs and branches. In this forest there weren’t many flowers. They weren’t needed because the leaves were so very pretty. In the light breeze they danced on the ends of their twigs and as they danced they chattered away, as ladies often do.

Although all the Leaf Ladies were the same, each one was in her own way completely different from the others, and when they all whispered together, their chatter made a pretty twinkling sound which added to the music of the wind. The soil and mud however was very much the same as any other soil and mud, except that sometimes lumps of it would break away from the ground and when that happened each lump found that it could look around and see some of the plants and trees which had grown from their body.

“Look at the lovely plants and trees which have grown from our bodies” said one lump of mud, “And look and those beautiful green fresh leaves dancing like glamorous ballerinas from the ends of the twigs”, said another as they looked up to the sky.

And likewise all the Leaf Ladies began each day by casting their eyes down in humility as they remembered where they came from. “We may be pretty and fine and fair,” they said, “But we all grew from the common mud and soil beneath us. Let us not forget this, sisters. Their solid character holds us up and gives us all the food and water we shall ever need.”

“Then let us start each day by giving thanks,” said another leaf, “And let us end it by giving thanks again to that from which we came,” said her friend. All the leaves agreed and nodded and danced in the wind on their end of the twigs and the sound they made was so tinkling and pretty that all the plants and insects and birds fell quiet as they listened to the song. The Leaf Ladies heard their own song too and were enchanted with their achievement. The mud however had no ears to hear these songs and just kept quietly feeding the plants, trees and leaves, and after a while the Leaf Ladies forgot about the mud which had no ears for lovely songs. In short, the leaves had forgotten their roots and the ground from which they all had sprouted, because they’d become distracted by the music they could make, and little by little they grew to despise the lumps of mud which had no ears. “Why waste our time singing to those who are tone deaf?” said one Lady. “And after all,” said another, “It isn’t that we’re not grateful to our roots, but these days we’ve become so busy practising our new harmonies.” Furthermore,” said the next Lady, “It’s rumoured that the leaves in the next forest are practising too. They grow on the lower slopes of snow-clad hills which feed them with fresh cool water and their voices are strong and can even move a stone.”

Lady Leaf become Queen of the Air

A few of the Leaf Ladies grew angry at the thought of this, and a slight blush of red colour crept into the green. Several of them jiggled up and down in a pizzicato frenzy, and as they danced, some of the twigs became loose. One of them jumped off to be carried by the breeze and for a few moments this Leaf had moved from being Lady to reigning as Queen because she was held aloft by the air, higher up than all her brothers and sisters and even higher than the songbirds on their branches because they need to have their feet on twigs if they are going to sing.

She was very proud about being higher up than everybody else and believed she was the best. And for the few seconds she was indeed the Queen; but this was only because of the gust of wind which held her up in the sky, higher than all the rest, and it wasn’t long before she started to drift down, down below all her friends, tumbling below all the branches and the twigs and the trunks of the trees, all the way down to the forest floor where she landed right next to a lump of Mud! Within the space of less than a minute, Our Leaf had shifted from being the Highest of the High to someone who was so low that if she went any lower she’d be buried in the ground.

Not long ago Our Leaf had been practising her song hard, hoping to make her voice rise high above the others, so that other leaves and forest creatures would turn their heads to look at her and her alone. She’d just started to grow a set of frills on the edges of her leaf and she did look exceptionally pretty rolling and tumbling through the air. So when she finally landed next to the mud-lump the expression on her face was one of total surprise. For the mud-lump, our Leaf Lady was one of the most beautiful things he ever saw. Leaf Lady was startled. In a word, she hadn’t a single word to say. If she’d sat properly to work it all out, she’d probably have thought that the mud-lump was one of the most ordinary creatures she’d ever seen, and her sisters up in the branches might have said he was quite ugly. So perhaps it’s just as well she didn’t have time to think!

Lady Leaf Lands with a Bump!

Yet in a flash our Leaf Lady now realised that without her supporting twig, she had no safe place in this world. Everything up there changed and jostled and nothing was secure. Furthermore the wind which blew her off the twig was getting stronger. Soon it would sweep through the forest floor and then she would be blown clean away. So the first words she spoke to the lump of mud were, “Oh my! I never was afraid of the wind before, but now I think I must be swept away from the forest and the home I love.” Indeed the wind was rising up, but the mud-lump, although he was a clod, was also a fast worker.

Leaf Leaf is Safe from the Wind

“As I have no fear of the wind”, he said “I shall shield you from all harm, but I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me sitting on top of you” and with that, the mud-lump jumped on top of Lady Leaf, who would normally have been flabbergasted at such an unseemly action. After all he was just a lump of common mud and his dirty body would smudge her pretty sheen, still tinted all with pink. Yet from deep within, she felt that right now she needed a body with some weight, and what other body was ready to help her in this way. Nobody at all!

Lady Leaf thought about her life up in the trees with all her sisters whispering and singing away, and what fine words were used and how good they all made her feel. And then she thought about her life down here on the forest floor lying underneath a clod of sticky mud. For a moment she missed her life ‛up there’ and she even tried to wriggle away, but as soon as she poked out one of her frills she felt the howling of the wind. Then she knew for sure that without the Mud holding her down she’d be blown clean away, and indeed when she opened her eyelid a crack to peep out she saw many of her sisters crying and wailing as they were blown away from home. She found it a little strange not being able to move much, but when she thought about it (and this was the first bit of proper thinking she’d ever done) she could have been out in that wind and completely blown away just like her sisters! The moisture in her beautiful sheen would have dried out. And when she did a bit more proper thinking, she found that being still and quiet in the forest she loved was not so bad after all. In fact, she found it strangely peaceful, and a delicious sense of calm began to flow over her.

After some time the wind stopped blowing and the lump of mud, true gentleman that he was, managed to plop himself away from the Lady Leaf so as to leave her alone. She was a little stained with mud, but being a true Lady at heart she didn’t make unkind comments on inconveniences, especially as the one who had made her all dirty has also saved her life. Indeed, she’d had a lot more time to ponder deep within her self lately. She’d been protected during the wind storm by one who had kept her safe at home, and that’s something which had never happened when she was with her high up friends who never stopped jiggling about. She’d spent a long time with her muddy lump now. He never said much, and he only used a word when it was necessary, and the more she thought about it the more sense it all made. She knew that the mud lump thought only when he needed to think and when that was done, he stopped, content to settle into the forest.

However, something else was now beginning to happen: The sky grew dark overhead as rain clouds gathered and heaved. It looked as if they were going to burst and rain upon the forest. The Leaf was happy at this, and looked forward to being washed all clean so that she could look all shiny and pretty again. But the mud lump felt something he had never known before: He was afraid. A deep unknown fear had crept up behind him. He was moved to think and said out loud, “Lady Leaf! I AM AFRAID! Oh God in Heaven, I am now afraid of rain!” Our Lady looked at him astonished, as she had been feeling quite the opposite, and she sang out in a tinkly voice: “Why?”

The mud lump opened one of his hollows to speak but no word came, chiefly because a new feeling had crept over him and he didn’t have a word for it. “Things are different now” he said. “Many times I’ve crumbled off, in one shape or another, from the forest floor, every time with different bits from here or there, and many times I’ve melted back into Father Earth, sometimes to be reformed again. I never feared the rain before. In fact it was a relief for me to lose my funny shape with all its lumps and bumps; but now, somehow after meeting you, it’s all different. You see I think I’m....”

Lady Leaf Keep Rain off Her Friend

“Oh shut up!” said Lady Leaf who had always been very quick and rather practical too, “So many words don’t suit you at all. Can’t you see that the rain is going to fall right now? Not long ago you jumped on top of me without a word, and now the time has come for me to jump on top of you!”

And that’s just what she did. She was far more nimble than the mud could ever be, so she floated rather than jumped, only to be pinned down by the first drops of rain which pattered from the cloud, wrapping herself over the lump of mud, who didn’t melt away into the ground. Furthermore our Lady had a very welcome shower.

Events happen quickly in this tale, although telling them takes longer, and it was only within the space of a minute or two that Lady Leaf had sung her heart out, been torn off her twig, floated like a Queen of the Air, landed on the ground and met a lump of mud who had introduced himself by jumping on top of her when the wind blew. Now their positions had been reversed and she was wrapped tightly around the lump and protecting him from the rain. It was an extraordinary meeting and a most unlikely friendship between two people who were such opposites in every way. Yet they had formed a delicate relationship, and both had changed. Lady Leaf was as beautiful as ever yet somehow the veins in her body ran deeper now; and they were a little drier than they used to be. Of course the mud lump made sure she had as much fresh rain as possible. He kept his body a little wetter than before. By sucking moisture from the ground he was able to give her the occasional massage and mud bath and this certainly helped. Some of the red colour from the Leaf’s earlier anger had now seeped into the mud, and sometimes you could see little streaks of red colour in the body of Our Lump, especially when it was twilight. It was as if he’d had a dab of rouge. Some of the Leaf Ladies remaining high up in the branches caught glimpses of the couple as they went around together. Peeping through the gaps between their crowded sisters they giggled and tittered and said the two had fallen in love, and did you ever hear of such a thing!

Meanwhile on the forest floor the couple continued to weather their storms, but the mud was starting to feel wetter than usual. Truth was that Lady Leaf had lost a lot of her pretty sheen, and every time it rained now she couldn’t quite manage to hold all the water off her lover and protector. One day the sun came out a little more and both had a chance to sit side by side, enjoying the Autumn of their days. Many of her sisters from up above were falling down now. Without protectors they were blown around, often mounding up in heaps in the boles of trees. “I’m glad that things have turned out this way” she said, and meeting you has made me the happiest Lady alive.” The Mud said nothing as he looked at her very deeply. Small holes were appearing in the body of the Leaf where the rain had penetrated, and he knew that they were both going to... “Oh don’t say anything!” laughed the Lady Leaf to the Mud, “Not even in your thought! Bless you, you have always been the Perfect Gentleman, so eager to protect me from myself, so keen to shield me from unkind words. But I know the truth, my dear! Separated from my twig, I cannot live for long. I am drying out, and my life up there and also down here with you is coming to an end.” If you looked at the Mud Lump now, you see he was a little redder than before he’d had a little pink on his cheek.. It was the effect of the slight drying out caused by the hazy Autumn sun.

“Heavy Rain Coming Tonight!” said the Mud. “Lady, will you cover me one last time? We cannot last through the deluge as two, but with your help, we’ll stay together for a little longer!”

“Oh need you ask!” she tinkled in reply: “Where in this planet would I rather be than here with you?”
The couple continued in their special relationship for the rest of the day, smiling, sharing, often joking together, and by the end of the day they both were Ready, happy in the knowledge that come the morn they would both be a couple no longer. The rain arrived, and Lady Leaf jumped on top of her partner. They continued where they always had been, and saw that nothing had really changed. It pelted onto her body and the Mud sighed, a sigh of contentment as more and more rain pelted through the holes in his lady love. Wetter and wetter became the mud and holier and holier became the Lady until she was far more Hole than Leaf. Soon all her colour had gone, and all the flesh tissue between the veins which held it all together. By the end of the night all that remained was a skeleton leaf, and the man she loved had joined joined his Father in the ground.

After that the rain stopped, and the forest fell silent as it waited for the new day to dawn.

The Leaf and the Mud are One

Acknowledgement: So many go to Ms Gabriele Ebert, whose sketches provided the fuel and the thrust for this tale.

An Engrossing Tale. Sort Of.

2012-01-14T02:46:00.000-08:00

Drowning Rose by Marika Cobbold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I fell straight into this book and became absorbed to such an extent I began to swear every time I was interrupted by somebody wanting something. OK, what they wanted was to remind me that it was time for me to eat, or go to bed; or perhaps I’d care to get into the car which I’d called for earlier and it had been waiting for me for 25 minutes. Annoying irrelevant things like that. Things to do with Me. That’s the extent to which it dragged me away from my own annoyances. Opening my Android phone I pulled up a note, wrote “Did Sodding Life Get In The Way?” and emailing it to myself I added it to the list and put a tick in a new box for my list called Review Criteria. Then I returned to guffawing chuckling, smirking and nearly sniggering at some of the antics three of the main characters, known as ‛The Princesses’ got up to. The theme outside this clique was unfolded by a fourth girl, Sandra/Cassandra whom the other three kept excluding from their lives. Many little strings were tweaked for me here, and once the joking, smirking and nearly sniggering had burnt itself out, these situations always twanged the nostalgic air in a minor key. Most of all, the story reminded me of someone I knew a long way back. I loved the odd take she had on life, the pokes she gave to nearly any- and everybody, especially to herself, many little verbal quips which ignited, flared and died away. Yet underneath this frolicsome, funny and yet rather cruel charade it seemed a deeper purpose was slowly moving, something which was distracting me from the subliminal underflow by all the frill and froth bubbling away in front of me. I tensed myself and waited for my jaw to drop .

The story kept me thinking further back to my own childhood as I remembered how desperately I wanted to make friends with other children, especially boys; yet most boys spent their time lying on their stomachs ruffling bedsheets and candlewick covers into mountains, dales crevasses canyons and rolling plains. They were positioning their little plastic soldiers into the smooth steps and slopes formed by the sheets. Many of the men were half-folded in a crouching position with rifles mounted on their knees. This set was ‛our’ people I was told, and the opposite set of people were called ‛Jerries’. The game was to lie in ambush behind folded rocks, ruffled trees and crimped-up bushes going “ack-ack blam-blam-blam!” to see how many ‛Jerries’ you could shoot down. It was all rather horrid. Considering my Dad himself had been a decade out of The War as a fighter pilot he must have been engaged in this, yet he’d always remained silent at home. When I wouldn’t join in with these boys they labelled me ‛sissy’ and some of the nurses added that if I didn’t like playing with boys I should have to play with girls instead. Which is exactly what I did.

The girls with their loves and hates sometimes spat poison at me like “Today we’re all ganging up on you” or “Linda says your radio’s no good ’cos it crackles” which would come out in an early morning hiss, followed later on by the making up with its love and smiles and whispered conversations about ‛Who’s going to cuddle Johnny next?’ or ‛Has anyone seen his willy?’ It all came hurtling back to flood my mind. Yet Drowning Rose was far more than these memories of half a century. Here it was the use of words and the gentle self-mocking of the protagonist — a girl called Eliza, who had grown on to restore porcelain pottery — which had me captivated and enthralled. A lady who loves to mend things in this broken world will always have a firm place in my heart. Lovely phrases like “sitting there as if he belonged, the glass of wine in his hand, his legs outstretched, cutting the kitchen floor in half” and “This bore the nose-print of my mother and I had wanted to ask her to please not put ideas into an old man’s head” were examples which lingered with me for a long time. Here was a lady whose words and me would I hope make very merry partners.

On this ghastly system of awarding ‛Stars’ to the book, I was thinking Five Stars, Five Stars all the way. I just couldn’t think of any other score for it. At times I was chuckling till my chest hurt and I had to take a drink of water. In fact I was high on the ride of the narrative and I kept on wanting more.

Yet sadly the hope of finding a new author whose work I could merrily munch through became a little jaded when I reached the section titled “Cass and Ben”. I was puzzled at the complete shift in tone. It wasn’t that another element was being brought in, as I was expecting a gear change at some point in the narrative. It was just that the change was so sudden, so different; so alien that I checked my ebook several times to ensure that I hadn’t somehow jumped into the middle of another tale. I now seemed to be in a pulp fiction novel I’d picked up from the Bangalore Bus Station in 1985. I told myself never mind, it will all fall together and make sense. And fall together it did in a way which was OK. Sort Of. Still I kept asking myself “How?” “Does the way this falls together work as well as the rest of the tale?” and sadly it didn’t.
For me it’s a matter of what you come to expect. The more the writing engages me, and the more it holds me in thrall, so the more I anticipate —and require— that the standard be maintained. So any shift which is below par and below tone in the harmony of the piece cannot entirely work. Nonetheless I had a hell of a time with this story and would love to have given it its Five Stars. Miss Cobbold’s exercise didn’t quite pull off though, which is a shame as it’s such a good story and there’s plenty of meat and trimmings here. If only a few extra resources had been applied to giving it a good brush, comb and spray before the final presentation to the public it would have been a cut far above what the ‛Princesses’ in the narrative could have managed.
When I look back on it, I certainly enjoyed it. But the strange jarring of the Cass and Ben chapter with its sad consequences certainly worked. But only Sort Of, and to an extent which appeared more limited every time I looked at it. I just couldn’t quite get rid of that feeling of being let down at the end. My jaw opened slightly, but it never really dropped. I’d been on a good ride, and I know the author has plenty of other rides available. So would I fork out on another one? Certainly the reader could do a lot worse than reading Miss Cobbold’s books. Yet many other artists out there have lots of different rides nuzzling me in all the right places and I’m giving their call more attention than listening to the capable harp of this author. It will be yet awhile before my hand lands on this author again when I give my book carousel another spin.

