Come away with the raggle taggle gypsy-o
Yes me! I submitted to South West Flash Fiction just for fun really and never dreamt that I would be short listed. National Flash Fiction day is on May 16th and Rachel http://rachelcarter.me an inspiring writer herself thought it would be a good idea to have a page to showcase the work of Westcountry writers.
So there I am and on the front page as well.
http://flashfictionsw.co.uk/ Do have a read, my story is Mystery Lady on The Train, written after I spotted an ad in the local newspaper.
Julia’s 100 WCGU this we at http://jfb57.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/100-word-challenge-for-grown-ups-week-37/ says this:-
The prompt this week is to go back to last week’s entries. You are to use the last 10 words of the post next to yours and using just 100 words create a story. It may be a follow-on from the previous one or you may like to take it in a different direction.
I’m told that what I have written is quite a bit ‘Off in left field’ and that it will confirm my craziness but hey, I like to play! My section of prompt is ‘walked up to the table slowly, “what is going on?”, here it is.
Growing Table
The medical authority, are battling to control an obesity epidemic, but an abundance of sweets and biscuits covered the office table. There were back-from-a-Transylvanian-holiday treats, and dunkies provided by the plumptious boss. Fresh today, a stack of cakes, brownies and shortbread, courtesy of GT Porky and Co, auditors.
The scrawny dietician walked up to the table slowly, ‘What is going on here?’ ‘Not in my clinic, WE set an example.’ Behind her, the boss’s kilogramically challenged boss, with an epicurean feast of hot cross buns and Easter eggs, retreats, his face flaming, as she swept the booty into the bin.
Khuri is a little desert village with a hotel of whitewashed huts.
We had cold drinks, and then went to meet our camels and make a decision, to camp in the desert, under the stars with a bed roll, or sleep in a hut with beds. We had several things to weigh up, what the food would be like – I don’t eat meat so didn’t fancy chicken, goat or camel roasted over an open fire! I’m joking of course, but no-one could tell me what the possibilities were. And what if pennies needed to be spent in the middle of the night? Let’s face it, there were no trees to hide behind. What swung it though was the possibility of scorpions. Who remembers a James bond film where one was climbing up 007’s chest? We chose to come back to the hotel.
It’s really quite difficult to get onto a camel, the saddles look good, well padded, but your legs are spread wide apart. Anyway, they are reluctantly in their lowest possible position, to enable you to climb on, then you have to time it just right and lean backwards, when they get up. That’s a very unnatural position, given that they sway as they do so. You soon get used to the motion; it’s a bit like a Space Hopper on legs. But then you go downhill, and not only do you need to lean backwards again, but also you have to squeeze tight with any muscles you can find in your thighs. So we were off into the dunes, to seek the sunset. That same still silence and heat that we experienced in Khuldera, something almost tangible, wrapped itself around us, lulling us into a state of euphoria and creating an inner glow, a bit like a meditation.
I could have been riding around for hours, travelling miles, or round in a figure of eight for ten minutes, because I had no sense of time or bearings. We reached a crest where a dozen people had already parked their humps and settled down to wait. This is where it went wrong. I dismounted and turned to where travelling friend was doing the same, just in time to see it get back up as she was getting off. Result – she fell, luckily there was no real damage but she was shocked and disorientated for a while and didn’t want to ride the pesky thing back.
We eased our hump shaped legs down onto the sand and waited while the sky became sky-blue-pink, it was beautiful but was like looking through a veil of micro fine sand. Travelling friend did ride back, very bravely. We couldn’t help thinking of what might have happened, of course it was hideous, scary and even embarrassing but thank heavens nothing was broken because Devon Air Ambulance was a tad out of range.
We were the only non Germans at the hotel, sitting around listening to some musicians, and dancing in the dark. We shocked Mr Singh again, with our capacity for Tiger, it comes in quite large bottles over there and well, it was very hot, even after the stars came out.
