Category: Fiction

Wow, What a Book #3, #4, #whatever

On By Mick CanningIn books, Fiction, Non fiction, opinion, Philosophy, reading, Review18 Comments

Well, Saturday already. Seems only yesterday it was Friday *sigh* I suppose I’d better get on with it.

I don’t think I’ll do ten of these after all, because I rather run the risk of listing books just because I like them, rather than because they have had a real and measurable influence on me. So today I present the final three.

1. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.

Image result for silent spring

I read this book when I was in my mid twenties, and it really did open my eyes to what we as a species were doing to the planet. Up until that point, I had not really understood the impact that we were having on the environment. Shocked, I became interested in learning more, and then even more shocked as I learned what food and drink manufacturers put in their products for us to consume. At that time, one of them was the nasty compound dropped by the Americans on Vietnam during the Vietnamese War; a defoliant that was known to be carcinogenic.

It was used as orange food colouring.

I got hold of a list of all the ‘E’ numbers that were permitted additives, and which the industry certainly didn’t want us to know about. Certain ones were very nasty indeed. It was at this point that I became very keen on reading the labels on food and drink packaging.

I became involved with various pressure groups, such as Greenpeace.

That book changed my life.

2. The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham.

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In some ways, this could lay claim to be the book that has had the greatest influence on my adult life, but in a different way to Silent Spring.

I’d always tried to be a reasonably decent human being, but reading this made me rethink the way that I wanted my life to be. It is the story of a man who returns from the first world war and begins to question his place in society. He finds the trappings of modern western life, and its values, empty and meaningless – its focus on making money, selfishness and greed. He then searches for something meaningful in his own life, through education, religion and travel, and explores his relationships to others.

The message in this book immediately resonated with me; that there is much more to life than the pursuit of money, essential though some of it it might be to my survival. Other people mattered. Helping others was important. What is called the spiritual life, whether or not you believe in a god or not, was an important part of us all.

5. The War of the Worlds by H G Wells.

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Are you serious? you ask. How could this book be an influence on your life? One of the first science fiction books, and admirable for that, but an influence?

Well, it is easily told, and the answer will probably surprise you. This book provided the initial impetus for me to become a vegetarian.

Yes, a vegetarian. There is a passage in the book where the narrator recoils with disgust as the Martians take the blood from still-living humans for their nutrition, but then comments that it was probably the same reaction as an intelligent rabbit would feel observing our own eating habits. That made me consider whether it was necessary for me to eat meat, and I came to the conclusion that no, it was not.

Well, yes, right…or write…

On By Mick CanningIn Fiction, NaNoWriMo, science fiction, writing64 Comments

The clocks have gone back, and it’s getting dark earlier and earlier, but there is still a blackbird singing in the garden, although there is also the smell of wood smoke in the air – from a bonfire, I would guess – and a definite chill in the air. The autumn leaves have been exceptionally beautiful this year, seeming to have an extra couple of tones of red and orange. And there are still plenty of late flowers out. I may be a summer person, but it is  decidedly beautiful at the moment..

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I said I’d take part in NaNoWriMo this year, didn’t I? What on earth could I have been thinking of?

Did I really commit to writing over a thousand words a day all through the month?

Oh, for goodness sake! I’ve not even had time to look at anyone’s posts for the last five days, let alone write anything.

I quit. November 2nd, and I quit. Just like that. I’m sure no one else has ever backed out of it that early. Can I claim some sort of record?

But, as some sort of penance, I’m going to put up a short fiction piece for today’s post. I wrote it last week, so that’s almost November…

Light Years

It appears now both ridiculously arrogant and incredibly stupid, but after a mere few thousand years of development we seemed to think that we had arrived at a stage of development that we should consider to be an advanced civilisation. For a handful of years we had been capable of a rather limited space travel. We were beginning to probe the makeup of the universe and were on our way to some understanding of its complexities. And out of all of these thousands of years of development, we had had machines only for a few hundred years. We had had electric light for less than two hundred years. Computers for less than a hundred. We reached the moon one year, and two generations later we were probing the edges of the Solar System. And in those two generations, the life expectancy of almost everyone on the planet increased dramatically. We invented mobile phones and within one generation they were tiny computers that virtually controlled our lives.

In short, the pace of our technological progress increased exponentially.

But we had had wars and cruelty and genocide all of this time. We never solved that problem, we only invented crueller and more effective killing machines.

And should we ever make contact with another civilisation – that’s civilisation, mark you, not just life form – then the odds were that it might be several millions of years old.

