Category: Fiction

A black squirrel just trotted through our front garden, first time in many years. So, inevitably, we were chatting about writing a pastiche of Watership Down and Animal Farm. It would be about the American Grey Squirrel being introduced into the UK centuries ago and how its presence decimated the native UK red squirrel population. There is now a melanic form of the grey squirrel in the UK, the black squirrel strain we had in the garden. So, it’s all a bit weird, if one were to attempt to write an allegory about racism, colonialism, first nation peoples, payback etc…

For my sins, I asked ChatGPT to write a plot summary to encompass this and all the confusion it brings. This is what it came up with, although its title was “Squirrel Kingdom” I thought “Oakleaf Glen” had more of the Watership Down vibe about it…

Anyway, surely, this is a good starting point for expanding into a complete story, probably with a jukebox musical to follow and six seasons on Netflix, plus all the stuffed toy merchandise – red, grey, black, and pride rainbow plushie squirrels! We’ll make a fortune!!! This time next year, Rodney, we’ll be millionaires.

Oakleaf Glen

In the tranquil woodland of Oakleaf Glen, a harmonious community of red squirrels lives peacefully under the benevolent leadership of their wise elder, Elder Rowan. The red squirrels, native to this land for generations, thrive in their home, respecting the delicate balance of nature and living in harmony with other woodland creatures.

One fateful day, a new and unfamiliar presence arrives in Oakleaf Glen: a band of American grey squirrels, led by the ambitious and cunning General Ash. The greys are larger, more aggressive, and carry with them strange new ways that disrupt the established order. Initially welcomed by the red squirrels, the greys quickly start to outcompete their red counterparts for resources and space.

As the grey squirrels’ numbers grow, a schism forms within the red squirrel community. Some, led by the fiery and defiant Scarlet, advocate for resistance and reclaiming their territory, while others, under the cautious and pragmatic Acorn, believe in finding a way to coexist with the new arrivals. This division weakens the red squirrels, making it easier for the greys to assert dominance.

Amidst this turmoil, a mysterious and powerful melanic (black) form of the grey squirrel, known as Nightshade, emerges. Nightshade’s appearance adds another layer of complexity to the already fraught dynamics within Oakleaf Glen. Seen by some as a harbinger of change and by others as an ominous presence, Nightshade’s influence spreads, further complicating relationships and loyalties.

As the greys establish their rule, they begin to impose their own laws and customs, often at the expense of the native red squirrels. This new regime, dubbed “Squirrel Kingdom,” is marked by exploitation and a strict hierarchy, with the greys at the top and the reds relegated to second-class status. The woodland becomes a battleground of ideologies and survival, where the reds struggle to maintain their identity and way of life.

Parallel to the squirrels’ story, the woodland’s other inhabitants, including hedgehogs, birds, and foxes, observe these changes with growing concern. They, too, must navigate this new world order, often finding themselves caught in the crossfire of the squirrels’ conflict.

The plot reaches its climax as Scarlet and Acorn, despite their differences, realize that the survival of the red squirrels hinges on unity. They form a reluctant alliance, rallying the reds and sympathetic woodland creatures to resist General Ash’s oppressive rule. In a final, dramatic confrontation, the diverse coalition challenges the greys, seeking not only to reclaim their territory but to restore the balance and harmony that once defined Oakleaf Glen.

In the end, the narrative explores themes of colonialism, resistance, identity, and the impact of invasive species, both literal and metaphorical. “Squirrel Kingdom” serves as an allegory for the complex and often painful interactions between different cultures and species, highlighting the resilience and adaptability of those who strive to protect their heritage in the face of overwhelming change.

Just received this rather charming Christmas Round Robin from a distant friend…

Dear Esteemed Recipients of our Distinguished Christmas Card,

Greetings and salutations from the heart of our grand abode! It is with the utmost pleasure, mixed with a dash of condescension, that I extend to you the honour of perusing our annual epistle—a riveting chronicle of the exciting occurrences that have transpired in our charmed existence over the course of this rather remarkable year.

First and foremost, our palatial estate continues to be a bastion of refinement and splendour. The East Wing renovations, featuring imported stone from the quarries of Brac one of the islands off Croatia’s Dalmation Coast and adorned with chandeliers that have been passed down through generations, have reached their completion. The resplendent ambiance now rivals that of Buckingham Palace, or so I am told.

In the realm of intellectual pursuits, our prodigious offspring have continued to exceed our already lofty expectations. Tar-quynn has mastered the art of debating the merits of monocles versus spectacles at his exclusive preparatory school, while Gwendolynne’s proficiency in the saddle has become the talk of the local equestrian club. One mustn’t forget to mention the accolades garnered by little Impresaria for her impeccable talent in watercolours – a skill he undoubtedly inherited from his forebears.

Our summer sojourn to the French Riviera was, as one might expect, a delightful tryst with opulence and gastronomic indulgence. The sunsets over Le Midi were only surpassed by the adulation we received at the elite social gatherings that punctuated our leisurely afternoons.

