Q is for Questions

Her name was Much or her name was Muse. It was one of the two or neither.




We were passing information about like a game of Chinese Whispers. The word on the street was that somebody had found the Helmet Zone and it had been destroyed. While other girls were saying that the Helmet Zone had been taken over by a small group of disgruntled Crackles who were unhappy about the day's events.


I wasn't prepared to believe anything because all I was seeing were walls. Bare walls. Colourless walls. I had lost the others and I only had Bag for company. For some reason she had decided to attach herself to me at the hip.


'So what's mine doing?'


'He's asleep,' I said.



Most of them were asleep. I have come to the conclusion that they spend most of their time sleeping. It's their favourite pastime.


'How is it attached?'


'It isn't really attached by anything,' I said, 'they are just there.'



'What does he look like?'


'Ugly.' I said.



'In what way?'



This is how we went as we continued to search for something. A way out or a door or a tutt. She would ask me a question and I would answer in the best way that I could. I didn't mind. It was kind of reassuring to have somebody to talk to and it was taking my mind off my need to empty my bladder. It was burning now and it felt like my bladder was about to explode.


I tried to manifest a tutt but nothing was happening. I asked bag to try but she didn't have any luck either. At the this rate I would just have to crouch down when nobody was looking but judging by the smells emanating from the colourdors I wouldn't be the first one to do it.


' How do they do it?'


'What?'


'How do they do it?' she said. 'Do they strangle us?'



To be honest I don't know but I don't think Rhyme or the tall girl had been strangled. I told her that I didn't know. I don't really see how they do it. the tall girl was pinned to the wall and then she died. Much or Muse or whatever her name was.



'Oh.'



Bag said that she thought all the rooms had been removed at the same time as the Stammies. And that all we were left with was the colourdors. I told he that she could be right but I hoped not or else we could be stuck here forever. I wanted everything to go back to the way it was. I wanted that more than anything. I didn't want my words anymore. I wanted Bath Day back. I wanted a long soak and a scrub with all the other girls and I wanted to do it with my seven words and nothing else.




I told Bag to walk ahead of me when we came to another turn in the colourdoors. I crouched and hoped that nobody would come walking in the opposite direction.

------    An excerpt from my WIP written for the A to Z Challenge.

P is for Pasttimes

Life is all about balancing.




We are all eternal jugglers trying to juggle our careers with our happiness with our need to pay the bills and with our need to enjoy our short lives on this planet.


But some of us have too may balls to juggle and we struggle to keep up. And some of us have odd shaped balls that are difficult to handle and sometimes we drop one on the floor and it shatters. And we are left with fewer balls than we started with when a family members dies or we lose our job or some other tragedy strikes.


But sometimes as jugglers we have balls missing. Or there are balls that we have hidden in a bag and forget to take out. We sometimes toss around our family balls and our job balls and forget all about our happiness balls or our fun balls. I guess it's just a case of making priorities. I think it's important that we don't forget our fun balls. It's okay to concentrate on our jobs so that we can earn enough money to pay the rent or the mortgage or to do a weekly shop. But if we forget about fun then what is the purpose of life?


Do we really want to spend all our lives working?



We don't live in a Utopian world where we can all lay on our backs all day eating grapes. The world doesn't work like that but surely we have to at least try to enjoy it. Or else what is it going to say on our gravestones?


Would you rather it said


Worked hard all his life and was a dearly loved by everyone.


or


Worked hard all his life and was dearly loved by everyone and loved having fun.




I know which I'd prefer.



So what do you do for fun? Are you a party animal or a mountain climber or a bike rider or a keen gardener?




Pick one. Make sure you have enough balls to juggle because sometimes they fall and break and you may find yourself juggling too many work balls and not enough fun balls. We all have to juggle but I guess it's a case of doing it on our own terms.

O is for Old Fashioned

Call me old fashioned if you like but sometimes I hamper for the way things used to be.




If I had a time machine I'd like to go back to a simpler time. I'd just arrive at a point and time in history where you can open a door the old fashioned way without waiting for a robot to open it for you. I can appreciate that sliding doors are more economical and cost effective but I am quite capable of opening a bloody door. I don't feel like I need an A Level or a Masters Degree in door management.