Quite well lubricated, we headed for our hut. It was clean but very basic, with a loo in a cubby hole. Help came very quickly when I screamed. Spiders. Lots of very large spiders. We were laughed at but rescued. I insisted on checking under the beds for any that could be waiting for some fresh, juicy, English or American woman to feast on. The trouble was, checking when the light was one little dangling bulb, was pretty difficult. Attempting to push a bed aside, we found that it was a mattress, on planks that rested on piles of bricks! We didn’t find any more octopods, but didn’t sleep well either for worrying about them. The lesson – we would probably have fared better risking the scorpions.
I would highly recommend a camels safari, there’s nothing quite like the perspective you get aboard a foul breathed, bottom burping beastie with long eyelashes.
For two days now I have been learning to write. No, not the creative type that I have studied with the Open University, but handwriting, just like this, that you may or may not be able to read. If you have paid attention, you will have seen a post a month ago, where I exposed myself as one of the worst scribes on the planet.
Last week there was a development, a patient at work commented ‘Oh you have such cute little handwriting’. It made my colleague laugh rather too much and gave me a nice warm glow all day. It actually wasn’t cute or nearly readable like this, it was more my old style. You see,I think I might just have turned over a new leaf!
I started to think about why it is so messy. I know that part of the problem is that I am really always in a hurry but it has to be more than that. And then I remembered, a few people over the years have said that I don’t hold my pen correctly, so I looked at how others did it. It seemed to be something to do with the angle, so instead of my usual grasp,
I tried like this,
and guess what? It’s instantly better, whoop, whoop I’m so excited, I can nearly do it. At this point my daughter will be thinking special mummy and laughing her head off. But why did it go wrong in the first place? I really was neat as a child and feel a bit cheated when I could have had really stylish writing all my life. My next challenge will be to keep trying to improve until it does look beautiful. I may have to work on making it a little bigger as well, I can remember my old boss saying my writing was too small as well as illegible and I would defensively tell him that he should be pleased that a pen would last longer because I didn’t use as much ink.
So, click on the two photos, can you all see some improvement? 🙂
http://jfb57.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/100-word-challenge-for-grown-ups-week32/
Because it’s leap year this week, Julia’s prompt is ‘take a leap of faith’ and my story is called,
Dogon Dreams
She’d dreamt for so long. Long faced Kanaga masks with square dark holes where eyes should be. She dreamt that staring in, was staring into her future, into the Dark Continent, to travel on the Niger to Dogon country. ‘Damn it,’ she’d said and booked a flight, a leap of faith, to Bamako.
***
A sharp sandblast of anxiety pelted her, as she stepped from the arrivals hall to a barracking mob of taxi drivers. They offered Mopti, her destination for $250. She turned, for reassurance, to the blue eyed French man she had just met. ‘Xavier, which taxi shall we choose?’
A lofty bay with a shaft of sunlight peeping through the leaded windows but outside the garden had rampaged to obscure the view. The chairs in the bay were rigid and upright, but she chose to sit where she could see more than just decay. Eight years. That’s how long it had taken to keep the promise she made as her grandmother lay dying.
‘Go to Krasne, take my diaries . . . in the bureau, and all of the photos’
‘Where is Cratchnuh Gran? I’ve never heard of it’
‘In Podkar, find your aunties and uncles, you have seven.’
‘What?’
‘I am Polish Anna and you must go, there is a home for you there.’
She turned away and closed her eyes.
Anna married, and lived her life in a small Devon town but she often wondered who might be out there and why her grandmother had left them behind. She found herself alone after an amicable divorce and decided now was the time. Researching on the internet she tried every possible spelling of the place names and got nowhere. The language was difficult with its alien sounds but she tried to learn a few words and when a Polish grocery shop opened, she became a regular customer, just so that she could listen. Of course the people there were bemused by this local woman, picking up tins to read the labels, but they would smile benignly and practise their English on her. Anna told them that her grandmother had been Polish and from Cratchnuh or Podca ‘Have you ever heard of it?’ They were delighted but frowned and shook their heads. ‘Podcarpahtzee’, another shopper said smiling, I have heard of this place’, it is spelt like this, and wrote it down for Anna, Podkarpackie. Anna booked a flight to Krakow that evening.