The commodious yacht, which was a mere trifle compared to our main vessel, provided a most agreeable setting for champagne-fuelled tête-à-têtes and ostentatious displays of nautical sophistication. The cultural enrichment garnered from private performances by renowned virtuosi was, naturally, the highlight of our maritime escapades.

On the domestic front, Aspen’s latest endeavour into the world of haute cuisine has resulted in a culinary masterpiece—her signature truffle-infused quinoa risotto. It has become the pièce de résistance of our dinner parties, attracting praise from even the most discerning gastronomes. Of course, we can’t ignore the addition of a personal mindfulness pavilion in the garden, a serene sanctuary for our pursuit of inner enlightenment and physical well-being.

In conclusion, as we bask in the glow of our self-created magnificence, we send our regards to you, dear friends and family. May your year have been half as extraordinary as ours, and may your holidays be filled with the kind of refinement and sophistication that only we can truly appreciate.

Yours, with an air of restrained magnanimity,

Giles and Aspen Urquhart-Smythe
The Croft
Tilbury

In case you were wondering, yes, this is an edited version of something I got ChatGPT to produce using the following prompt:

You are to act as a pretentious, over-privileged middle-class Englishman writing a “round robin” newsletter to include with their Christmas card. Imagine all the personal and boring news from the year you have to share with friends and family you rarely see and don’t really care about.

I’ve written a short poem to use with my video montage of a few of my photos from the 2023 Cottenham Theatre Workshop production – Peter Panto!

Tickets on sale here.

Peter Panto

It’s panto season once more
Oh no it isn’t! I hear the crowd roar
We’ve tuned the ba-dum tsch, We’ve settled the score
And stitched curtain calls for the walk-down encore

The principals’ principles are sometimes ad lib
The chorus-line parts are tight like a jib
Cute kids play their part, There will be no damp squib
And the drums they may crack your spare rib

We’ve got Wendy and Peter, Hook, Mick, and Tinker
The Darlings are darlings it makes you just thinker
Tik Tok Crok, with a K? It’s a bit of a stinker
It’s all quite enough to turn you to drinker

The baddy is bad and he gets a Booooo!
The goodies are as good as goody-two-shoe
The lights are alight, There’s no dame, that one’s new
And come Saturday, once again…it’s behind you!

Written and Directed by Kerry O’Connell
Musical Director Barbara Duckworth

A puerile joke I’ve been making since schooldays when our motto was carpe diem is that it actually means “seize the fish”. Of course, it actually means “fish of the day” (see Garden, G. ISAHUC) and in a similar educational vein, a few more:

In loco parentis – Mum and Dad are coming by train after lockdown

Audio hostem – It’s my house, I get to choose what records to put on

Quid pro quo – The Italian branch of Poundland, just behind the Colloseum Bingo hall

Caveat emptor – we’ve run out of Spanish bubbly again

Status Quo – the same thing over and over again and again deeper and down, down down…

Contra spem spero – What the Romans used for birth control

Cui bono – Everyone knows about him out of U2
Pro bono publico – Yes, he gets everywhere
Contra bonos mores – There can only be one Paul Hewson…surely?

Ratio legis – one lower limb longer than the other

Respice finem – Cooking with saffron is really expensive, but worth it

Sic vita est – I had far too much rye bread and cottage cheese

Ubi sunt – Taxi hasn’t turned up

Extra omnes – Really delicious

Veritas cum libertate – Got arrested when playing the piano in a diamond-encrusted furcoat

A posteriori – Just a bum who thinks they’re better than you

Vox populi – Talk to the trees

Sine loco – Old-fashioned rollercoaster that just goes up and down

Terminat hora diem; terminat auctor opus – My train finally arrived but I got to listen to the whole of Rush’s “Caress of Steel” on the journey

Pro forma – ordering sanitaryware online

Pro tanto – The Lone Ranger voted for his sidekick

Quantocius quantotius – I’d really like to take another trip to Australia soon

Deus ex machina – Facebook

A priori – Just a priory

Anno Domini – We only get take away pizza once a year

Pax Christi – Posted the last of the Yuletide pressies

Cacatum non est pictum – Use a bag when clearing up after your dog

Magister dixit – In court for sharing “rude” selfies

Alter ego – To stop being so self-centred

Corpus Christi – All town, no gown

Ubi amor, ibi dolor – Yellow cabs are great, but very expensive

Per se – Where Canadians put their loose change and lipstick

Dramatis personae – Always making a fuss about nothing

Pontifex Maximus – Really big darning needles

Ex cathedra – They demolished a big church?!?!

