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Part six of the spirit world story has been uploaded as an attachment on an earlier post, 'Spirit and Alien Party - 6th July' Tagged - spirit party

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          Mental Health issues

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[ 7 minute read ]

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Some people call it 'Getting out of bed the wrong side'; some people call it 'A bear with a sore head'; some people call it, 'impatience' and some people might call it, 'discrimination'; I call it, 'being in a new alternative world'.

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A long time ago, I was in Tesco buying cheap T-shirts. There was a pink one in my size. 'Oh No! I can't wear that one because people will think I am gay'. At the time, it bothered me if people thought that about me. At the time, I was also learning how to be more comfortable with myself and more importantly honest with myself, because I recognised that being honourable means having a solid starting base from which to work. 

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In Hamlet, Act One, Scene 3, Polonius says to Laertes: 

"This above all: to thine own self be true. 

And it must follow, as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man."

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Oscar Wilde said: "The truth is rarely pure; and never simple."

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It was a challenge to be true and upright that I just could not shy away from. Not least, because I thought that there is something else to see. William Shakespeare summed it up for me, in Hamlet, Act One, Scene 5:

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HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

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HAMLET: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in Heaven and Earth.

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I felt that I needed to discard duality; shed falsehood; and see with fresh eyes, because I wanted to see strange things.

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I bought the pink T-shirt in Tesco, a long while back. People probably did think I was gay. I was definitely biased at the time, because I didn't want to be roped in with gay people. I had to buy the T-shirt because I had to wear it like a hair-shirt. It must, I vowed, keep causing me discomfort until it does not. I thought that when I feel that gay people are just like me, like any other person, I can stop wearing it. In any case, if gay people suffer because they are gay, I want to at least taste some of that pain, even if it is discrimination. Two things may have prevented me noticing any homophobic discriminatory behaviour towards me: I was a very well muscled, 6 foot 1 (1.85m) man, and there was a Rugby team that played in a pink strip on the television.

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Of course, that pink T-shirt eventually stretched and wore out, so I bought another one, and another one. While I had been wearing the first pink T-shirt I became comfortable 'being gay'. It didn't matter one way or the other, and I quite like pink. It really doesn't mean 'gay'. 

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I colour matched a pink T-shirt with pink socks and today and wore black shorts with them; the actual Rugby team colours as it turns out. I am pleased to say that it is, for me, not the colours that are important; it is the smartness, the matching, that is paramount.

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I suntan really quite easily and have thick skin so I really do colour well. The looks I get from strangers are more sustained and frequent in Summer than in Winter. Perhaps it is because I am so handsome and magnificent and they are jealous. I think we should really be thinking the opposite though. I can't help thinking that I am living in someone else's country, like I am a trespasser. I even feel guilty and move towards meekness. Meekness is great if you want to be meek, but as a defensive attitude it doesn't really sit well with me.

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I was in Aldi this morning, wearing a pink T-shirt and pink socks. My skin colour matched the man paying at the checkout, immediately before me. He had many facial attributes that suggested, to me, that he possibly has an Asian heritage. I don't care about that. I had a little chat with him about packaging. Our skin colour matched the checkout attendant's skin colour, who may have South-East Asian relatives. We three shared a few words, but did not delay any progress in the shopping/paying process.

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All I had to buy was a single tin of Tuna, and the woman behind me placed a large multi-pack of toilet paper first in her queue of items; effectively hiding her view of my tin of tuna.

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This woman, behind me, rearranged her chosen items on the conveyor belt. I could see that she moved the crush-able items to be the last that would be scanned and so be placed back in her basket on top. Now here is the rub: I always make sure the crush-able items are last in my queue of goods as I unload my basket, because it is important. I suggest that if someone does not do this at the outset, but then later changes the order to make it so after three or four minutes, it is because they were not thinking and were on auto-pilot and then snapped out of it because there occurred a strong enough thought to bring them from their secret alternative world into the 'here and now'. This 'here and now' has a gay Asian man impeding her progress, who seems to know the man paying because they are talking and have the same skin colour, and this gay Asian man will not advance along with the man paying; you know, past the checkout till. 

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The woman kept pushing her items forward and rearranging them. She alternated between doing this and giving me long looks. I think she was trying to tell me something like: 'Look, gay Asian, I am next; will you move so I can be attended to?' I am only guessing, but I don't think she was including. 'Please'.

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I am only guessing. I suppose some may say I was making an educated guess, but that is a bit of a misnomer really, isn't it? In any case, I felt certain that she would very soon realise at least one of her mistakes. A mistake that fomented her impatience which came about by being woken from her alternative, secret, dream world, which heavily relies on her using heuristics to navigate the real and mundane tasks of everyday life.

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Shopping, for me, is never boring. It is never dull or mundane. There are always people who are in alternative worlds around. They are blind to me; they are blind to you; they will never remember you or me. You and I do not matter to them. Effectively, we are beneficial to them; a hindrance to them; or indistinct in every way.

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If a person enters into a fevered state; angry, impatient, or discriminatory, they are most certainly in an alternative world to one they more often inhabit. It is as though the kind family-oriented person has swapped places with the domestic-abuser who also has road-rage. I think illness can be like this. People do recover and their kind persona comes back, just as their irascible persona flees back to another world.

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By the way, I am not going to say whether I am gay or not. Not because I am proud one way or the other; quite simply because I couldn't care less (Could care less, in American English).

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I will say though, that when I first experienced racism directed at me, I was hugely surprised. I had no idea that I come from another country, or have relatives outside of Europe. Thanks for opening up a new line of thinking for me. That first hit was twenty years ago and it still hurts. 'The first cut is the deepest'.

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  Part Five of the Spirit and Alien Political Party story has been uploaded as a downloadable document in the post 'Spirit and Alien Party', tagged 'spirit party'.

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All my posts are available at: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

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Can you see what I see?

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History shows us where we have trodden before, or something like that. Literally, where I have trodden helps to reveal what I have done and not done. Allow me to explain.

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I like fried food. I like to make patties and fry them. I can put pretty much anything in them; just think of a home-made fish-cake. Why not a chicken-cake? (not a beef-cake though because that is old slang for a heavily muscled man, and the words don’t sit right for me when I think of cooking).

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Cheap frozen fish has usually been in a pressurised environment that forces water into the flesh. More water and less fish to make up a required weight means more profit for the supplier, and I suppose the retailers. You have to defrost these fish before you fry them otherwise there is a lot of oil spitting all over the place. This is invisible to me because I have eyes that don’t see everything as your eyes might. I am also kind of forgetful and, like many people, easily distracted, particularly when it comes to cooking and eating. Although I will wash the dishes, plates and utensils that I use for food preparation as I go along, I always seem to not clean the cooker. Not really surprising because it is hot when the food is cooked and ready to eat and I just want to eat. Even when I clean the cooker, I forget to wipe the tiles above and at the back of the cooker. There is nothing that I can see to remind me that tiny spots of oil have accumulated there during the cooking process. And, oil doesn’t really have much colour anyway. I know many people can see the oil and tiny drops of water. But, if you consider that I have always been amazed that the people in football (soccer) stadiums can see who has the ball, you will begin to understand the difference between my vision and normal vision. I can only guess what detail other people can see.

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If I use clean water, which is what any self-respecting and clean person should use to clean things, I cannot see where the tiny oil spits have landed, and most often, dried out. These dried ones are the ones I have to scrub with actual detergent and one of those green scourer things. If I use dirty water, these dried oil spots are very visible to me; yellow.

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Even though it seems disgusting to practically everyone, including me, if I was to wash the kitchen floor and then use the same water to wash the tiles by the cooker, I would be able to see where I need to scrub. I don’t do that, but if I did, the history of where I have trodden would show me some of my cooking and non-cleaning history. In my head, this equates to: if you want to reveal invisible dirt or rather contamination, use dirt.

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I turned on the television and turned to a shopping channel.

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        ‘Want your home to be clean and smell like it has been recently cleaned? For the low price of sixteen ninety-nine you can have not one, not two, but three bottles of the new improved formula ‘Dirt’ by LMS. Your visitors will envy you that musty smell.’

All my posts : https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

  Part Four of the spirit story has been uploaded as an attachment to the post 'Spirit and Alien Party', tagged with 'spirit party'.

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[ 5 minute read ]

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Some Stuffed Toys

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A while ago I discovered one of those big, rectangular, wheeled recycling bins, that people in the USA call ‘dumpsters’. I didn’t actually discover it, because they are everywhere and it was not in an unusual place; it wasn’t lost and unknown to the human race, like in an unexplored rainforest with arrows sticking out of it. It was at the back of some shops. I don’t, however, haunt alleyways and look slit-eyed in corners for opportunities. The back of these shops has a road that is a short-cut to somewhere else, which I sometimes use.

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This particular bin is used by the British Heart Foundation Charity Shop for perfectly good stuff that, I suppose, they think they can’t sell; so they throw it away. I once found a lovely doll in there, very clean and in great condition, and thought about an unmet little girl that might like a doll, but money is too tight to mention for her family. So, I sat it on top of the edge of the bin. Half an hour later, I passed again, and it was gone. I looked in the bin and it wasn’t there. Yes! It worked! Someone, maybe even an adult, will be happy today! Even the giver will be happier! Success!

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It is actually illegal, in the UK, to put in, or take out anything from, a bin, or skip, that is controlled by someone else. I don’t really think a judge would want to convict a good person though, and taking something out leaves more room for other stuff, doesn’t it? I think the ‘taking out’ bit of the law relates to something like using a skip for collecting recycled bricks that will be resold, something like that, or top soil, maybe.

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       ‘You did willfully remove….a….children’s doll….. from a bin. A bin that you do not control or have responsibility for. How do you plead?’

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       ‘Guilty, but I was trying to be kind and thoughtful.’

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       ‘We are not concerned with kindness here today. We are measuring the degree of your criminality!’

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I could hear someone in the gallery say, sotto voce, ‘That told him, nasty little thief.’