Travelling alone held no fear for her. Her grandmother had brought her up after her parents died and money had never been a problem, she had used part of her inheritance to backpack around Australia. Arriving at Krakow her first thought was to get to Krasne as quickly as she could, but negotiating the language was a lot harder than trying to buy bread in the Polish shop at home. She would see what she thought must be a post office, and it would turn out to be a Vets surgery instead. She decided to settle in for a couple of weeks and enjoy Krakow, getting on and off of bus’s, finding out how they worked and each day going a little further. In her hotel, her patience paid off when she became a familiar face and people began to talk to her.
Of course they would help her get to Krasne, ‘Why hadn’t she said before?’ The manager helped her find the bus, buy tickets and wrote detailed instructions for her journey. The hundred miles of countryside were stunning but her nervousness spoilt her ride. She had no idea what she would find at her destination, a small town with barely any internet information where no-one knew her. Would they remember her grandmother? By all accounts she had left there at least fifty years ago and never returned. Her hotel there was not the cosmopolitan experience she’s had in Krakow and she thanked Bazyli silently for his notes in Polish.
The taxi driver waited until the studded wooden door opened to her and then gestured that he would return in two hours. She smiled down at the woman who looked puzzled at first, but then spoke, ‘Bo . . . Bozena?’
Inspired by this photo by Barbara Fritze (Beelitz Heilstaetten), courtesy of Frizz text http://flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/looking-back-christopher-hall/
more of Barbara Fritze’s work can be seen here
http://flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/barbara-fritze/#comment-12369
Small Stones # 4
I miss . . .
the shiny golden
shipshape weathervane
it’s a mile away
but not today
it’s hiding behind
the treetops
folded in grey
I have a scar on my left eyebrow. I don’t think many people know it’s there, because it’s overshadowed by a mole. Even I forget, until it’s time to pluck my eyebrows and then unlike the right one, which hurts like eyebrows do when you pull them, it has this strange tingling thing going down. Every time I remember its existence I’m catapulted back to the day I acquired it when I was a young girl living in a very different society. I lived on the edge of a rough neighbourhood that grew up when the local council built hundreds of homes in the 1930’s. They cleared the slums in the wet quarter of the city and dumped 2500 people in a soulless area that became infamous for vandalism.
There was no-one to play with in my road but one girl in my class at school lived inside this troubled circle, we were friends and as soon as I was allowed to spread my wings it was to her I flew. I never ventured to the park – that was far too dangerous; we’d hang around on street corners instead. In time the next phase of building began, this time private homes were built on the broad fields where I’d been taken for Sunday afternoon walks as a very little girl. A building site was very tempting to Linda and I – don’t ask why, I haven’t a clue what made a couple of eleven year old girls want to snoop around there. Maybe the risk of getting caught scrambling through breeze blocks and unframed doorways imagining the room they would become. It was always sunny back then, we all say that don’t we? When I was a kid summers were long, hot and dry. Well on that day it was and in the early evening we were looking for some trouble to raze when it came to us with a bang.
First came the shouts, ‘Oi blackie,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘gollywog,’ ‘we’re going to get you.’ Worst of all a ‘joke’ from some disgusting TV comedian of the day, ‘What’s black and lives in a hedge?’ I’ll leave the answer to your imagination or memory. Jokes like that were commonplace back then before the Race Relations Act was introduced and Alf Garnett argued that Jesus was English rather than acknowledging that he may have had some interesting skin tone.
I was a feisty little thing; I’d had to defend myself a few times so that night I turned to look at my tormentors, hands on hips. I even watched one of them pick up a stone a hundred yards away and take aim. I watched its arc through the air towards me, closer and closer, one of those moments when that air was pre storm silent. Ten feet, five, one, bang. Into my head, I spun with disbelief and shock.