No one seemed to realise the rather obvious implications.

And, despite warnings from a few of our more eminent and talented thinkers, we continued to recklessly send signals out into this huge unknown, advertising both our presence and our level of development.

Science fiction in popular culture would have aliens suddenly visiting our planet, swooping through the skies in huge flying saucers with deadly heat rays as weapons. The visitors would be recognisably bipedal – large headed, of course, since their brains would be more developed than ours – but with a limited range of facial expressions (why limited, I always wondered? Surely they would have developed more subtle ones? But perhaps they no longer needed them). The world would be in a panic; world leaders would meet, and attempt to make contact with the visitors. There would be an ill-advised attempt to engage them in battle, which would turn out very badly, but they would finally be forced to leave, or leave of their own accord, and in the end we would be the wiser for it.

But it wasn’t like that at all.

No one seemed to know what they saw, and many seemed unaware even that they had seen anything at all. There was light, but not the lights of UFOs buzzing through the skies at night, and not the stabbing beams of destruction envisioned by the writers and film-makers. For several days, it seemed to me that the light was a rather odd colour, and at times a little misty, or…hard. Others noticed that the light would move around, almost in blocks. It sounds ridiculous, but there you go.

That was about the time that I noticed a slight throbbing in my head and my brother complained of a ringing in his ears. No more than that, although it did seem that there was more shouting and arguing from some of the families in the neighbourhood, but this wasn’t particularly unusual and I thought nothing of it then.

It was the following day, which was yesterday, that everything seemed to go quiet. The arguing had stopped, for which I was grateful, but so had the background noise of traffic. I walked down to the ground floor and pushed open the door, and with that the throbbing in my head seemed to get worse. There were one or two people in the street outside, but no one seemed to be in a particular rush. All of them appeared to be strolling or standing around aimlessly and when I began to walk towards one of them, I found it quite difficult to move my legs; they felt very, very tired. I stopped and looked at the man I had been approaching, but when I caught his eye he began crying. It seemed shocking, and I wanted to cry too, although I did manage to stop myself. In the end, I turned around and went back home. I thought I’d see if there was anything on the news, but the TV no longer worked, and nor did my laptop. There was power, since the power lights came on, and I filled the electric kettle and made a cup of tea, but that tasted awful – perhaps the milk was off –  and I poured it away.

My head was still throbbing, but I thought I ought to see how my brother was this morning. I tapped on his door, then went in, but he wasn’t in his room and the bed looked as though it hadn’t been slept in. He had gone out the previous evening, and it seemed obvious that he had stayed out all night. It didn’t seem to matter.

I still felt tired, and now I did start to cry. It only lasted a moment, though, and then I thought I should have some breakfast. I put a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and put a pan on the cooker. I was going to fry a couple of eggs, but the oil in the bottle seemed to have turned a greenish colour and set solid overnight. I pushed the lever down on the toaster anyway, and for about a second the whole thing glowed with a bright orange light that hurt my eyes, and then just faded away. There was no smell of burning, and the toaster looked unharmed. I unplugged it from the wall, and lifted the lever. The bread was still white.

All of this should have worried me more than it did, but the truth was that I felt that I didn’t care. For the next hour or so I sat at the window, watching the few people outside trudging slowly along or standing and crying. A couple of them were lying motionless in the road. With an effort, I lifted my head and looked up to see that there were bands of thick colour across the sky; not clouds, because they were too transparent to be clouds, and they were the wrong colour anyway. I don’t know what colour they were, but it was wrong.

When I looked down again, the street was empty, apart from the colours.

It is possible that what we saw was no more than a trick of the light, or perhaps they were machines. Possibly, they were even the creatures that had sent them. Who knows, maybe they were both at once.

Light. Yes, light. It keeps coming back to light.

I don’t even know whether this is the end.

But I think it is.

Wow, What a book #2

On By Mick CanningIn books, Fiction, opinion, Philosophy, reading, Review19 Comments

To continue with the 10 books that have most influenced my life.

My second choice is The Lord of the Rings, by J R R Tolkien.

Image result for the lord of the rings book cover

I suspect that very few readers are unaware of the story of The Lord of the Rings, having either read the book, seen the film, or both. And at this point, it might be a good idea to just make it clear that I am talking about the book here, and not the Peter Jackson films, or even the ill-fated attempt at animating the entire book in 1978, an attempt that got as far as the first book, and was, to be honest, rather dreadful. Let me content myself by just saying it was a bit ‘Disney’. I’m not that mad on the Peter Jackson films either, to be honest, but back to the book.

