I Have a Dream

Wouldn't it be great if in every one of those huge open plan offices, each chair had a huge spring under it. And utterly randomly, once or twice a week, it would launch people into the air.

Health and safety nightmare, I know. But when I worked in a big office this was what I spent my days imagining and it brought me great joy, laughter and quite a few strange looks. I thought I'd share.

EDIT: Launchees would yelp. the yelping is what makes it funny.

An Actual 100% Accurate Metaphor (Involving Soft Furnishings) For What it is Like to Write a Novel.

I'm two thirds through a rewrite now so I thought I would take a moment to explain what it's like to write a novel and use an example that we are all familiar with, and indeed one our lives would be smaller and somehow less civilised without: soft furnishings.

A novel is a lot like making a cushion. Your plot and characters are the cover, they give the novel its shape and then your theme is the decoration you use on the outside of the cushion, it needs to tie in with the cover you have made. Once you've completed the cover you go back and “stuff” the cover with dialogue, sub plots and description. Once that is done you spend some time beating the cushion in to shape, trying to get out the lumps and make sure your cushion fits in with all the other soft furnishings in your house. Or as I like to call it, “your vision”.

Then your friend who has heard you like soft furnishings so much you are making some of your own calls on you and they bring a cushion they bought at Habitat in Homebase. You look at this cushion and realise, although it was made by someone called Julie with eyes dead through boredom and whose only thought is for Gary who looks really cool when he smokes Regal Kingsize, it is still better made than yours. In fact, you can't see how you can ever make a cushion that can compare with the one your friend brought you.

In tears, you throw your friend out of the house and refuse to ever speak to them again. Then you spend a few weeks staring at the new cushion and your pathetic, shameful attempt at a cushion that you can't believe you ever considered for one moment any sensible human may ever, ever want to sit on. Then you burn the habitat cushion on the electric fire which shorts out everything in the house and your wife tells you that you are an idiot and you are over-reacting and actually your cushion is perfectly good. WHAT DOES SHE KNOW? IS SHE A CUSHIONOLOGIST???? NO.

You realise she will never understand you or your art and you only option is to leave home. You relocate to a stone bothy on the Isle of Mull with only as much Morrison's own brand whisky as you can get in the car and a photograph of your children. The only soft furnishings in the bothy are an upright chair that is thick with the smell of the previous occupier's incontinence and is also worryingly damp, you feel sure it also has bedbugs. Worst of all, despite its decrepit state you cannot help but notice that the cushion on it is very well made.

The whisky takes the edge off the pain.

Years pass and eventually you run out of whisky and decide, maybe, it is time to return home. When you do you find your wife is living with a man called Roger who does, 'something to do with accounts but it's not really that interesting what I really enjoy is paragliding.' Your children now call Roger 'Daddy' and look at you like you are a tramp who has come in off the street, mostly because you look like a tramp who has come in off the street. In the front room you find your cushion and, shockingly, you realise it is not nearly as bad as you remember. In fact, if you find better material, use a completely different design and change the stuffing it could actually work.

Frantically, you set to work, week after week you stay up late into the night, ignoring Roger and his pathetic attempts to 'sort this out like grown ups'. When you are finished you hold up your cushion to God and he sends a single, beautiful ray of sunlight which illuminates your cushion and you know. You. Know. This one is far, far better than the last.

But on the other couch, unnoticed until now, there are two cushions, one showing an amusing picture of a cat with a cigar and the other with a Union Jack in blue and green that is shaped like a teapot. They are well made, too well made. A TEAPOT? WHY DIDN'T YOU THINK OF THAT? This is more than you can bear and you throw your pathetic cushion out of the window. You hear the siren call of Morrison's own brand whisky and the bothy on the Isle of Mull and the whole process starts again except this time you have scorpions in your hair

Cbeebies Xtra.

Being a stay at home Dad I watch an awful lot of CBeeBies. An awful lot. Sometimes it's more than you can bare but as there's a fashion for gritty reboots I thought I'd have a go.


Gritty reboots
 
Octonauts.

Kelli Kitten is the new Octonaut and has sworn to avenge her father killed by pirates. Kelli and Kwasi swiftly become best friends but when Kwasi comes clean about his Pirate past he is forced to kill a vengeful Kelli. Overcome with remorse Kwasi throws himself into the ocean without his mask to drown. Meanwhile, Captain Barnacles and the Vegemals play with a mischievous Sea Urchin.

Lesson Learned. - You cannot run from responsibility. Sea Urchins are a type of mollusc.