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       ‘Yeah,’ said someone aloud, ‘Shout harder at him.’

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Anyway, I went past the bin on another occasion and lo and behold, there were three little stuffed toys still with BHF price tags on; I think they were marked for just short of two British pounds each. I was on the way to Aldi, one of the cheaper supermarkets in the UK, and thought, ‘Outside Aldi would be a good place to leave them.’

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Unfortunately, displacing the stuffed toys from an obvious salvaged position and placing them outside a supermarket invokes a different set of values in people; sadness. Because Aldi attracts, in the main I think, people with low and finite budgets for food, and because we have all heard about people sacrificing home heat for food. The people who saw the little stuffed toy animals probably thought that a young parent had spent what little money they have to make their child happy, and then forgot to take them home to the little one.

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It got worse. I thought that it would be better to place the three little toys on a low wall next to the bus-stop so passers by would get a chance to take them home. So, I took them from the front of the supermarket and put them on the wall. It started to rain. I knew I had messed up when I saw a man walk past, look at them, and shake his head. HE probably thought that a child had been playing with the new toys and forgot them when they clambered onto the bus with their parent. He may have thought that the child would be sad that they had lost the little animals. I know the rain helped to convince him that he was right.

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Of course, those toys were never bought from the charity shop by a parent or grandparent hoping to please a child. No-one had to count their money to check if they could afford them and still manage to feed the kids. No-one played with them and then forgot them. The only thing that happened was that someone, some time ago, had bought them new, they were gently played with, maybe washed, and then given to a charity shop to be resold, so someone else could get some pleasure. A kind person did that.

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I spoiled it all. I rescued them from the bin and took them to a place where, when people saw them they became sad and empathic for something that never happened. I created sadness and pity by trying to be kind. I am not sure, but I think the Portuguese word, ‘Saudade’ fits this.

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I am so sorry. I blundered into a situation and tried to shape it without even looking forward to see how things might unfold. I saw only one future; a future that I wanted to make for someone else. It all went terribly wrong.

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I am so sorry. Really sorry.

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       'All rise'

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       'You are accused of willfully removing children's toys from a bin that is not controlled by you, or for which you have any responsibility. How do you plead?'

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       'Guilty.'

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       'Yes, yes. But that is not why we are here. Move on!', came a hungry voice from the gallery.

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       'Quite. You are further accused of attempting to shape a future of which you had no control of, beyond the initiation of it. How do you plead?'

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       'Get to the point, came another voice from the gallery.'

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       'Guilty.'

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       'We come now to the most heinous crime. You did willingly allow other humans to become saddened by your actions. In fact, you created a scenario that would, in all cases have caused sadness, because those people's pity and conscience would NEVER allow them to pick up and take toys that have been forgotten by poor children. How do you plead?'

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       'Guilty.'

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       ' This court shall be lenient, despite this not being the first time you have appeared before me. You shall be pierced and feel emotional pain until such time as the court recognises you have amended your ways. You must, and I should not need to tell YOU this, consider the effect that your CLUMSY ACTIONS HAVE ON OTHER PEOPLE. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?'

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       'Yes, your Honour.'

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[ 5 minute read ]

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Her mouth moves up

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I have a neighbour that has a really cute smile. She doesn’t smile often, at least not at me. But, like most women, if I smile at her she smiles back. Maybe a psychologist would say she doesn’t want to give me the wrong signal. I have never really understood why smiling is the wrong signal. No, I tell a lie; I had a girlfriend that many men found alluringly attractive. She, maybe because she is Columbian, smiled a lot. It turns out she was a lot of men’s temporary girlfriend for an hour or two. Yeah, okay, I understand that a woman’s smile aimed at a man might be construed / misconstrued as ‘Would you like me to be your temporary girlfriend?’

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My neighbour lives next door and we sometimes talk, mostly about plants and trees. We are mature like that. She sometimes gossips a bit and I try not to.

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I had hurt my knee and had trouble getting my bicycle out of my front door. It goes in forward and comes out backwards and needs to be turned around without touching the ground as it comes out to avoid the plants. This meant that I had to take all my own weight and the bike’s weight on my soggy knee and rotate one hundred and eighty degrees. I can normally do this in one because human bodies can be facing a different direction to the direction the feet are facing, but it does mean twisting our knees a bit.

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       ‘Urgh! Urgh! Aahh!’ I panted quite a bit too ‘Pant, Pant’, because I also had Atrial Fibrillation (the heart doesn’t beat as it should or misses beats) caused by too much caffeine and too much stress. Mine goes away and I only rarely get it. This urgh and pant went on down the garden path until I reached the road, where I carefully got on my bike from the elevated position of the pavement. Now, most of my weight is on the bike saddle and the movement of my knee will not include any twisting. Much less pain.

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I started to ride and THEN I noticed my neighbour in her garden; she had been hidden by her hedge a bit, and my own inability to recognise the presence of other people being around. That was a temporary issue because I am ‘blessed’ with hyper-vigilance. Most people with PTSD are cursed with it; that’s what makes them jumpy, I think. After decades of it, I have somewhat turned it into a super-power. Okay, a power. Well, maybe an AA battery power. It is actually pretty binary in how it manifests – super-aware and not shockable, or jumping out of my skin.

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       ‘Hello, Sally!’ I cheerfully called.

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She had heard me huffing and puffing and oohing, aahing, and ughing before I got on my bike, and then noticed me calmly cycling past her like a magnificent, tall and handsome swan in human form. I am like that. She plainly thought that I had been aware of her and had pretended to be in pain or out of breath. She turned her head towards me, away from her bird feeder, and smiled her wonderful smile. This one said, ‘You had me fooled, you rascal.’ Thinking about it as I cycled on, I wondered what she might do if I dropped down dead in front of her. That would be a real shame because I would miss her smiling at me. So later, I told her I was not acting; you know, not ‘crying wolf’. She just looked confused. It was a couple of days later and I don’t figure in her life as a memorable entity, so I think she had forgotten my act / actual pain.

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I am unusual in that most things I come across are not particularly interesting to me. I have a ruthless streak and use it on myself. I will deny myself practically anything for the sake of the tiniest cause; most of the time the cause is driven by how can I be more lazy or how can I reduce spending money. They don’t always segue together well. Take cycling instead of catching a bus or driving, for example.

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Advertising and marketing have absolutely zero effect on me. I mean zero. I even studied marketing to find out why, but I am none the wiser from solely that. So I studied mental health and there, by extrapolating stuff and making my own recipe I came up with a passable understanding of myself. And it is only today thinking about Sally’s smile, that I understand why photographers of clothing models make the models mould their bodies into certain shapes while they click away.

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If I was a photographer and Sally was a model, I would trick her and then reveal the trick to her. She would squint a little and that smile would move her cheeks a bit, more than Mona Lisa’s, her mouth would move up a bit, and I would be able to ‘see’ Sally thinking, ‘Sneaky.’

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So now, I can recognise three smiles, the smile that says ‘Sneaky’ the Duchenne smile (genuine and reaches the eyes) and the ‘Pan Am’ smile (false for customers and cameras); four if I count my Colombian ex-girlfriend’s smile that says. ‘Want to have fun?’ I can’t help thinking that, HER smile is just a natural smile and European men, surprised by it, think it means, ‘Let’s do it’. I know SHE never turned it off because she once said to me. ‘If it happens, it happens.’ It’s a good attitude but it didn’t really make me happy. Young, carefree and heading for complication, but she felt good from the male attention.

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I wonder if there is a smile that just says, ‘Good Morning, keep walking and forget about me.’

All my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

800 words written in two hours for a five minute read. It’s a bit like cooking; an hour or two of preparation and heating, for only fifteen minutes of eating. But it is so much fun making pies and cakes and then tasting them.

Wild

[ 5 minute read ]

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I once got caught short and had to take a leak behind a hedge. To be honest, I have done it thousands of times. I used to be a long-distance haulage driver, including on the European continent and there are no toilets for hundreds of miles sometimes. On this one occasion I have in mind, I had, of course, gone behind a tall hedge so no-one would know I was there; you know:

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       ‘Ugh! That man is weeing!' as they drive past.

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There isn’t much you can do while you are ‘weeing’ in the countryside, except look around. There wasn’t much to see on this day though, so I just looked down into the undergrowth and leafless brambles and ‘saw’ a whole new world. It was as though I could suddenly see in colour when everyone else was already seeing, except they can’t. Oh, this is unreal! I thought. This is what ‘they’ are all talking about, except they weren’t. This is so, so...I don’t know.

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It is strange that I later mentioned having a piss behind a hedge to my brother. I think every boy or man has done it. It is nothing unusual or interesting. The only time you might tell someone is how you got caught by an irate or surprised person who has suddenly come upon you. I said, to my brother,

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       ‘I looked down and just saw…’

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       ‘Wild’, he said. That was it! Wild! It wasn’t like seeing wild through David Attenborough’s eyes. For me, watching amazing wildlife cinematography was like going to a zoo and seeing a tiger only a few feet away with my own eyes. If the tiger had leapt at me and I was saved by a thick sheet of, I suppose, laminated glass, I would certainly have experienced a shock, a fun shock.

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       ‘I had the fright of my life.’ (You will have to put your own expletives or blasphemy in there).

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If the tiger had actually gotten to me and bitten my arm off and had to be pulled off by keepers, I would, of course, experience a ferocity beyond anything I had encountered before. I witnessed a boy get 'attacked' by chimpanzees at Twycross Zoo when he stepped over the low barrier separating the public from the cage, and 'handed' some nuts to a chimp. Instead of taking the nuts, it grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm into the cage. Somehow, another one managed to get the bag off his back and the other whooping chimpanzees emptied it on top of the cage. One 'read' a book upside down, while others opened his lunch box. The keepers, hearing the racket, had to bring fruit for the chimpanzees before they released the boy's arm. I bet he thinks he experienced wildness, but he didn't, because the chimpanzees emulated humans; they had experience. My vision was different. The experience I had of urinating on some dormant brambles in Winter was a blending of the world I live in; buildings, roads, people, jobs and so on; and the wild. What was distinct was that I saw a world without our rules. Wild.