So, I’m not going into any great detail about the story, but, in a nutshell, it involves a quest to destroy a ring that gives great power to the wearer, but inevitably corrupts and destroys them. It’s maker, Sauron, is attempting to find it, and the free peoples of the world must not only keep it from him, for if he recovers it it he will then have power to enslave the entire world, but also take it to the fiery mountain, Mount Doom, where it had been forged, to cast it into the flames and destroy it.

Mount Doom is, inconveniently, inside Sauron’s heavily fortified and guarded kingdom.

Elves, dwarves, men, wizards, hobbits, orcs…you all know it, don’t you?

As readers, we are all different. Some of us like a plot that gallops along so fast that we can barely keep up, with writing that limits itself to the action and no more than the minimum descriptions necessary.

Others, like me, enjoy the scenery and the atmosphere of the described world almost as much as the plot itself – join the Slow Book Movement now! Just send a completed application form to…sorry, wrong place. Where was I? Oh yes, most readers like a mixture of the two, of course.

But as one of these Slow Readers, there is a massive amount in this book that appeals to me. When I read descriptions of the hobbits setting off to walk through woods and fields as the sun comes up through early autumn mists, I might have been reading a description of a morning when I had done just that whilst wild camping in the countryside in my part of England. I have always loved walking on footpaths and through fields and woods, and disliked roads and towns.

The countryside Tolkien described around the Shire – the home of the hobbits – might have been my countryside. there were chalk downs and woods and streams, even one or two names (for example Michel Delving) that could have been local.

There were other woodlands in the book, and if they were described as magical, then that was little more than I naturally felt about woodlands anyway. Aren’t they all magical?

And, on top of all that, there were mountains. Today, I love mountains! But I had never seen one at this point, and suddenly I wanted to go and climb one. There were inns and beer, adventure and song, friendship and dangers. What was not to like?

The whole book is really made up of three books, and the first book, which has always been my favourite, is the one which is mainly set in this land that I could almost identify. This was not the first fantasy book that I had read, but it was, and still is, the one whose descriptions have the greatest power to draw me in. It is the one that, to me, seems the most real.

All of this, with the themes of courage and friendship, self sacrifice and loyalty, and the message that good will eventually triumph over evil, come together in a mixture that is in just the right proportions to appeal to me.

But how has it actually influenced me?

For a start, when I began to write, everything that I wrote seemed to be influenced by that book. This was not actually a good thing, because other than The Lord of the Rings, I don’t really enjoy fantasy! But I wrote that way for a long while.

Today, though, what remains is the descriptive writing. I wonder whether I might otherwise have been a very different reader and writer, since before I read LOTR, I read mainly detective stories and adventure novels.

And I explored a lot of the Middle English literature that influenced Tolkien, from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I suppose not too many people do today.

I visited mountains because of that book.

And a measure of how strong this appeal was (and remains) is that I have probably read the book about twenty times. The last but one time, though, was around twenty years ago. When I decided to re-read it last year, I did wonder whether I would be disappointed. I strongly suspected that I might have ‘grown out of it’.

I needn’t have worried.

I enjoyed it just as much as I ever had; I noticed one or two details I had either forgotten or never really noticed in the first place, and I found myself drawn in every bit as strongly as I had been before.

I loved it.

Wow, What a Book! #1

On By Mick CanningIn books, Fiction, opinion, Philosophy, reading, Review39 Comments

I thought that I would pick out what might be the 10 books that have most influenced my life. Well, I say 10 books, but I may tire of this long before I reach 10, so let’s just see what happens.

You see, these are not really reviews, although it is necessary to give some idea of the plot of each book, it is more about how they have influenced me, and I may decide after a while that I’m just giving away too much about myself.

Or that I’m just going over and over the same ground.

Okay, then. Let’s get on with it. The rules:

Firstly, I must have read the book more than 5 years ago. I know this is an arbitrary figure, but any book that I have read recently is likely to be clearer in my mind, and so appear a little more important to me than it really is. It needs time to settle.

Secondly, I need to be able to demonstrate to myself exactly how it is that the book has influenced me. Just to say ‘it was important to me’ will not be enough. That would be little better than just saying ‘I like it’. Perfectly valid, but hardly the stuff of a blog post. This is another reason to impose the 5 year rule – there must have been enough time elapsed to see the influence.

So I’ll start today with Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.