‘Run’ Linda said and pulled me along. I tried to shake her off and somehow lost several minutes. I was vaguely aware of her returning with adult voices. I was taken, bleeding and dazed to hospital, an echoing, high ceilinged place with slamming doors where they shone bright lights to check my eyes and I could hear them say ‘Half an inch lower and she would have lost her eye.’
I enjoyed the attention at school the next day, showing off my stitches, but I didn’t play on building sites again.
Verbal racist abuse continued through my early and mid teens. I was never physically attacked again, but those years when skin heads ruled the town at night coincided with my night club age. I could never just relax and I still hate being around town after dark, I look out under my scarred eyebrow, over my shoulder.
Until I began researching the idea of a trip to India I didn’t know Jaisalmer existed, but once I did it had the most powerful allure. I have tales to tell about the places en route out of Delhi, but that’s for later. We left Bikaner early, to travel 200 miles across the great Thar desert, a place so hot it burns inside your nostrils when you take a breath. After some 15 miles on NH15, signs of life became scarce. We stopped for a stretch and a photo opportunity, and when the engine was cut we stepped out into the most complete silence I’ve never heard. The landscape was empty, vegetation was the odd scrap of scrubby weed, with an occasional bug burrowing around it. It was my first taste of really dry heat – the closest feeling I can compare it to is a hair dryer on dry hair, and yet I loved it. It makes little sense to be able to get so much from . . . nothing, but I could have stayed at looked at that nothing for hours.
The good Mr Singh had other ideas, and rounded up travelling friend and I into our jeepy thing, where our body temperature gradually normalised. Half way across the desert the little huts started to appear occasionally, with boys persuading a goat or two with sticks. A government restaurant was our lunch venue with an indifferent Thali – because it contained the dreaded gobi – and apple juice, for one hundred rupees. More desert road, and just as our eyes were growing heavy, looking at beige-gold sand, Magan slowed down to negotiate his way through a crowd of people. There was nowhere, no homes, enclosed land, McDonalds or anything, but somehow around twenty people had appeared, to argue over who had run over, and killed, a camel. Someone had to compensate the owner and somehow it had to be moved. It was macabre, just like hearing sirens on the motorway.
Magan must have watched our expressions in his mirror instead of watching the road, either that or he read our minds, because he always stopped just when we spotted something interesting. Later in the journey we became cynical, thinking that he had stopped at the very same place countless times, where the very same group of women always wore their best saris, for the delight of his western tourists. This time we had chosen a couple of striking brick and thatch houses a hundred yards from the road. As we took pictures some children came and invited us to visit their homes. Newly built and tiny but with a bed for each person, some shelves for clothes and one had a fire to cook.
Outside, another charpoy bed was under an open sided, four post shelter. In all there were three adults and seven children, the sum of their possessions would have fit under my kitchen sink but they were so happy and proud.
To celebrate Dussehra they had painted a Rangoli, a bit like a mandala, in white on the pressed ground that was their courtyard. The oldest child, a girl around twelve asked for shampoo but as Magan said we should not start a precedent, we gave them only sweets and they were very happy. He told us that they would tell the story of our visit for the rest of their lives, we would never forget them either, it was an encounter to cherish.
The countryside from then on was sprinkled with villages and a few military bases, including an area where nuclear testing was carried out in the past. In the greener areas there were castor oil plants and kedgeree trees. We knew were approaching civilisation when there was enough irrigation from ‘tanks’, concrete reservoirs, to grow water melons. Rather than the red we are accustomed to, these were white fleshed and Magan smashed them against rocks for us, a welcome treat.
Magan had a wealth of knowledge to impart including about turbans:-
Men wear them to protect against heat.
They can be used as a towel
They can be tied to trees to use as a hammock.
They can be used as a bag.
And, different colours represent different families.