View all my reviews

Only in India...

2011-12-31T01:50:00.000-08:00

Only in India...

Can you go to the Government “Electric City” Office (as some call it) to pay your monthly bill and be turned away because of a power cut.
If your coco-nut tree is struck by lightning you’re entitled to a grant. When the Claims Officer calls to assess the damage it’s customary to offer a cup of coco-nut milk from your own tree.
If you’re destitute you’re entitled to a monthly government allowance. You must fill in the appropriate form declaring your sorry state and sign that you have no family and no friends and know nobody at all. The form must be witnesses and signed by somebody who knows you very well.

Quickly She Passes

2011-12-23T01:00:00.000-08:00

21/12/11 3—4 pm

However much of a nuisance these monkeys are to our coconuts and banana crops, there’s always a moment of reflection when one of them dies. One minute we’re shouting and waving sticks and berating them with bared teeth and in the next one of them is found dying. This one, a female (you can tell by the red face and backside) became seriously ill in a shady area outside my little Cave. If it sounds romantic, I’m afraid the wood ants had already started crawling all over her body while she was still breathing and twitching. Sad, because they are some of the nastiest ants I know. Rumi took some insecticide powder and sprinkled it over her body and I think it deterred them a little.

Wide-eyed in her Final moments
Her Nipple Swollen with Undrunk Milk

The human Mum with two of her children came out to see and to take a few photographs. You have to be very careful when you’re dealing with a dying ape because the others are near-by watching what it is you’re getting up to. Even if she’s there because they’d given her a good decking they still don’t really want us horning in on their act, and they have been known to bide their time and to take revenge. Moreover a dying monkey can easily deliver quite a nip, as a final sign of affection I’m told.

Nonetheless we took a stout bamboo cane and propped her up a little so she could sit for a few seconds and see that someone had a little concern for her, holding her no grudge. She opened her eyes wide and looked straight at me. They were very bright and very clear and it look as though her mind was clear too. Just a straight look, all difference between man and animal swept away in that brief moment. “You’ll be all right in a minute, you poor old thing” I said. As if in reply she blinked at me and then she closed here lids. Her eyes were wide open one second and in the next they’d closed, long lashes she had like a doll, and her eyes closed just the same. It’s somehow tough not to sniff back a tear in situations such as this.

An Awesome Moment

22/12/11 10:28:03 AM

With humans it’s customary to leave the body outside all night in order to give it some air and to check whether death really has occurred. After we’d established her death, Rumi went on to give her a bath, her first and final ablution. All the relatives must have been watching from the trees because after we’d retired they came one by one to sit at the new flat patch of ground, to pay their final respects to a lady who must have been well known in the community. I get the feeling that the abandoned child will have found his place within this microtribe and that perhaps lessons have been learned by both sides.

While they were gathered round her grave they were quiet but they melted away on our approach. She’s buried by the side of the Cave where I go each day and I can see the spot from where I type these lines. I guess we could have put the camera against the fine-gauge mosquito mesh in the window frame and snapped the shutter, but it didn’t feel right. They showed us more than a little respect by coming to the place where we had dug and shovelled, and it was right to return that measure of propriety, to show that though the war still rages between us, we don’t hold any personal enmity.

How Many Leaves Does It Take?

2011-12-19T22:52:00.000-08:00

I sometimes wonder how many leaves you need to call a book a ‘book’ and how many blades you need to call a fan a ‘fan’, and when I’m nonchalantly musing on that I wonder how many books you need to read before you can call a person a ‘fan’ of a particular author? I’ve probably got more dictionaries in my house than most people (one of which runs into eight volumes), but no person who’s perused my once expanding (yet now mercifully contracting) bookshelves has ever said “Oh I see you’re a fan of dictionaries” because people who like dictionaries for their own sake are often called other names, which it would be best not to enter into here.

Now apart from the sort of which which spins round and keeps you cool, the first time I learnt about another sort of fan was when I was 13 or 14 and heard about a rising group of young men who called themselves The Beatles. When I saw them on the telly, girls were jumping up and down in their seats and screaming, with tears were pouring out of their eyes. As plumb lines of mascara ran down their faces they hollered “John”, “Paul” and sometimes “George” and they did that because that’s what fans did, and that description’s as good for me now as it was then.

Rolling the clock on twenty years or so, a young priest had insinuated himself into my wee dwelling and was judging my character by my bookshelves. “Ah,” he said, “I see you're A Fan of Susan Howatch.” I had picked up one of her novels from the mobile library that turned out to be a trilogy which revolved around the internal dramas and wrangling within the clergy in the Church of England. I did find it interesting, even enthralling at the time because the first novel pulled me into the second and by the end of that tome I just had to go on to read the thrilling ecclesiastical conclusion. So much for my earlier notions about the dusty clergy. The shenannigans which went on behind the scenes coupled with the “making it all right in the end” somehow kindled my reflirtation with the Christian Church. I was a Hindu fish gasping for air in England's agricultural belt, and I felt I was, perhaps, still young enough to change my spots and swim in the Ocean of Christ. After all, water was water and I felt I'd rather live than die.

Later on I was called A Fan of Orchid, a term I thought wasn’t entirely inapt as the plants must have moving air in order to thrive. So I bought them a fan of their own, along with a Burg Humidifier and a lifetime's supply of Osmunda fibre. Yet I wasn't really their Fan according to my definition of the word. I was just nuts about them and I thought and dreamt about them morning noon and night. They were totally fascinating. From the moment of their husky microscopic births, they’re hurled into a life-and-death struggle: Born to be the prey of a Borg-like fungus, the orchid husk surrenders itself to the greedy mushroom but, like all living organisms the fungus has to excrete, and this fungus excretes simple sugars which to an orchid infant is like being fed mother's milk straight from the nipple. Human milk makes babies grow big and strong and the shit of a fungus is not only nectar to a mewling testiculloid seedlet, it’s also exactly the right ingredient for it to make a powerful fungicide known now to be a Phtyo-Alexin. Poof! Squirt! The baby launches its own poisonous ejaculate into the face of the monster, and the fungus retreats. The infant’s victory is short-lived though for the fungus, now given the equivalent of a bloody nose, nurses its wound in the corner of the ring while planning its next deadly assault. After all, it’s sure that babies aren't that hard to obliterate, so the micro-toadstool plans a renewed attack on the tasty babe, excreting an extra amount of sugary dung as its armoured plating grows.

Except of course that our infant is no longer an infant. It’s already grown to be a toddler after sucking in its first sweet load and toddlers can wield considerable damage. Even now I still reach for my temple which gives me trouble on a rainy day as memories of things my sister found she could do with a poker when she was aged 18 months are still a little too green in my memory, I'm afraid. In the meantime this orchidoid toddler has grown formidable power of its own. The latest pulse of primitive sugars excreted from the ravenous fungus has now fuelled the brattish seedling and an extra dose of fungicide is squirted into its fungal receptors, to make the orchid think it’s now got enough power to sprout a nascent testicle.

Of course this is a speeded-up version of what goes on in that mini world. It’s the fast-forwarded version yet the real process is extraordinarily slow and far more progress would be made by a human playing a game of chess by post, even if he used snail-mail and had to put a stamp on every move.

So I was perhaps (despite my earlier denial) a fan of orchids, although spelling the abbreviation full into ‛fanatic’ would have been far more appropriate for me. But what about my electronic book collection? Terry Pratchett? Does Amazon Dot Co Dot Ukay really think that because I’ve purchased three of his books for my Kindle that I Am A Fan? When I “Shop in the Kindle Store” I Am Greeted by them with “Kindle Best Sellers”, “New & Noteworthy” and “Recommended for You”† followed by a list of 27 Terry Pratchett Novels, interspersed with a peppering of other books one of which went under the name of Butterfly Knight. Now don’t misunderstand my point. I have nothing against Terry Pratchett, apart from the fact that he’s far too rich, far too famous and has far too many fans, quite apart from being far too clever with words. ~~for my liking and now know that~~ It is dangerous to read this man. Allow me to give one example:

Last year I was touting for cheap titles, and saw that Equal Rites was on offer at £1.99. So I bought it and actually started to read it, while marvelling at how a book can be delivered to me by Magic somewhere in an obscure paddy field in South India. I started to read it with googly eyes and soon I didn’t feel quite so good, which wasn’t really much to do with Mr Pratchett but probably quite a lot to do with being in the Land of Delhi Belly, even if I was 2,000 miles away from the capital. Knives were stabbing my guts and our heroine Eskarina was hobnobbing with the laundry ladies in the bowels of the Unseen University and plotting against the Male Chauvinist Pig Wizards Upstairs who had ruled the roost for far too long. This lady could attend to washing clothes and deliver a punch in the Goolies which, when you think of it, is far cleverer than being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. My guts hurt like mad, and laughing at Eskarina hurt even more, but what hurt most of all was a batted remark in Tamil which I heard the boys deliver amongst themselves, namely, “Well if he’s laughing at a bit of writing on that Kindle things he can’t be that bad.”

“Can’t be that bad? Can’t be that bad?” I thought, “Man I’m bloody dying here!” I was gasping my final breaths. There’s three words for three different types of breaths in Tamil which a dying man takes, with a special one signifying the very last gasps. Unfortunately I can’t remember even one of them, but I’m sure that the final one must have had variation or tone which meant convulsed in unpleasant laughter, because that’s what was happening to me. And why the heck shouldn’t times be modern and I be leaning and dying over my Kindle with my mind on Disc World, even if that’s the last place I’d want to be at my departure?

That’s the place I was now: Dying, and all because of this book it seemed. Except that the old wizard in the story only had seven minutes left to live before passing on his Hat to a baby girl, and I unfortunately had to live for about as many days, and the baby boy I passed all my worldly and ethereal things to had since matured into a young man aged twenty-six. He had a great body, but sadly not much clue as to what’s Really Going On Here and I had very little time to teach him what wasn’t happening and would probably have to sum it all up in four small words which are NOT A LOT, REALLY. Which when you think about it is probably the best way of saying it in the first place.

So with the convulsive death of my body we appear to have come round full circle, and we ask, ‘Have we ended up in exactly the place we were before we started or is there a difference?’ The answer of course depends on whether you have a viewpoint. If you have, then you’ve moved a long way by the time you reach this point, and if you think you’ve moved, the amount of movement will be in direct proportion to your thought. But if you ponder deeper, diving beneath the choppy surface waves of thinking, you’ll see you never really moved because you were never ever really anywhere to begin with. The fan needs to cool you because it chops the waves of mind, but that can only happen as long as you believe you have a place here, and when you realise you don’t there’s no ‛you’ to keep itself apart from the rest of the stuff that isn’t there.

Citizen Barney Leaves the Hive

2011-11-15T06:09:00.001-08:00

“Welcome to our crazy country Barney:We’re lucky to have you!” is one of the most delightful SMS’s—text messages— I’ve ever heard. The message was delivered in aroundabout way to my carer Barney as we arrived at the CambridgeshireCounty Council headquarters, Shire Hall no less, on our way to thepomp and grandeur of the Civil Citizenship Ceremony.

While my left ear was receiving thismessage of charm and welcome, my right eye saw a councillor dash outto the delightful West Indian car park attendant called “Fred” to ask rather urgently “Has the Mayor arrived yet?” “The ’oo?”said Fred as his face lifted in a gaze of total puzzlement.

The occasion was the CitizenshipCeremony of my carer and friend Barney.

I first met Barney somewhere in a paddyfield in India when he was three years old. I was trying to dandlehim on my knee, but he was far more interested in showing me theprogress he was making in saying his ABC. Barney raced ahead butstumbled on the letter Q. His face twisted in frustration as he beganto wonder why the alphabet was racing backward, so I handed him backto his uncle to help him with “koo” and RST.

The next part I remember easily waswhen he was a rather weedy little boy of ten. By this time he’dpicked up English well, and when he started answering me back in thattongue I felt he was well and truly on his way. He said his Englishteachers were telling him about a film called “My Fair Lady”which he was asked to see but couldn’t. So when I told him the talehe gazed in wonderment and asked whether we could play that game andwould I take the part of Professor Higgins. “Well you’re neithera lady, and your hair and complexion’s a bit light for this rôle,my little bantam chick” I answered, “but I don’t suppose I’dbe terribly good at being Professor Higgins either. I suggest thatyou just stay as Barney without the Rubble and I’ll just be Johnwithout The Sir. Let’s put all we’ve got into this project to seehow far we can take it. It may not work, but rest assured we’llhave a lot of fun along the way.”

A few more little hops, and all of asudden my little bantam has grown into a strapping young man, andwe’re in Cambridge Shire Hall, the nerve centre of the County ofCambridgeshire, the fastest growing county in the UK, which operatesa dual world system of administrative realities. One of them is apaper world where everything is strict, magnificent and correctlymanaged. In this world the Citizenship Ceremony is managed with anopulence which reflects the past glory of the British Empire. Placesare allocated, names are taken and everything falls into place withprecision split-second timing. Messages are left on my answeringphone that I may bring an extra guest, adding that everything is laidon for the wheelchair user. The car park attendant will show us to aDisability Parking Slot, where-after we’ll be directed to theService Floor and Lifts.

But in the real world of concrete notpaper it’s cold and wet with driving drizzle and slippery steps.There’s an amiable but jobs-worthy car park attendant who doesn’tseem to know what a Mayor is. I’m chilled and raw and I’m waitingright at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, which is as much of anightmare for wheelchair users as it’s always been.

The ceremony is received deep in theInner Chamber of the Hive, where The Queen or Her authorized portraitreceives the citizens of foreign lands, citizens who throughassociative contact with the UK have fed and grown, worked and turnedthemselves into plump budding pupæ, ready to hatch into fresh,opulent British Citizens.

The Hive is vibrant and buzzing now,mainly with the background hum of Musac which the Master ofCeremonies adjusts with his volume knob. A friend and I la-la alongwith it and receive a slight scowl from one of The Suits. We’reevidently not supposed to celebrate by voice until the NationalAnthem begins. After to-ing and fro-ing with some official worriedlooks when the Mayor and his wife appeared to be late, we begin.Citizens all have to exit to divide into two groups. One is for thosewho want to Swear their allegiance to Her Majesty and the other’sfor the swarm who find that quietly affirming their intention isenough. The Musac rises to a volume sufficient to cause a few membersto dab their eyes, everyone says their name —Barney’s warble isespecially clear— and the new pupæs’ skins are popped as theyduly emerge from their cases, eyes and skin shiny, iridescent and alittle moist.

A cup o’ tea and a biscuit togetherwith a chat from the Mayor is enough to harden their tender skins anddrones, workers and future politicians are ejected out like popcornfrom the warmth of the Hive out into the driving November drizzle.The ritual and the ordeal has past, we’re heading home, preparingto have a celebratory meal and put our heads down for the night.Sooner or later he’ll find that waking up British is much the sameas waking up as anybody else...

Away from the cocooned warmth of thehive where he was swaddled with Musac and ritual, Barney must nowpursue the hunt for the his own queen. Or she for him, as he may wellsoon find out!