Image result for steppenwolf Hesse

Sometimes, you get the feeling that some people have just been born into the wrong century. Not that they would prefer dressing in cravats or crinolines, although they might anyway, or that they have a hankering after a little piracy or bubonic plague, but rather you can see that they don’t fit in with the pace of modern life, or much like the ethos of the times.

There must be quite a few people like that, which must partly explain the immense popularity of Steppenwolf both when it was released, and then especially in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

It was the second book by Hesse that I had read, after cutting my teeth on ‘The Journey to the East’ as a teenager, and I was a little unprepared for its message.

Whereas ‘The Journey to the East’ felt like a bit of drug-induced fantasy, although a very clever and readable one, without any obvious message beyond ‘free yourself from the conventions of society, man’, Steppenwolf clearly had a more serious message to convey.

It begins with the protagonist, Harry, contemplating taking his own life, because he sees himself as a serious writer both at odds with the world that he lives in (Germany, post WWI), whose values, especially the bourgeois ones, he despises, but also with his inner alter ego, the very opposite of the sophisticated artist that he sees himself, which he calls the Steppenwolf – or the wolf of the steppes. He hates and fears this alter ego, who he feels he cannot control, and who sneers at everything that Harry holds dear.

It is whilst Harry is contemplating suicide, that he comes across a booklet entitled ‘Treatise on the Steppenwolf’ and as he reads it, he discovers that it is about himself. the booklet talks about Harry and his alter ego, but also explains that there are many, many more of these other sides to his character.

Through the rest of the book, Harry learns how to reconcile these many sides of himself and, more importantly, how he can manage to live in this world that up until then, he sees no value in.

When I read the part of the book that consisted of the treatise on the various different natures that made up the protagonist of the novel, it was the first indication to me that we really do have these different sides to our characters; sides that do not need to be in conflict with each other, but can coexist quite peaceably. As a typical young man, I knew that there were parts of me that yearned for safety, parts that simply wanted to rebel. Parts that enjoyed home life and parts that wanted nothing more than to wander the world with my possessions in a rucksack. There was the aesthete and there was the lover. The artist and the fighter.

Until then, the rebel in me had sneered at the home lover, and the artist seemed to be in perpetual conflict with the fighter. I had felt embarrassed by parts of my character and, just as did the hero of Steppenwolf, rather tried to repress them.

What this book did was to show me that it was natural to feel like that, and that the secret was to accept all of these sides of me, and allow them to all have their moments of dominance, and their moments of passivity. They did not need to be in conflict.

It completely changed my outlook on life.

Sue me and I’ll have you killed!

On By Mick CanningIn Fiction, humour, satire, writing43 Comments

…slowly, he inched his way along the ledge, his heart in his mouth. It was too late to even contemplate turning back now. The sun was sinking rapidly in the pale sky in front of him, dropping towards the distant plains that were almost hidden in the desert haze. It would be completely dark within the hour. For the first time, he knew real fear. He could never survive a night on this thin, narrow ledge – God knows, there was barely enough room to stand and almost nothing to hold on to. It was inevitable that he would slip off at some point. Even now, there was a thin skin of ice on much of the surface, and the terrible cold would descend as soon as the sun disappeared.

Gritting his teeth, he edged towards what looked like a slightly better foothold, and cried out in sudden terror as his foot slid into space, the momentum taking him over the edge and falling…

Hell, I can’t do that! Stop! Phew, that was close.

As writers, we have to be so careful, because nowadays even our characters have rights, did you know that? And we can’t just be doing this and that to them, just as we please. Only the other day, a lawyer claiming to be acting for a character in a well-known children’s series attempted to take the author to court and sue her for, literally, defamation of character.

This character claimed that the author had totally misrepresented his actions, and applied motives to them that could only be described as evil.

And she said he had no nose, which was just spiteful.

He has claimed damages running into millions of dollars.

If this character is successful, then it is difficult to know where we will see this ending.

The fact that the author has created said character is no defence in law. Really, they are like our children. And whereas a few hundred years or more ago, parents had absolute authority over their children, and, short of killing them, could do whatever they so willed with them, nowadays they have more rights than their parents. And I’m afraid that it may come to that with our characters, too.

‘Why should I be killed off?’ They cry. ‘What right have you…?’ And so they will challenge it.

It has even been mooted in some quarters that these characters should perhaps be able to resort to the legal process appropriate for the time and world that they have been created for. Thus, a dragon in a tale set in ancient times, peeved because the author claimed it ate virgins and had bad breath (not sure if the two are connected…) might very well demand that it meet the author in Trial by Combat, a trial that the author would probably be rather ill-prepared to face.

