As the pianist played, the rain fell.
As the rain fell, the thunder sang.
As the thunder sang, the lightning danced.
As the lightning danced, the pianist played.
Thunder and music.
Lightning and rain.
Harmonious. Togetherness. Nature and sound.
Dancing. And playing. Music abounds.
In tune.
In rhythm.
Inside and out.
The pianist plays as the rains come down.
Thunder. Now birdsong. Raindrops galore.
Both nature and musician need to give more.
Sometimes you find yourself in the most surreal of situations. You have to ask yourself whether things are real or imaginary. Take this for instance…
Clyde Caspian of The Northern Star newspaper caught up with me at lunchtime today. I was walking around the lake when he jumped out at me from one of the pathways from the main road. I was startled, but nowhere near as much as he was. Apparently, he hadn’t jumped, but tripped over a root from one of the trees that was slightly uncovered at the edge of the path. If I was any further along, he’d have flattened me, but luckily I wasn’t and he didn’t.
“Tell me,” he said, just after putting his sunglasses on correctly after his stumble, and in his brisk journalistic tone, “what are you doing around here at this time of the day?” It was 13.30.
“Walking” I answered – I’m always polite, if slightly apprehensive when asked strange questions – I continued, “It’s my lunch”
“Oh,” he said, sounding slightly intrigued, “Do you normally go for lunch around here without anything to eat?”
“On a Friday, yes” I said, “I find it very relaxing.”
“What do you feel about the daylight?” He had taken a pen out of his inside coat pocket, and was reaching for something else. His notebook.
“I think it’s brighter today than it has been” I watched as he wrote this down.
“So, you are telling me that you find today’s daylight brighter than normal. How does that make you feel?”
“Erm, fine,” I had to squint as the sun appeared from behind a cloud, and shone directly into my eyes. I dashed under the shade of one of the large trees so that I could see clearly again. “Sorry,” I said to Clyde, “That was bright then.”
A strange look crossed Clyde’s face, and in the shade and through his sunglasses, I could make out his eyes – he was staring directly into my eyes. An extremely strange stare it was too! Very weird.
“Could you confirm that you find the sunlight uncomfortable?” His pen was poised.
“That was a little, then” I responded. Clyde drew a huge tick onto the page.
“Does it make you… cross?” Clyde now had a strange smirk on his face.
“Not really,” I smiled.
“Does it not… burn?” Stern look now, still with the intense stare.
“Well, it did a little then”
“So, you are confirming that you find that the sunlight in the daytime burns you?”
“Well, not so much at this time, but it did a little then” Clyde was now scribbling intently into his notebook. His hand was shaking.
“Tell me… garlic. How does it affect you? And holy water – how about that?”
“I’m fine with garlic, but haven’t had much experience with holy water”
Even more scribbling.
“You look pale,” I thought he was now getting a little personal. “I suppose it isn’t very often that your kind get out in the daytime”
“I’m out everyday” I replied, maybe too indignantly, “And not only at this time too! I’m paler than usual because it is January and I haven’t used my sun bed for a while.”
Clyde twitched again. “So, you use artificial sunlight to keep your skin in that condition”
“No, I…” He interrupted me before I could say anything else.
“And you don’t like holy water. I knew it!”
“No, I…” Yet again, another interruption. You can’t get a word in with some of these journalists.
“No need to say anymore. This story will be big. You are now marked.”
I was totally and utterly confused for a couple of minutes. I looked up and Clyde was gone. Vanished without a trace. My neck on the left hand side was itchy, and I had a small spot of blood on my fingertip when I itched it. And I was thirsty. Very thirsty.
I decided to go back to work as the sun was starting to give me a headache.
That was earlier. Now that it’s dark, I’m fine, and I’m ready to go out for the night. And, even if I do say so myself, I look pretty good this evening…
An enchantingly eerie sound has been with me all day long,
Carried by the wind, it’s like a spooky siren song.
A wail…?
A shriek…?
A hum…?
A moan…?
Yes and no in random measure…
Like… feeling pangs of sudden fear mixed in… with extreme pleasure.
The voice, if it is a voice, sings constantly all the while,
She… or he… or it… or they… have found their unique style!
I try not to listen – but I can’t stop – such is its eerie pull,
I can even hear it when my ears are stuffed with cotton wool!
This siren’s call is calling me, tonight I wonder why?
I’m hoping that they stay away, I’m feeling very shy.
I’ve no need for sirens to come calling this or any other night…
And judging by the sound they make, they’ll be a daunting sight!
I’m hopeful that they’ll fade away,
Leave before too long…
For one, the wail’s annoying me,
And for two, I like the song…
It’s a little known fact that Aqua Mansion is built on a tiny tectonic plate, within the county of Cheshire in the United Kingdom. The plate generally moves in the same rhythm as the much larger Eurasian Plate it is surrounded by, but at times, it moves completely independently. Renowned scientist, Professor Vloksclog Vobbler of the European Tectonic Studies Institute in Copenhagen, has said that there are many of these miniature sub-secondary plates existing throughout the United Kingdom, and possibly there are others yet to be discovered around the world.
“These plates,” states Vobbler, “are actually a mystery to modern science. We have known for years of the existence of the larger plates, and of the devastating effects that they cause when they shift, but the existence of these sub-secondary plates have only recently come to light in the eyes of the scientific community.