L → R: Mr Adam Mars-Jones, The Mayoress, Barney and The Mayor

A Fuguing Great Read

2011-10-31T00:31:00.000-07:00

This Place of Men by Doug Cooper-Spencer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I could never review this book because to view it you'd have to separate yourself from it, to be apart from it, and that was where my problem lay. Despite my most valiant effort to resist its siren song, I found it hard to be detached, and it was quite impossible to ‘view’ it with a professional eye. I tried. I failed. My reading glasses did their best to keep me apart from it, but they soon dissolved as my emotions and hormones flooded my cells as I was sucked deep into the narrative.

After what seemed to be a typical Mills ’n Boon-esque titillating start which attracted my libidinous side but repelled my heart (what would his parents say if they knew he’d entered NY College to troll the streets looking for dicks to suck?), the story settled into a very warm if slightly tense family situation with food, laughter, and a Mama our hero Otis clearly adored, even if he hadn’t seen her for over twenty years. For some reason I felt myself to be incredibly at home, with a humid fecund warmth and humanity coming off the pages as I remembered by own past home life and how I liked it, but how at the same time I’d also been seized and driven by dark, unnameable, unmentionable desires which family must never know.

I never read this book, you see, for to read a book you have to view it and hold it apart from yourself. You have to judge it and tell people what you think, and I couldn’t do that here. I couldn’t think about it because it wasn’t separate from me. I walked right into it. The Kindle disappeared, my bedroom vanished and I walked straight into the scene: Terrell with his wife and boisterous kids, the suave Stanton with more than a skeletal wishbone in his closet, the bishop trying to make his swansong, and of course Otis, poor lonely lovely brave Otis who carries the cross imposed upon him by the very ones who were supposed to hug him and make him better, not wring him tight and hang him out to dry. Poor Otis with his emotional back broken by those who were themselves crippled by their own blind prejudiced rituals and beliefs.

The sense of family life is incredible and the feeling that I’d walked right into the scene was particularly strong. I felt that the only reason the characters didn’t talk to me was because I was invisible, and I felt that if I’d materialised from nowhere in the middle of a meal, I’d have been handed a plate of food which I’d have devoured heartily. The fact that I was different, a white man, would have been neither here nor there. And even on the side of Otis the loner in the book, I felt his inner hospitality was vibrant and alive. Of course I’d never have deigned to ask author or character that I might approach Otis’s feet, but I felt nonetheless that if he’d spotted me he’d have brought us both a cup of coffee, told me how lonely being a fictional hero can be, and I’d have blubbed in agreement. He’d have welcomed me into an angelic part in Place of Men, and I’d have welcomed him back right into the lonely corners of the Cedilla novel. Would that either of us had had that power, or the right.

Finally the sex scenes. The book subtitles itself “A Story of Love, Religion and Sexuality”, a subtitle I felt may pull a lot of people in, whilst at the same time putting another lot of people off, and the people who were pulled in might not like the story much when they started to read it, and the people who didn’t feel attracted to the cover blurb would be the people who’d get the most out of it if they actually read it. The sex scenes themselves, by the way, were for me evocative, poignant and very effective, with that mystical elusive element left to the imagination. After all, we don't want every pore, drop and detail pushed into our face when we'd rather bring it here ourselves. I could not imagine these erotic — and limited — episodes giving offense to anybody.

I was one of the ones who felt that the opening paragraphs put the story in danger of lapsing into pornography and titillation, as mentioned earlier, and for that reason I put off reading the book for a very long time. There was also one sentence that I felt was out of place and didn’t work for me at all well. Nonetheless, these are venial issues. I normally give such books a wide birth and if I do dip into them, my eye is usually jaundiced because I tend to berate it 3 times per page before giving it up in disgust, or merely boredom. It’s a lovely, heartfelt, beautiful story and I am truly delighted that it’s the first part in a trilogy. That ‘wishing it would never come to an end’ feeling was easily (and fortunately) assuaged for me by the knowledge that I had two more in store. I wanted to live forever in this warm male gay, family-oriented yet homœpatherotic world, when the wall between me the reader and the story turned from plasterboard to paper. I only had to poke it with my finger. The membrane was popped with a minimal yelp and the story and I became One.

View all my reviews

Self Directed Payments Benefits and You

2011-09-16T00:55:00.000-07:00

If through no fault of your own you find yourself in receipt of government welfare benefits, you'll very likely have developed an open-hand and open-mouthed attitude regarding the money you get. As a bird in the family nest you'll have begun your life by learning to open your beak and squawking loudly until your parents dropped food into it. To start with, they'd have done it because they felt compassion for your helpless plight, but as things progressed they'd have fed you, more to shut you up than anything. And as you opened your eyes and moved around your nest, you'd have elbow-winged your way ahead of your siblings to get to the front first, to squawk the loudest and open your beak the widest, in order to get as much as you can.

And if you're in the United Kingdom you may end up on one of the many disability-related benefits to make sure you didn't starve through inability to stretch your hand. For a long time, if you didn't get better, you'd have stayed there. And stayed and stayed and stayed, growing more stately than an overgrown cabbage in an open society which is nonetheless an institutional cabbage patch but with invisible walls and wardens and with locks and keys removed. But remember: Your progression from oversized flightless bird to woody vegetable was not sudden. As you rooted into your virtual institution, you became set in your ways; yet as your once mobile arms ossified and your neck became less easy to turn, your jaw and mouth would have remained fully mobile. In one way or another, food and caring services would have arrived for you.

Don't Turn into an Ent

Sometimes this would have been great, but on occasions you may not have liked the food and something about the caring would have seemed off-kilter, may not not have been liked, or even uncomfortable and things may have been a little painful for you. Worst of all, you may have found that you'd been pushed headlong into that nightmare of scenes — the personality clash. You simply could not stand the person who had been assigned to you, and very likely the feeling would be mutual. What they did for you would have been carried out grudgingly and with a bad grace. You'd have been left feeling helpless and tense. You'd have been asked to sign your helper's time sheet and she'd have left 15 minutes earlier than stated. You'd have signed, of course. It would have been worse for you if you hadn't.

Yet remember that you were left with a moving mouth and open jaw. You first were able to squawk, but you ended up able to speak. At some point you may have moaned and groaned about your lot, and when it came to money you'd have doubtless remonstrated at how it was being spent. "Well if I was put in charge of the way it's spent I certainly wouldn't use it like this" "I'd do this" "I'd do that" "I'd do any number of things".

Now then listen up. If you really know what you want to the line of receiving care services, and you can keep records (and keep up with keeping them) there is a chance that you may end up being able to do just that. Every county in the UK has its own method of achieving this, and some no doubt will be better funded than others. In the area where I live, Cambridgeshire East Anglia, Self-Directed Payments just might accomodate your needs and put you in charge of who you're going to have, and how and when it will be done.

Every case is different, so there is no way of being able to describe the overall process. All I can do is explain what happened with me.

It was suggested to me on the 29th April that there was something which may be of more interest to me than the Royal Wedding. A spider I'd just seen on a bunch of bananas purchased was disappearing into a dark crevice in the hand of fruits. Already I was more interested, and as I listened to my storyteller's narrative I found my interest had waxed to a tantalizing degree. I wanted to get on the phone straight away, but the people on the end of the Social Services line were going ga-ga over a Royal Kiss, and I wondered if their mood of sheer gullibility would last until Tuesday when the country returned from holiday.

This is briefly what happened to me and may well happen to you:

You'll call up, and after speaking to their friendly receptionist your brief details will be taken, and you'll be told that you'll get a call-back. Nothing will happen, and will continue to happen for quite a while. Ten to 15 days later you'll call again and remind them you're still there and again they'll offer to call you back. Another week, and you'll be calling to remind them again, only to be told "That's three times you've called us now. You won't get seen any quicker if you keep calling." You bite back your impulse to ask them what their definition of "keep calling" is and resign yourself to another wait. Nonetheless, you may well get a phone call that very afternoon from a lady (Let's call her Mesq'ita) who'll ask if you're up to a 45-minute interview over the phone and you agree.

Agree by all means, but have some water and an energy bar at hand to nibble. You'll need it, for Mesq'ita will then morph into a hybrid between Jack Russel and a Snapping Turtle. Her questions about your needs will snarl and snip. You'll have to to think fast and think deft. You may be tempted to play with some of her words and bundle them back at her in a slugging volleyball, but you'll find Mesq'ita's totally lacking in humour, and your tarball of sticky adjectives will be vapourised by her solvent-busting adverbial snaps.

Left defenceless for a moment, Mesq'ita cuts right in at me with a slick razor-thrust, and I am wounded. Without sufficient time to recover from her carbon tetrachloride squirt, I can only croak a reply that my head is spinning for a second and could I please be granted a moment's recovery time. "Do you fatigue easily?" was Mesq'ita's rejoinder here. I wondered if there was any young male in the land who could come through her fusillade unscathed and unfatigued, but I answered yes, by which time my breaths were coming in gasps, the room was spinning and hypoxia set in. Barney took over the phone, ¡bless him! and soon those two were snapping and hissing at one another down the line. Not long after that he finished, telling me that she would return if need be.

2nd Column Shows refusal

The following morning the phone went again. It was taken by Barney who said, "One moment, I'll see if he's available. Who shall I say is calling, please?" whispering "It's someone called Mesq'ita and she'd like a word with you". My body went stiff into rigid spasm again and I lay myself on the verbal altar, waiting for her to finish me off, but to my astonishment the claws were fully retracted and she spoke to me now in velveteen tones, licking my scars and asking me how I was doing. She added that the last thing she wanted was to cause me stress, and gave me time to get my breath back between questions. Quick, quick slow, ask ask... wait. Jab jab... stroke.

2nd Column = Refusal

I remember being arrested once. One cop jabbed and quizzed me with his probing words, then another one came in all offering me fags and slapping my back and telling me what a bastard the other guy was. Now we're in a recession. Who can afford the luxury of paying a Good Cop and also a Bad One? Double 'em up and roll them into one. Just have Mesq'ita, but give her a different hat. Have your own hats on too, practise your quick changes and with a fair wind, and truth to back you up, you may win your with your written plan and enter into a contract with your local government.

Guilt

2011-09-10T01:42:00.000-07:00

Guilt is mainly on my mind
a) That I haven't kept up with Diaspora
b) That I have left undone those things that I ought to have done
c) That I have done those things that I ought not to have done.
d) That I love doing things I didn't ought to be doing.
e) That I think I don't love the things I ought to be doing.
f) That I end up loving the things I ought to be doing anyway.
g) That I ever thought I wouldn't love the things I end up loving
h) That I determined never again to tell myself I didn't want to do the
things I thought I'd hate
i) That I didn't complete the job I should have completed three days
ago and ended up writing this instead.

The Surprise Prize

2011-08-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

I was sittin' in me old winged armchair this morning, grumbling about the weather and the price of postage stamps and feeling a sneaky suspicion that I'd turned into an old grandpa somewhere along the line, when one of the boys sauntered in with a parcel, saying “Looks like your shower gel”. After giving it a good old rattle Barney added that it “feels like you’ve got about six bottles of it here. We told you not to order *that* batch! S’pose we’re all gonna run round the village ponging of ‘Lynx Aluminium’ now!”

I mumbled to put it on one side and said we’d stow it all away later before I went back to the mysteries of why my scanner wasn’t working with 64-bit architecture. I’m someone who hates geeks and geeky things when the current project drifts into realms I don’t understand, but once things have fallen into place and pennies have begun to drop, I admit to being quietly impressed, wondering why people don’t take a little more trouble to understand the mysteries of their black boxes.

That box of 6 shower gels, ordered in a moment of hypoxic haze, annoyed me by not being tidied away and I asked Barney to unpack it and stow it away as it looked as if we might be in for a storm. His sentence began with a whinge, but half-way through opening the package his tone changed to wonder. He said that the parcel appeared to be somewhat different. Unexpected and unexplained.

It was all in a "Whiskas" box which had presumably held an assortment of delicate meals for Puss, he said, adding that on the inner cardboard sleeve someone had written “Old People's Breakfasts”. So I decided that the solution was clear: An old people's home had stocked up on shower gel, and the new Health and Safety Rules had banned the old timers from using it in case they slipped. I speculated that tubs of Fullers Earth had been ordered instead and now the old folks could take dust baths along with their cats. Both cats and old ladies would be far cleaner than with shower gel, anyway.

My excuses and implausible explanations quickly run out as the contents of the box began to seed out like a tombola onto our ample table:

Lots of small parcels spewed out of the box, each individually wrapped in pink tissue paper. There was a sugar mouse with a string tail such as I hadn't seen since the days of Christmas stockings, sweets, shells, a plastic rattle, a stick of rock, a bubble-blower, little pot of sand, a clay pipe and last but not least, a yellow clammy slug. I think you're supposed to eat it!

The boys whooped and laughed like little kids — and everybody was completely baffled.
Which is where we leave the tale. A packet of Bulls' Eyes was included in the mix and they're so good, we're going to suck our way through those first, and then try to find out who sent them.

It Ran Out of Steam!

2011-08-04T02:15:00.001-07:00

Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I don’t like stories where ladies go out to a disco for a good time “dancing in that red dress until I caught the eye of someone, anyone, and best of all finding some dark corner of the club and being fucked against a wall” and I like it even less when it’s from ladies who are personnel officers. Sluts who give interviews and hand out important jobs are certainly not by cup of tea. Indeed had I known that there was going to be an abundance of this type of language in the book, I simply wouldn’t have bought it.

However I’d bought it for a song, and whereas some people don’t mind throwing things away which they don’t use, I am not of that ilk. Neither was I going to waste my precious breath complaining to Amazon until they relented to give me my 99p back.

The story opens with a court scene with the two major players, the accused Lee Brightman and the – alleged – victim Cathy Bailey (really! couldn’t the author have picked another surname?). The dialogue doesn’t pick up very well on the Kindle so we see:

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MACLEAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

BRIGHTMAN---------------------------------------------------------------------

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MACLEAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

BRIGHTMAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

with the dotted lines being the dialogue. Took a while untangling the skein there. Not a good start at all, so combined with my opening paragraph, which runs on with little if any separation, so it can be tricky seeing who’s saying what. And what is being said is pretty boring.

Nonetheless there were a few things which began to intrigue me slightly: Cathy can only go shopping on even days. She has to check the locks on all her apertures when leaving the flat, starting with the outer window and ending with the front door, and in the right order too. This twanged deep sympathy notes within me from my own past and furthermore when coupled with the realisation that Cathy was entering into an abusive relationship with Mr Brightman, chords in the minor key vibrated inside me, and I was siding with our heroine, desperately hoping she wouldn’t come to too much harm ~ even if she remained a committed two-dimensional character throughout the narrative.

As everything boiled up to a seething climax I sided with Cathy, urging her on to biff, bonk and humiliate and torture the nasty man with everything she’d got. I was jumping up and down clenching my little fists and cheering at the end as loudly as if Tottenham Hotspur had just scored a goal when, all off a sudden:

The tale ended.

We were 91% of the way through the book. The tale had ended. This is the bit where the audience rises and walks out of the cinema, with 9% of the film left to run. I don’t. I have to remain in the cinema until the last credit has been shown, the projecting equipment switched off and the lights have come back on. So I read and read and read, wading through the incredibly dreary bits. The new lover-boy, Stuart, is a one-dimensional being. He is quite attractive for me, but only because “he smells of hospitals”.

The dreary dialogue ends with yet another terribly-formatted court room scene, and after all that an incredibly boring spiel from the authoress relating what gave her the idea, and how she had started to form and draft the book.

Ms Haynes works for the Police Force, as I understand it. If she attends to her work with the same care she writes her novels, I’d begin to get a little concerned if she were to be in charge of my patch.