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That was the first time I ever fully realised that there are other worlds. Not physical worlds orbiting distant stars. Patrick Moore used to tell us that in ‘The Sky At Night’. Now, it is Professor Brian Cox who delights us.

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Of course, when I was sixteen, I knew there was something else. I knew that there was ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Well, I thought I did. It is a lot more complex than that, I know. But, this ‘wild’ I discovered twenty or so years later, was an entirely new and different ‘fish’.

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I suppose that experiencing it has left me with an indistinct portion of me still in it, perhaps the very end of a tip of a gossamer-light finger. Yet, if I look really closely all I can see are the ripples in a still pond that, that finger tip makes in the wild world. I can imagine that the pond is not really a pond but is instead an entirety that is a raging storm that derives from the animals and organisms that make up the wild world interacting. I want to go there. I once, I think on a spiritual level, wished to be part of it. I wanted to be more in the wild world than the human world. I have, on many occasions, felt the bite of nature; close to death from hypothermia for example, but realistically that is how to be confused, even fevered in believing you are warm when you are not.

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I am having ‘difficulties’ with the animals that come into my back garden; Muntjac deer, badgers, foxes, and I suppose domesticated cats from over the road that kill pigeons and leave the feathers everywhere. My plants are eaten and trampled and they make holes in my jerry-built fences. I have even spoken to the obvious ants and snails;

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       ‘Go away.’ But they don’t understand me.

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I want to tell the animals to go somewhere else and let me grow some plants. But I know that is just plain mean, and I know that I would have to leave the human world to do so. I don’t want to do that. I will just have to be content with ‘seeing’ a tiny pond; through a minuscule hole in the fabric of the veil that separates us, and be patient with something I know is there but really don’t understand.

[ one and a half minute read ]

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I think I will go along with time

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Someone once asked me why I have not replaced my old electric cooker. It has rust on it, a couple of the knobs have fallen off and I have to guess what temperature I have turned the oven to because the numbers have worn off. I told them that it is for the same reason that I do not replace a car because it is out of fashion or doesn’t go as fast as it once did or has developed strange quirks that sometimes irritate me; I married a beautiful, young and shiny woman. She was fast, exciting, and reliable. Heads turned when she passed. Other people admired her classy looks and style and she was accomplished at learning new things. I knew that she too would get a little rusty; I might know her well but one day she would develop little annoying quirks and I won’t be able to read her as well as I once did. I knew that she would get slower and less eager to please. All this, I knew would also happen to me. I never envisioned that I would need or want to get a newer model as soon as something goes wrong. If she ever got injured and needed to be repaired in a hospital I would not abandon her. Of course, people are not utilities and I am only using metaphors as sub-text. What I actually said was:

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       ‘Why would I? I like it. Having to use something to turn a couple of knobs is not hard; it's habit and I have it to hand. A little bit of surface rust is fine and guessing, and hoping, how something that's been in the oven turns out is fun; it's cooking.’

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[ 7 minute read ]

Guilt and confusion

My local hospital is an University hospital. There is never the same staff at reception and never the same people not doing things and never the same doctors, if they are doctors. The patients are all strangers to me except they are obvious in their sameness; dull.

As I enter the main waiting room; the one where we actually have to wait, I am entering a waxworks museum of people. Silently seated and movement reduced to thumbs flicking across phone screens, they appear to be disengaged. But they are not; by flicking through a few templates to overlay the scene I find that the one with cows in a field with an overcast sky matches these people the best. Like cows, the bored patients playing with their phones are chewing their cud.

     ‘Mr Mundane’, called the young woman for the next check of someone's eyes.

Sometimes, I hope that a snake might run in and hold us at bay for a while until the snake-wrangler arrives with a hooked stick. Yet, in the eye clinic, there is almost never a young person who lacking experience might be flighty or irrational in the face of potential agonising death. For such a person, Russian Roulette played with a loaded snake would be obviously tense. Young people would try to increase their odds of survival by standing on their chairs or, strangely in a modern hospital environment, screaming.

In a discussion on why older people are usually less thin than teenagers, I proposed that it is because mature people have developed heuristics for living, which reduce the amount of effort they need to expend, to get what they want. Of course, that isn’t everything though. In marketing, a product goes from obscurity to growth, on to maturity, and then declines into obsolescence. Any person over the age of fifty-five trying to re-enter the job market knows how the job interviewer views the ‘product’ before them. The lifecycle of a product could be used as a template for understanding why some people feel wanted and some not so sought after. Further to this, is that as we grow from a babe-in-arms with only few needs, we develop a kaleidoscope of ‘wants’ in our teens, twenties and thirties, which slows down and declines as we reach a more mature age. Getting a job in the later stage of life means that invisibly showing the interviewer that one is not satisfied with what one already has, is an absolute that should not be ignored; If you are not nervous or eager in a job interview, it is because you don’t want new trainers or an electric scooter or a concert ticket. Having a contingency plan, such as older people tend to have, will not win the day in a job-seeking scenario. So, working because it is your hobby means you need to find a new hobby.

Likewise, in the hospital waiting room filled with waxwork people, if a snake runs in, the people will sigh and, might, just might, stand with their backs against a wall. Always wanting to have a bit of fun, I knew that taking a snake to a hospital appointment would be as exciting as a a sudden downpour in a high street when everyone has seen the weather forecast and is carrying umbrellas. Nobody will react differently to each other. No-one will cover their expensive hair-do with the important file folder for the upcoming business meeting. In other words, when the rain stops, there will be no crazy aftermath; no changes to a routine; no deviation from a very linear existence. I had to face it. Disruptive behaviour would simply get me removed from the hospital and the only thing I would leave behind me would be some ‘tut-tuts’ under soft breaths. Realistically, no-one over the age of fifty wants anyone to suddenly play the soundtrack of jungle animals from a Tarzan film in a mausoleum. Macaws screeching, lions roaring and chimpanzees chattering, discordant jokes fail in the translation.

Fortunately, there were not enough seats for the number of patients and at last the perfect opportunity for disruption occurred. An elderly man came in and the only chair available had been reserved by a selfish handbag belonging to a comparatively young woman seated next to it. The handbag stubbornly refused to give up its chair..

‘At last’, I thought.

I broke my conversation off with a bloke from Northamptonshire who was telling me about a man he knows in Spain.

     ‘Would you like to sit here, Sir?’ I rose from my chair. The hobbling man faltered in his steps, and I knew he had his eye on the handbag and was heading that way.

     ‘Er, er..’

     ‘No problem, sit here. I don’t mind.’

Bingo! He moved towards my now vacant seat. Of course, the handbag’s companion called over to me. The handbag had jumped into her lap.

     ‘There is a space here if you want it.’

     ‘No, I am fine. Thanks.’

Because my now occupied seat was at the end of a line of seats, and I was standing against the wall, by taking only a single step, I was able to introduce the ninety-something year old to my, now suddenly bereft, chatting partner.

     ‘He knows all about the churches in Norwich’. I said to the old chap.

They talked for a while, while I enjoyed watching the guilt ebb from the minds of the waiting patients. I could see that some people felt none, but most obviously the youngish woman glowed with confusion and regret.

I felt that I had gained a house-point or a gold star or something for polite performance. I suppose a scout or guide might get a badge to sew on. I mentioned this to my previous talking companion when the elderly man with his walking stick was almost immediately called.

     ‘Old man with walking stick!’ the ophthalmologist whispered. Perhaps she likes playing games with people’s hearing. Maybe she thinks that it makes the patients more attentive. You know, prepare them for the instructions she is about to give. ‘Look here. Look there. Turn your head to the right…..’

     ‘Would you like me to carry your stick for you, Sir?’ I asked the slow moving man as he passed. He smiled, while a nurse started to splutter an explanation that he needed it.

My seating-neighbour said that my gold star was something you get in a primary school, so I told him I was trying to earn enough to be promoted to chair monitor.

Almost immediately another patient entered the waiting room and my fun companion offered his chair. I knew I had competition now. Who can win the most gold stars? By now, he was aware that I knew that I had made a lot of people feel guilty by showing kindness.

The new person found another seat as someone else was called. No-one got any nods of approval.

Things got interesting when two people came in accompanying a gent in an electrified wheelchair, and parked him next to me. Because I was at the end of the row of seats and my now ‘sworn buddy for life’ was next to me, we offered our seats to the standing relatives. Jason, my ‘friend’ was called before he reached the wall, so whoever was responsible for giving out the gold stars missed him and gave his to me. This meant that I had accumulated enough to sit next to the handbag that was now dozing on the woman’s lap. I approached her, and she clutched all her other belongings closer to her.

I know that she was relieved to be soon called because she must have read the same page of her book twelve times. She never turned a page in ten minutes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told her that I wasn’t going to steal her stuff after she gathered it together, before I sat down next to her.

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw21955

(Monday 2nd June 2025)

  Mental Health - (bereavement)

[ 30 minute read ] 

5,539 words read at 190 words per minute. Read it here or download the story from the post  'Writing by numbers without numbers 7'

This is the final post on Toby's love story in which in order to write it I forced myself to face dragons from my past. There are areas in my mind that seem to eternally deny any probing. I shall just have to consider that part to be my 'dark'. However, I am lifted by the lyrics in a Alanis Morissette song, in which she thanks someone for loving both her light and her dark. Incidentally, I only remembered her song 'Everything' this morning, after I had finished the story. I strongly encourage you to listen to her song after you have read my story. You can find it on YouTube.

Lyrics from 'Everything' - written and performed by Alanis Morissette. Released in 2004

'You see everything, you see every part. You see all my light and you love my dark. You dig everything of which I'm ashamed. There's not anything to which you can't relate. And you're still here. What I resist persists and speaks louder than I know. What I resist you love, no matter how low or high I go.'

