Elixir of Miracles

There is a liquid available which, when consumed, has truly miraculous effects on the imbiber. This liquid has the ability to transform the entire planet into whatever you want it to be - instantly!
This liquid, called alcohol, can turn your neighbourhood into anything from a urinal to a giant rubbish bin. It also enables you to slip into a mode called 'Mind over matter'.
You don't mind, and no one else matters. Small wonder then that it's so popular - and so readily available!
This means that you can band together with other people and, in the middle of the night, you can shout, scream, vomit, distribute litter, vandalise & anything else you can think of, because suddenly, it doesn't matter!
In the unlikely event that you get arrested during the course of your 'harmless fun' you will probably get away without being punished because afterwards you will be able to laugh, shrug and say that you were intoxicated - so it really wasn't your fault at all!
And if you drink this draught for long enough you will successfully transform yourself into two completely separate people. Even if, when you are not drinking, your behaviour is normal & law-abiding, when you do drink you will suddenly become someone who almost everyone else avoids out of embarrassment. When this happens you will have no recollection of what you have done while being this other person. When this happens you will stand an extremely good chance of losing everything you hold dear - because the thing that suddenly takes priority above everything & everyone else is this marvellous liquid.
Goodbye job. Goodbye friends. Goodbye employment. Goodbye social life. Goodbye last vestiges of sanity. Goodbye family. Goodbye ability to make sound judgements. Hallelujah! Praise the brew!
Yet another bonus of this magical fluid is it's ability to make you speak in a language that no one else can understand.
Dribble! Wet yourself! Smell like a cross between a brewery and a public convenience!
As the Central Scrutinizer himself once said (admittedly about something entirely different):

"You'll love it - it's a way of life!"

Teck nollo gee

Latest figures reveal that people using computers spend an average of 12 years of their lifetimes staring at a small representation of an egg timer, praying for their laptop to do what it's supposed to do, threatening their computer with actual physical violence, and going grey with electronically-generated anguish.
Thanks to this marvellous new technology, perfectly normal people can be reduced to a nervous, gibbering wreck by those three little words:
Programme.                                           Not.                                                   Responding.
Computers, we are told, are amazing things. They enable us to send messages instantly to any part of the world - unless, of course, those amazing little problems rear their amazing little heads. Then they amazingly enable us to become enormously enraged to the extent that we are enabled into having amazingly fatal heart attacks & sensational seizures.
I'm not sure, but I can't recall a piece of paper having this effect on anyone. Your biro runs out of ink - ho hum. 4 pence for a new one. Your printer runs out of ink - scarey interview & much pleading with your bank manager.
Is it just me - or is the internet just a cunning way of cutting down the burgeoning elderly population by presenting them with problems that not even a rocket scientist could solve - thus driving them headlong to an earlier grave with despair?
Answers on a postcard - or else!

On the border between Mercia & Wessex

Bristol, Spring 2011

All roads lead to more roads

Is there anything beyond the lateral, horizontal free-fall?
Is there anywhere left to see that hasn't already been obliterated
to make way for the human racetrack?
Thick clouds
omens unheeded and unseen above your artificial canopy
drawing down to claim and smother
in the name
of another game
yet more of the same
Constant rover
Land's End to Dover
God send
God send
God send
God's end

Game over

The Great Awakening

Night falls, but dawn breaks
the wind calls, the leaf shakes
the snow smothers the frozen lakes
the faults of others for your mistakes
The Earth gives, the Earth takes
the soil lives, for all our sakes
hunger fill, thirst slakes
until, the Earth quakes
drink deep, yearning aches

from her sleep the Earth awakes

Magpie

Magpies playing in the trees
firing their toy machine guns at all & sundry
Two for joy & all for one
Airborne and portly relics
of when the world was still
only available

in black & white

Dream landscape

For most of my adult life (from the age of 15) I've worked backstage in the theatre. In the summer of '98 my back was badly injured in an accident during the get-out of WNO's la Traviata. By the autumn of 2000 I was in an awful lot of pain and was no longer able to work at all.
I still suffer from chronic lower backpain, and can still no longer work.
But I still dream that I am working backstage and building sets that are sometimes even more bizarre & unlikely than the ones I used to help build when I was still touring with the aforementioned opera company!
On the few occasions when I am not being a stagehand in my sleep I quite often go to a place that has a (for me) instantly recognisable topography.
Sometimes I am travelling on a train, and the train goes across a large area of fields among some hills before crossing a gorge (not unlike the Avon Gorge) on a high bridge.
There is also a fantastically tall building which I have ascended in a terrifying transparent lift - right to the top. I don't know how high it is, but it is always quite daunting. There was another time that I was dreaming of travelling on a train and, looking out of the carriage window, I could see the tower in the distance.
Another feature is a huge rock - a bit like a small mountain. In yet another dream I was wandering through a valley road with someone and, stopping to indicate a large rock to my companion, I can recall telling him that I often dreamed of a rock similar to this one, adding: "Of course, the rock in my dream is much larger than this." When I awoke after this dream I did think it funny.
Some years ago I dreamed that I was in a hospital - as a patient. The truly strange thing about it was the fact that I woke up twice during the dream, and both times I returned to the same dream. I wasn't scared by the dream while I was experiencing it, but when I thought back to it afterwards I realised that it had been quite an awful nightmare. I won't describe it here, but if we ever meet ask me to relate it to you.