Upset a Tudor monarch or a Viking chieftain, and I wouldn’t give much for your chances.

And any authors writing tales set in the future, who had unwisely failed to specify what sort of legal process was in existence at this time, might find the lawyers, or even their characters, being given the right to specify this. And that might get very nasty indeed.

But there may still be one remedy open to us. If our characters hold the threat of litigation over us, we might, just might, be able to retaliate by threatening to make their next incarnation even more horrible than the one that they are prosecuting us over. Threaten to sue me for creating you with a flatulence problem? Go ahead, and see what problems you have in my next novel! Don’t forget I’m writing a series! You had quite a decent time in the last one, it’ll be the torture chamber for you next!

It might work, but I’m still nervous about it.

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So what am I going to do? I’m just going to write nice stories about pussy cats, from now on, that’s what.

Authors, you have been warned!

What a great review for Making Friends with the Crocodile!

On By Mick CanningIn Fiction, Making Friends with the Crocodile, publishing, Review49 Comments

 

Making Friends with the -Crocodile

Somali, at: Somali K Chakrabarti has put up such a generous review of my book, Making Friends with the Crocodile, that I am going to spend the rest of the day puffed up with most unreasonable pride! It comes as I battle with the various internet demons to put up a version on Kobo (ready in a couple of days, I hope), and, finally, a Print On Demand version for sale in India.

My biggest worry when I published the book, was that as a Western male writing in the voice of an Indian female, I would not be able to make it sound realistic, but I finally feel reassured by Somali’s review.

It can be found here: Making friends with the Crocodile

 

Pitfalls for Writers – no.6: Historical Accuracy

On By Mick CanningIn discussions, Fiction, history, pitfalls for writers, research, writing43 Comments

 

‘Dear Mr. Author.

Whilst reading your book ‘Oh what fun and laughter we had during the time the Black Death wiped out our village’ the other day, I was disappointed to notice that you mentioned July 23rd 1449 as having been a sunny day in your fictitious village. From the descriptions you provide, you have clearly located said village a little to the south of present day Norwich, and my extensive researches prove that July 23rd 1449 would have been a rainy day there.

Yours disgruntledly,

A Pedant.’

How accurate do you need to be, as a writer, with historical facts?

If you are writing a non-fiction book, you have to be scrupulously accurate, no matter what subject it is.

End of.

On the other hand, if you are writing fiction, you have a certain amount of leeway. First of all, though, it is worth saying that if you sell enough copies of your book you will eventually attract correspondents like the fellow above. Is that something to worry about? Only if they get to know where you live, perhaps. Otherwise, send them a nice reply, thanking them for their diligence, and assuring them that you will correct your dreadful fault in the next edition. On the other hand:

‘Dear Mr Author.

The Black Death was actually sweeping the country in 1349, not 1449.

Yours smugly,

A Historian.’

This time, you’ve screwed up.

And yes, it matters.

Very minor inaccuracies are bound to slip through, and very few people will notice them. And if they do, they will not think anything of them.

Except for Arthur Pedant, of course.

The big things are another matter. Imagine reading a novel set in the days around the Russian Revolution, and then the author tells you that the Bolsheviks rose up against the state in 1927 instead of 1917. Or that they were led in the beginning by Stalin. Immediately, the author’s credibility has evaporated, as has their story.

Because the reader no longer believes the author, and they no longer accept their story.

The moral here, then, is don’t skimp on the research!

It is possible to radically change the facts of history, but the difference is that to do this the author must present it as the whole point of the story. In steampunk novels, the whole history of Victorian Britain is altered, but the reader accepts this as it is the premise behind the genre. It is seen not as a mistake, but as a narrative invention.

In many science fiction novels, the premise is a future that is the result of a different history than that which actually happened. For example, the Germans won the Second World War, or of different worlds or dimensions in which history diverges from the accepted version. Again, this is accepted by the reader, as it is the premise that the story is set on.

It is possible to break this rule, but to do so the author has to break it in such a way that it is quickly obvious that they have done it deliberately, and not by mistake.

One might, for example, set a novel in Victorian England that is not steampunk – a detective story, perhaps – but in which Queen Victoria is assassinated in 1860. As this is something that no one could possibly put in by accident, it will be seen as part of the invented narrative and accepted.

Well, probably. Where is Arthur Pedant?

Ooh, it’s nearly finished!

On By Mick CanningIn books, editing, Fiction, India, publishing, women, writing109 Comments

I’m getting excited, now.