This is the completed love story with no comments and no highlighted changes, and is also now uploaded as ‘A complete Toby story 01 June’ as an attachment on 'Writing by numbers without numbers 7', along with all the other attachments from beginning to end, with all my comments, notes, and changes.

I am not a writer or tutor. If you are a student of creative writing, I strongly urge you to open yourselves to advice from your tutors. 

This story is only to show how I faced a challenge to write about something that I recognise I find difficult to understand and show; love. I wrote the interaction between the characters and then embellished it to fill in with some background 'colour'.

Toby fell in love

Mimie and Chloe

(Spring 2023)

The Spring air had brought a flush to Mimie’s face that was enhanced by her closeness to her older identical twin sister. Mimie looked fondly at her over the kitchen table.

      ‘You make me laugh so much, Chloe!’

      ‘I am glad, because you’re so ugly when you don’t!’ Chloe smiled back. A long and drawn-out moment passed while her smile slowly grew to a wide grin, ‘I’m pregnant.’ she said joyfully.

      ‘That’s great! Oh Wow! Oh God, I love you so much right now! I am so happy for you, Chloe.’ Light danced in Mimie’s eyes and she hugged her sister.

      ‘Owen is delighted, he insists he will be a great dad and he has put in for overtime. He wants to celebrate by taking me, us, to Rome just before its born. He thinks it will be easier to carry inside me than push a buggy in a crowd.’

      ‘He is such a man!’ laughed Mimie.

She absent-mindedly rearranged the daffodils in a vase on the table. She was deliriously merry.

January 2024 (The following year)

Toby hated Winter. When he opened his front door a little slush fell in. The bare stems of a hazelnut shrub near his front door, despite being three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind and tiny particles of snow, like the ice scraped from the inside of freezers, chilled his face. The gusting blast had travelled countless miles from the East, and it had no gift of value, apart from a few partially decomposed, skeletal, leaves it blew across his path. Despite his flower beds still showing signs of frost, he took a few moments to carefully search for new growth, but found nothing he recognised. ‘Winter takes so long,’ he thought.

The sky, grey with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his rushed, light breakfast was not large enough to stand in for satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around, during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to do so, and not for fun.

His shortcut to the main road, through a spinney, took him past a long-abandoned bungalow. Its roof, open to the elements, had collapsed and lay under a blanket of snow where the shaded sun could not reach. On the footpath, a young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed him, coming the other way. She miserably passed him every day. Her face was reddened by the biting wind. Toby thought she always looked cold, and the baby must be, he thought. He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These days though, offering help came across as pity and contempt. 'Perhaps she needs money for heating', he thought. Tomorrow, he decided, he would leave twenty pounds on the footpath for her to find. He kept walking, feeling helpless.

At the bus stop seven people were waiting. No looked at him. A couple of them rocked from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. Apart from little crunches from their shiny shoes crushing small islands of late un-thawed snow, there was silence.

Like every day, the bus driver stopped the bus a little way from the kerb, causing the passengers to take a large step over the resident puddle. Toby, waiting for everyone else to move before he did, had time to see, in the puddle, a reflection of compacted dirty slush from the road stuck at the underside edge of the front wheel-arch, before he stepped onto the bus. He could not recall there never being a puddle there. Last in the queue, Toby took the only available seat; the seat that everyone avoided every day.

Dave, occupying one half of the bench, was a dog-lover. He never spoke, but his dog-hair covered clothes spoke for him. Only people with head colds and wet tissues were immune to the conversation that Dave's damp clothes had with fresh air.

For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers' heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward as the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.

Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office building.

Where the block paving concourse had lain in the shade for two winter months there was a sheen of green algae beginning to spread up the abutting walls, in a corner where a small heap of frosty leaves poked through a clump of partially thawed snow, that was now becoming translucent and glossy wet.

February 2024

Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down, it still touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.

The baby was crying again. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears in Mimie’s eyes starred her vision and she had to blink a few times to clear them. After making the baby as comfortable as she could, she gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room.

Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The man in the expensive suit blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, without knowing why, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.

The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. She desperately wanted to go home but went back to the flat.

The next day, near the fallen bungalow in the spinney, now that there was no snow to shroud it, she noticed all the accumulated rubbish. Crushed soft drink cans and crisp packets lay alongside empty polystyrene fast-food containers and sodden pieces of paper. The striped segments of sun and shade through the trees and saplings only served to highlight the decay. Looking away and mindful of where she trod, she saw a dry twenty pound note on the wet path. Obviously, it had been recently dropped there. It wasn’t long before she realised what was happening; she passed the good-looking suited man and then found twenty pounds. Over the next six weeks, she found twelve more. She kept them. She didn’t spend them, she saved them; each time she took them home back to the flat and dried and gently ironed out the crease down the middle, all two-hundred and sixty pounds.

March 2024

Now that the days had warmed and lengthened, the ground responded and Toby pondered which shoots to keep and which to keep, He had decided to give everything a chance unless the result was only an ugly thrusting of green mounted by tiny flowers that quickly faded, or easily recognised weeds that had deep roots that perniciously grew forth into the light from just the tiniest shred left in fertile soil. Constantly cutting back unwanted ribaldry that inevitably lead to insignificance or disappointment was not something Toby felt he wanted to do. He stuck to his plan of transplanting the seedlings he recognised as being escapees from his neighbours flower garden, and discarded the rest.

This morning, he got off the bus before it got to the road-works in the High Street.

Kate, the prosecutor on Toby’s current case, eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day, they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a kernel of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.

There was something sincere about Toby that she liked. His obvious compassion for the downfallen was apparent, yet he had a strong sense of propriety that she herself held to be valuable.

In the Greek restaurant, Toby inwardly winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.

‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’

The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had warmed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.

It was not until the third lunch that Toby noticed how her voice, now she was not projecting it in court, came from her holding it in her chest and larynx, though each word was carefully enunciated in a deep and smooth tone. When she questioned Toby, she did it with a neutral, genuine curiousity as a child might, or an inquisitive visitor from a different country or planet. A few times, Toby surprised himself by thinking her voice sounded similar to an AI assistive tool with an almost indistinguishable Californian accent, yet it evinced a good private English schooling. He felt held by it; supported by it; and warmed by it. Naturally a talker, Toby found himself hunting for questions to ask her, so he could listen to her rich voice. Eventually, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.

      ‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her equally straight dark eyebrows.

Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went, instead, with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’ Yet, why not? It was after all her she that had precipitated these meetings.

They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.

The restaurant they agreed to meet at was outside of town. Toby stepped out of the taxi onto a wet, recently lain car park. It had trees on two sides that separated it from fields. The trees however, did little to slow a damp wind that brought with it the merest puff of the scent of wood smoke that dissipated and then came again and faded. Not quite a full moon the light from it was alternately obscured by fast moving clouds, and waving branches that cast sweeping shadows across the car park. Expecting, but not knowing why, that Kate would be fastidiously punctual, he waited where he stood. Five minutes passed. Then, feeling foolish, he went inside.

Perfectly on time, Kate arrived at the restaurant with a light make-up that subtly enhanced her Eurasian features. Her dark hair was piled on her head. Despite there being some familiarity, and certainly an intriguing attraction, between them, they were still a little nervous, since this was an occasion at a different part of the day than their previous meetings and would have only one of two possible outcomes, one of which would be brought about solely by their mutual desires, and the other by a disconnect, or a shaped recognition of a job or meeting that they must return to in the coming days.

By the end of the following week, Toby and Kate were thinking of one another often, but Kate decided that they should not meet for lunch anymore. Her idea, presented to Toby, seemed sound. She suggested that their dates, and nights out, should be fresh and not mundane; in any case, they were both embroiled in their cases during the week. Soon, through Kate’s contrivance, they settled into a smooth and relaxed relationship where respect began to make way and accommodate affection and then love.

If an emergency vehicle siren was heard and they could not see each other, they worried that the other might be injured. They were silly, but love brings with it divergent, almost psychotic, thinking; Confidence is boosted and people become friendlier, which tricks the mind, and things that would have been considered trite and meaningless, while one dwelt in loveless solitude, become important and relevant.

Each day, subconscious inspection of their relationship revealed new shoots of discovery. Kate was ticklish behind her knees and Toby smiled whenever he was asleep at Kate’s house. They made breakfast together and let their fingers touch when they reached for toast or their coffee. The shape of their lives, shared with one another, seemed to be conforming to their combined values in an environment of anticipated warmth and brightness. They saw no clouds on the horizon.

Toby preferred tea with his breakfast, and at home, by himself, would eat a large but disjointed and hurried breakfast as he readied for work; toast in one hand and jacket in the other. Then put the jacket down, and scoop some scrambled egg, which never made it to his mouth without some of it falling off the fork back onto the plate.

April 2024

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp, full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love; Kate had inflamed his desire and he had found satisfaction. She was strong and feminine; she hid her body yet was not modest in her words or actions.

He plucked an emerging stinging nettle from near the self-seeded snapdragons. It stung his finger-tips but not really unpleasantly like a sting on the back of the hand would be, or on an arm or a leg; more a tingle; more an 'ooh!' than an 'Ouch!'.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely woman with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. A jogger, recently happy to exercise now her face and especially the bridge of her nose, wouldn't get so cold, dodged the waiting passengers. The bus, unusually, arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

April 2024

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings.

      ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

      ‘There’s twenty pounds down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

      ‘Move along'

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through.

      ‘Wait!’

Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.

      'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.

      'Okay, what's up?'

      'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a pseudo-date, off the premises.

      'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie grinned. Breakfast seemed too small again.

Toby was intrigued, she didn't work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this evening.

The lunchtime meeting with Mimie

Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her incisors were the same length as her canines. It made Toby think of a friendly spider, a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie, guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found it.

      ‘You let me find money in the street’

Toby looked up.

She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks. Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would not look back at him.

      ‘The baby you saw me with, its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.

Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She waited. A bus passed by outside.

      ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

      ‘Mimie’, she answered. ‘She died.’

      ‘The baby?’

      ‘No, my sister. I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to come back.’