View all my reviews

The Hyperglycæmic Birthday Cake

2011-07-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Christmas Throwaway by R.J. Scott

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was in two minds whether I'd ever admit to anybody that I'd gone and bought this book. It would be giving in to teenage crushes, which have never really left me. An incurable romantic, I'd just ventured out into the big brave world of futuristic cyberpunk*. Reading this story of futuristic techno macho men (and even more macho women), I'd swum in the rough-and-tumble of waters I hate and found that, despite myself, I'd been shaken, bounced and depressed, sent on a bad acid trip and rattled to the bones. Yet not entirely put off, for the author had pampered me with my favourite chemical tipple: 10 ml of Brompton Cocktail† and I fancied I saw light at the end of the tunnel, for I really loved the hero by this time and looked forward to the time when I'd become strong enough to read the next volume in the series.

But shame on me! This review isn't about the young Richard Morgan and his creations, the spotlight has to be on Mr (?Mrs ?Miss ?Ms) RJ Scott, the author of an 'unwanted present in the toecap of an Xmas stocking' (the book under review). The reason I bought it was I wanted a delicious and indulgent dessert after my wickedly spicy first course of Altered Carbon as I felt I needed pampering, pleasuring, massaging and being touched up in the nice as well as the naughty places, because I had fallen out of my wheelchair when I was ten years old and been picked up (before hitting the ground) by a policeman in shiny uniform and lovely gleaming buttons and things. He'd held me tightly and affectionately, implanting a fetish within my psyche which had embedded itself into the genetic make-up of my being, imbuing me with a delightful malady which I've no intention of attempting to cure. So imagine that the clock had wound its way on so that I was a teenager again and the wheelchair had been replaced by a park bench and I was sleeping rough on it and been woken by a dashing 24 year-old copper who asked me to move on.

This copper, Ben, feels all protective and things towards this shivering chilled waif (whilst the seeds of desire swell) and the waif has a big chip on his shoulder which he wants to remove by throwing it at the copper; however once he's thawed out in the copper's mother's house, he discards the chip in favour of Mum's Christmas baking and bon-femmie. Warmed by the moisture of the homely grub, his own hormone-enriched seeds begin to swell and sprout and he starts to fancy Ben's pants and uniform, as long as he keeps them on.

Meanwhile, the dashing policeman develops the hots for the lad, especial if he can get his pants are off. Well the boy's 17, but with his 18th birthday at the stroke of midnight on December 27th, both parties can just about manage to hold their love-tanks in reserve until that date. What's more, they show admirable self-control, merely cuddling on the sofa at 11 pm on the night of the 26th and are so enwrapt snoozing and snogging that they don't open the release valve of their mutual passions at the stroke of midnight: they wait a whole two hours more before they have their wicked way with one another.

And that... is that. The cake looked lovely while it was on the stand in the shop, but it was altogether too sickly-sweet. My worry now is what I'm going to read for my dessert to Broken Angels‡ after reading it. I'd had the vague plan of taking it to the bathroom with me to flagellate the bishop over the Christmas Throwaway story, but the occasion just didn't rise to it. The one who was thumped was me, on the back by my friend when I choked on apple. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I wasn't even in the right fairy tale.

* Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
† Brompton Cocktail: Interpret according to your proclivities.
‡ Broken Angels will be the second book in the Trilogy which began with Altered Carbon

View all my reviews

James Bond on Empathic Methedrine

2011-06-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Typing limitations urge me to try reviewing this in Q/A format:

Did it linger or stay in Mind?
Did You Dream About It?
Very much so.

Did it have "Got-to-Get-Backness?"
I used every spare moment I had to switch on my Kindle, even to the extent of letting friends decide which food I'd probably like to eat.

Did it Tweak Deep Past Memories?
Yes. Ancient composted memories stirred up their fine tilth.

Did it have "I-don't-want-it-to-End"-ability?
Yes, I wished it wouldn't.

Glad you read it?
Definitely.

Did it go "soggy" in the middle?
A little bit. I rushed through the Innenin and italicized Jimmy de Soto bits, feeling it was stronger without them.

Did you get lost in it?
Indeed I did.

Would I want to read another one of his?
Definitely, but not yet.

If it was an eBook, was it it well formatted? Were there chapter divisions?
Well formatted, well indexed and only a few typos.

Was it swamped by/did it swamp another book & if so which one?
Yes, it squished The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, which was beginning to irk me. I've been to University and got Eng Lit Degree and all that jazz too. It was a bit like know-all students playing literary consequences. I look forward to returning to it, however.

Anything Else?
I hate tough-guy macho violent books, preferring gentler, deeper strings of my harp to be played, so I was surprised when I found myself being magnetised by it despite myself. Takeshi Kovacs [hero], you're a tough brutal thug, but I can see your thinking and I sense that there's something loving buried deep inside you. You'd never admit it, of course.

Now, Richard Morgan, please let me clear you out of my head for a month or so while I look for something Completely Different.

View all my reviews

The Frozen Sky ~ Needs Thawing and Proper Cooking

2011-05-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

The Frozen Sky by Jeff Carlson

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This book sparked a lot of interest for me. Apparently, Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, has the potential for supporting Life, particularly in the light thrown by the discovery that tube worms and various clams can and do thrive in deep oceanic geothermal vents. In the story, this is a given and I was heartened to find that our heroine Vonnie is spurred on by ecology and outreaching rather than pulling out your laser and blasting everything that moves (although as I recall, there is some blasting and splatting as well). I also liked it that I could dredge up my schoolboy memories of chemistry, and go out on the net and investigate and find out fascinating details such as the poisonous hydrogen sulphide (bad egg gas) being a potential 'messenger molecule' between brain cells and elsewhere in the body. All in all, a fascinating bundle of things for me to go out and investigate and learn from.

And that strength was for me the inherent weakness of the 'book': although I thoroughly enjoyed my explorations, I had to remind myself that this was a 'novel' and not a research project given to me by my biochemistry master. If it had been that, I'd have grasped the project with aplomb, gophered some essential data, showed him the draft of draft of my 'story' and waited to see what Sir thought. If Sir had given me a pat on the back and told me it was a splendid start, but please flesh out the story more (if I intended to lengthen it) and to cut out some of the clutter (if I was going to keep it short) I'd have been heartened and begin to make my plans.

However, this is quite dreadful as it stands. It was a "fascinating bundle of things for me to go out and investigate" indeed, but I had to go out and do the investigating which I loved doing, but I was reading it on my Kindle, and can press buttons and things which go out and investigate for me. But supposing I hadn't got a Kindle or a good net connection?. What then? I would be well and truly stumped, stymied, painted and snookered into my corner! My dinner was supposed to be presented to me on a plate. Admittedly it was tasty chicken drum-sticks on the bone, but they weren't even thoroughly cooked. I had to finish them off in the oven myself and go to find tissues I could clean my fingers with!

More can be read on the Jupiter Project which is purported to be happening in 2020.

On the Europa Jupiter System Mission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Jupi...

View all my reviews

The Manual That Crept

2011-05-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

Containment by Christian Cantrell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

While reading this story which has received some rather enthusiastic reviews, I kept on having the feeling that I was reading a technical manual — and I rather liked it. Of course it wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, or plate of coils and chips, but I was after all, reading Science Fiction.

Science Fiction has surely to be fiction with a lot of science in it. Switch them round and you'd have fictitious science, which simply wouldn't work at all. So without further ado, I read the fiction that goes into the science within it. And I could mostly keep up with the science, although at times it was slightly beyond me, but I don't have a problem with that. Not being a true scientist I can't attest to the authenticity of the science, but it seemed OK as far as I knew, at least at the beginning.

There's a loose story with a lot of particular detail in it and I found myself being particularly interested in the delicate matter of the interface between the biological workings of the brain and the implant inserted into it, along with the problems that can occur as the tissue begins to harden in the presence of conductive metals, even if they're sensitively aligned and harmonised.

Little by little the background atmosphere of the technical manual began to fade as the story welled up from its damp pages like an exotic fungus. This was going to suck me right in, I felt, and I settled myself in good and snug, to have a Good Read.

The story inched its way along. I didn't have a particular problem with that because inching is by and large the story of my life. It kept on reminding me of 2001 ~ A Space Odyssey, and I'm sure that part of its DNA at least was founded in that root-stock. I felt quite pleased when I sniffed out the odd red herring (but does the author really have to lecture the reader on what a red herring is?), however my sense of smell grew far too confused along the way: our hero Arik may well have become hypoxic and disoriented himself in the narrative, but does the reader really have to feel oxygen-starved as well?

I liked it in parts, I was really gripped at certain points, but my attention did keep falling apart, particularly towards the end, and the silly spelling mistakes at key points didn't help.

I ended up desperately wanting it to end, and now, with the penning of this brief review, that job is done and dusted.

View all my reviews

Game For A Laugh??

2011-05-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

T r a n s l i t e r a t i o n:

A Grand

E X H I B I T I O N

Of the Effects Produced by INHALING

Nitrous Oxide, Exhilerating, OR

L A U G H I N G G A S !!

Will be Given At The Masonic Hall

Saturday E V E N I N G, 15th

& ^ & ^ & ^ & ^ &

30 G A L L O N S O F G A S

w i l l be

p r e p a r e d a n d a d m i n i s t e r e d

t o a l l i n t h e a u d i e n c e

w h o d e s i r e t o i n h a l e it.

MEN will be invited from the audience, to protect
those under the influence of the Gas from in-
juring themselves or others. This course Is adopted
that no Apprehension of danger may be entertained.
Probably no one will attempt to fight.

THE EFFECT OF THE GAS is to make those who Inhale it

LAUGH, SING, DANCE, SPEAK OR FIGHT, &c, &c according to the leading trait of their character. They seem to retain consciousness
enough not to say or do that which they would have occasion
to regret.

N.B. The Gas will be administered only to gentle-
men of the first respectability. The Object is to make
the Entertainment in every Respect, a Gentle Affair.

& ^ & ^ & ^ & ^ & ^ & ^ &

Those Who Inhale the Gas once, are always anxious to inhale it a second time. There is not
an Exception to this Rule.
No language can describe the Delightful Sensation produced. Robert Southey, (poet) once said
that "the atmosphere of the highest of all heavens must be composed of this Gas."

For a Full account of the Effect upon some of the most Distinguished Men of Europe,
see Hooper's Medical Dictionary, under the head of NITROGEN.

A foil-wrapped refresher

2011-04-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Fire Gospel by Michel Faber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I purchased this over the Christmas period as a present to myself, after liking the review, and because it was going for such a bargain price. As soon as I'd done that, I squirreled it away in the archives and forgot all about it.
I'd previously been reading my way through The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow, and was feeling soggy and saturated by the time I'd reached the end and as I was looking for something short and cheery I felt this Fire Gospel might just be the thing to dry me out and warm me up a bit.
Except that by the time I'd started to read it I'd completely forgotten what the story was supposed to be about. Therefore, as books have always been a serious matter for me, that's the way I took it.
Seriously.
It would doubtless come as no surprise to seasoned readers to discover that I found myself splurting and coughing not long after starting the book, but it came as a considerable surprise to a greenhorn like me. It happened to me one morning when all-of-a-sudden I sneezed over my morning cuppa, spraying a mist of tea and Canderel Sweetener all over my Kindle screen. Oh dear!

Yet it was a nice surprise to be expecting a cold sandwich, only to find that the dish had been flambéd by the waiter, right in front of my eyes and at no extra cost. The book set off a sequence of small explosions in my psyche which danced like jumping jacks - cracking and leaping and yet hopping back to snigger at you when you thought the show was over.

Theo (our hero) had wanted (and won) fame and fortune, having landed himself a gorgeous, slim and highly seductive lady who now manages his affairs as well as acting as his care-giver who gives him as much sex as he wants; she's also a highly successful literary agent who can pleasure him with a spare eye glued to her wristwatch whilst monitoring total sales volumes. One hand pleasures him (sexually), and the other one acts as nanny and mouth mopper:
"Jennifer, still talking, jammed her cellphone between her jaw and shoulder, and extracted a small item from her jacket pocket. She handed him what at first appeared to be a condom foil but proved, when torn open, to contain a moist towelette."

At one point the selfsame "wife" must needs produce a gun to protect her charge. It appears as if from nowhere from her slender person before slickly returning to its source: "She had already returned her weapon to wherever she’d concealed it before. Theo couldn’t imagine a cavity in her snugly tailored clothing where a hunk of steel could be stashed away without causing a bulge, but it was done."

Yet for me the killer chapter was the one where the Amazon reviews are scanned by our hero, giving delightful examples of pig-ignorant attitudes to books and reading:

"If you read the King James (per) version you won’t see the name Yahweh and if you don’t see it you can’t call it and therefore can’t be saved. Clever! So, in conclusion, read this book for the information but beware the traps and pitfalls. Satan’s hand is all over it."

and the one which creased me up until my chest ached and I was left gasping:

"I haven't read this book yet but I can't wait to read it so I am reviewing it early. The other people on Amazon who say don't read it are brainwashed stooges of the Catholic religion, which has been sexually abusing children for 100's of years. Who needs it? I already LOVE this book."

Left breathless, I can only add gaspingly: "If this book jaundices your opinion about Amazon reviews, give thanks you're not reading this review on it"

Wackily delightful, I award it five stars.
But not to amazon because they've got 16 of them already.

View all my reviews

Everybody Sees My Green Light!"

2011-02-17T00:32:00.000-08:00

These past few months people have been seing my green chat light on in Gmail.
Green means "online and available to chat".
Theoretically it means I'm "here".
Even when I'm not, apparently.
Apparently I'm here even when I'm switched off.
Even when I'm lurking with intent in the the seedy back alleys of Tiruvannamalai, a little bell will tingle and throb by my hip pocket. I'll cuss and pull it out and a message will say "Hi" and, "Uh, uh... sorry to disturb, I see you're busy"
I don't know whether this is pleasing or disconcerting to be always "here".
Where that might be I know not, except that I am always Here these days, it seems.
Even when I'm Not.

It's all down to the New God who's in our lives these days.
The Google God in the persona of Android.

Oh Android! Please don't start to make me Paranoid.
Let me switch off once in in a while to recharge my emotional batteries!

Hari Om!

My Boys Sure Take Some Beating!

2011-01-31T01:45:00.000-08:00

Last Monday was very strange for me — unnerving and sad. It was the fourth and the final day of Pongal. Pongal is the South Indian Harvest Festival; it’s a late English August held on the 14^th of January. Christmas here is usually a vague awareness that something might be going on, and if you have a name like John, some body or other will doubtless send a wave or holler a call of Merry Christmas, more likely in hopes of getting a present than a concern over whether your enjoying your own festival. Christmas is dwarfed because we’re getting ready for the New Year (the western one) and that’s dwarfed by the prospect of Pongal.

There are 12 days of Christmas, but only four days of Pongal: and on the fourth day of Pongal, the wise keep a low profile; their heads are kept down low, their eyes cast down to the ground, or on the bed with sheets pulled up to chins; on the fourth day of Pongal you stay indoors, or you creep into your garden cautiously and you don’t go outside your compound wall.

On the fourth day of Pongal, the ghosts of Old India rise up as the clock is wound back 30 years or more. In that time ‘we’ are the lords of the fiefdom, and ‛they’ are outcastes from the colony sector, who come to work in our fields and enter our boundaries, hands out-stretched in supplication. Old folks on their death-beds rise up from their final agues, hands stretched forth in hope of a bag of rice, not to nourish their skeletal bodies for now, but to nourish their souls for later on. My spine tingles. This can’t be happening.

The Present—Past Tense

Someone drops the lid of a saucepan. The clang shocks me out of my brown study. This isn’t the mid ’70’s — it’s Monday 17^th January 2011, for Heaven’s Sake. The Old India has gone, and gone for good. The New India has arrived, the India that powers the software that runs British Gas. These days, India is everywhere, not just here. You know: the India where in the Home Counties I stub my toe on a sharp stone in the garden and curse because the street light’s bust. In a fit of pique I pick up the phone to dial the Council. I’m answered by a pleasant young man. He thinks I think he’s local, so I exploit his illusions and play with him for a bit. He wonders how I appear to know so much about him, little suspecting that his call centre language training hasn’t ironed out all the creases in his accent. I pick up the wrinkles in his speech envelope, because I specialise in the pieces that other people miss. I already know his Indian PIN code from the dialect twang, and I tell him my UK postal code and the number of my house. He apologizes profusely for the neglect ‛our’ local council has shown me, and promises that he’ll send a van round the following day. He asks if there’s anything else he can do for me, and I sigh down the wire, giving him a benediction in the Tamil Tongue as I disconnect the line. Perhaps he’s now wondering who is who and whether he’s awake or sleeping. I muse about him too, finding I’m wracked with a twinge of guilt, because I moaned about a street light, but I do have other lights in my village street. If the call-centre man is lucky enough to have a street-light, he’ll be even luckier if it’s working.