My novel, ‘Making Friends with the Crocodile’ is hopefully ready for its final edit.

This part of the journey seems to be taking a great deal of time, but this might be because it is my first foray into publishing. I know that there is still much to do – formatting, advertising, proof-reading, the publishing itself, amongst a plethora of smaller but no less important tasks – but I am finally beginning to feel that I am getting there.

Curiously, after what I wrote in my last post, I never found any of the characters threatening to hijack the plot in any way. Although I never planned it out in any detail, I had a rough plan in my head, which, remarkably, I kept to. Perhaps it is because the subject matter is strong. I don’t know.

And I think that I have settled upon the cover (the artwork is my own).

Making Friends With The Crocodile cover 1

I may play around with the wording, slightly, for example I might take out the words ‘A Novel’.

For some background; the story is set in a village in Northern India, some fifteen odd years ago. It is about the deteriorating relationship between two women in a family: the mother and her daughter in law. Like this relationship frequently is, it is a strained, fractious one, not helped by that society’s attitudes towards women and their roles in general. And when one of them gets caught up in events beyond her control, these attitudes become dreadfully destructive.

As always, your thoughts would be very much appreciated.

The Expedition Report

On By Mick CanningIn Fiction, humour, satire, travel28 Comments

As promised in my last post, I attach here a report of my expedition.

On Saturday 30th January 2016, the morning sky cleared and the sun came out. It would be a good walking day.

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I had thought long and hard over the various logistical challenges of this expedition, and decided eventually, albeit reluctantly, that it would be wise not to attempt it alone. As much as I was loathe to share the glory of this journey, the sensible traveller realises his or her own limitations, and assesses the difficulties and dangers that they are likely to meet. And so I decided that I would take a companion; not only to make the journey more amenable, but also to help with the navigating, act as a safety back-up, and who could act in need as a porter.

We decided to split the tasks. ‘You’re leader,’ my companion Bob said, ‘so you take the big pack with the emergency stuff, and I’ll navigate. It will make life easier for both of us.’ Somehow, that wasn’t quite what I’d planned.

We picked up our packs, said our goodbyes, and set off down the path to the road. ‘We go left here.’ Bob said, turning right. I hesitated. ‘What are you waiting for?’ He asked irritably, turning round.

‘You said left.’

‘Yes. Are you going to stand there all day?’ I shrugged, and then followed him. The first part of our journey presented few difficulties. We turned left at the next junction (‘I said right!’) and followed the road until we had left the town far behind and were surrounded by a sparsely inhabited landscape. Now we needed to find our way down the hill on the other side of the road.

‘It’s not safe to cross here.’ opined Bob.

‘There’s hardly any traffic!’

‘It comes round the corner really quickly. Let’s go on a bit further and find somewhere better.’

‘The corner’s half a mile away! I’m crossing here!’

‘You cross then.’ He sounded sulky. ‘I’ll catch you up.’ He turned away and stomped slowly along the pavement.

I crossed the road, found a bench, and settled down to wait. Minutes passed, and I took out a chocolate bar and ate it. I had a drink of water. I pulled out the guidebook and went over our route again, and then got side tracked and began reading about the dreadful earthquake of 1734 that destroyed so much of Tunbridge Wells. I had another drink of water. I found a newspaper in the side pocket of my pack and did the crossword. As I finished, I looked up, and my companion arrived.

‘Where have you been?’ He looked sheepish.

‘I turned left by accident. Never mind that, I’m here now.’ He sat down beside me. ‘Sorry, I need a drink.’ He took out a flask and poured a little of the contents into the cup.

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, just a drop of whisky.’

‘That was meant to be for emergencies only!’

‘This is an emergency!’

When we set off again, we were fortunate to find a track that seemed to be going in the right direction. It was no more than twenty foot wide in places, surfaced with a smooth, black layer, and showing occasional white markings roughly in the middle, as if left to guide travellers. Following this, we worked our way down from the ridge and found ourselves in a fairly steep-sided valley. The road bent around to the right and ran along the bottom the valley, following a stream on one side of the road, and an old railway track on the other. There was a signpost beside us, a pub on the left, and a farm on the right. In front of us a church tower showed clearly above the trees.

Bob took out the map and compass, handed me the map and then carefully lined up the edge of the compass with the side of the map. For a moment or two his eyes flickered between the map and route ahead of us, and then he clicked his tongue irritably.

‘I think we’re lost.’

‘Er, the compass needle isn’t pointing north.’