She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the baby now.’

She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and started for the door.

Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.

      ‘Come on, silly,’ she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them both a cup of tea each, avoiding the promised coffee.

The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time, or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.

     ‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’ he mused.

In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her mouth. His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship. Something had broken her.

Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his wife and Mimie’s identical twin sister, Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and afterwards he apologised over and over again, wandering the flat naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s past or future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on a safe and carefully maintained ice-rink. She had said she felt that she was always between falling and landing, and her arms were flailing to try to right herself before the inevitable impact that was always coming.

Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet together, made three little backwards jumps and bumped the fridge door shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed. Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took what she freely gave.

May 2024

The compassion he had felt for Mimie in Winter, caring for and pushing a buggy with a crying abandoned baby, and combined with his new understanding of her, brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed, She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again because he knew other men saw it.

She did notice his change towards her, and his soft concern, to her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so much. Every day, she remembered her sister and how she had given herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep a link with her, and every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was somehow broken. It made it worse.

August 2024

Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden, overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a little frigid, was at times haughty, and the heat from her, though voluptuous, was never scorching like he had known, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly.

One warm evening, under low-wattage garden lighting and shielded by high fences, Toby and Kate lay naked, dozing in the soporific scent of lavender, night-scented stock and honeysuckle, when a cold shower surprised them.

The shock of it on Toby’s skin was exhilarating. ‘Mimie’, he thought.

Christmas 2024

Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to share,the fruits of his labours in his garden. Pests had decimated his crops throughout Spring and Summer, but strong sunlight and night-time showers had been kind. There had been triumphs and achievements. Eating the first strawberry of the year was always the best flavour he tasted in Summer. Alongside this, he had discovered that they also ripen off the plant, though not so sweetly. Yet, those less sweet fruits that were left to resolve themselves when severed from the bond of the group, and which developed from their own resources, tended to last the longest.

In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops; ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and frozen raspberries Kate wanted, to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that morning, at 5am, by torchlight.

Later that evening

Keeping the engagement ring, meant for Kate, in his pocket he made his final resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.

Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.

He knew that just off the High Street there was a road junction where young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first, her greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t much going on that night.

      ‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’

Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. It was irrational of her, she knew, but she also knew how Toby felt about her. Toby knew then that he would never see her again. Their lives would, from now on, never cross again. He felt that he did already know that before, but now he was certain. The look of horror he thought he saw there was to him the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’ But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm implacability on it.

      ‘This is a Mourning Ring. It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond, which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it, but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and looked down.

      It’s….it’s worth something.’

It was worth more than something, he had swapped a four thousand pounds engagement ring and paid an extra three thousand pounds for it.

She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it. The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket, which was still held in the ring, melted it.

Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked away. His shoes crunched. It had begun to snow again, but with little half-frozen flakes that whipped in the nervous wind. On the other side of the road, a car crunched over the ice crystals forming on the road. The driver, possibly inebriated from a party, belatedly switched on the headlights.

Toby had passed three dark houses before he heard her call to him.

      ‘Toby!'

He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.

Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now bare hand.

      ‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’. The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark night air.

As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement near Mimie, swirled around her ankles, brushed her feet, and settled down again.

      ‘Happy Christmas Toby’, she breathed. ‘Thank you.’

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw21955

[ 12 minute read ]

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

The following is published elsewhere, on hegemo.co.uk, which is a platform for innovative ideas. The site is new so cut and paste the address hegemo.co.uk rather than search for it. You will see that I am a featured associate and the Sample Solution is what you read below. There is an open invite for contributors. I use this Open University space to practice writing and developing my own style, fictional characters, stories, and pretty much having fun colliding my understanding of marketing, logistics, psychology, and spirituality with every day life for many of us. Here, on this Open University site I can be wrong because as a student I have to be open to making mistakes. However, I feel that one of the best ways of learning is to use what we have come to understand in real situations. To this end, there is a open invite for contributors on hegemo.co.uk both for solutions and logistical problems. Logistics was a military matter; in effect how do we get those men from here to there and feed them along the way while making sure they can fight when they get there and protect themselves while they are travelling? It is about people but logistics has come to mean, to most of us, moving boxes.

Perhaps persons operating in different industries and fields, and students of different disciplines, would like to practice what they know on a platform that promotes new ideas, and acts as a staging point for gaining employment in their fields. Inevitably mistakes will be made and they can all be deleted and ameliorated to present a more acceptable presentation. that is the goal. Part of logistics is how to get the job we want. In any case, creativity is highly valued on hegemo.co.uk. Obviously, business, marketing, law, creative writing, psychology, and spirituality are essential attributes for any modern human, and software development for digital portals and integrated supply chains. Let's practice what we know and privately and safely critique our ideas from different perspectives.

Comment to this post if you like, email me, or just go to https://hegemo.co.uk

I will get all the messages.

mental health issues

[ 21 minute read ]

Duality is a bed that duplicity and selfishness share

The world is a noisy place. Thinking, just thinking, is becoming more and more difficult. It seems I am surrounded by demons with the sole job of disrupting achievement. The proverbial teenager; you know the type; someone who wants to listen to music and have constant excitement, considers any person that places a boundary on their activity as a tyrant. Yet, listening to music is only useful to people who are studying or working in the Arts. However, as a leisure pastime, I am told, it is quite popular. Some people, even play music while they are studying. Having a duality of focus is admirable, but I think duality is a bed for duplicity and selfishness that begets a child called interference.

When I drive, I sometimes have the radio on. When some people jog they listen to music. I have even seen cyclists with earbuds and headphones.

I had the radio on when I had to reverse a lorry off a pavement back onto the road. It was a curved road and pavement, which meant that the parked car behind me was in my blind spot for a while. Because it was school-kicking-out time I focussed mainly on the pavement more than the road. The car had arrived between the time I got in the lorry and when I started reversing. I scraped the whole side of the car from front wing to back wing including the doors along the way. No-one was in the car. I did not hear the scraping or feel the bump. If there was a person in the car or someone standing between the lorry and the car, I would not have heard them shout. I could have killed someone. Now, I never have an auditory distraction when I am reversing any vehicle, ever. My passengers look at me agog when I turn off their favourite song.

     ‘Hey, that’s my favourite song!’

For a few moments, I don’t give a rat’s tail what you like or don’t like or how comfortable you are or what you are saying unless it is relevant to not maiming or killing someone or damaging property.

I silently think, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, you stupid, stupid, ignorant fool. YOU are a distraction!’, Being British, I simply say, ‘Sorry’, then ‘Please don’t’, when they reach for the radio to turn it back on again.

I am a very experienced driver; that is why I am nervous. The checks we make on our behaviour when we are beginners at anything almost inevitably fades into the background when we, with a little experience, regard our watching ‘overself’ as a tyrant that is ruining our fun. A little experience is all we need to convince ourselves that the student (ourselves) has outclassed the master (paradoxically also ourselves). Yet, in my world, the true master has a shape.

     ‘Well, Look at that! He’s getting ahead of himself. There’s not enough interference.’ The head Demon said. ‘Who do we have under our control. Let’s see, which neighbour is oblivious to our existence? Oh yeah! ALL OF THEM!’ it gleefully shouted.

I had gotten up nice and early to study. All my needs for focused attention were attended to. I had not broken my fast, so my energy would not be diverted to moving food around in my guts, and I was suitably dosed with caffeine, lots of caffeine.

     ‘He is getting used to the idea that it is useless to even try to succeed.’

     ‘Just another few shoves and he will give up’

     ‘Often,’ I hear, ‘it is enough to allow the thought of a probable outcome to divert us from our true path.’

I was reminded of a piece in Reader’s Digest, that someone had sent in. It was about a grandfather of a young boy explaining to him how their footprints in the snow showed their different approaches to life.

     ‘Look how, as we crossed the field, my footprints go from the gate at that end to the gate here. They are straight and purposeful. Now look how your footprints go from the gate to that tree and then to the pond and then to that tree and the water-trough and then in a curve end up here. Your way is complicated and unfocused. It does not have any direction.’

     ‘Yes, grandad’, laughed the boy, ‘But we ended up here at the same place and I had a lot more fun getting here than you did.’

It’s all relative. Even as I remembered this, Master nudged me and said, ‘I can hear you saying to yourself that spending time having fun is useful, and is a good argument against applying yourself in a circumscribed and focused way. This is distraction.’

    ‘Master', I wearily said, ‘I know what distraction is.’

    ‘Yet, you are distracted from remembering it.’

I arranged a meeting.

Ah! Someone has torn the title off

While this was taking place the Demon regional office looked on, unable to send one of its agents to dance before me and lead me to noticing the vape smell coming from the neighbour below me. It had, of course persuaded, Jake, who really IS below me that vaping is fine and there is no real reason to ever give up doing something that is so much fun. Many times, in the brief moments when our paths had crossed, I had noticed the spiritual spears that pierced his head and upper body. Most gruesome was the demon which had its walrus-like tusks deeply buried into Jake’s right shoulder and that side of his neck. Smaller ones always seemed to be clinging to his back, but really they are controlling him in ways I can not understand. Unfortunately, like bacteria, we all have these stuck to us. And, like leeches, we cannot just pull them off because they leave their ‘teeth’ behind that fester in the wound.

I have long given up trying to ‘educate’ people as to their plight. Realistically, we cannot just go around saying, ‘There is a nasty demon sucking your potential out of you, by the way’, without substituting, ‘by the way’ with ‘Man’. It is quite useless to say, ‘I can help you with that.’ meaning I can’t get it off you but I can tell you it is there and how YOU can get it off you. Actually, we can’t get them off by ourselves, again paradoxically, we need ourselves. You see where the duality is now?

But earlier, I inferred that duality leads to corruption; of the truth primarily. That’s bad isn’t it? Yes!

In surviving life on Earth, we have to play a game with all the other inhabitants; a game which has rules, but like the rules of the game ‘Monopoly’ each human family has adopted new household rules that suit them best. My family, when we played Monopoly, would pay fines into the middle of the board and anyone who landed on ‘Free Parking’ would take the accrued pot in the middle.