Snap Out of It!

Now I must attend; I must wake up from the dream within my reverie. I’m not sure which dream was which, but the one I’ve woken into now sounds urgent: There are shouts and calls and shrill reedy whistles as fingers are stuck in mouths. My Devaraj, normally so attentive, is only half ‘there’; mobile phones chirrup, and motorbikes are revving. ‟Sorry anbey” he says, putting on his coat, “There’s trouble” and he’s half out the door... I’m seized with panic as my dream cruelly collapses. This is like being left back at the hospital again, your mother going away and leaving you. I look pleadingly at him but he says he has to leave, and he’s left an uncle to see over me. My final plea is that of course he must go, but please at least tell me what all this is about, and it’s here that he takes a short pause and sits down to tell me the tale.

I Must Take the Beating

There’s been a bit of trouble, dear, he explains. A friend was involved in a motor-cycle accident and Barney went to help. It was in Anna Purna, a village which contains factions which rival ours; things were taken amiss and someone in a state of intoxicated insobriety called the Police. (The bastards, I think. The bastards called out bigger Bastards, who horned in to join in the fray. And the bigger Bastards’ policy is: take money first and beat the other side. Make an arrest for disrupting the peace, then take the culprits down to the Police Station for a further beating. There’s usually a big brutish bloke in there. They pick him out for his size and put a uniform on him and give a piece of rubber to beat people with.)

That’s what they’ve done with Barney. After the first beating, they’ve taken him down to the station for a further, harsher beating. I have to go to help. If they keep on beating him, they’ll end up making out an FIR, a First Incident Report. Once that’s done there’ll be no turning back. There’ll be a Court Case which will take months and months; his passport will be impounded, and he won’t be able to accompany you to England.

I have to go. I’ve got a different T-shirt to the one my brother’s wearing. While they’re taking a breather between beatings, we’ll switch shirts. Then when they see me with his top on, they’ll think he’s me, and I am he. So goodbye, my love, I’ll go and take what comes to me. Don’t worry —I’ll be back. Two or three hours, or perhaps a little sooner. I’ll be back.

Going to help out a mate in trouble is standard practice here, but it’s not just social politeness. It’s really vital. Helping out a friend is part of the survival mechanism. My tender carer, whose soft hands know every inch of my delicate frame, is going to swop places with his brother. He’s cheerfully going to submit to the pain, to let the Police beat him with fists, with sticks, and perhaps a rubber hose. And after that, he’s planning to return, and take his place along my side for the remainder of the night.

* * * * *

For a moment I wonder why the cicadas sound so shrill tonight, but then I know that the singing in my ears is just the sound of being stunned. I recall a recent commuication we received a week or so back: Barney’s Visa restrictions have now been lifted and he is free, should he so desire it, to apply for membership as a Reserve Policeman.

Laying Down His Life...

The Two Tonys [i]

2011-01-18T21:31:00.000-08:00

“The Tonys were home-makers, and their kitchen turned out wonders. Grisly wonders, on this occasion, laced with blood — pâtés and terrines. I nibbled awkwardly at some crisp sheets of Melba toast, to show willing.” — From The Novel Cedilla by Adam Mars-Jones ('literary sadist') to be published on Thursday 20^th January, 2011.

It's funny how the wheels turn. The last time I had two Tonys for company was 1972; they’d mince along in my direction before perching on the sofa next to me (keeping a wary distance) before to me and saying things like: “What have you been doing today?” or “We didn’t see you last week... hope things were OK” or “Tony managed to procure some Gjetost yesterday. We had to go to Robert Sayle to buy a stainless steel cheese slicer at a shocking price. We bought brown Rye-King and Cashew-Nutta from the health shop in Rose Crescent and found it perfect as a base on which we could lay the slivers, and cutting it in itself is quite a business. Anyway, the first thing Tony said was, ‘Make sure we save a slice for Little John, who can’t get any’ — Didn’t we, Tony?” and I was handed a brown crispbread smeared with brown goo and a sliver of some fudge-like substance balanced on the top. I was starving but I asked him if he’d he’d put it on the counter for me to take later. I couldn’t stand the idea of the expectant looks I’d get from them, eagerly awaiting my comment on the strange cheese, knowing full well that they’d have no interest whatever in my thoughts which they’d merely use as a springboard to launch into their chic opinions and judgments. I hate listening to people’s judgments on food I haven’t tried, and I hate listening to opinions of dishes I haven’t eaten when they’re prequelled with details of the ingredients you’ll need, methods of preparation and cooking. You’re just supposed to enjoy the dish first. You’re supposed to be enamoured with it so much that you end up gagging for the recipe.

I left the crispbread on the counter, determined not to take even a nibble as I’d been doubly insulted in one sentence: ‘Little John can’t get any’ indeed! It was true: I ‘couldn’t get any’ because until a few moments ago I had no clue as to what the Hell ‘Gjetost Cheese’ was. That’s always always a valid reason, of course, but somehow I don’t think that was what the Tonys had in mind. Although I was hungry, my real appetite gnawed at a deeper level. I didn’t go to CHE meetings in those days to eat vol-au-vents and go into soufflé recipes, but that was the groove into which people seemed to be channeling me. There were a few interesting people on the other side of the room, one of them a rather gaunt and hauntingly attractive youth who seemed to be lonely and searching. I recalled my first trip to India about eighteen months ago and felt we’d find some common ground. Yet when I struggled to stand and begin to hobble over all eyes were fixed in my direction. A few started to make ‘let me help’ gestures and before I knew it one of the dratted Tonys (who must have been following the direction of my gaze) horned in with a statement like ‘Let’s see what we can do to get you fixed up’. Nothing could have been more off-putting.

Allergic by now to cheese I’d never tasted, my small burning flame of desire was quenched by the smothering help of one of the Tonys. I altered my course and made a bee-line for the door as if I’d never had the slightest intention of making contact with anyone: I’m good at doing that. I did manage though to exchange a smile at the haunting youth — it was a swift glance which escaped their radar, and I even managed to roll my eyes heavenwards in their direction and that raised a further smile from the young man. Evidently eye-rolling had the same meaning in India. It was really nice, and it was enough for me.

The steps which ascended into the meeting room were perilous to ascend, but even dicier when you tried to go down. I’d given no thought to this vital aspect and was suddenly afraid of toppling over, both physically and from sheer pride. Providentially a hand appeared from out of the shadows. It was a mirror image of one of the opening scenes of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. In the classic (and gripping) romantic thriller a woman dressed in white from head to toe appears out of the shadows and solicits help to cross the heath, on the condition that ‘you will not ask me any questions, or interfere with me in any way’. On this occasion a figure appeared from out of the shadows: a man in a casual white suit which went from shoulder to toe. Middle-aged in appearance, with a kind face, his movements were soft and firm. He eased me down the perilous dark descent, then softly walked with me to the car, where he held the door open for me like a chauffeur. His actions were very physical, but gently so and his lilting Welsh asked if I’d be all right for going up the steps to my room. I said fine yes thanks, the steps to my room were very easy. I had somewhere else to go first but another night I’d be grateful for help and perhaps a little company, stopping short of the mention of ‘a coffee’ which was usually a lewd thing to offer in those semi-secret days.

“Don’t be put off by tonight,” he said, “they mean well, but seem unable to see that people do need to find their own way.” I said it’s OK and it didn’t matter and I was used to it by now. He stood outside on the steps of 5, Glisson Road, Cambridge and waved. Waved until I reached the end and turned right into Regent Street, then left into the imposing wrought iron gates of Downing.

All the way back I wished I’d accepted his offer of help, and I wondered if we’d ever meet again. You see, he’d saved me from the third insult from the Tonys which usually topped the evening. Politely but firmly one of them would put his hands together and beam the question which had me totally stumped:

“And what are you going to do now?”

* * * * *

Blanket Babies

2011-01-15T23:38:00.000-08:00

I need to introduce a lifelong friend; a friend who's been constantly at my side from the cradle. This friend stays young, and when age comes, she is renewed. Somehow she is always fresh and fair. She warms me when I'm cold and cools me when I'm hot. In my native land she's cast off not long after infancy, but in India she's acquired new fans, and I'm happy to say her latest recruit is my handsome carer and lifelong friend, Devaraj whose name means God King.

In UK they're hardly given a second thought, but the other day when I sent a lady into town with a specimen to see if we could get another one, I became fascinated with the reports that came back to me. They had never seen anything like it. Too good for here, they said; and another added that nowhere in Tiruvannamalai could you get a thing like that. “Try Spencers Plaza in Pondicherry” added another one, “They've got them in there”. How people who have just seen something for the first time have no idea about it in the first minute, and yet know exactly where they are sold in the next is something I never really managed to understand, but at least I felt that I was on the trail, and that one way or another the cellular blanket may be had in India.

The greatness of the blanket is that it starts on you in a miniscule way. It jokes with you a bit by not feeling in the least bit warm when it touches your skin — the feeling is cool, although not unpleasantly so — it's a light covering more reminiscent of cotton slacks you'd wear in the tropics to let your skin breathe in the heat of the day. After a few minutes of having the blanket on my lap I touch it again, and again am greeted by coolness, but with a subtle difference: my legs feel warmer without being warmed; they feel as if they're starting to make their own heat, the body cells being stoked and primed and winking into life.

Like a second skin the blanket breathes. The breeze passes me, or the the fan oscillates and every puff of air movement is felt under the blanket. It's no longer a question of 'me' and 'it': it's joined with me and is a part of my being. It suffuses and osmoses, rocking with the baby on the top of the tree as the bough in the wind. The wind kept everything light and airy, and my mother, in tune with her oft-sung nursery rhyme theme, kept in tune with the rocking air when she provided me with the new wonder blanket. Mum was a walking advertisement rep, and she told me about the blanket's magical properties in such a way that I learnt the words as catechism. In many ways, like her mother before her, she manipulated and domineered every domestic situation; yet her ways which would otherwise smother me to stupefaction were here aërated and mollified, until they were made as light as the soufflés she showed off to her neighbours — feathery clouding sponges of near-nothingness which didn't sink, however much you fanned them.

Blanket of snow, night's thick blanket or blanket weed in a pond: all of these are smothering words, terms that allow no breath to enter. Cellular these miracles may be, but blankets they are not.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Research into this new kind of material was actively under way in 1952, and by 1955 Early's of Witney, Oxon had gone into full production. The material was taken up by hospitals in a big way, as being cotton, the blankets could be sterilized by boiling. One make which springs to make was made by Zorbit who made The Antibac® made for Hospital use only. I had one of those for many years.

Dysenteric Pebbles

2011-01-04T21:10:00.000-08:00

For three days I wasn't able to make my day-time trips to The Cave: I'd gone into a close partnership with the toilet, and nothing could untie me for longer than 20 minutes. It was a shame, for a squirrel had given birth to a clutch of young, and was busy scampering and scuffling about as the did her frenzied nest duties. Before locking the doors, I'd enquired if she had access to the outside, and was assured that she jumped out through a ventilator near-by. For three days her brood hardly entered my mind, which was more concerned with where to pitch my tent to rest in the field of consciousness. In the phantom world between outbursts of heat and sweating, followed by tooth chattering cold. I called for blankets – lots of them, yet 20 minutes later I was drenched in sweat. Somewhere between these two states, there's a grey land where you can take your rest, and that's where I managed to sleep; I gobbled the slumber deeply and shortly before the cycle moved on, and I reckoned that the interval between the two states was about the same as Dawn and Dusk on the planet Mercury.

On the third day I rose shakily from my bed, initially unknowing whether I was dead or alive; but the smell that came to me as a entered The Cave told me that the dead thing definitely wasn't me. Something had passed away. The rotting stench was unmistakeable, yet not steady. It blew over in acrid little wafts. Our first thought was to make a search for a dead lizard as one of them passes away in the bookshelves every so often. However on this occasion nothing was found until our noses led us to the box where the squirrel had her kits. It was too late for two of them and the third, dehydrated and shrivelled, was squeaking its last, calling for milk we couldn't give. I was told wrong: the mother wasn't getting out by the window vent, but would wait until I made my daily entrance. I think that during the confusion and process of the guys propping me up, she must have scampered in and out.

Another squirrel has entered my life now, this time through the kitchen. She enters through the extractor fan over the cooker and is busy making her nest in a cardboard box full of wires, broken plugs and adaptors This is a more sensible choice for her, and I look forward enormously to watching the kits scuttle in and out. They all look like beach pebbles in embryo before they open their eyes, grey-backed with silver on the bellies; they're gobs of mercury waiting to streak along, just at the edge of field of vision, slipping past and gone so quick I wonder if anything was ever there.

The King's Life in the Balance

2010-09-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

He was a pest, a curse, and a bane on so many of our lives. A rowdy of the first order, he bullied his way to the top of the trees. He only ate the sweetest, tenderest coconuts, supping out the centre of the young green fruits before wantonly throwing the remains to the ground, little caring that each bud he plundered would have given us an income, had we let them grow. He scared the kids, and seemed to take a fiendish delight in watching the kids run screaming back to their mums. He put us all on our guard, and waited for each of us to be alone before he'd appear in a doorway, growling from his belly and baring his teeth as he frightened us into giving up our last banana, or a tender guava, or a little bag of sugar or other sweets.

The monkey catcher came to catch him. He brings a cage with a trap door, and places tender food inside. Attaching the trap to a wire, he hides in the bushes, he melts into the leaves and soon the world forgets that he is there. Sooner or later a monkey is overcome by hunger or greed or both. He reaches in and finds the fruit secured. In tugging it he inches closer, then as he goes to grasp the prize — ker-lunk! the string is loosed, and that's our monkey trapped. Once that has happened, the rest is easy: the others, anxious to find out what's happened to their friend, will go to help. But the first one has worked his way into an inner chamber, leaving the first space empty, empty for another primate to enter. It's only a few hours more before seven or eight monkeys are encaged.

The cages are spacious, airy, roomy, and at all stages plentiful supplies of food and water are supplied. Before too long, two or three may be seen inside the cage, chatting and chewing, gossiping away about their new situation. One of them waves his paws expansively in the direction of the field, to explain the direction the troupe will be following next, as if he knows. He only needs to le the others think he knows.

Let's find out: The monkey man has lit a beedie and smoked it down to the stub. He asks for water, and a dish of rice and soup, before sitting on his haunches to consume his fare in similar vein to his cousins in the cage. The final stage of his job is drawing near, and with two large bags made of stitched-together paddy-sacks he hoops them over the other end of the cage. This also has a door, an escape door, and with a hucky-hucky-hushing sound he shoos them into the bag. A few deft sleights of the hand and the bag is released and tied and knotted, and we're handed a bag of wriggling monkeys.

Next step is grabbing a rider and hoiking the bag onto the motor-bike. We point ourselves away from the town and into the open road, deeper into the countryside, away from paddy, culture, crops and people. And while such places remain to us, we free ourselves and open up a further enterprise for them. We open the bag and shake it out, watching their bemused faces, as they purvey their land and wonder what's to steal. Adjusting from the darkness of the bag, they blink and wonder, even looking chattily in our direction as we let them out. For a few hours we were their captors, and now for many more they have their freedom; while we remain within our cages, made of bars you cannot see.

The King, however, never could be caught: he laughed defiantly as he bared his teeth, scorning the cages and bags, humiliating us all and out-witting the ruses of the monkey man. We settled down into an uneasy truce, we lived our lives and left the King to rule with tyranny atop the sighing trees.