Ex officio – Used to go out with the co-worker in the next cubicle

Pacem in terris – Yorkies and Jack Russells can run quite fast
Pacem in terris – Yorkies and Jack Russells can all get into tight spaces

Laudetur Jesus Christus – I can barely hear the vicar

Cum laude – Shhh…you’ll wake the neighbours

Ab initio – I got DB tattooed on my belly

Ab intestato – Beer belly

Agnus Dei – 14th June, a celebration of grannies

Et Cetera – Peter’s jazz singing sister

Quod erat demonstrandum – I’ve shown you my thigh muscles, now show me yours

E pluribus unum – Family motto of her out of “Till death us do part” who also played Aunt Sally in “Worzel Gummidge” something about not worrying what time the tram arrives

Loads more from friends and contacts on a Facebook thread I started here.

Vernon’s Equinox by David Bradley

Nominitive determinism had failed Vernon Carpenter. He was an office clerk. No one could say precisely what it was this 63-year old office clerk did day to day, so it was odd that the memo arrived offering redundancy with immediate effect.

If nominative determinism had passed him by so had the boom of the baby boom generation of which he was purportedly a member. But, such is life, hyperbole is rarely tangential with the mundane and the everyday. If he’d been a poetry reader, Vernon would have known only too well of the life of J Alfred Prufrock. He would in his seventh decade have also known that he should be raging, raging, I tell you, raging against the dying of the light.

There was a flicker, an ember, not a dying ember, a slow burn that might rekindle a fire that had yet to be lit. Vernon, the papers might have told you, if it had turned out he was a serial killer, was a quiet, unassuming man, who, according to neighbours “kept himself to himself”, a classic cliché of journalese. He did. Vernon did keep himself to himself for what he lacked in carpentry skills he made up for in an altogether different area of skill. Vernon looked to the stars. Every clear night. He had a half-decent telescope locked securely away in his garden shed. A shed that had a nice big skylight, that could be pushed open and out of the way with the broom exposing the universe to his all-seeing eye and his telescope to any thief who figured the door was locked but the roof not.

Vernon hoped that his nocturnal commissions would one day bring him fame and fortune. He was forever on the lookout for a supernova, an exploding star in the depths of space that no one else had spotted at the time and place he happened to be pointing his reflector. That said, he wasn’t particularly bothered by the two effs, he had enough to fulfil his simple dietary requirements and when it came to it, he’d rather not be famous. Nobody wants to be recognised in the supermarket aisle stockpiling tins of spaghetti hoops and baked beans, after all.

It was late March when the memo arrived. Mars had been very close to the moon in the night sky, although that kind of coincidence did not interest Vernon. It was new points of light in the sky he was after. He had a feeling that his time at Maitliss and Warner probably wouldn’t last much longer and had been musing on how to fill his days when his nights were so clearly taken.

He couldn’t bear the idea of joining a club, all those people with their weird hobbies and their weird smells. No. He’d find something solitary to do with his newly released nine-to-fives. Gardening? Definitely not! He couldn’t risk all that mud and muck near his telescope. Birdwatching? Again, a real no-no…he really couldn’t picture himself wasting his time staring at elusive and distant objects through a pair of binoculars. The irony was not lost on Vernon. He had snorted at the thought as it flitted through his mind. Maybe he could undertake a DIY project, make that skylight more secure, perhaps add a motor to raise and lower it rather than poking it with a broom…maybe not.

It was still light by the time Vernon was at his doorstep and turning the key in the lock for what may well have been something like the 16425th time in his adult life. The nights were drawing out, which to Vernon meant only one thing: longer to wait before telescope time, and things would only get worse with the imminent switch to British Summer Time. There was a waxing gibbous moon set to rise this evening, better than a full moon for stargazing. The sky was clear and the forecast fair. Orion would still be wearing his sword for a few weeks more. It was also one of only two nights in the year when the period either side of sunrise and sunset is equal. The Equinox.

Vernon’s pan was on. Baked beans this evening. No toast. He’d set the gas a little high and the glutinous orange mass was bubbling and beginning to catch. He extinguished the flame with a twist of the knob and scooped the beans and their so-called tomato sauce on to a China plate, grabbed a fork from the draining board and set off for the shed. The key was on a ring on a chain with all his others secreted in the left pocket of his office trousers. He set the beans down on the upturned crate by the shed door, quickly unlocked, grabbed the plate set it down again on the workbench to be forgotten until the wee, small hours, and cleanly removed the protective dust sheet from his telescope. Pushed open the skylight with the broom.

Was it an expensive telescope? Well, it had absorbed the best part of Vernon’s inheritance, but no matter. It was a relatively simple affair with minimal controls but a maximal tripod and the biggest, most perfectly polished mirror. The best his money could buy, Vernon would reflect. His notebooks were piled high on the workbench, dust had gathered for months on the uppermost, the solitary ballpoint pen with which they were so closely acquainted having run unbearably dry months ago. Vernon had no need of notebooks, of logging dates and times of sketching planetary trajectories. He had sufficient memory to keep tabs on what he saw each clear night. Anyway, there would be no notebook worthy of the discovery he hoped to make one of these nights.

Vernon set the telescope just east of Lyra and glued himself to the eyepiece, focusing along the way micron by micron to span lightyears of distant, ancient space.