Playing the game of life with other people on earth means we have to cheat sometimes. Cheating is selfish, and selfishness means you survive a disaster while altruistic people in the same circumstances are helping others.

I lived in a town that decided to have a music festival one year. ‘Let’s make it a tradition!’ they said to themselves at the Council offices. At the time, I worked about sixteen hours a day and in eleven years I had had only four consecutive days off with a total of nineteen days off out of about three and a half thousand days. Booming music that originated from half a mile away met my ears. Early on, I went to the event, where there were no partying people and made it clear that the music was an interference.

     ‘We are trying to relax’ the organiser had said.

     ‘Exactly. Shut it down so we can relax.’ Music festivals are two-a-penny where I live. We need to be away from them to gather our wits and recharge ourselves with reality before the next one.

If I had looked carefully, I would have seen the demon’s spear in the organiser’s head that stopped him thinking clearly. He was egregiously convincing himself that a selfish undertaking to enjoy ourselves through music was justified because entertainment must be had in every stage of a person’s life. His thinking was curtailed by a demon to not include actual rest periods like sleep, contemplation, experiencing misery or sadness; all of which are essential for good life. And yes, misery and sadness are rest periods quite simply because they are a contrast to fun. 

Sooner or later, we have to get off the fun fairground ride that are all only so much fun because they are not free. In paying for fun, considered by most people to be a negative in our lives, we have an expectation of getting value for money. While we are on the ride we don’t remember the price we paid to get on it. Of course, we value the memory of the fun too. That is when we compare the cost to the benefit, and mostly find that we have invested our money wisely. Incidentally, my memory has a broken leg or something and won’t get out of its armchair. It has become lazy and arrogant and spends its time replaying old videos of my life, finding fault and pontificating on how it would have done things differently.

    ‘Yes, Yes, I know,’ I patiently soothe, ‘But that girl didn’t like me, so if I had stayed in the country and asked her out, it wouldn’t have turned out any differently. Memory, you really must stop spending so much time with Supposition.’ 

      I went on after a brief pause for memory to catch up. 

     ‘For most of us, Memory, Supposition is not much more than a tool, but to you, Supposition is your drinking buddy who brings you contraband while you convalesce. You ARE getting better, aren’t you?’

    ‘I used to be well, you know.’ Memory said. I could almost, but not quite see Memory reach for a blanket to cover his legs. ‘I don’t feel wanted, these days’, it moaned.

      ‘Trying using Adventure, for a while.’ I said. 

Adventure, as we all know, is in all of our medicine cabinets. Sadly, it is gathering dust and hard to reach behind that Austrian product, weirdly labelled, ‘Gemutlichkeit’ because somebody in marketing can’t spell ‘comfortableness’, and hidden by the ‘Scales of Limitation’ with which we daily weigh ourselves, Adventure, dusty, but still a good bed-time read for Memory, patiently sits in the proverbial ‘Dentist’s Waiting Room’ reading magazines. Adventure knows it will have its turn one day but with so long since the last cleaning it expects things to be gruelling and messy when it does happen. In any case, Expectation constantly haunts him, or ‘keeps him company, bless him.’

During our impromptu meeting, I had to remind memory that he was not knowledge itself; that knowledge is in storage, and Memory, with his own predilections that satisfy his own character, is the librarian that fetches information from stored knowledge. I also had to make sure that memory would know that he would not be able to fob me off with some ‘cock and bull’ story about how the stored information has gremlins in it which like to tell long stories that lead off into fiction. I promised I would send someone to mend the swinging door between the library of knowledge and Imagination’s workshop.

     'There has to be a door there between the library and Imagination’s Workshop, as well as separate doors to and from each of them, to your office.’ My telephone voice tautously toned over the speaker in the corner of the room. Of course, all my voices had a free ticket to every meeting, except for the comedy voices which were kept in Memory’s office, in a box near the library. A visitor’s quick glance would have seen a recently thumbed instruction manual on the box opened at….let me see…...Ah! Someone has torn the title off. It was probably the same person who had removed the sign from Imagination’s Workshop door that had said, ‘Strictly no admittance’. All sorts of wild ideas had been coming out of there recently. It is almost impossible to police because nobody recognises any of the new ideas until Memory and I have tagged them for processing.

I should say, that the ‘Scales of Limitation’ is a Trojan Horse gift from the demon-world. We don’t need a birthday or a debilitating event to be handed it, but usually these circumstances are the catalysts that encourage us to accept the ‘gift’. Oh, No, The ‘Scales of Limitation’ with which we weigh ourselves is in every spiritual library we attend and the personal-sales technique, that demons use, persuades us to, at least, stock one copy in our personal library; you know:

   'You never know’, they winningly smile, ‘You might find it useful. Bye!’

 My advice? Burn it! Burn it now! We were born with our own book called, ‘Danger and what to do when it leaps out at you’. The problem is we have to learn how to read it. 

     ‘Hello, young one. Would you like me to read your book to you? Then you can put it away and never need to look at it again.' 

I learnt about that trick when I was sixteen during an extraordinary meeting in a lucid dream in which I was to choose which spiritual way I would go. Hmmm, I can’t decide.

Imagination had recently been having a problem with ‘Formula’ creeping into his workshop. Being linear and one dimensional Formula has always been very difficult to spot when he was there, but recent off-site training had made Formula attractive to some of the Concepts that worked in Imagination’s Workshop and a few Concepts were hanging around long enough for a presence to be felt. The clustering of Concepts, of course, led to some very good decisions being made, but I knew that such a conglomeration could easily become a coagulation. Lumpy imagination, we do not want. This then, was another place for demons to get a hand-hold. 

I know that conspiracy theories, contrary to beliefs solely formed from external sources, such as in confirmation biased information, needed lumpy imagination in order for Memory to recognise that a formed idea needed filing. Since I have been promoted to, or more accurately a senior post has been created for me of, Chief Operating Officer, with a majority vote on internal activities, I have been sifting through the available departments for records with a goal of creating an agile and lean operating system. Obviously, the two dimensional Formula was assisting me. I told Imagination to stop turning Formula sideways when he came to visit him (we need to see that Formula is actually there), and told Formula that Imagination is always busy but certain times could be arranged to help to construct a ‘form’, jig’, or ‘mould’ for Imagination to work to; but as the nature of Imagination’s job is to take naturally created psychedelic drugs specifically tuned to our being, it is not always a GOOD time to visit, because there is a high chance of coagulation.

     ‘Invite only.’ I warned.

Head of Services made it clear that some of the cleaners were inconsistent with disconnecting and clearing away all the extraneous and disused temporarily-linked dendrites. In fact, some important ones acting as essential conduits had been removed and some of the more sparkily ones were being used as decorations and starting to take up a longer term residence. Evicting dendrites is problematic in itself but when they are like ropes, the spare bandwidth is often used to carry information that was once pertinent to the original build but is now non-sequitur to anything nearby.

Formulation (Formula’s sister) said she would look into building an efficient super highway of dendrites for the sole purpose of degree level study. I remarked that it would have to bypass Imagination’s Workshop but transit bodies should be able to access it in order to ferry away useful tidbits that we can rearrange for our own purposes. It was noted that this is duplicitous in nature, particularly as there was an underlying tension surrounding the unsaid intention to dismantle the super-highway once all the relevant information had been successfully siphoned off. Head of Works and Head of Services agreed to discuss plans to create a new department called, ‘New Creative Tools’ which would only be accessible from Imagination’s Workshop and Formula would hold the key to, though not necessarily be the ferryman, between the two departments.

- end of story -

Because I operate in a cross-functional team, Harrari and Hakim were present. Personally, we three didn’t really see the necessity of their presence but I had to make sure that they would be able to stop Formula making changes to how we three communicate. There must never be a disablement or interference to our clear communication, particularly in light of the continuing dimming of the spirit world and its slightly gelatinous form in many places that made fluidity between us and the rest of it ever more difficult. We still didn’t have a solution to the microwave problem. Harrari can communicate with her alien species by using the high tension electric wires spread across the countries of the world to send and receive signals; not difficult, she says.

    ‘It is all done with prime numbers.’

I have actually heard it myself, but, when they sent and received, it just sounded like an American radio advertisement selling something or other, and the carrier wave was just an ear-worm to me. I think Long-wave radio used to send a similar repeating signal when no communication was sent to let people who are seeking the frequency know that they have found it.

Hakim, my faithful friend and protector-avatar, is ever-near and ready for a medium sized spiritual attack, but we three know we will need some new tools one day.

Unfortunately, if we want to walk like the grandad in the story that was sent in to Readers Digest, directly from one place to another, we have to learn how to ignore distractions like pretty trees, and ponds, or clumsy-minded and demon-dulled neighbours creating puffs of sour air with their vapes. The demons love the foetid air here, they meet up here and every now and again when another one arrives, the door to their realm opens and another waft of stale demon-sweat-ridden air leaves my neighbour’s mouth and, looking about itself for an outlet, evilly finds its way into my clean and spiritually-fresh home. Of course, Hakim alerts me and my involved focus on the text I am studying evaporates as we silently debate what to do. Usually, it is a minor demon and now that my nemesis is himself dead, Hakim can easily sieve the demons out of the stench. Nonetheless, Harrari and I are more than a little miffed at the constant interruptions but it is Hakim’s job and he cannot retire until the myriad of demon’s that my nemesis hosted are disarmed, disseminated and made safe. Of course, that day will not come soon. His demons are legion.

Like an obsessed house-proud denizen of pompous self-righteousness I have to stop trying to learn and understand, to sweep out the drunken demons that follow the scent to an idyll. Just like the ‘nutter on the bus’ talking to (poking) the person going to an exam, who has all the information they have on their chosen subject finely balanced on their heads, a slight deviation in posture will bring it all tumbling down. We know that the cheats who smuggled the information into the exam by storing it INSIDE their heads will win through against the distracting non-playable characters on the bus.