And I'd like to go back to a simpler time when we had normal shops in our streets. Shops that were necessary. All I want is a butchers and a greengrocers and a pub and a hardware shop. Throw in a barbers and a post office and a bakers shop for good measure. Proper shops that served a useful public service. But these days all we seem get are Indian and Chinese take-aways and nail boutiques and phone shops. I just want some old fashioned normal shops. I don't want to get my toe nails polished or my eyebrows redesigned or my left nipple realigned to match the one on the right. Correct me if I'm wrong but in the old days people didn't have time to get their nostrils flushed or their body spray painted. They were too busy working in the pits or the cotton mills or fighting in the trenches.



These days some women won't leave their house if their make up clashes with the colour of their mobile phone. And where do these people get the money and the time to do all this shit?



I don't want any of it. I wish somebody would knock down the sunbed shop and replace it with a candlestick makers. I want to burn down Fluffy's Nail boutique so that somebody can replace it with a good old fashioned shop.





Give me a green grocers or a butchers shop and shove the E-Cig store up your arse. I want my time machine.

N is for No Music

So I have heard about so many people that listen to music while they are writing.


Whether it's Mozart (that seems to be the thing at the moment) or Black Sabbath or Siberian Whale Music, listening to music seems to be very popular. But I can't quite get the hang of it.


I did a trial tonight by listening to Mozart on Spotify while I was writing the latest installment of my Camp Nano project but it was just annoying. I don't know it it made my writing any more creative than usual. I guess I will find that out tomorrow when I reread what I've written.


I just found the whole thing annoying. Just like I find it annoying when the whole world seems to walk into our back room whenever I decide to write downstairs for a change. I find it even as annoying as listening the the drone of a hoover. Maybe I am just one of those writers that needs absolute silence?



Otherwise I just can't seem to hear my characters speak. So I am wondering how many silence seekers are out there in the writing world or am I in the majority?

Maybe I just picked the wrong tune. Maybe I need to get my hands on some of that whale music or Chinese water music or whatever the hell it is?

M is for More Than We Talked

I've never known the stammies to go out.


Ever since I was born to my birther they have watched over me, There's no escape from them. They are the same now as they were in the beginning. That line has been drummed into us from Day Zero.

So to look up and see a those little blanks screens was impossible to take in, It was too big to comprehend.


'The bastards have gone.'


It was Ink. She had joined me and Rosh in the now colourless colourdoors. Bag was also tagging along. It seemed that Rosh was collecting people but I didn't know what purpose she had in mind. Bag was a tiny blob of black hair. I have never spoken to her but sometimes we share a boothical in helmet when Ink isn't well. She is one of life's tagger-alongers. I don't know who she shares her words with or anything else about her.

All four of us were looking up at the empty stammies, expecting them to flash back to life at any moment. At any moment we would see their faces and we would hear the bells tolling.


'Where did they take her?' said Ink.

'Who?'


'Rhyme. When they die where do they go?'

'Dunno,' I said. I really didn't. Nobody does. None of us know anything, We live in our bubble and we don't ask any questions. Because we have nobody to ask them to and usually don't have enough words anyway.

Other girls were filing past, most of them looking as uncomfortable and dazed as we did. Others were running around like headless porkines. And all the time I was thinking Noah would know what to do. Noah would save us.


'Well lets' find out,' said Ink. 'Let's find out where they have taken her.'


We started to walk and we carried on walking and we walked more than we talked because we weren't used to our voices. We didn't want tp break them. But we were all thinking the same thing, I was sure of it. For once I really thought that mindspeak was possible and that all four of us shared a that same thought. I could almost hear it spoken out loud and I think they did too. Even Bag.



The doors. The doors may be open. The doors that belong to them and not us.





                     ------------





An Excerpt from my WIP for the A to Z Blog Challenge

L is for Look Left.

Is it just me or does every third person you pass in the street have a mobile phone glued to their ear?