Our King has Lost His Strength

And then there were the screams; the sobs, the cries of pain.

The Wheelchair Ridge becomes a Bed-rest

It made no sense, to hear the cries, and rush outside, and find the King of high trees crying on the ground.... Instead of Palm-fronds, leaves wet from a monsoon downpour now become the mattress for our King.

The hard ridge I built to stop the wheelchair sliding into the soft silt becomes the place where Hero King will rest.

Oh yes, he was a nuisance sure, a plague, a pest, a background itch; it was our fervent wish that one day soon, the monkey man would catch him fast and bag him up so we'd carry him away, further than his kingly eyes could see, beyond our reach and out of sight and once and ever out of mind.

He cries for Help then shoos us off

Yet now it's different, now we want to know, what might have happened to make this fall from Grace. Was it a scorpion, or a krait, lurking in the bushy can-can tufts which blow and billow in the humid air? Was he stung? Did he fall? Nah! It seems unlikely, unbelievable that such a guy with street-cred such as this can fall, or break, or succumb in any way. Yet succumb he has.

We look up, suddenly suspicious of the electric cable, the government cable leaning on its rotting pole, sparking and hissing when the branches brush against it. Electricity, the unknown force, the unseen enemy of the Monkey King. His wives and children and minions, subjects all, are gathered in the bushes at the wall side of our compound. Seeing if we can help, they stare hopefully up, yet hiss at us if they think we mean him harm. Our Rowdy, our Nuisance, our Pest and Danger, and yet our King to climbed to heights and places where we can merely dream.

We Offer Food, the Choicest Monkey-fare we have...

A Small and Valiant Hero

2010-08-30T12:10:00.000-07:00

It was over three years ago that a man arrived on my doorstep; in his hand was an ordinary shopping bag which he held away from me slightly, asking if I'd like to see what was inside. The bag heaved slightly, and I couldn't wait. I plunged my hands in to feel a ball of warm featheriness, and ever so gently lifted it out to see a guinea fowl whose beady eyes blinked in the bright light. So arrived Johnnie, a bird who was to be my pride and joy, keeping me company and strutting round the grounds to inspect everything and everybody.

Johnnie pecks for worms in an empty flower-bed

Not only does he pick up worms, bugs and centipedes, but they say that he can pick pests and parasites off cattle too. He's very green, and a scrupulous biological control officer. There ain't no flies or fleas on him!

Clean as a Whistle

When you make a dive for Johnnie, he just crouches down on the ground, with a crooning noise ~ but only if you're human. If another animal tries to get near him, Johnny is off like a little rocket!

Within a few days of being birthed from his hand-bag womb, Johnnie has made himself completely at home. In fact, Johnnie treats the place as if he's lived here for ever.
And even longer than that.

No unauthorized entry allowed!

When it comes to John's bath, the team of appointed bathers move in to do their duty. Bathing is a great daily event here, and for maximum satisfaction for all, it's carried out in a small enclosure at the rear of the house.

For some it's a pleasure, for some it's a chore; some just want to get on with their study jobs and not spend an hour being swallowed up by the bathing and exercising ritual, but for Johnnie this event carried out at 10.00 a.m. each morning is an important job and a positive delight.

Just the Thing to Wet My Whistle

The special treat is, for some reason, my dirty bath-water. This would doubtless raise some eyebrows, were it to be witnessed in the outer and greater world. But Johnnie is crazy about sipping it while it's still warm, and I maintain that there are some vital micronutrients and trace elements which Johnnie finds beneficial to his health.

This is a Good as it Gets

After the ritual of bathing, it's time to spend in quiet refection as we offer our devotions foe the day. Not to be left out, Johnnie is very methodical in his duties as a verger, and he pays his earnest respects to the many names and forms we give to the One Creator and the the source of all life and being:

Hail Ramana!

Hail Mary!

A few days before we leave India, Johnnie becomes fully involved in the packing:

Better sure they don't leave something important behind!

Master has packed all the Important Tablets.
Hope he takes Good Care while he's in England

Good-bye dear Johnnie, you valiant wee policeman of a bird; I guess you're past middle age for a guinea fowl by now, and you must take good care of your health!
Regulating his life according to a strict and fastidious routine, Johnnie goes off duty when the shadows of night begin to fall. Ensuring that he hasn't left any loose ends behind, he heads for his favourite tall tree, where he flies aloft to perch on his favourite branch, away from night predators and snakes.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Johnnie has left us now. Gone to meet his maker, as it were: Yesterday while quietly feeding, he was set upon by a gang of five hungry dogs, who attacked and him before tearing him to pieces and eating him up. It feels indescribably sad, that a quiet, peaceful and devoted being should meet his end in this violent way.

Good-bye, dear brave friend: For more than three year you shared our lives and our houses. I hope your end was quick and that it didn't hurt too much.

What did the Lady Really See?

2010-07-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

As a child, I saw a program on the telly where a tasty meal was prepared and served upon a plate; the food then was held out toward the viewer offering you the chance of taking it out of the telly and enjoying it. From that time onwards, I’d held a hidden wish that one day someone would buy me a TV like that. Or at least if it wasn’t to do with cooking, I wished that the day might dawn on which a TV story would spill itself out of its electronic box and so come into my life. What I didn't expect was that the time would arrive when this would happen to me, when I was at the tender and highly impressionable age of thirty-five.

It was the mid 1980's, and after a sorry gap of one-and-a-half decades I found myself back in India, having fed on and swallowed the Mahatma Gandhi line with no thought as to how I’d digest the fish that he’d left wriggling on the hook. Caste distinction had gone, and brahmin and road-sweeper could now walk together in the garden of frangipani trees, even if they weren't yet ready to clasp hands or at least link their arms together.

I was staying in Madras (as it was then) as the guest of a merchant I'd met on my first visit, and for a few nights I was to be their guest before moving on into the deeper south. They now had a colour TV and an A/C living room with sofa, and they appeared anxious for me to watch the movie which had just started and, although part of my reason for coming to India was to get away from the telly, I felt unable to move off to the shady garden with a book. A guest was staying with them, a lady with a silent green silk sari who made a waft of scented wind in my direction as she swept by, for she wore fresh jasmine flowers tied into her hair. She was coming from the direction of my hostess's kitchen, bearing a small dish of ice-cubes, on the top of which were set four dark sweetmeats. I immediately recognised them as the Ferrero Rocher chocolates which I'd brought from England as a gift for my hostess. The Green Lady immediately opened the gold foil wrapping and popped one into her mouth, before sitting squarely on my right as she settled her ample bottom down on the settee like a mother hen on a clutch of eggs.

The film related the story of a love affair between a high-caste brahmin lady and a young man from one of the lower castes. Degree by degree the pair were fighting social prejudice and bigotry, their few triumphs and many set-backs musically unfolding in front of us. The vision in cool green had become so transfixed with the proceedings, that she'd returned to the 'fridge to get a few more of the diminishing supply of chocolates, and had even managed to replace the ice. Returning with her replenished dish, she gave me a little grin as she immersed herself in the story, saying: “I expect you're thoroughly sick of these, but for us in India they are a great treat! Mmmm” As I watched her sucking the dark cluster into her orifice, my glance flicked over to the left to where my new friend and object of adoration, Chandru, was standing in the shadow near the screen. Chandru my carer of a few weeks’ standing, was lurking with the look of I-don’t-belong-in-there on his face; Chandru, whose skin was the same colour as the chocolates which the Green Lady was devouring with relish.

In a flash I saw it all: India’s heart had long been torn by class division: when the mad slash of zealotry had taken his life away, Mahatma Gandhi had left his healing message for the Nation ~ the message that untouchability was a sin and a crime. Little by little the message had filtered down to everyone and now this middle-class home, this fan-cooled living room had become a melting pot for that message for me — on my right side the Green Goddess was munching away, and on my left was a young man from the caste of thr lower scribes, who had worked his way into the job of caring for me and had also seated himself in my heart. What more natural than for him to come to sit next to me on the same sofa as the Green Lady, watching a hopeless love affair on the TV, yet knowing that within this very room, racial prejudice was melting as fast as the ice-cubes in the lady’s saucer?

A vision welled up in me, a picture of harmony and peace, goodwill to all men. This very room was to be the melting pot, the microscopic picture of bonhomie which would radiate steadily outwards until it engulfed all of the sub-continent: after all, the ingredients were here, instigated by the very programme we were watching. It had reached the point where the lovers from different castes were being torn apart by family and social prejudices. It was very heart-rending too. The Green Silken lady took the corner of her sari with her left hand and wiped away a tear which had started to run down her cheek, whilst with her right hand she took another chocolate from its bed of ice and crunched noisily. That particular hazelnut must have been a hard one, for I fancied it had put up a valiant fight before getting crushed between her molars.

What was I waiting for? There ahead of me was the film, on my right hand was the lady, on the left my shadow-lurking lower-caste friend. Why not call him over to join us and we could all wallow together and end up being friends? Didn’t revolutions begin in the most unlikely of places, and hadn’t I read once that the Indian Mutiny been sparked off by a chapatti? What, in effect, was preventing me from calling him over? Only my own stupid self, I decided. I myself, who could soon be sitting alongside the very Indian waiting in the wings, I could be the spark that starts off a social revolution, if only I could conquer my own inbuilt sense of hesitation; besides, I knew already that these chocolates were a rich source of the euphoric drug theobromine, which was why one gave them as a token of love, didn't one? Deciding that my fears were groundless and that this was, after all, 1985, I patted the seat next to me with my hand and called him to come to sit by me, while making reassuring noises that there was no reason whatever to be afraid.

Chandru came over and sat beside me cautiously as he took my hand. The woman on the right sharpened her face so that her nose appeared much more angular than it was made to be, and the muscles in her body seemed generally to tighten up; she took one of the two remaining sweets off the melting ice and pushed it in her mouth, not with the lazy relaxed swing of a few moments early, but with an impulsive motion that was almost a twitch. “Oh of course,” she said, “I see he needs to come and help you back a bit” and stupidly I fell in with idea, with Chandru easing me back another inch or two onto the settee; but he carried on holding my hand after I’d become settled. The lady on my right began unwrapping the last clustered chocolate from its melting dish of ice and carried on watching the movie, which was now approaching its melodramatic climax, with plenty of tears and pleadings and tugging at the hamstrings of the heart. Chandru was holding my left hand firmly in his right, and I saw my short stubby white fingers poking out between his long and slender black ones. I looked down with a pang of shame, for I would have wished that mine were as long and graceful and delicately formed as his. He however did not seem to mind or even see the clash of what my eyes saw, for I think he felt another tension hitherto unknown to me. His hand-grip tightened, [DCS00020] but his entire body grew more fidgety, and he said: “Shall I get your bed ready for you to take some rest, dear? You have had a long journey of many kilometres and you should take some rest.”

My enthusiasm of a few moments ago evaporated, and I knew that with Chandru’s announcements, the magic of the dream was melting fast. I was aware of kitchen noises and cupboards being noisily closed. What sounded like a ’fridge door followed by a mallet sound. Soon after this, Milli the daughter of my friend entered with a beaming face and a dish of crushed ice fragments on which were borne more Hazelnut Chocolate Clusters. She looked sorrowfully at the green lady’s pool of water with its fast disappearing lumps and its twisted strands of golden silver paper. “How are you Chandru?” she said smiling. Scanned at [7-15-2010 16-09 PM (5)] “Heavens, look at the time! Night falls so fast in the tropics, and we fear your auntie will be worrying about where you have got to and believe me, you don’t want your bus to become bogged down in the traffic. This is Madras, not a country town you know!”

Chandru’s twitching nerves now had an outlet, and he sprang up as if propelled on a spring. With a hurried thank you, and words of how much he had enjoyed the film, he jerked his limbs in several directions, and picked up his little overnight bag; he mumbled a hurried good-bye to me, and within a few moments he had left. Milli came over and sat next to me, offering me a Ferrero Rocher from its crushed ice-bed. I thanked her, but reminded her that they were a gift, and in England I could get them any time I wanted.

I stared vacantly at the TV and reflected that in distant childhood I'd been watching it and wishing that the magic drama being enacted on the box would spill out into living room. Now it had done that with the granting of my wish. This was my reintroduction to the new India, and I wondered whether I'd be ale to swim the waves without becoming engulfed by them. We all had seen different pictures, different movies, and my attempt to harmonise them marked the beginning of a struggle that was to puzzle me for many years.

Memories of an injured friend

2010-06-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

The phone went "Hello," I said.
"There's a big bird in our garden, dear - I think it's nearly dead"
"I'll grab my coat & partner and we'll be there" and off we sped.

Attacked by something big and fierce, he flapped a bloody wing at me,
When I came near he spat and hissed and would have turned my hand to gore.
Out came the leather gloves and then he lunged and clawed and tore.

I held him fast, kept clear my face,
It was not hate but only pain
Which held him in that ruffled state

We took him to our garden shed,
Gave him water and a nice clean bed;
We'll see how he is tomorrow, I said

The following day dawned bright and clear,
Yet still I couldn't hold him near
Without exacerbation.

I soothed him, fed him, brought him viands
Till at last he fell compliant
When he on me became reliant.

Each passing day he drew a little near to me
He saw no further reason to attack, you see,
For

I soothed him, fed him, brought him viands
Till at last he fell compliant
When he on me became reliant.

I saw him next day, we'd called him Oúlu
He was more fluffy and more gainly,
Getting better and acting tamely

Another day, and he looked restless,
Grateful, and yet wanting to leave,
With us he'd had a safe reprieve

I soothed him, fed him, brought him viands
But now his look had turned defiant
No longer would he be my client.

Just one more day, his time was through
We'd let him free, no hullabaloo;
And then I clasped him with full care
Lifted him up, and threw him in the air.
He beat his wings and circled round about
Then he was up and he was Out
In seconds he'd relearned to fly
Then up he wheeled and vanished in the sky;
Up to greet the rising sun
Tu-whit, Tu-woo, and he was gone.

I soothed him, fed him, brought him viands
For now I knew I'd lost my client.
For each of us was self-reliant.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Glossary: viands = food-stuffs, victuals

Grateful acknowledgment is made to http://www.decaturmetro.com/tag/injured-owls for the use of the photograph of an injured owl.

http://www.decaturmetro.com/tag/injured-owls/

Does Virgin have to be a Total Prune?

2010-06-08T01:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Richard Branson,

The afternoon was so nice and bright, I thought I'd take my guys out into the back garden, where we relaxed to read or listen to some songs. I was finishing a book I had been deeply into and, remembering that my mobile could go on the net, I'd started googling a few interesting links, when I was interrupted with a mini banner which said:

I think my phone must have thought my mind as green as the grass on which I was lying; nonetheless I found my face turning a little pink as I dialled the Virgin helpline and prayed that a girl wouldn't answer:

"Hello Virgin Mobile, this is Lisa speaking," announced a member of your staff: "How may I help you?"

My face had now turned to a livid puce when I realised that my prayer hadn't really been answered at all; but I guess it had at least been modified, as I judged from her accent that "Lisa" wasn't from British shores. So I imagined a sunny backdrop, perhaps from Italy or the South of France, and that made it all so much better, even if I wondered why your staff are allowed to work in such exotic locations.

"Lisa," i said, "I'm lounging peacefully in the back garden with my friend and I've got my Virgin Phone and a Coke in my hand, and I've found a reference which has got me searching for the English meaning of a 1975 Indian song; but Virgin appears to be living up to its name and telling me I'm not allowed to read it. I'm think I'm big enough and old enough to take read the site, Lisa, don't you?"

"Oh John," she said, "I'm sure you are!"