Of course, demons are sent to prevent us absorbing information that will be ultimately useful to us. We are supposed to succeed at pretty much everything we try our hands at, if we have the right aptitude; and we would, without distractions.

In psychology, in order to successfully recall information there are three steps required.

Coding

Storing

Decoding

If we fail at one of these tasks we will inevitably lose the information.

Storing information requires a physicality that not everyone possesses. After an incident that affects the brain. Areas where information was once stored may become physically inaccessible. The links in the brain go to a dead-end where there was once a series of shelves with stored information.

Coding information requires the transmutation of stimuli into something that the brain can process. Processing is not necessarily understanding it. Children know that the sky is up and it is blue without understanding why – it just is, is good enough for that information to be stored. Even rubbish can be coded, stored and decoded for successful recall to occur, though this is much, much harder because by ‘rubbish’ we mean ‘random’ as in not obviously linked to anything else. It is the linking of nuggets of information to other ‘bits’ of information that help make up the encoding of information; mnenomics is an example of this. A candle or pencil has a similar shape to the numeral ‘1’, just as the shape of a stereotypical form of a sailing boat (a sloop) resembles the numeral ‘4’. This is rational and dedicated encoding we can use to recall the order of things. Here is a list up to ten

Pencil; Swan; Bow (bow and arrow), Sailing boat; Fishing hook; Tadpole, Boomerang; ‘Fat Lady’ (from bingo); Balloon on a string; Bat and Ball

I prefer rhyming sounds: Bun, shoe, tree, door, hive, sticks, heaven, gate, line, hen.

To remember the order of a list of ten, you simply associate the respective image with the new item to be remembered. This pairing then gets stored and to recall the new item and its place in the list you just bring back the code and see what is associated with it.

    ‘Please recall item number four’ (an orange – maybe) which to me, is the new item printed on, or is in the shape of a door. The door could have a door-knocker shaped like an orange, or an orange could be the door or blocking the doorway.

All demons have to do is interfere with the coding and the information is instantly lost. Imagine being given a series of numbers to remember and spilling your coffee on your lap-top half way through. A trained person would, however, still code the numbers.

Because learning a new subject often has few connections to anything else all the bits of information MUST be encoded not well, that means without repetition or ambiguity. Understanding something complex requires a building of information that is coded and stored and recalled over and over again until the whole is understood and finally coded and stored, before any comparison can be made with new information and then recoded and stored. Such as, cows are mammals. Random information is now stored. Mammals feed their young with milk. Random information is now stored. It is much easier for us to just remember that cows feed their young with milk which becomes ‘Milk goes on my breakfast cereal and in tea or coffee’ which is of secondary importance to ‘Cow milk is available in shops’. Now we can forget about cows providing milk. We only have to remember that we can get milk for our own use in supermarkets. Now we know this. However, if your phone rings at the split second you notice there is no milk in the fridge and you answer it and then complete an action associated with the phone call, there might not be any milk in the fridge tomorrow morning. If your morning routine is to drink coffee before you go out to wake you up a bit before driving, and you simply won’t drink black coffee before driving to the shop to get milk (half-awake) a demon can make a susceptible person accidentally dial your phone number the day before you run someone over the next day.

Why do my passengers want to turn the car radio on when I am about to reverse?

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

The tags for seeing only the evolution of this story are:  writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story. If you can see the list of tags to the right you can click on the suggested (above) links to eliminate all the rest of the posts. If you can't see the links click on the link above and then they should be visible when the page reloads.

PART TWO OF THIS STORY IS ALREADY POSTED AS 'Writing by Numbers without numbers 6' and is below this post.

I am not a writer. If you are on a writing course, particularly with the Open University, your first focus should be with your course material and tutor advice.

I have been trying to write about love; the purpose of which is to force myself to confront something that is difficult for me to do. Throughout my effort, I have been looking to eliminate worn out cliches and avoid simplistic declarative statements. Overall, I wanted to discover characters and characteristics that I could use elsewhere in understanding diverse topics. I like to anthropomorphise dry subjects to make them easier for me to understand. The 'plot' of the story is clear to me; but the whole thing is incomplete because to give it substance I still have to have a parallel environment that follows rules we are all familiar with; I have chosen a full calendar year, a garden, and the weather throughout the year. This, I hope would add a canvas on which the story is overlaid. Since I have experience of a few seasons I can hold the way seasons change from one to another in my mind, and how a garden is affected. This, however, is not yet written into the story.

Here is the story without comments and corrections in two installments.

There will be constant changes to the story in content, but not plot, over the next couple of weeks. The reason for writing about love and publishing it is for me to delve into a subject that is difficult for me to write and in the process discover new ways of understanding how I can make shortcuts to imply something is happening. I have, so far, not tried to write a smooth and finished piece. This is because I wanted to share how difficult it is for me and how and what I have learnt.

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Toby fell in love Part One

PART ONE

Mimie and Chloe

(Spring 2023)

The Spring air had brought a flush to Mimie’s face that was enhanced by her closeness to her sister.

      ‘You make me laugh so much, Chloe!’

Mimie looked fondly at her older identical twin sister.

      ‘I am glad, because you’re so ugly when you don’t!’ Chloe smiled back. A long and drawn-out moment passed while her smile slowly grew to a wide grin, ‘I’m pregnant.’ she said happily.

      ‘That’s great! Oh Wow! Oh God, I love you so much right now! I am so happy for you, Chloe.’ Light danced in Mimie’s eyes and she hugged her sister.

      ‘Owen is delighted, he insists he will be a great dad and he has put in for overtime. He wants to celebrate by taking me, us, to Rome just before its born. He thinks it will be easier to carry inside me than push a buggy in a crowd.’

      ‘He is such a man!’ laughed Mimie. She was delirously happy.

January 2024 (The following year)

Kate

Toby hated Winter. The greyness of the sky with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his, usually substantial, breakfast was not large enough to stand in for satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around, during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to do so, and not for fun.

The bare stems of hazelnut near his front door, despite being three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind; a gusting wind that had travelled countless miles from the East and had no gift of value except a few dead leaves it blew across his path. His flower beds still showed signs of frost.

A young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed him, coming the other way on the footpath to the main road. She miserably passed him every day. Toby thought she and the baby looked cold, and he opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These days, offering help came across as pity and contempt. 'Perhaps she needs money for heating', he thought. Tomorrow, he would leave twenty pounds on the footpath for her to find, he decided. He kept walking, feeling helpless, and ashamed.

No-one looked at him at the bus-stop. A couple of them moved from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. There was silence, apart from little crunches from their shoes crushing small islands of late snow.

Like every day, the bus driver stopped the bus a little way from the kerb, causing the passengers to take a large step over the resident puddle. Toby could not recall there never being a puddle there. Last in the queue, Toby took the only available seat; the one that everyone avoided every day.

Dave, occupying one half of the bench, was a dog-lover. He never spoke, but his dog-haired covered clothes spoke for him. People with head colds and wet tissues were deaf to the conversation that Dave's damp clothes had with fresh air.

For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers' heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward when the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.

Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office.

February 2024

Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down it still touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.

The baby was crying again. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears 'stung' her eyes. Skipping her own breakfast she, after making the baby as comfortable as she could gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room. Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The suited man blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.

The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. A seed of something new has been planted, though it has not yet sprouted. This is in keeping with Winter in which there is no evidence of growth, only chances.

The next day, she found a dry twenty pound note on the wet road. Obviously, it had been recently dropped there. She picked it up. Over the next six weeks, she found twelve more. It wasn’t long before she realised what was happening. She passed the good-looking suited man and then found twenty pounds. She kept them. She didn’t spend them, she saved them; each time she took them home and dried and ironed them, all two-hundred and sixty pounds.

March 2024

Kate, the prosecutor on his current case eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a seed of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.

The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had thawed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.

In the restaurant, Toby inwardly winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.

‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’

Eventually, after three consecutive lunches together, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.

        ‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her straight dark eyebrows.

Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went, instead, with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’ Yet, why not? It was after all her that had precipitated these meetings.

They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.

Kate arrived at the restaurant with a light make-up that subtly enhanced her Eurasian features. Her dark hair was piled on her head. They were seated, yet despite being formally familiar with one another in court and now over the first bumps of courtship in the Greek restaurant at lunch-times, they were still a little stiff.

Nonetheless, they both prepared the ground for a shared experience that evening that would potentially result in a more intimate introduction to one another. This, however, did not occur until two more dates had passed. By then, Toby and Kate were thinking of one another a good lot of the time, but Kate had decided that they should not meet for lunch anymore. Her idea, presented to Toby, seemed sound. She protested that their dates, and nights out, should be fresh and not mundane; in any case, they were both embroiled in their cases during the week. Soon, through Kate’s contrivance, they settled into a smooth and relaxed relationship where respect began to make way and accommodate affection and then love. If an emergency vehicle siren was heard and they could not see each other, they worried that the other might be injured. They were silly, but love brings with it divergent, almost psychotic, thinking; Confidence is boosted and people become friendlier, which tricks the mind, and things that would have been considered trite and meaningless, while one dwelt in loveless solitude, become important and relevant. 

Each day, subconscious inspection of their relationship revealed new shoots of discovery. Kate was ticklish behind her knees and Toby smiled whenever he was asleep at Kate’s house. They made breakfast together and let their fingers touch when they reached for toast or their coffee. The shape of their lives, shared with one another, seemed to be conforming to their combined values in an environment of anticipated warmth and brightness. They saw no clouds on the horizon.

Toby preferred tea with his breakfast, and at home, by himself, would eat breakfast as he readied for work; toast in one hand and jacket in the other. Then put the jacket down, and scoop some scrambled egg, which never made it to his mouth without some of it falling off the fork back onto the plate.

April 2024

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love; Kate had inflamed his desire and he had found satisfaction. She was strong and feminine; she hid her body yet was not modest in her words or actions.