It is the Equinox. What a night for a major find. Unwanted but not unwarranted fame and fortune might await the amateur astronomer who catches a glimpse of the first particles of light to reach planet Earth from the burst of energy ejected by a dying star. Photons that would shed light on our understanding of the life and death of a distant star.

The beans cooled and congealed on their China plate. Vernon stared and scanned, ignoring the ache in his shoulder, the chilled air pouring down on him through the skylight. Clouds were gathering slowly from the northwest. They covered the moon. The veiled Orion’s shoulders as the hunter ducked below the horizon to carry on with his stalking of the night on the dark side of the world. A blackbird shocked to wake for another day began its chorus.

The equinox was over. Vernon disengaged himself from his dreams, scooped a few dollops of the cold baked beans into his mouth, swallowing them with barely a nudge from his teeth, and pulled the skylight shut once more with the broom. He might catch forty winks before work. Work…

We’ve been tasked this week by our maestro Tim Lihoreau to come up with a sonnet for the Tyrannochorus weekly ZoomChoir. I don’t think I’ve written this type of poem since English lessons at school. It felt like too much of a challenge but I read a couple from The Bard and I think I’ve got their measure (yeah, right!).

So my first public sonnet laments the lack of live music any of us can rehearse or perform right now and also, perhaps, the notion of problems one might experience with one’s sense of hearing having been involved with relatively loud live music for years and years…

Anyway, it’s entitled “The strings I’ve strummed are wearing thin”. I hope I’ve not got my iambic pentameters mixed up with my alembic pentagons

“The strings I’ve strummed are wearing thin”

The strings I’ve strummed are wearing thin
The words I’ve sung feel like they’ve failed
The notes and chords that once echoed from within
Against an empty bar room wall now descaled
The practice of arpeggiated riffs somehow betrayed
Faced with silence in the midst of night
Reverberates no more against clefs unplayed
A wall of sound now noise so white
And yet in music, there may still lie some peace
Though sound is lost this passion still brings heat
The melody inside that catches quick won’t cease
Despite the ritardando slowing of the beat
A solo flight must glide on to take a bow
If harmony in chorus remains but a memory for now

I posted  a fairly simple challenge on Facebook at the weekend:

Make a movie mundane by subtly altering one word in the title. I'll start..."Radiators of the Lost Ark"

I expected a few friends to join in with the fun and for it to fizzle out quite quickly…I watched the first few entries dribble in and then went off and did something completely different. When I came back to Facebook a few hours later there were more than 500 comments, it quickly got to 600 and I added a few more of my own. It’s still going on, at the time of writing 745 comments, which is almost viral for one of my posts. I’d estimate that well over 700 of those are MundaneMovies several been parodied several times and handful have been duplicated, but all in lots and lots of originals.

UPDATE: November 2021, it peaked at well over 800 comments.

I especially liked Dial M for Merthyr, Marmite on the Orient Express, Last Mango in Paris, The Beer Hunter, Aye Claudius (and the sequel set in the North East, Why Aye Claudius), Dainty Dancing and Dirty Prancing, The Lady Varnishes, Chinchillas in the Mist (one of mine of which I was the proudest).

I’m already hearing from some contributors checking into rehab and therapy to try and shake off the urge to post yet more…it could go on for months…or at least until the end of lockdown 3…which could, admittedly, be months.

My good friend, jazz pianist extraordinaire and metrics expert, Hugh Tonks founder of Thymometrics, kindly copy and past the titles from the Facebook thread, ditching a few that didn’t fit the challenge criterion at all. So, here’s the list as it stands:

1 Dalmation
101 Damnations
101 Dull matrons
12 Donkeys
12 Slightly annoyed men
12 Years a Dave
1919
1983
2 Leagues under the sea
20,000 Leagues under the bath-water
2001 – A Spam Odyssey
2002 – A Spare Odyssey
24 Minute Party People
A Bag of Chips Now
A bridge really close by
A Chocolate Orange (2x)
A few decent geezers
A few good pens
A fist full of dog ends
A Night at the Oprah
A rebel without a motorbike
Aldi President’s Men
Alice in not very interesting land
Alice in Sunderland
All The President’s Deserters
American Werewolf in Poundland
Angel Hearth
Animal Fart
Apocalypse in the Past
Apocalypse later
Appointment with Darth
Austin Flowers
Aye Claudius
BT
Back to the Freezer
Back to the Furniture
Back to the Futon
Bakery Wars: The Rise of Sourdough
Bald Runner
Bat shit-crazy
Bay Beauty
Beast of Eden
Beer Hunter (6x)
Ben der
Ben Err
Ben Them
Bend Hur
Bend it Like Geller
Biplane
Bladestroller
Borax
Bored of the Rings
Born to be Mild
Bra Wars
Bravefart
Breakwind at Tiffany’s
Bridge on the River Cam
Bridget Jones’s Dairy
Briefs Encounter
Briefs on Counter
Brighton Rack
Broke the Back of the Ironing Mountain
Brokeback Mound
Broom Service
Broom with a View
Brrring me the hearing aid of Alfredo Garcia
Built up area gump
Bunfight at the OK Corral
Bus Station Zebra
Cakes on a plane
Car Wars
Casino Foil
Casino Peasant
Cassadarker
Catch a Cold
Chariots of Water
Charlie and the opium factory
Charlies Angles
Cheesy Rider
Chinchillas in the Mist
Chitty Chitty Gang Bang
Chunderball
Citizen Ken
Clean dancing
Clockwork Orange
Clockwork Orangutan
Close Encounters of the Turd kind (2x)
Clothes Encounters of the Third Kind
Clothes Horse
Codzilla
Coldfinger
Contacts
Covid park
Crease
Crouching Tiger Hidden Cat Poo
Crouching tiger hidden drag queen
Cuckoo flew over the cuckoo’s nest
Cup!
Curry on Camping
Dad’s Armband
Dainty dancing
Dam butters
Dances with feral pigeons
Dances with Wombats
Dancing with Wives
Davey Crocket, King of the Mild Frontier
Daydream on Elm Street
Deaf in Venice
Deaf Poets Society
Dearth of Stalin
Death on the Pile
Death on the Tyne
Debbie does trump
Desperately Seeking Sanity
Devon’s Gate
Dial M for Merthyr
Dial M for Mother
Diamonds aren’t forever
Dick Soup
Die easy
Diet Hard
Dietary Harry.
Dirty Hankie
Dirty prancing
Dirty Rotten Scourers
Dobbie does Dallas
Don Kirk
Donnie lighto
Dove Actually
Dr. Maybe
Dr. Strangelove or: How I learnt to stop worrying and Love the Bum
Draws
Drizzle man
Dusk till midnight
Easy Briber
Edward Thimblehands
Eggs Royale
Elvis in Dagenham
Enema at the gates
Enter with Drag On
Escape to Victory Way
Escargot to Victory
Expensive willy
Exterminator
Fantastic Feasts and Where to Find Them
Fart Club
Fart club
Farto
Fatman
Ferris Buehler’s Day Job
Ferris Buehler’s Day On
Finding Memo
Finocchio
Fleshdance
Florence of Arabia
Flush Gordon
For your Pies Only
Forest Dump
Forest trump
Forest Trump
Forrest Trump
Four Lines
Four Waddings and a Funfair
Four weddings and a bar mitzvah
Friday the 14th
Fried
From Here to Enfield
From Reigate with Love
Froth on the Nile
Game- i want to play forever
Game of Crones
Gentlemen prefer ponds
Goat with the wind
Gold Fillings of 1933
Golden Arm
Gone with the regular bowel movements
Good Mowing Vietnam
Good Wall Hunting
Good Will Haunting
Greasy
Gregory’s Grill
Gregory’s Gull
Grindrella
Groan with the Wind
Ground Dog Day
Groundnut Day
Groundnut Day
Gums
Gunfight at the UK Corral
Gut Carter
Harriet’s on Fire
Harry Patter
Harry Potter and the Giblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prints
Harry Potter and the Odour of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Pensioner of Azkaban
Home Loan
Home together
Home with everyone
Home with the Entire Family
How the Breast was Won
How the vest was won
Howard’s Blend
Indiana Jones and the last charades
Inglorious Bustards
It’s a wonderful lift
It’s a wonderful loaf.
Its a terrible life
It’s a Wonderful Knife
It’s a Wonderful Lime
It’s a wonderful lime.
Jeepers 600+
Jive and let die
John Thomas Crown Affair
Jungle magazine
Jurassic Carehome
Jurassic Parp
Jurassic Party
K3
Kind Hearts and Castanets
Kitten Park
La La Lamp
Lady Chatterley’s Liver
Lady in the Pan
Lame – I want to limp forever
Larder on the Orient Express
Last Exit to Boston
Last mango in Paris
Last Tanga in Paris
Lawrence of Suburbia
Layer Cave
Leasing Las Vegas
Legally bland
Legends of the Mall
Lidl Shop of Horrors
Life of Pasty
Life of pie
Like Actually.
Littlest Millionaire
Lock stock and two smoking burritos
Logan’s Rug
Look Back in Angers
Lord of the files
Lords of the Rims
Lost Bingo in Paris
Lost in Specsavers
Love handles and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing.
M*U*S*H
Malice in Wonderland
Mardy Poppins
Marmite on the Orient Express
Mary poppers
Mary Pops In
Mary shelleys frankunfurter
Mattresses and broom handles
Mellow submarine
Men in Pink
Midnight Cowpat
Midnight cowshed
Midnight Espresso
Midnight Tesco-Express
Minstrel on 34th Street
Mission Impossible Plague Nation
Monday Night Fever
Monsters Ink
Moulin Blanc
Moulin Rug
Mr Doubtfire
Mr Zhivago
Mrs Certainfire
Mrs Doubtfart
Muddle on the Orient Express
Murder on the 6.30 from Charing Cross
Muriel’s Weeding
Murmur on the Orient Express
My Big Fat Greek Yoghurt
My dog
My Shabby Launderette
Night at a Morrisons
Night Train to Monkseaton
Nightgown on Elm Street
Nightmare on Rooks Street
Nine and a half weeds
Not in Hull
Nowtbreak
O Brother, Where Fart Thou?
Oh What A Lovely Wart
Oklahomo!
Once upon a time in Middlesborough
One flew over a robins nest
Cullercoats harbour
One of our Draconians is missing
One shite day
Our Man in Havant
Out of Paprika
Pack Up Your Roubles
Paws
Paws.
Peaches
Petty Woman
Pilates in the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Vest
Pilates of the Caribbean
Pilots of the Caribbean
Pink street
Piss In Boots
Planes, Trains and National Express
Polite Club.
Pontoon
Prescription, Quorn of the Dessert
Pretty Worm
Princess Kong
Pulp fact
Pup Fiction
Raging Ball
Raging Bulldog