I was sipping my Coca-Cola®, when something in the lilt of her Mediterranean voice went into alliance with a bubble in my mouth, and I snorted coke out of my nose into a fine spray which then broke out into a splattery cough which set her laughing, and it wasn't long before the virgin and I were cooing to one another like a couple of teenagers out on a first date. Between splurts and giggles, Lisa managed to spit out that to remove restrictions on my account she'd need to speak to a third party. Parties being in somewhat short supply at the time I managed to hook in little Rajah who's thirty years younger than me on the clock, but most would agree that at half my age he's more mature than I'll ever be. So for a few minutes he stopped fiddling with his own gadget and started playing with mine whilst promising the Virgin Girl that I was allowed to drink shandy now, and in his view I was over 18. "Make sure he switches off before rebooting his phone she said" Rajah handed her over to me in peals of silvery laughter, which was where I left her on that sunny day called Yesterday.

And Richard, have you been playing too? It's time to stop playing with your aeroplanes in the garden dear. Come in and eat your tea. Time to stop playing Nanny to me, because that's my job, not yours. Now off you go -- time to learn to manage your companies like a Big Boy!

Love John.

PS: I almost went of focus. What was the fuss all about?

I'd been finishing the Whistling in the Dark interviews, and was flicking through the intro again where I was reminded about the 1975 blockbuster film Sholay, "that finds an excellent parallel in the overtly gay, 2007 film Brokeback Mountain [which] ...is in fact the other side of Sholay, its off-screen side. The Yeh Dosti number sung by Jai and Veeru on a motorbike emerges as a queer song when when one scrutunises its lyrics and imagery."

Yeh dosti from the film Sholay (1975)

Yeh dosti — from the film Sholay

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Refs:
Raj Rao, R. 2000: Memories Pierce the Heart: Homoeroticism, Bollywood-Style, in Andrew Grossman (ed), Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, p 305. New York: The Haworth Press.

A queer reading of the song Yeh Dosti is set out in the author's forthcoming novel: Engineering College Hostel (Penguin).

Who is the Fair Cop?

2010-05-24T05:26:00.000-07:00

"Hello, Hello, May I have a word Sir?", shouted a voice I couldn't see.
Unable to see my mystery caller, I waited till he shifted himself round into my field of vision, even as I was trying to work out who it was. A uniformed copper bedecked with movie camera on his helmet and all kind of gear stepped in and said he'd like to ask me a few questions. Wondering what the heck might be the problem now, I recalled that Barney had just driven back from ASDA: Had he jumped a red light or done speeding?
I feebly stuttered "...err ask away!"
The seeds of my deepest fears were beginning to sprout and I knew the time had come for me to drill deep through the layer of the fragile world we see, in order to hook him in from the shadowy area on the surface of the choppy mind: my entire survival depended on keeping my car and driver, and I couldn't afford to lose either.
"Indeed it is, officer!" I smilingly aver whilst desperately summoning my inner strength.
He looks slightly crestfallen, for my sweet carer has been doing nothing more sinister than loading bags with the remnants of our picnic and loading them into the boot of the car.
"Just wanted to confirm that, Sir!" he adds: "These criminals make themselves look as though they're loading a vehicle when in fact they're stealing it." I glimpsed a weak link in his mental armoury and made to soften it with sympathy. "You don't say, officer! I'm fascinated" He was loosening up nicely. "Please tell me more!"

"Well Sir, you see it's like this..." He then launched himself into a saga of his duties and responsibilities which, when mingled with his sympathies and apologies, gave him a rather appealling mien. I had a brief mind-flash of bringing him down to my level, of being a mere boy again, up and bold and ready to indulge in a love-hate bout of fisticuffs. He's down to my world now for a wee chat and a bit of hand-contact,

continuing to tell me in half-apologetic tone about how it could be seen that my little Rajah might have been making off with my bags and with my car. Of course this is exactly what Rajah was doing, only he was also taking me along with him: He didn't see that! Neither did he see that my short arms working in flicks and smooth curves.
Flashing my fingers and spinning silken threads from words, I was spinning a gossamer fabric on which he could focus his mind's eye as his eye-balls followed my finger

and I saw his attention wander, thence to focus somewhere in the depths of his recently-abandoned childhood. The rest was easy. Hooked with my yarn he travelled back to the time of innocence, when golden light played upon branches laden with apples. In short we were both held captive, and he was tickled pink. A final snap of the fingers and he was back

to being the friendly Bobby-on-the-Beat. Just a few seconds was all that it took. Beamingly he told me about how he was happy to be serving the community in this way and I beamed back at him; he called his mate over : he’d been cautiously watching from a short distance, but now he swam into view, joining the merry scene; and so we parted, our fates pulling us in our various ways.

A snatched glimpse of their conversation revealed that he was training his mate on methods of approach, which explained the movie camera on his helmet and all the other gear he had strapped to him. "That's the way to do it..." came a whispered echo of his voice . Indeed, I reflect wistfully to myself: that indeed is the way it’s done.

Back home, while my innocent eastern lads unpack the shopping and put on the kettle for a cup of tea. I hobble to the scanner as I empty the contents of my pockets. The pen with its three ergonomically smooth-gripped edges perfectly fits the awkward curvature of my fingers and will, I’m sure, be my pocket companion for many years to come.

I'm grateful to Messrs P Kumaresan and P Bharanidharan for taking the photographs and also to the Cambridgeshire Police for allowing me to play with their Officers for a while.

Oh Come into My Barlar...

2010-05-11T05:21:00.000-07:00

If we picture the Indian rural setting we see before us today, we'll see cows being milked, goats grazing, chickens pecking at the ground to find some grain. Then wander along from here in the direction of the town, and sooner or later you'll see a hair-cutting salon or perhaps a "Beauty Barlar" with its price list displayed for all to see.
>>>

When I go into such a 'barlar' I feel as though I've been warped into a parallel state somewhere between the sixties and seventies, and yet in neither of these states. Smart young men saunter in and out, admiring their own and their friends' hair-dos, hips swaggering and trousers flaring away like mini-trombones at the bottom of their legs. You may be in a 'barlar' but you never dare say 'barber' for that is now such an insulting word amongst the young that it's most impolite to utter, or even to think. 'Barber' is Out and 'Disco Ravi' is in with the Hip-Hop, the One-Stop Shop and dishy-dashy Don't-Know-What.
>>>

Disco Ravi is a Cool Kid who dances lightly on his toes, his smile and fingers flashing as the SunBeams catch them on their homeward journey through the bars of his window onto the soft moisture of his slightly parted lips and flashing blades. He's not fat, and his nimble legs display soft black trousers which show off every muscle curve of his prancing thighs ~ the fit is snug, and yet Ravi manages to stay mere millimetres away from being fat. He's lit by sunlight because there's a power-cut and the heat is sweltering; many of the young men have to mop their brows; yet by a miracle of physiognomic impossibilities, Ravi always manages to look Cool. Without even a bead of perspiration on his smoothly-shaved face, you suppose he'd keep that dusky hue even in the Sahara.
>>>

You feel that he's so entrenched in his work, and is so much part of the furniture, that he arrived with the arrival of the town: you feel that Ravi is rooted in.

And yet in this town, his roots are completely lacking in depth; they travel horizontally out into the country field before taking a nose-dive into the arid soil, hungrily seek reserves of moisture trapped between the ground, on the quiet land of their fathers or grandfathers, to their relatives who are not ashamed to be referred to as 'barbers', not ashamed that they never had a shop or dandy barlar, rustic barbers who are there in the village to visit you at your beck-and-call, at any time of the day or night, ready to wait on you with every need that you may have, to convert their passion into your pleasure, for their passion is human body hair, its variety and growth patterns — to study the way in which it grows, and the best method of removing it.

Broadly speaking, their services fall into two unequal parts. The first —and by far the most common— part being head-focussed, or that pertaining to your noble bonce and the panoply of hairs which crowd, gather and curl upon the nut, growing out of its cracks and fissures on your visage with its level plains and curvaceous dales. These can be trimmed, smoothed or removed, wherever and however they desire to grow. Eyebrows, moustaches, beard and rebellious whiskers. Ear-hairs are no problem and when it comes to nasal follicles, the cowardly had best close their eyes, whilst the brave may brace themselves to cast their eyes down to see long blades scything their windswept harvest on their journey into your nostrils.

This hair-cut and shave is the be-all and end-all for many a fine Tamilian, and for men like this, the line is drawn. Yet as some of us find ourselves unable to paint one room without wanting to daub more rooms in our houses, so some Tamils, after submitting their heads to the hands of the village snipper, want him to treat another part of their body, and for many it's little short of sacrilege to shave and smooth the plains of the face, to harvest off the moustache which crowns the hole where air and food flow in, only to neglect the orifice on the other end where waste and gases flow out. For men such as these the area surrounding the body's exit needs to be smooth and hairless as as the entrance.

This offers an exquisite delight for the razor man, who applies his skill with equal deftness here. But he needs help from the client, who must put his arms behind his back and applying one hand to each buttock, draw them apart as he opens the anal slit into an 'O'. This exposes the duck down, and the barber then begins working away. He gently caresses away the fluff and as he works a reciprocal energy comes into play. The client, acutely aware of the knife-edge between ecstasy and pain, hovers on the threshold as the tingle runs up-and-down his spine, goose-bumps helpfully bringing the fluffy hair into attention.

All too soon the delight has passed and eager for more, the client will then turn round to face him with the barber's bladed fingers following in close pursuit through to the remainder of the perineum. Their journey only ends when all the hairs on the genital region are scythed. The gent feels the winnowing caress of the wind over the area and after paying —or deferring to pay— thr barber he'll head for the shower to take his own private douche. After doing that, he may well visit his friends and lifting up his lunghi, will display himself, front and back. Showing off his satin smoothness he'll be the envy of his buddies, who'll want to follow suit. So they're soon waiting patiently for their head hair to grow another crop for the barber to harvest.

Our sketch of one of the hidden sides to Tamil Nadu is now almost complete: only a small portion in the corner remains, the empty gap which tells us that the tale is not quite finished, but I don't have the space left for the conclusion of the tale, neither is my pencil thin enough to cram in all the lines. I'll just have to shade it in for now, draw a modesty line beneath it and tell the remainder on another day.

I'm grateful to S Arumugam for taking the photos and for the characters' permission to use them in this blog.

Whacked in Both Eyes

2010-04-16T00:22:00.000-07:00

When I went to the Opticians recently for my biannual sight test, I looked forward to the glaucoma test at the end of the session: It had been a dusty day, and I fancied having the short, sharp puff of air squirted into my eye, to giving a coy little jump and going 'ooh'. Well that had gone. No longer any need to get you up to the contraption, he said. You can stay in your wheelchair, and I'll bring my snazzy little contraption right up to you. Just look over here now, and keep looking at that point.

The next minute the machine went click-clickety and I found myself blinking rapidly. It was probably some sort of laser or visible ray. Anyway it was soon over.

"Excellent!" he said, "your pressure is 15 in the right eye and 16 in the left. Then he showed me his thingie more closely and explained that the machine, an I-Care® Tonometer had fired a probe onto my eyeball six time, and then he showed the probe to me:

I nearly fainted at the though that a 1¾ inch needle had been whacking my eyes at ultrafast speed, but I guess I was interested, in fact I was fascinated enough to wheedle the probe out of him, even though he's 'not really' allowed to do it. If you don't tell, Sir, neither will I!

A Visit to the Orthopædo

2010-03-20T05:49:00.000-07:00

I was visiting an old friend in London last year, when I found it suddenly very painful to sit. In fact the situation was so bad that I had to make a sudden departure from my visit and head back, with my lads, to Cambridge, Even then, it took many weeks for me to recover from the unknown event. Yet how could I recover when I had no inkling what I was recovering from? Not long after that, it was time for me to head to India to continue my adventures. To live and love; to laugh and cry; to see many who are better ~ and a few that are a great deal ~ worse than me.

As long as you get yourself inveigled into the right sort of bunch, India is a great place to be where sitting presents a problem, for you can lie and loll and sprawl, speadeagle yourself, lounging on couches and propped up with cushions stuffed full of silk cotton growing from pods on trees in the next field. With massages and lively chat, your bed exposed to the wildlife and fresh air, you can easily lose yourself in wreaths of timelessness. One day melts into the next until, of course, it's time to come back home.

Driven on by pain again, I have an X-Ray and an appointment with the Orthopædo, who shows me one of these:

The contraption inside me is a hip replacement known as a Mckee Pin, and it was inserted into me when I was a lad of seventeen. It's an artificial ball-and-socket joint, and in my case the ball is still going strong, but the socket has eroded away, disintegrated and collapsed. Yet the good old ball is going so well, that it's trying to grind its way further up into my pelvis. What a good job the body defends itself against such excesses by producing defensive gristle, cartilage, scar tissue and stuff. So there it is! I'm a ball without a socket, a hinge without a bracket, a ping without a pong and a Cedilla without a C. ;)

Now is this a 'good' thing, or a 'bad' thing?

Well that depends on how you want to look at it.
If I'm hoping to enter the paralympics or climb the Eiffel Tower, or even a modest flight of stairs, my hopes are dashed. But if you don't mind being cuddled, cajoled, carried, toted, and carted all about, adjusted, mollified and pampered, then it's great news.
In other words, it's a repeat prescription for being spoiled way beyond what's good for me, a docket for being caressed and stroked, and it's a voucher for my every whim to be granted my every whim in a flash, and in that respect it's just the ticket.

The Last Walk

2010-02-22T12:47:00.000-08:00

While prejudices of race, religion and sexual orientation steadily crumble in the rain, there seems to be one small taboo remaining: The funny way in which people react when they go into a room and see you lying down. They get an idea into their head that they have to whisper, or treat you as if you were unwell, or a trifle out of sorts. Few indeed are there in England who will visit you at home without drawing up to an embarrassing halt when they see you're lying down.

In India, however, lying down is much more a part-and-parcel, a deeper embedding into the warp and woof of life than in the green pastures of England. In warmer climes you can stroll into a hall to see a lady cleaning brass work on the right, an infant swinging from the ceiling in a muslin sling in the middle, and a man lying down and sleeping at the back of the room, whilst another guy might be simply reclining on the floor and chatting in a desultory way; yet in England — even in the chill of deep mid-winter — you may find yourself categorised as out-of-synch if you're not up on your haunches and alert to all comings, goings and musings.

In India my resting often turns into a sprawling dance: I'll shift my position so as to re-angle my leg; then with the end of my prodder I'll give a gentle tap upwards to my carer's knee. By magic his leg will immediately bend, slowly rising to the vertical, as if it were a hydraulic lift. A tap in the opposite direction, and the hoist will stop. Sometimes others will come along for a sprawl, and two or three sets of legs will ascend to lean against the wall, proclaiming silhouettes of forked tree-trunks with miniature toe buds wiggling playfully in the breeze of the fan.

Lying supine is not, however, restricted to the bedroom and locked door: It spills out into the verandah and the Dinnai* and it lops along the path and field. Day or night I may stroll along on my constitutional, and invariably meet a gentleman in the Land of Nod, as we see here on our leisurely stroll.

This gent seemed so peaceful, with his feet in just the right position, gently resting in the spokes of his bike. Good ah'-noon, Sir: I know exactly how you feel; please don't even think of shifting yourself – no need to stir – for you'll never be able to get back into that position if you nudge your foot away from the stiff wire of the wheel!

And look at the serene expression on the face of this gent; I wonder where he is and how he fares, a wee pillow under his right arm, and nought but cold stone beneath his head.

Moving on in our walk, and further on in time, we see the deeper sleep of age. All this man's belongings form a pillow to cushion his head. No-one will disturb him during his rest. He's doubtless left his family, and surely left sad, unspoken tragedies behind... I wondered how he lived his life and how he made a living, how he fared. He travelled well. Now see how organised he is, with all his belongings tied up in a sack, with his pillow and his sandals on the bench!

We wander on, in timeless silent mode. Before long the scenery’s changed, and we're away from the countryside and back to the shrieking, clanking conurbation, with mad bikes and madder lorries rushing past us at break-neck speed, missing our slender frames by inches. I want to get home, I want to rest, to slumber in the silence of my quiet bed, I want a spot of stillness in this manic rush.

As if my thoughts had taken shape, I spy a bundle left upon the remnants of a pavement; right outside a chemists shop. I pass it by, then feel a pull. It is an inner urge — a tug which draws me back to where the bundle is. I ask ‘what's that?’ and looking at the heap, my friends look too, to see the spectacle which brings me to a halt.