‘Eh? What…’ he fiddled with the compass for a moment. ‘Oh, you had the map upside down, you fool. No wonder!’ He snatched it from my hands, looked at it suspiciously, glanced up at the signpost quickly when he thought I wasn’t looking, and then handed the map back to me. ‘This way. Come on!’

Half a mile along the road, a track turned off to the left and ran under the railway and into a little wood.

‘This way,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ I went under the bridge and into the woods, to find that the path was a morass of mud. This area is renowned for enjoying (or otherwise) what can be regarded as fiercely localised weather. Even though it was pouring with rain today in the Lake District and in Southern Hungary, the sun stubbornly shone throughout the afternoon on our little expedition. But it seemed as though that hadn’t always been the case recently. This part of our journey should only have taken us about ten minutes, but it was almost half an hour before we crossed the stile in the fence that marked the boundary between where we were at the time and somewhere else.

The next section of the trail took us down a steep and uncertain track, ankle deep in autumn leaves and with little sections of mud here and there underfoot. It proved necessary to watch our footing carefully, and now and again we had no choice but to hold onto the guard rail for a moment. After a minute or two, however, we reached the foot of the slope safely and paused to catch our breath and have a snack.

We checked the map, noticing that we would have to navigate the next section very carefully.

‘I’ll lead this.’ Bob said, starting to take the map from my hands. I slapped him.

‘No, you won’t.’

We passed under the old railway bridge, which incorporates parts of a still older construction. All that remains now is one end of a medieval banqueting hall, complete with shields. In places it is still possible to glimpse traces of what appear to be the original wall paintings. Judging by what remains of the inscriptions, they possibly depict Saint Darren, patron saint of nearby Tonbridge.

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It is a glorious place in the spring, when the wild marsupial trees are in blossom, but now it was a gloomy place. But still it was with reluctance that we dragged ourselves away from this important historical site, and tramped onwards through the woods.

For the next leg of our journey, the path took a great, sweeping loop around a mysterious and secretive area of pipes and tanks and low buildings. The trees creaked ominously overhead. Was it just the wind? Yes, of course it was. It has always had an evil reputation, though. In medieval times, it was a place of alchemy, and rumours still persist that it was in some dark chamber beneath the ground, at this exact location, that an evil sorcerer discovered a magical substance that turned real beer into lager, or false beer as it is properly called, threatening to plunge the whole kingdom into a new dark age.

And at times the traveller of today can almost fancy that a whiff of sulphur or some such odour still overhangs this dreadful place. Several years ago someone tripped over a protruding tree root nearby and hurt themselves, and the rooks call their depressing calls overhead in the gloomy trees.

We were glad indeed to get away from such a terrible place.

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Now, on almost the last leg of our journey, our path ran along south-facing hillsides, through one of the small tea gardens that produce our famous Sussex tea, and then dropped down lower to meet the overgrown and largely clogged up remnants of the Bristol to Tunbridge Wells canal. It was still being used to transport coal and gin from Bristol to Tunbridge Wells, with a return cargo of young slaves, as recently as sixty years ago, after which it fell into disrepair as demand for these products fell off.

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Care has to be taken along this stretch, as the old towpath along the edge of the canal is quite obvious, but on the other side lies the Great Groombridge Swamp, which has been known to swallow up unwary travellers. Bob was leading at this point, and we were both keen to reach the end, now. I noticed him straying slightly towards the swamp so I called out ‘Just go right, a bit.’

Oops.

A quarter of an hour later I was enjoying a pint of Black Cat Ale, before catching the bus back home to write up my notes and then make a tricky phone call to Bob’s wife.

Still, all expeditions, like life itself, throw up challenges that have to be faced up to.

Disclaimer:

Please note that an expedition of this nature is not one to be undertaken lightly. Should you wish to follow in my footsteps, you are strongly advised to ensure that you have adequate training and suitable equipment for the journey.

Ho Ho Ho

On By Mick CanningIn Christmas, Fiction, humour, Short story, writing9 Comments

So, here is the final instalment of my merry Christmas tale. Everything will be resolved satisfactorily, and we’ll all live happily ever after. As if.

Merry Christmas!

Henderson stood there staring at the spot in the middle of the field where the sleigh was no longer standing, but the peasant with the pitchfork was; he was looking up into the sky, as motionless as he had been before, so that Henderson thought at first he must somehow still be frozen in time. He had not noticed the woman following him across the yard, but now she called out ‘Moses!’ and the man turned, saw him, and swung the pitchfork around so that it pointed towards him. Involuntarily, he gave a little yelp, put his hands up and took a few steps backwards as the man stepped towards him, his face expressionless.