I think I'm turning into a grumpy old man but these tiny prophetic signs of doom niggle me. I mean is it absolutely necessary to be in a constant conversation with somebody who you probably saw in person five minutes ago? I grew up in a time when there were no mobile phones and no internet connection. If you wanted to connect with somebody you had to use your home phone or attach a message to a pigeon or nip across the road to use a telephone box. Yep I just said telephone box. Those strange alien looking things that are now either filled with second hand books or used for drug dealing and pissing in on a late night bender. I think everybody of a certain age can remember squeezing into a telephone box to hide from the rain or breaking up with somebody in one of them or stealing a quick fumble with somebody you shouldn't have.



Now the only thing people are fumbling with are their mobile phones. They don't even stop to cross the road. When I was a kid I remember the Green Cross Code Man telling everybody to look left and then right to make sure the road was clear. Now if they ever had to wheel him out of retirement he'd have to change it to Look Left, look Right and switch off your bloody phone.


Phones are a menace. Somebody is going to get run over one of these days in the middle of downloading a map of the Chinese Underground or while ordering a cheese and elder-flower sandwich from Butties4U.com. But is that the reason why everybody is on their phone? Are they really that desperate for human interaction or are they hiding something deeper? I think that it goes deeper than that. I propose that the real reason people have phones permanently glued to their ears is this.



They want to look like they are not on their own.



Read it and then read it again. It's more of a hunch. I'm no psycho analytic wizard but it's what I'm beginning to think. People don't want to be seen to be actually on their own anymore. It's not cool.


Maybe my hunch is a load of codswallop but I do know it can't be safe crossing a road with a pram and a dog and a phone stuck to your ear lobe.



And then there are drivers.


Drivers with mobiles stuck to their ears or (more often) on their laps.



It's dangerous. Very dangerous. But somehow the message isn't getting across. We need the equivalent of the Green Cross Code Man to tackle this problem or we need to bring back the good old telephone box or we need to bring them back and lock a few of these idiots inside them. Or maybe I need to get with the times and stop being so grumpy. I'll let you decide.








Written for the A to Z Blog Challenge.

K is for Knife-Edge

So I've caught up with Camp Nano but I'm behind a little bit with the A to Z Challenge so here goes for K.



It's Election time in the UK and the political parties are all over our TV like it's just been invented. You can't turn on the television at the moment without seeing David Cameron's smug face or Ed Miliband making love to the television cameras. One is smooth as silk and the other has been worked on so much by his team that he is nearly unrecognisable from the geeky, nervous guy that first won the Labour Nomination all those years ago. He is turning into a Tony Blair clone. He is talking and walking like him and soon he will probably be indistinct from the former leader.


But it's not all about looks. It's about content. This country has been through the worldwide recession and it's coming through the other end. But it's still on a knife-edge. The NHS is in turmoil. Immigration is such a hot potato that nobody wants to catch it in case they burn their hands. And we are still up to our knee-caps in debt.


But who is on a knife-edge?


I'll tell you who. The Tories and Labour and everyone else are banging on about their party being the party for the workers. It's the phrase that keeps falling out of their mouths every second. The workers. 'We are the party of the workers of the United Kingdom.'

They shout it from the rooftops. They fling the banner over their specially designed coaches and their pulpits. But listen to what they are saying.


Who is missing?



The unemployed. There you go, I've said it. The unemployed are missing. I have listened to them on TV, on the radio, on the internet, in the newspapers but where have they hidden the unemployed?


There are thousands of unemployed people in this country who are trying to scrape a life from themselves from the left overs of our society. But when do they ever get mentioned by Miliband? By Cameron? By any other faceless politician?

It's a dirty word. Unemployed. Isn't it? But they are the people that are on a Knife-Edge. Unemployed people and homeless people and other human beings on the fringes of our society. Human beings that politicians don't want to talk about in case they catch something. Not once have I heard the phrase 'job creation,' coming out of their mouths.



Yes there are many people who live their entire lived on benefits because it's what they do. It's what their families have always done. But a vast majority of unemployed people have fell down life's plughole and nobody is even attempting to scrape them out. Human beings in their 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's are on the scrap heap but who is talking about them?





Dear Mr Miliband/Blair & Mr Cameron are you?



Quit calling yourselves the party of the working people and try to be the party of all the people of the United Kingdom. Not just the ones that you'd sit next to at your dinner tables.











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Written for this month's A to Z Challenge.