Raiders of the lost houses of parliament
Rebel without a Clause
Rebel without a Clue
Reservoir Cats
Reservoir Frogs
Rhyl with a View
Ricky
Rioters at the Gate
Rocky Horror Picture Shoe
Roman Business Trip
Rosemary’s Bauble
Salmon fishing in the sink
Salmon Fishing with a Lemon
Sandal
Saturday Night Fevertree
Saving Private Godfrey
Saving private parts
Saving Ryan’s Privates
Saving Ryan’s Parfait
Scar Trek
Schindler’s lift
Schindlers lift.
Schindler’s shopping list
Scratch 22
Seats on a plane
Sen
Sense and Insensibility
Seven Broads for Seven Brothers
Seven Years in The Wet
Shakespeare in Hove
Shallow throat
Shaun of the poorly
Shaving private Ryan
Shaving private Ryan
Shred
shriek
Shrike
Sickly Ballroom
Sid and the argonauts
Silence of the limbs
Singing in the pain
Sinking in the Rain
Sleeping With The Enema
Slightly cold in Alex
Slow and not really agitated
Slumdog Milliner
Snacks on a Plane
Snakes on a menu
Snow white and a couple of old tin miners
Soft edge implement runner
Some Like a Hut
Some Like It Rotten
Some like it Tepid
Some Like it Tepid
Sound of Muesli.
Souper man
Spar wars
Spider dead.
Stand by somebody else
Star Jumps
Star Trek, The Search for Spam
Star Wardrobes
Star Wards
Star Warts
Star Warts
Star Warts.
Steamboat Wally
Steve Davis’ Diary
Straight Outta Cornwall
Straight Outta Croydon
Submission impossible
Sunday Night, Monday Morning
Supermac
Swan Flew Over the Cuckoos Next
Tarzan of the Japes
Tax advisor
Taxi Drivel
Tents and Tentativity
Tepid Runnings
Tess of the Baskervilles
Texas toothbrush massacre
The 39 Stops
The 40 Year Old Plusnet
The 40 year old vegan
The 400 Plows
The Andromeda Stain
The Bagel Has Landed
The Balls of St Trinian’s
The Batter of Britain
The Beeching Children
The Beige Brothers
The Best Little Warehouse in Texas
The Best Ordinary Marigold Hotel
The Blair Stitch Project
The Blue Fax
The Bradley Bunch (The Movie)
The Bridge on the River Wye
The Bridge over the River Thames (2x)
The Budgies of Madison County
The Cent of a Woman
The clash of the pathetic whimps
The Colon Purple
The Cool Sea
The Covenant
The covid holiday
The Dampbusters
The day of the hamster.
The Day Of The Jackass
The Day the Hearth Stood Still
The dead poets sobriety
The devil wears primark
The Devil’s Advocaat
The Dogfather
The Door Hunter
The Draftsman’s Tax return
The Dull
The Estuary Buoys
The Exercise
The Extortonist
The fantastic 3&1/2
The Fat and the Furious
The Fifth Elephant
The Fifth Sense
The Flea
The Flirty Dozen
The Found World
The French Concoction
The Fresh Lieutenant’s Woman
The Germinator
The Girl on a Push Bike
The Girl with a Wagon Tattoo
The Gizzard of Oz
The Godmother
The good the bad and the very attractive
The good the bald and the ugly
The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy
The Goolies
The Graduate Cylinder
The Grand Budapest Motel
The Grandfather
The Great Potato
The Great St Trinian’s Tray Robbery
The Green Mime
The Greenstamps Redemption
The Gums of Navarone
The Guns of London
The Habit
The Habit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hamshank Redemption
The Harder They Comb
The Hoarse Whisperer (2x)
The Imitation Gammon
The Irritation Game
The Jingle Book (2x)
The Karate Kit
The king and nobody
The King’s Peach
The Lady and The Trump
The Lady Turns Up
The Lady Varnishes (2x)
The Lambshank Redemption
The Land that Tim forgot
The Land that Time Furloughed
The Lidl Mermaid
The Lime of Brian
The Limitation Game (2x)
The little barmaid
The little shop of cuddly things
The living alive
The Longest Dag
The longest Dave
The Longest Way
The Lost Buoys
The Lunchpack of Notre Dame
The Magnificent Severn
The magnificent six and a half
The Malteser Falcon
The man that went up a hill and came down a marshmallow
The Man Who Shot Liberty Balance
The man with the golden pun
The man with the golden thumb
The Mask
The Mediocre 7
The Middling Exotic Marigold Hotel
The Mildness of King George
The moth effect
The Mudguard
The Night Manger
The not quite so transformed
The Oddfather
The old ones
The Parent Tap
The Pelican Boxer-shorts
The Pelican Briefs
The phantom of the gala bingo
The pirates of the houses of parliament
The Pornshop
The Postgraduate
The Postman Never Rings At All
The Princess in the Fog
The Printer’s Bride
The Quiet Manatee
The Railway Chilblain
The Rocky Horror Picture Shop
The Scent of a Worm
The science of the lambs
The Seven Samovars
The Shallows
The Shiting
The Silence of the Spam
The snickers man
The snooze brothers
The Sound of Mucus
The Sound of Muzak
The sound of nothing (2x)
The spy who hated me
The Staycation
The Talentless Mr Ripley
The Texas Chainstore Massacre
The Texas seesaw massacre
The Thin Red Wine
The Toblerone Triangle
The Truman Shoe
The Turd Man
The Twilight Zoom
The umpire strikes back
The unavegened
The usual cesspits
The very dark rider
The Visible Man
The Way to the Stairs
The Wicker Chair
The Wizard of UK
The Wool of Wall Street
The World Is Enough
The Wrench Connection
There Will Be Food
There’s nothing about Mary (2x)
Things to do in Denver when you’re a Druid
Thora and Lewis
Three Billboards Outside Epping Morrisons
Three days of the pigeon
Three ironing-boards outside Ebbing, Missouri
Three Men and a Booby
Tindrella
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spa
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, SPAD
To Kid a Mockingbird
Toy Tory
Trading Plaices
Training Places
Trains, Planes and Shank’s Pony
Treasure Peninsula
True Grits
Try another day
Try Hard
Twelve Irritated Men
Umbrella (Barbarella)
V for Vienetta
Vanilla Pie
Village of the Dimmed
WD40
West Side Store
When Harry met Derek
When Harry met Salty
When Harry Smote Sally
When Sally met Burt
Where Eagles Undertake a Risk Assessment
Whisky No More!
Who Cooked Roger Rabbit?
Who farmed Roger Rabbit?
Who framed Roger Bannister
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wade?
Wife of Pi
Willy Wonka and the Chalk Factory
Wimp Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Wound Bill
Your Anus
Zorba the Geek