Mike The Knight.

Mike butchers the Muslim prisoners. Realising this isn't honourable he volounteers to be first over the wall at the siege of Jerusalem.  Squirt's leprosy gets worse and results in a hilarious search for his arm. Meanwhile, at home, Evie is burnt as witch.

Lesson learnt. Take responsibility for your actions.

I Can Cook with Gordon.

Danny (5) buckles under the pressure of a twenty cover service. Jasmine (6) falls off her stool while preparing pasta and suffers 35% burns. Gordon says a naughty word.

Lesson Learnt. Get your ars*s in gear, being a f**king child is no f**king excuse in this F**king economy you f**king cretin.

Peter Rabbit.

When Peter sees Mr Todd has eaten so much he says he can't eat another thing he thinks it's safe to leave the burrow door open. Mr Todd rushes into the burrow and massacres the entire family just because he can. (Last in series)

Lesson Learnt: Nature is red in tooth and claw.

The Third - 'The Boy Who Listened in at Doors

This was due to be the third in a triptych of experiments after Interment and The Social Diary of a Ghoul but as is wont to happen life intervened and Mikko had to attend to boring things like earning money for food and stuff. It was recently featured on the lovely, fragrant and talented Susi Holliday's blog and I thought I'd put it here.

Hope you like it anyway.

The Boy Who Listened in at Doors.

There are Witches out there, with skull faces .

On windy nights they gather in the tree outside his window and huddle together on branches winter-shorn of leaves. They chatter and laugh, flap their cloaks and watch him with beady black eyes.

All witches, all watching. Laughing black leaves on the cold oak’s boughs.

,
'They’re just crows,”'says Mother with her half-sad mouth. 'Just crows, my boy, just crows.'

The Boy pulls his curtains together tightly.

not even the mercurial moon

can peek into his room.

Better the dark than peeking Witches,

with skull faces.

Hard, black, leather-skin carapaces

Long dead grimaces.

Grinding and eating and cawing and gnawing.

He has protectors, many and varied.

Can't, doubt the bravery of Flying Fred Ted nor Keemo the duck that Daddy brought him from the hospital.

When Daddy was still here.

Stick thin on the bed.

The bears hate the witches with Skull faces and he hugs his small army close.

He should feel safe.

Witches talk

And squawk

And screech and cackle and yatter and caw-caw the night away.

Outside those thick black curtains that Mummy, with the half-sad mouth, fitted.

'They’re just crows, My boy, just crows,' she had said as she hung the curtains, shoulders slumping, a pale hand covering tearfilled eyes.

When they first visited - black flecks falling out the dusky sky to populate the bare oak - Raggedy capes making excellent wings for those who wish to be something else.  

The same night the Terminal took Daddy went away.

Witches have guile, they know people would spot birds with skull faces straight away.

(Make a fuss.

Call animal protection.

Or the newspapers

Get the T.V. People

Or maybe write a book.)

Witches don’t want that.

So they slip their black pointy hats down over their shiny-leathered skulls.

Hard black beaks

Cover hard black faces.

 

 'Just crows my boy, just crows. Where do you get these things from, my son?'

Sometimes, the caw-cawing and yattering starts to swirl in his head, stops being squawks and screeches and becomes words.

Always the same.

Taunting, teasing, sneering, squealing, high pitched, rakkety-ratchet old-hag, warty-chinned voices

'Shall we eat the boy tonight? Good and plump he is. Who’d miss the lonely little scrap? Our bellies would be full and his mother not be sad.'

Again they say it. 

Again and again.

Each time more teeth-on-glass voices join the chorus until eventually, in a great taunting, teasing, sneering, squealing, high pitched, rakkety-ratchet old-hag, warty-chinned wail the whole flock of skull-faced, witch-crows takes to the sky.

Raggedy capes flap. Hat mouths croak. A dark spiral rising up and out over the city.

'They’re just crows, my boy, just crows' she says but the tears in her eyes and the tremble of his lip won’t leave.

'Daddy would scare them away.'

'I’m sure he would,' she looks at the floor to hide her tears as she tucks him in. 'There are no monsters, my son. Nothing eats people They’re just crows, my boy, just crows.' Her voice a strangled sob.

He tries to be brave but he knows she lies and pulls the covers over his head and curls up, folding in his fear and pain with ganglion arms.

Monsters are real.

'I'm sorry, Mrs Taylor,' said the doctor. 'There's nothing we can do. It's eating him away.'