“He's dead”, my friend said, “Here he came, because for him the road of life was at its end. Shall we leave a little money? The authorities will come along in the morning and take the body off. The ones who do this job get little pay.” I empty the contents of my pockets onto his cloth, about seven Rupees, 11pence or perhaps a couple of dimes in value, wishing that I’d carried more. I was sad and glad, yet also horrified to see the people hurrying to-and-fro, oblivious of the situation, yet aware enough to leave him be. I look and look, fancying I see a glimmer of hope in a slight breath; my friend denies it – then it’s there! ~ there’s definitely a little life left in the bundle!

I cast an appealing look towards my friend: to take him to our local doctor, to call an ambulance, to tell the Police? Yet straight away my plea falls flat. What would they do? Who could ever take him in? This was his path, and now for him the journey was at its end. What difference could a little breath make now?

I leave him, imagining how once he was a little boy playing marbles in the street with other boys, with mother, father, uncle, sister, brother. All now gone, alone, friendless: little brought in and next to nothing taken out. And yet, paradoxically, he was fine and so was I.

So were we all. It was the way it was, the way it had to be, and everything had worked out as it should.

= = = = = = = = = =

*Dinnai: A kind of stone couch attached to the front of your house. Strangers may sit there without permission or leave, and you can welcome any people there. Often, Visitors on Dinnais may become quite good friends, and be served with refreshments, even if they are never invited into your house.

Reflections on a Water Bottle

2010-01-28T18:08:00.001-08:00

I look back on life — it's
funny how things turn out.
You, the creator of beeping
sirens and honking cars, yearn
for the solitude of the
mountains. You, a connoisseur
of fast food, now gaze at water
that took years to gather
natural minerals as it trickled
down from the Himalayas to
within your reach. And I, some
of the purest water in the
world, stand here, trapped in a
bottle. Come, enjoy the irony.

From Ground to Brick to Dust

2010-01-09T04:03:00.000-08:00

When this house was being built in 1992, one of the labourers was gored by a cow. Rajamba had been treating it herself with country herbs, but it was to no use, for when she brought the place to me for inspection, pus was oozing out. The wound was very deep and far beyond anything I could do, so I sent her packing off to a good hospital in town, and within days it was well on the way to getting better.

Even when wounded, Rajamba didn't stop work of one kind or another, not even for one day. She'd been labouring for this house, carrying bricks, cement and buckets of water. After her accident, she took a few days off from here and resorted to some field work, helping to bring in the paddy harvest; but not long after that, swathed in bandages oozing blood and acriflavine, she reported in one morning and was soon carrying pans of cement for the stonemasons again.

No record was ever made of her birth, and none will be made of her passing: Out of nothing she appeared, moved and had her being. And now she has returned to nothing. Less than a week after passing from us, she's already becoming a dim memory. Once the heat comes she'll be forgotten, without trace memory or any record that she ever existed.

Use Our Toilet & We'll Pay You

2010-01-04T03:52:00.000-08:00

I'm grateful to Tim Mars for sending me the following snippet: B-)

"A toilet that pays its users has been opened in Musiri, Tamil Nadu, India.

"It is the first of its kind.

"The public toilet, in the town of Musiri in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, gives users as much as 12 U.S. cents a month for their excreta. Fæces are composted and urine, which is 95 percent water and has already passed through the body’s own filter, the kidneys, is collected, stored in drums and used as fertilizer for bananas and other food crops in a two-year research project by the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.

"‘The day that I can use your toilet and you pay me instead of me paying you, that will be the day when we have really learned to reuse our waste,‘ says Santha Sheela Nair, India’s secretary of drinking water supply."

Here's the Full Story

My Christmas Escapade ~ By Shadow

2009-12-30T03:16:00.000-08:00

While I was enjoying a quiet Christmas in India, my dog Shadow in India was having his own idea of a good time. He and Barney had been invited over to Cambridge for the evening meal. Not long after arrival, a small group took him out for a walk in the chilly streets and ice-packed frosty air. All went well Shadow was the much-loved darling, the centre of attention, luxuriating in the fuss that was made of him.
Back home, joints were rubbed and warmth crept into limbs as the fire of the Christmas spirit was kindled. Guests continued to arrive and as the merry throng chatted and greeted, the flames caught hold and started to blaze until the bell went.

One guest entered and this little blighter bolted out unto the dark frosty night. All rushed out onto their bikes calling his name while our host, who was right in the middle of cooking the meal, became frantic with worry, carefully tending the oven and wondering whether anyone would return to eat it.

Words fail me at this point, the point at which such behaviour in humans amounts to preposterous behaviour, our Shadow turned the situation round and will now relate his own version of the events, in the words of his Barney his amanuensis:

"I made 7 people unforgettable Christmas 2009 last night. When Les opened the door at 7.30pm to invite his guests I sneaked and rushed out like lighting on the streets of Cambridge even though they took me for 2 hour walk earlier in the afternoon. They all were worried and didn't know what to do. Barney was running around in his slippers and Les was looking for me in the bike even Phil who left the house in the middle of preparing food and was searching for me, including one of the guest. I know they were worried sick ;-) . At last Barney found me near a close after about half an hour and they were relieved. Even after this little naughty play (Don't tell to anybody but I did enjoy my run as I was off the lead and I don't get that many chances!) they all loved me to pieces nobody; was scolding and they were always cuddling me. So I had lot of fun. I even had a Christmas present of Pedigree Schmackos Limited Edition Turkey flavour which Les & Phil got for me. So I am happy here. You look after yourself."

Scolding till the Mouth Hurts

2009-12-23T23:14:00.000-08:00

...is an ancient, almost fabled Tamil saying which, even in this day and age, carries the force of a dragon, when administered in carefully titrated doses. Too little, and it will have no effect and time is wasted; too much and wounding may occur, or else a cut-off which shuts the door to the ears and is equally ineffective. Such scolding can not, and should not, evolve into a rant. And above all, they work most effectively when there is little or no self-interest at the heart of the admonishment. They're when the recipient comes to see that prudent heeding of harshly delivered words serves their family and children best.

Take the case of little Sandhiya here:

Sandiya has became afflicted a couple of years ago with fevers and shaking, night-sweats, and been waking up in the night with shortness of breath. Her schooling has suffered and for a little girl of nine she has been right through the mill of suffering. We've had her in the CMC Hospital at Vellore more times than we can remember, and even after poring over the doctors' reports and prescriptions which have been sent to me over the seasons, it has been impossible to determine what the diagnosis of her ailment is. I've sent the mails with the scans to friends whose children are now doctors, and the same report has come back to me that, based on what they've seen, it's really not possible to say what the problem is. And so the situation goes on.

The other day she came into my room and stood by the bed. I took her hand and felt along her arm, noticing how cold it was. It's always like this, and I've taken to assuming that the chilly skin is wrapped up with the problem.

After some time she was joined by two her friends aged 5 and seven, and they climbed onto the mattrress (Sandhiya moving slowly and delicately) and we chatted together and played some songs. A cosy amtmosphere soon built up until after 25 minutes or so, Sandiya shifted, telling me that she needed to go home and study, for the following day she was sitting for an exam.

I took the opportunity of asking the other two little ones to return to their houses as we all had things to do, and it was at the point of coming up for a hug good-bye. I realised that she was now warm all over, and at that point the realisation hit me that she had on no more than a pair of boy's shorts and a thin short-sleeved shirt. No wonder she was so cold!

It took a few minutes for this to settle in, after which my tongue broke its chains and I began scolding those who are near-by. Hadn't we been sending her to hospital for tests for more than two years? Had we not passed her bulletins round amongst concerned friends in England and the UK? Had not those same friends tossed coins into the hat to enable her tests and procedures to be carried out? How can a reasonable parent expect their child to have any hope of getting better if she wanders around in this cool, rainy weather dressed little better than a street ragamuffin selling dusty sweets by the roadside?

Delivered in the form of a series of rhetorical questions, these 'scoldings', when delivered to the right people and in the correct dose, may have a deep-seated effect. And in this case it's not for me to deliver them directly to the parents: they are not the 'right people' for me. I reprimand the tea, the team, secure in the knowledge that the admonitions will be sifted, filtered and delivered in the way that they might understand.

Let's see what effect the ripples have as they radiate from this house to theirs. If we can't get to the bottom of her problem, we can and should be able to make her life more comfortable.

Wondering About Ant-Lions

2009-12-04T01:12:00.000-08:00

Outside my bedroom and study I've got a low dry wall which has become home to about twenty ant-lions, and I'm suddenly filled with a sense of zeal which makes me want to know all about these strange and wonderful animals, these animals which I know are there, within half a metre of where I'm typing this, and which I've never seen.

The wall is almost 12 foot long, 10” wide and two foot high: It's an ordinary wall up to 19”, but after that it stops being ordinary, for it splits into two miniature 1½ inch walls. No ordinary wall is this, for when it was made I had them build it hollow, for really it's two walls, each being 1½ inches thick, carefully built up with one-inch bricks and fine cement. It has fine metal bars running inside between the mini-bricks to prevent cracking, and the entire cage is encased in plaster.

To start with we filled the cavity with soil, and planted flowering plants in the trough, but in time we forgot to maintain them, or let them die back, and the dry wall went over to the hands of good healthy neglect. It was then that the ant-lions must have moved in, for one morning I saw a few shapes of inverted cones, smooth conical holes with very smooth sand up the sides. It reminded me of watching an egg-timer, or of seeing sand in an hour glass falling in, the soft sift moving down, to be swallowed away at the centre.

“If you get an ant or small bug to move over the edge, it will lose its foot-hold and the Creature will suddenly rise up, grab the ant and pull it down into the hole” said a child to me by way of explanation. I was glad to be told, glad to hear what I already knew.

Something within me wants to travel over to a net-point and Google all about these fascinating animals; and yet at a deeper level I want to do no such thing: I want to have the child's sense of wonder and find out for myself. And yet I'm reluctant to go dig it out and disturb the miniature Lion. How to proceed? Perhaps there is a way: I'll find some bugs and try to persuade them to walk over the precipice. I'll pass the Death Sentence on one and hand it over to the Executioner, then perhaps I'll catch a glimpse of the Creature. Playing the part of Judge is what I'll do next.

—

Carried by the One I used to Bear

2009-09-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

I muse at all the little creatures I have held: tadpoles, hamsters, kittens, puppies and babies of the human kind. You hold them, feed them, love them, cherish them, rear them and scold them. Then the day comes when they seem a little bigger, and their bigness is at least as big as yours: You turn and look to see the little boy, once half a head lower but now exceeding the same as you did his. You scold him, and he holds his ground and challenges you. You fight him, but your power is spent and his is only scuffed in part..

So you surrender to him.

Next minute he tells you you are forgetting something; he has to help you out of your chair - just a little stiffness and he eases your socks on for you; cooks the dinner at the weekend, which soon extends to three days long.

And last not least he picks you up, you're feather light, and he's carrying you the way you once, in former days, would carry him aloft.

Fluffy Cabbage Rice with Dahl

2009-09-05T00:52:00.000-07:00

For the Rice you'll need:
1 cup basmati rice, washed and soaked for ½ hour.
Some cabbage cut up small (A savoy or pointy cabbage gives tasty results)
Oil
Mustard seeds, cumin seeds
Dried Mixed Herbs (optional)
A little salt
1 cup water or stock

Method
Take some oil in a deep saucepan and heat it.
Add some mustard seeds and cumin seeds and wait for them to jump.

At this point at the cabbage and stir with the seeds using a wooden spoon.
Add a pinch of mixed herbs if required and Keep the heat to medium.

Drain the rice and add it to the hot cabbage mix.
(It will be quite wet but this is no problem)

Continue to stir in the heat.
After a few minutes it should 'feel ready' for you to add the water or stock.
Stir, and bring up the heat again, turn down to simmer and cover it.

Continue for 10 minutes, then open and give a quick stir.
Cover it, then turn up the heat again until it steams up.

Then turn the heat off and leave it to sweat.
The rice should be fluffy and ready to eat.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For the Dahl

A cup of yellow or red dahl, cooked earlier. A pressure cooker is ideal for this.
1 onion
Garlic cloves to taste (we use three or four)
Some ginger, chopped
1 green chilli, chopped
Madras Curry Powder (optional)

Method:

Again, heat some oil and put in mustard seeds and cumin seeds.
When they begin to jump, add the chopped onion, chilli and ginger and cook.

Madras Curry Powder may be added (or omitted) as desired.
When soft, pour in the cooked dahl - this one has some cooked carrot in it.

Stir and allow the sambhar to settle for a few minutes.

Just before serving, add fresh chopped coriander or mint leaves.

Serve with green vegetable of choice, or a salad.

2009-09-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a lover of detective stories I was intrigued to hear a review of this book which tracks the Road Hill House murder which occurred in 1860. It happened at the time when Detectives as we now know them did not exist, so we see the budding of an embryonic enterprise which went on to blossom into the globally-interlinked agencies we have today. We bear in mind that there were no telephones, no motor cars and no media as we know them today; however the new medium of the Newspaper was causing great excitement. These were the sheets which everyone eagerly went out to buy, in order to find out what was going on in the wider world out there.

Ms Summerscale has included many intriguing events that were going on at the time the murder occurred, and I involved myself by scanning plans of the house, from the plans of the house and grounds provided in the book, which I then printed and folded up into a separate booklet which I read along with the main volume. I'd read a section and then cogitate the scenario, mapping out the rooms and trying to calculate who had the motive and the opportunity to commit the murder, and most importantly, why. Everything you need to know is included in the volume, although if you want to explore further, websites are provided which enable the reader to dig as deep as he desires.

As my reading continued I became sucked into the web of intrigue and frequently found myself scribbling on pieces of paper trying to puzzle out what had really happened, much as people must have done in 1860 when the murder occurred. All round the country folks were eagerly scanning through the broadsheets to see if new maps or clues had been discovered as to the perpetrator of this shocking murder. Small details such as what our detective hero Mr Whicher would typically eat for his breakfast (a chop, a potato and a cup of coffee), the moods of the servants and the spats which flew around in the family brought the story out of the book and into my sitting room. Background details such as the passing of the Factories Act 1933 explained the standing which the head of the household, Mr Kent, would have held in the local community: child labour in factories had become banned, and as Factories Inspector Kent had efficiently seen to compliance of the Law. However this had resulted in the loss of about £400 per annum to the village, so in real terms this increased the poverty of the villagers. This fermenting resentment against Kent adds spice for those who speculate which persons might harbour a motive to commit this horrible crime against a 12-year old boy.

I tended to give this book short readings which were interspersed with periods of cogitation and musing. I lived the story as if at first hand and sometimes when I woke up in the night I felt a tingle of fear in my spine; for although the episode had occurred in 1860, the tale reverberated in my ears with a curiously modern tone. I was fascinated to read which characters in the story had survived well into the twentieth century, one of them even dying within shouting distance of my birth. My mind was thick with intrigue and speculation when I tried to figure out 'who dun it', I marvelled at the secrets which siblings share with one another and hide from the world, and when I drew my own conclusions, my hand went to my mouth to prevent it shouting in alarm.

View all my reviews >>

Canine Maturity

2009-08-24T00:35:00.000-07:00

Last Shadow barked persistently in the kitchen, and pestered so much that he was allowed in the bedroom. He sounded so sad scratching away in the kitchen and scratching at the door, that we brought his ed through into the bedroom. He settles there well. However sometimes he sneaks in the night and curls himself around my feet.

Memories of a Sixties School Library

2009-03-23T08:07:00.000-07:00

Selected POEMS T.S. ELIOT by Eliot, TS

My review

How very strict the school was that let me borrow it - quite against the spirit of what the heroic tome says.

But, as Orwell has written that the teachers who recommend the reading of Dickens to children tend to be the spitting image of the very masters whom Dickens detested.

Flashman wasn't in that school: He was busy beating my brother in a school at Liphook, Hants.

View all my reviews.