Next up, advance warning for fans of the site: Mash up two or more TV programmes to come up with a new pitch. For example, Richard Osman’s Game of Thrones

I’ll post the call for Telly Mash some time on Friday 22nd January, probably late afternoon UK time.

UPDATE: I’ve sent various iterations of my short stories to a select few friends over the last few weeks. When I’d written Remediators, two of these beta testers (Andrea and Darren) felt that this chapter was actually the prologue to Wave Markers rather than the other way around, which was my intent.

So, with that new logic in mind, I’ve spent a couple of hours working on how that might move better in the opposite direction rather than my trying to make water flow uphill. The story now begins with the fix, we get a twist, and then the future emerges in the latest version here (PDF).

As with all of this writing so far, each component seems to be a standalone short story in itself, but I suspect as it develops and becomes more complex, that will be less and less obvious. At the moment the hybridisation of Wave Markers and Remediators is essentially a 2600-word short story. I’m taking some time, per Darren’s suggestion, to let it simmer gently on the backburner.

Remediators

I fell asleep thinking about a future where we might start withdrawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a sufficient rate that it actually has a serious effect and underdoes some of the problems of decades and decades of burning fossil fuels.

I didn’t sleep well, but in between kept dreaming up bits and pieces of a story about this notion. When I couldn’t get back to sleep, I got up, put the kettle on, and scribbled the story on to a few sides of A4. I’ve just finished typing it up and editing it down.

The story is called Remediators of the Anthropocene. It follows on from the putative prologue – Wave Markers – pulled together from my fenland gothics written at the end of 2020. It’s perhaps Chapter 1 of the book or maybe just another standalone effort…we’ll see.

Remediators of the Anthropocene by David Bradley (PDF)

Elouise Sparrowhawk, Dr Sprawk to her students, was proud of her surname. To her imagination, it told of an ancient ancestry, of woodlands and fens, of wildlife and nature, of a time long before now. It told of woodcutters and woodturners of fenland farmers and drovers. It hinted at a long-forgotten time when things were, to put it bluntly, better. Dr Sprawk hankered after those times. Perhaps it was an unrequited nostalgia for events that never happened, places that were not as they seem, and people who never walked this earth.