He plucked an emerging stinging nettle from near the self-seeded snapdragons. It stung his finger-tips but not really unpleasantly like a sting on the back of the hand would be, or on an arm or a leg; more a tingle; more an 'ooh!' than an 'Ouch!'.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. A jogger, recently happy to exercise, now her face, and especially the bridge of her nose, wouldn't get cold, dodged the waiting passengers. The bus, unusually, arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian

A friend I have, knowing that I have a sympathetic ear, cornered me at a conference, with the following thinking as part of his belief system:

       ‘We all live in a rapidly changing world that somehow always manages to be one step ahead of us, at least technically. If you want evidence of this, you only have to look back to the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the steam engine.’

       ‘I’m listening,’ I said.

       ‘I had a model steam traction engine made by Mamod, when I was a child.’ he said.

       ‘Hmm. My brother had a steam roller.’

       ‘Given the right tools, I could build a rudimentary, but still viable, steam engine to power something that requires only a relatively small amount of power. I could even use a flywheel to maintain the power between piston strokes.’

Yeah, not difficult, I thought.

I am not an engineer; not in the strict sense of being someone who has formally studied engineering; electrical, mechanical, chemical, physics, or whatever. I am definitely not a scientist, such as we think mathematicians are and people who work out out how big our universe is. Yet, all of us can be in one or the other of these camps of thinking; I have mentioned this before when explaining a priori and posteriori. An engineering mind takes the facts that scientists have discovered and uses those facts to solve problems in the real world.

When we were at school, we worked in teams. Ostensibly, this was to make the brightest kids in the class take the role of assistant teacher; let’s face it, those brain-boxes had intelligence to spare anyway, and end of school results needed to look good. A communist might be happy with taxing the rich to give to the poor. Schools have done this for decades.

Quentin went on; I knew he would.

      ‘Of course, poor achievers in life have a right to think they should live in luxury. The nanny-state from 1948 to the present has consistently robbed the poor of opportunity, recently.’

Well, I didn’t expect to hear criticism of the Welfare Act 1948 today, but with Quentin, anything is possible.

      ‘When I say ‘poor’ I mean the one’s who received the most help in school from the richest or brightest person in the team. In 1765, James Watt came up with an improvement to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine. This ‘light-bulb’ or ‘Eureka’ moment could only have come to someone like Watt. People like him are the ones who brought improvement to modern poor people’s lives through the subjugation of their ancestors in weaving mills.’

Blah, blah, blah, I thought, Get to the point!

    ‘James Watt, in a modern school, would be the bright kid helping everyone else in his team to make the leap of discovery or realisation to understand how to come up with a solution to a problem set by a teacher or textbook. Schools then rely on pupils’ memories to be able to award level two and level three qualifications for students at, what is it, sixteen, eighteen years old? After that, Watt would go on to invent things to make himself rich and make utilisers of his inventions rich.’

I wasn’t averse to Quentin’s thinking, and he knew that. I didn’t always agree with him, but I had half-cooked ideas of my own, which left on the back-boiler, were always ready for a stir and some seasoning.

I moved my quite forgotten stew of juvenile thinking forward. In the 1980s, the UK Government decided that everybody should be allowed credit, pending credit checks of course. This meant that the class society was gradually taken from the UK populace. A communist would say ‘Good, Share the wealth and support the people.’

I chucked in Quentin’s mix, piece-meal, and tasted it. A class-less society means supporting people who falsely think they could have been a modern-day James Watt or Thomas Newcomen and are somehow equal to genius or successful risk-takers. ‘I know, I will get credit and be equal to the people next door’. Those people next door, they did not realise, have everything they need without credit. With no credit interest to pay, there is better utilisation of their available income. The ‘haves’ get richer, while the ‘credit-ridden’ get poorer; poorer because they somehow believe they have a right to luxury because the modern ‘James Watt’ helped them at school, and gave them a false sense of hope based on their end of school examinations which are a result of their achievements IN A TEAM with excellent thinkers in it. Take away the spark of initiative, and what do you have?

Quentin watched and waited. I nodded in a head-lolling way, raised my eyebrows, and grunted. He smiled.

Why did, Quentin, my friend, tell me this? It turns out that Quentin has a great deal of money, enjoys amateur dramatics, and has another friend, Alec, who went to the same private school as him, but has always been an under-achiever in the modern world. Alec had, Quentin told me, moved to the very same village I now live in, only two years ago. I had never knowingly met Alec.

Quentin told me that the last time Alec had won something without coming up with a formula to fleece bookmakers at horse races, was when he had bought a single raffle ticket and it was selected. Apparently, he wasn’t a popular sixteen year old in his home village and there was an array of prizes which the master of ceremonies had had to spend considerable time scanning to find the least valuable, or least useful, item. Eventually a sushi rolling mat was chosen against a bottle of wine, a small food hamper, a box of chocolates and about five other expensive things.

       ‘This is what matches your ticket number!’, Alec was supposedly told.

So, when Quentin, in sympathy for Alec’s life of inadequacy and disappointment, ear-holed me at that conference to ask for my help, I came up with an award for his ‘Alec’. Everybody has their ‘Alec’ and nobody likes a Smart-Alec. I congratulated myself on that one, despite it being a little mixed up in its relevance.

Quentin told me that, as a result of our combined efforts, Alec had been nominated for an award, sixty years  after his raffle win. Alec didn’t know what to expect. Of course, he now lives in a different village to his youth, and the locals, by dint of his age, automatically consider him to be greater than any unruly teenager. Of course, I had to meet him and he is, truly, still unbelievably dim. Yes, I am one of those bigots who classify people and thereafter use heuristics to keep them there in my mind. No-one can change their spots or class position. Once a teenager, always a teenager, as far as I am concerned.

The event was to be held in our village hall after the monthly screening of an obscure film by the local film club. After a couple of yawning hours, the crowd cheered up and some were woken by their immediate seated neighbours. At last, the moment that they had came for; the ‘Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian’. No-one in our area had ever been lauded or praised so highly, quite simply because there never had been this award before.

       ‘And now the highest award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian’

      ‘The nominees are Anna Clarke for arranging Council funding for the local Brownies’ trip to Offa’s Dyke, last year; David Brown, our local farmer, for contributing to the new East/West railway with the donation of his farmhouse and re-development of it into a local train station; and Raymond White, for the clear instructions he gives for which side of a cyclist he will overtake on, while on a cycle path.’. That’s me! I realised.

The crowd sat up a little more.

       ‘And the winner is….Raymond White!’

      ‘Bravo’, called the crowd as they threw flowers at me, at ME!

      ‘No!’, I shouted above the din, ‘It should be Alec!’

For years, cyclists had been troubled and confused about which side the faster cyclist approaching them from behind was going to pass them on.

The UK Highway Code under: ‘Annex 1. You and your bicycle

Information and rules about you and your bicycle’, states that:

‘A bicycle should have a bell.’

It does not say must have a bell

Many pedestrians, particularly the older type, think that is law for a bicycle to have a bell. I have always liked to prove that a bell is no longer suitable in the modern world because people wear ear-buds and are listening to music that may include notes of the same frequency of a bicycle bell.

This is what I told Alec. Quentin’s plan was to use his wild bunch of amateur dramatics-loving friends to create a scenario that Alec would unknowingly interact with. I had told Alec to call out, ‘Passing on the right.’ each time he overtook another cyclist on a cycle-path. After a couple of weeks, actors would, unbeknownst to him, race to catch up with Alec from their hiding places along his route back home from work. As they approached him they were to call ‘Passing on your right’ just before overtaking him. The plan was to cause Alec to think that the local bike-riding population had recognised his efforts to be clear and safe, as being something they wanted to adopt themselves. Alec would then pat himself on the back. The award at the village hall was to cement his pride; after all false pride in someone so old as Alec wouldn’t be much of a problem for the young people of today.

I thought that Alec would think this was a sound idea because I already did something similar; to make sure that I was noticed when I approached pedestrians from behind I called out, ‘Bike’, with an expectation that the person in front would move to the side of any shared pavement for pedestrians and bicycles. When they do not hear me I then shout, ‘BIKE BEHIND’. A standard bicycle bell sound cannot be turned up, my voice, of course, can.

According to my diary of near accidents, I have saved over two hundred lives by shouting at pedestrians. But, the best part of shouting at pedestrians is when they stand still and shout back. That way I know they have heard me and I have saved a further one hundred and seventy eight lives because they will not be suddenly stepping to one side or the other.

On occasion, I have had to pick myself up off the floor with a sore face because the clumsy pedestrian, usually men, in turning has allowed one of their hands to fly out from their body at face level. I realised that these accidents could impact on the fomenting of good manners, so that is why I decided to also do what I had told Alec to do.

      ‘Passing on the right!’

Now, in my area, there is no sound of bicycle bells, only calls of intent. Many people are now safer.

According to my log of near accidents, scenarios I have witnessed which I keep at home; all told, I have vicariously saved one thousand, five hundred and five lives in my area by introducing good clear manners to young cycling people.

Alec was grinning ear-to ear.

A woman came over to me and introduced herself as a talent scout from the UK Highway Code legislators. She warmly shook my hand.

       ‘I am going to recommend that the UK Highway Code has an entry that states that cyclists should shout at pedestrians and pedestrians should stand stock still and control their children so bicycles can move smoothly on pavements, unimpeded and safely.’

     ‘This is a breakthrough in progress!’ gushed her companion.

The cheering crowd carried me out of the hall on their shoulders and right back to my house. The next day, I walked back to the village hall to collect my bicycle, and thanked all the cyclists shouting at me as they approached me from behind. A few of them held up a single middle finger to show their support for my first award. They seemed to think I was wearing two hats, at least that is what they were shouting, though running the words together.

The elderly cyclists held up two fingers in a victory sign, but most couldn’t seem to remember whether the palm should face the recipient or not. Perhaps they were showing their support for me to win a second award.

      ‘Thank you so much’, I gratefully called. 

I didn't realise that Quentin had set me up. It was just a joke; a joke on me. Most of the people in the village hall were actual residents in my village.