Our last stop before Jaisalmer was when we saw some women working in a field, Magan thought we wanted to take more photos, but before he noticed, I started to stride across to talk to them. I’d gone a little way when I heard him call me so I turned to wave and carried on. He called louder and sounded quite panicky, but because he was such a mother hen worrying about his Western chicks, I ignored him. He ran after me and looking like he was going to cry, pointed at the bottom of my salwar kameez. I was covered in hideous, prickly, seed heads that had buried themselves into the fabric and were agony to remove. He was mortified, poor man.
We arrived at a point just outside Jaisalmer, an ancient city at the end of the earth and stood to absorb the view. But you’ll have to come back again to hear more.
I had a disaster yesterday. At least what amounts to a disaster in my little world. I went out for the afternoon to try to get some decent photos to use for my course assessment and took two lenses. Now, I hate carrying things and try my best to travel light, but you know how women just have to have certain things with them? So yesterday instead of taking my main handbag that weighs a ton and slides off my shoulder whenever I try to take a picture, I took a tiny little bag that has lots of sections and padded it out to take my zoom lens along with the usual essentials. Going outwards on the walk in Shaldon I used the camera with its standard lens and at the furthest point, frustrated by my crappy shots, I changed to the zoom and put the standard into the camera case. Got some slightly better shots but not really what I was hoping for, the views across the estuary to Teignmouth were invaded by industrial warehouses.
Shaldon was a delight to wander around though, there was a decent butcher and a divine bakery (I’ve just had their tomato bread warmed and filled with cheese for lunch) with lower than supermarket prices. Back at the Ness car park, having snapped all the way, and in too much of a hurry, I rummaged for the zooms lens cap in the camera case. Unfortunately the case was at a funny angle and out fell the lens, landed with a clunk on the tarmac and rolled into the verge. I swore as I bent to pick it up, there was a brief moment before it fully registered and then I burst into tears when I heard the rattle of shattered glass. I cried all the way home and for most of the evening.
If you know me well, you’re probably wondering why I’m making such a fuss about something material that can be replaced. You may be thinking that it must be insured. Well I’ve had it three years and never had a problem before – believe it or not I’m very careful – and when it was due for renewal in June I decided that two hundred pounds to insure the camera and its lenses was more than I could afford. I’ll now have to spend that much to replace it, sometime.
So why the strong reaction? I’ve never been a dropper or breaker of things, been tempted to be a thrower of things at times, but as I have a scar over my left eye from having a stone thrown at me, I never will. It took me a while to work out the cause of my tears, it wasn’t something being broken, it was about a photographic item being broken. I had my first camera when I was about eighteen, a Kodak Instamatic no less, a cheap, simple to operate little thing that produced small square prints. I couldn’t afford to take too many photos, the cost was prohibitive and continued to be for many years. But even then I had a good eye and could see many, many photos crying out to be taken. Being a mum was the priority for many years and I was never in the position to own a camera. Just before the dawn of digital I bought a nice little compact 35mm followed by my first canon digital with just 3.2 megapixels but I took some good shots with it. That was in 2003 and two years later I upgraded to a 5 megapixel Canon and then I was away, teaching myself to use Photoshop 7 and using my photos to make cards, some of which I actually sold!
In 2008 a dream came true when I got an eos 450d with two lenses and the following year a third. I’m still learning to use it and I think I’m getting there because it’s set to manual these days. My ‘eye’ has grown faster than my techie skills could ever keep up with and if I’m honest there’s a limit to how much interest I can drum up in the ‘sciencey’ stuff I’m supposed to be learning on my Open University digital photography course. That’s where I am right now with photography. I wonder how much more skilled I would be by now if I had been allowed to use the equipment that had been in my house for most of my life? But I wasn’t, instead I was always told to leave it alone, don’t touch it you’ll break it, it’s too complex, delicate and expensive, and the bottom line YOU’RE TOO DAMN STUPID TO USE IT.
And so there I stood yesterday in shock as my expensive, delicate, complex lens crunched to the ground and shattered. Is it any wonder that I cried? Now I’m okay, for the first time ever, I have by my carelessness, allowed something to break, but it really isn’t the end of the world.
Lucid Gypsy 