A minor key drone

It's almost bedtime. Listening to some extremely chilled Miles Davis on headphones (thanks, Derek). Another friend of mine (Tony) told me a story that he heard some time ago about some people excavating the remains of an old Roman road somewhere in the north of England and, while one of them was alone at the underground site he was suddenly able to hear a minor key drone. Thinking that some of his colleagues were listening to a tape or the radio in another part of the dig, he was astonished to see the hoof & foreleg of a horse step through the stone and, cowering in fear, he watched the rest of the horse come into view.
He was able to see an extremely weary rider slouched in the saddle, dressed in early Roman attire; followed by several other figures on foot. After a few minutes they had all disappeared into the far wall.
The experience so rattled the witness that he said nothing about it until eventually pressed into doing so by friends a few weeks later who wanted to know what was wrong.
Describing the clothing & the weaponry that the figures had been carrying they were able to ascertain that the vision had emanated from sometime in the 3rd or 4th century when the Romans still ruled in England.
What struck me about this was the sound of the minor drone that seemed to herald the vision. Being something of a musician myself, I am always transported somehow into the distant past when I hear a song in a minor key; and a minor key drone really seems to contain an air of mystery & magic.
Could this be an element of time travel?

Things that happen while you're asleep

A few nights ago I went to sleep and, at the beginning of my dream, I was in a large capsule with a number of other people. The capsule was about 50' long, mainly transparent, and travelled through a long tunnel that comprised a series of interesting, entertaining and exciting things for the benefit of the occupants of the capsule as they travelled through the tunnel. Unfortunately, I cannot recall any of the things we saw before the end of the ride.
However, when the ride came to a halt, I was one of the last to disembark and, before myself and another man could get off, the doors closed and the capsule began moving in the opposite direction. We could only watch as the capsule went through the wall at the back end of the 'station' and took us on a long, high-speed ride of terror that ended above ground in another part of the town which neither of us were familiar with.
Managing to climb out of the now stationary capsule, my companion went underneath the capsule and, to my horror, he metamorphosed into a steel strut or support for the rail system that the capsule travelled upon.
Although I managed to avoid a similar fate, I felt that I had fallen from the frying pan and into the fire because the next thing I knew was that I was one of a party of other humans that were now worker slaves to an army of frightening & inhuman creatures that were using us to construct more tunnels.
I remember that many of us were hoping to rebel & overthrow our cruel oppressors, but we were constantly observed & terrorised by the creatures. Eventually there was a form of rebellion, but the leader of the creatures, a tall, muscular, menacing, dark & horned figure escaped, running past me to freedom as it evaded capture.

The last thing I remember before waking up was the dreadful feeling that the danger was not over.

A Life Rewinding

Near the end of his life, the 89 year old Paul Davidson awoke one day to find on the right arm of his motorised wheelchair, instead of the normal lever for propelling himself in different directions, the control panel of a time machine.
It was set out much like the controls of a video or dvd player: Play, Pause, Fast Forward, Fast Rewind. Stop.
He had awoken a little earlier than he normally would, and decided to experiment with this curious adaptation to his wheelchair. Tentatively, he pressed the Play button.

When, after a while, nothing seemed to have happened, his finger hovered over the Fast Rewind symbol. A curious smile rearranging his wrinkled face, he pressed the button.
There was a strange, musical drone in a minor key and he was suddenly rushing backwards through time at several times the normal speed of his life. The careworker lady who looked after him flashed into existence, a blur as she attended to his needs in reverse. Days & nights strobed by as he felt his strength recover.
It wasn't long before he was out & about again - delighted to be able to see old friends again - friends who had recently passed away - though he was sad that he was going too fast to communicate with them again.
The minor key drone still in his ears, he was back working at the factory again, though his job had drastically changed; at a headlong speed he was now required to turn finished products back into raw materials.
Then he was rushing his dead wife from hospital back home where her health swiftly improved, and his children were suddenly back on the scene again.
What seemed like only moments later his children were going back through adolescence until he & his young wife were alone after getting wedded.
Disturbed by the fact that he no longer had any recollection of his wife or children, Paul was travelling back through his own youth - amazed to see his own parents not just alive again, but so much younger - and looking younger by the minute.

A feeling of panic made him look for the controls on the arm of his wheelchair, but the chair was no longer there. When he looked back up he was back at school, emptying his head of knowledge at such a rate that he became mystified by the sky & the rushing clouds above him.

Then he was too young for school and, still fast rewinding at a terrifying rate, he felt his body dwindle until his last memory was of his parents in old fashioned garb smiling at him as he lay in his pram.

When his carer found him lying on the floor he was dead. When she put his wheelchair back upright after his body had been taken away, she noticed that the control lever had snapped off the arm when he had taken his final tumble.