Then he turned and ran.

Behind him, he heard the man also begin to run and ahead of him the woman stood grinning at him. He swerved as well as he could, considering his age, his fitness, and the mud, and ran through the gateway.

He stopped for a second to catch his breath, and then began to run again towards the buildings. He had only taken a couple of steps this time, however, when he suddenly saw the cat in front of him. It hissed and took a couple of paces towards him, and then fixed its eyes upon him, crouched lower to the ground and began to run towards him, before launching itself up towards his throat. He backed away, suddenly terrified, and watched the creature sail towards him. He seemed to have plenty of time to take in its evil, soulless eyes; he saw its mouth full of razor-sharp teeth like tiny little yellow daggers, little droplets of saliva clinging to their tips; he even had time to see how its whiskers curved ever so gently backwards in flight, although they had spread out wide as they bristled stiffly.

He had plenty of time. As much as he wanted, it seemed, for the cat had stopped in mid-air, about a foot in front of him. Very slowly, his eyes on the cat, he stepped sideways. Then he reached out and touched it. Its fur still felt soft, but its body, like that of the horse earlier, felt cold, but the weirdest thing of all was that no matter how much he pushed it, he could not get it to move at all. He passed his hands all around it, but it hung there, in the air, in front of his face.

Slowly he turned around, and walked back towards the gateway. He paused and listened, but the world had gone silent again. Entering the field, he saw that the sleigh had returned. It sat on the opposite side of the field, now, where the farmland seemed to turn to woodland. The peasant and the witch had become frozen statues and stood close to the gateway. He scratched his head in bewilderment, and then walked quickly across the grass.

As he reached the sleigh, he noticed some small, fresh, muddy footprints on the running board. At that moment, there was a kind of double thud, and the elves landed beside him.

‘Jeez!’ he gasped, and they burst into spiteful laughter.

‘Boo!’ said one of them.

‘Well, look who it isn’t.’ said the other. ‘You’ve got mud all over your clothes, Fat Boy.’

‘They’ll bill you for that. Dock it out of your wages.’

They seemed none the worse for their experience, he thought bitterly, as he stepped into the sleigh, and sat down.

‘Come on, then.’ he sighed. ‘Let’s go.’ They grinned.

‘Maybe we don’t want to get in.’

‘Oh, stop buggering about! I’ve no intention of sitting here all day.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose you can go back without us.’

‘And we just came back for you! Aren’t we good! I reckon you owe us, Fat Boy.’

‘Actually,’ he said, exasperated, ‘I came to get you before you got involved in a witchcraft trial.’

‘Oh, aren’t you the noble one, then! What brought that on?’

‘Nicol looked up this year and this place on the internet. Seems a bit of a coincidence your arriving here and then the witchcraft trials taking place.’

‘Well, there’s no accounting for the stupidity and ignorance of humans. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you actually do, because you can’t alter history, Fat Boy.’

‘Oh, really.’ He grinned, after a moment’s thought. The elves glanced at each other, the implication apparently also striking them, and for the first time they looked worried.

‘Wait!’ Quickly, they hopped into the sleigh and took up their positions at the back, where they put their feet up and made themselves comfortable. One of them took a clay pipe out of his pocket, whilst the other grinned at Henderson.

‘Okay, Fat Boy, you can go now.’ He stared at them for a second or two, and then turned around to start up the reindeer. He’d have loved, at that moment, to have just booted them out and taken off, and hang the consequences, but he was, he had to admit, afraid of them. He didn’t have any idea of what they were actually capable of.

He pressed the big green button, and the reindeer exploded into life (once witnessed, never forgotten!). In what felt like no more than five seconds, they were high in the clouds and cruising smoothly.

It wouldn’t take long to get back. He sat musing over how he would be spending Christmas, but at some point, he realised that he had been looking at a vapour trail in the sky above him for a little while, but the implication of that only struck him when the radio on the dashboard, which he hadn’t even noticed before, crackled into life.

‘Attention, unidentified military aircraft: You are violating North Korean airspace. Turn around immediately or you will be shot down. I repeat, turn around immediately, or you will be shot down.’ The elves burst into laughter again.

‘Now you’ve done it, Fat Boy!’

‘Oh, it gets better and better!’

You can’t alter history, but now they were back in 2015, which was the present day. Glancing over his shoulder at the elves, who were looking at each other and giggling, he reached for the satnav over-ride button.

If Nicol wanted to try and get them back this time, he was welcome to try.