Whatever the nature of past reality, Elouise knew that in her laboratory there had been an opportunity to remediate the present. Whoever was to blame for the here and now mattered not to those living the nightmare today. It was Arvane, Arvane Tempor, who first spotted the changes. It was a chance discovery, a contaminant in a reaction flask. The serendipity was not lost on the team although no one who lived through the plastic age would ever have dreamt a solution might be found in this chemistry. They could not have imagined that polythene, the scourge of the Anthropocene, would, with a few almost trivial molecular tweaks, become the panacea.

Tempor was almost done with his Master’s and was on the verge of writing-up, but one last experiment was needed just for completeness. He had been fastidious throughout, dotting every “i”, crossing every “t”. His lab-books were meticulous, not for him their digital descendants. He bathed in the ethereal smell the pages absorbed that would take decades to fade. However, this time, it was late. It was a seemingly unimportant experiment. He rushed a little. Contamination happens. Identifying the contaminant and what went wrong, or as it turns out, right, later would only be possible because of Tempor’s more usual diligence.

Molecular modification followed by chemical correction somehow generated a structure so reactive and so porous that it could literally draw breath. That porosity give it the space, or more technically, the surface. Lay it all out flat, Tempor would tell his colleagues, and a single ounce would cover 400 tennis courts. That fact alone was astonishing, four times the area available for absorption of any previous material. But those earlier molecular sponges mopped up useful gases, such as oxygen and hydrogen, for various applications, high-speed reactions, safe storage. This was different. Not so much a useful gas, as a gas of which we could do with a lot less in the air we breathe.

Giving a porous plastic coating to hundreds of tennis courts was not the aim, of course. Once Tempor and Dr Sprawk had figured out the ins and outs of their new material, they were then intent on finding ways to pack it ever tighter into the machine, the remediators.

A lot of raw material was needed to pack the 1000 feet spiral columns that would line Sprawk’s towers. But, there was a lot of it to be had, much of it lying dormant in deep mounds on the outskirts of the old cities. The relative ease with which the plastic could be mined from those countless landfills of the twentieth century made sourcing the feedstock incredibly efficient and ironically enough, almost carbon neutral. Moreover, after all these years in the ground even the plastic bags that would last for centuries had degraded to a suitable form ripe for processing into the green strands for Sparrowhawk’s columns.

The vast woven myriad within the towers would need nothing more than water and sunlight to do their job. The drains below would catch their sickly sweet rain and this could be tapped and trapped, vitrified and buried again. Carbon, locked away for aeons just as its precursors had been in the liquid black gold on which society so wantonly imbibed in those long-lost days.

Thousands of towers were built across the wide tropical belts. They looked out over broken seas from abandoned coastlines. Pharos ruling the waves, Tempor would joke. Location was irrelevant to the swirling atmosphere, but sunlight and water were key ingredients so the polar north and the desert margins were precluded from this work for their lack of one or the other. Exactly how many towers were needed was a moot point, they ran with high efficiency wherever they were built drawing their hot breath deeply. The analysts tapped their devices assuming malfunction, but as the data accumulated, so evidence of remediation sprang from far and wide like so many green shoots showing in a new world spring. The sceptics tapped their thermometers but could not ignore something of a soothing chill in the air.

Ice was crystallising once more at the poles. The fringes of the equatorial deserts moistened subtly. Tiny islands poked algal crowns from beneath the waves and quickly dried, terrestrials arrived to feast on the marine and the wind planted the seeds it couriered from distant dry lands so that shoots would show and plants would bloom digging deep with anything but hesitant roots. Elsewhere, the new fenlands began to dry, the marsh gas to dissipate. Who would have thought, plastic – the ultimate friend of the earth?

Download the PDF of Wave Markers right now.

This is a work in progress and so far it is a hybridisation and expansion of a clutch of short stories I wrote at the end of 2020. The idea of melding them together was suggested by an enthusiastic friend who imagined my short tales morphing into something akin to Cloud Atlas (I wish). And, like a map of the clouds, wave markers could be as ephemeral and imagined…and perhaps as pointless. It’s a kind of Fenland Gothic in the “eco lit” genre, either way.

This short story expands on the journey of Madelief, a Dutch woman, perhaps from a religious order, walking through the natural world of the New Fenlands with a mission in mind, a refuge named on a scrap of bark, hidden in the folds of her clothing, and the idea of a seed in her belly. A seed that might rebuild the world after society is ravaged by disease and ever-higher tides…

You can read the latest iteration of the story Wave Markers in PDF format here for your Kindle etc. This is, at this point (January 2021) either the complete story or simply the prologue for an as yet unwritten proper debut novel from David Bradley, we’ll have to wait and see. I’ve also done some additional writing in a short story entitled Remediators of the Anthropocene, which has also now been subsumed into Wave Markers.