“They appear to be disconnected from the plate they should be connected to, and connected to the adjoining plate; in the case of the Cheshire Plate either the North American Plate or the African Plate. Further studies are needed to establish which plate is the ‘controlling’ one, but we are sure that the Cheshire Plate is independent of the Eurasian Plate.”
Why is Professor Vobbler so sure of these facts? He points out that at times of the occasional earth tremors in the UK, of which there are many over the course of a year, people of Cheshire, and particularly people within Aqua Mansion, do not notice them. It’s as though the Earth steadies itself, and as the surrounding countryside rattles and rolls ever so slightly, the land on the Cheshire sub-secondary plate remains perfectly still and balanced.
He also points out that there may be many other sub-plates waiting to be discovered. Have you ever felt that you have missed out because other people are commenting on the tremor they felt that morning, perhaps at the time you were waiting for a bus as a lorry trundled by, or as you pulled shut your front door as you left to go to work or to go shopping? You too may be living on one of these sub-secondary plates.
“It could be that you aren’t, either,” continues Vobbler, “and you may just be in the right place at the right time. Nobody really wants to feel an earthquake now, do they?”
Vobbler has actually taken his study further, and has claimed that the Cheshire Tectonic Plate and other sub-secondary plates may also be connected to each other. He claims that although they aren’t connected to the main surrounding plate, and appear to be connected to a neighbouring one, the sub-secondary plates may actually be a sort of stabiliser, a support structure that activates when other sub-secondary plates move in opposition to their surrounding plates. They try to keep the balance while the larger plates are going through their geological shift, and all move in the same rhythm simultaneously.
Vobbler admits this is only theory, but is continuing to study the Cheshire Tectonic Plate in greater detail, and hopes to find a connection one day.
He is also looking for a complete Stegosaurus fossil within the county of Cheshire, as he believes this will prove the connection between the county and the North American Plate. The Stegosaurus is believed to have roamed freely in North America some 150 million years ago, long before Cheshire was Cheshire, and when the world really was a different place.
Time. One thing we have plenty of yet always need more of. I’m still caught up in a whirlwind right now, with time intermittently speeding itself up and slowing itself down again. Within this turmoil, I’m trying to hold the whole fabric of time and space together by bridging this ever widening and ever shrinking ‘thing’ that in reality doesn’t actually exist.
Whilst I had one foot on the brake pedal, I’ve delved backwards into the mists of time to find some of the events that brought me to this very point today. And then I came across this post that I’d made in June 2010, so decided to repost this rather than write a new one. All of the events in this post seem like they happened yesterday, but with some, decades have passed.
Time. Sometimes a second can seem like an hour, and a year from our past can seem like a week. Random. Anyway, here’s to cosmetic surgery, pulp infections and equilateral triangles:
Several years ago, I was sat in work across from a colleague. It was a quiet time of the day, and she nonchalantly said to me “Don’t your earlobes stick out.” I replied, “That’s because I’ve had cosmetic surgery on my ears.” My colleague then said, “Really? You can’t tell.” To which I replied, “Yes you can. My earlobes stick out.” My colleague fell about laughing, blaming me for making her go purple.
But it was true. When I was a lot younger, I think it was when I was in infant’s school, I went into hospital to have my ears pinned back. I was being teased by some other children because of my ears (notice I haven’t used the word ‘bullied’!) and this was to make me look more like the other children. I was only in hospital for three days, and then wore a bandage around my head for the next ten weeks. For some reason, I thought I looked like a spaceman. It’s funny, the things you think when you are little.
I saw an old photo of me the other day, with my big sticky-out ears, beaming smile and bright eyes. It got me thinking how much I have changed over the years, yet how much of me is still the same. I definitely have not got the same body, that’s for sure. So my mind is still the same. But, my thoughts are completely different to when I was in that picture, so my mind isn’t the same. A new mind and a new body, yet I am still the same person. Life is absolutely amazing when you start to look at it in great detail! I had to apologise to the photo of little me in case I had changed to something completely unrecognisable, but that little one is still there, so I had nothing to worry about! I can’t go about second guessing where I might have been if I’d done something differently, and sometimes certain routes lead to the same place anyway!
I’m not sure whether it was around this time, maybe it was a little later; I had to go to the dentist to have a tooth extracted. I had to be ‘put out’ rather than having an injection. I’ve had many weird and wonderful dreams over the years, and many of them I can remember, but the dream I had this day is one of the weirdest dreams, in my opinion, ever. As I was breathing in the ether, as I called it, through the rubber mask that left an awful smell in my nose and taste in my mouth for a few days after, I started to drift off to sleep. In that moment, I dreamt of some animated dots sweeping around the blackness, creating what I think was an equilateral triangle. I’ve heard of people dreaming of past lives, great adventures and other wonderful stuff when they were ‘going under’, but this was a first. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it since then, so this is the first time. Occasionally, I still get glimpses of those dots and that triangle.
And finally, in this mini montage of my memories, a few years after the dentist trip, I went on a trip of a different kind. We were holidaying in North Wales, and my brother, cousin and I were walking along the sea wall. I spotted a Superman kite flying in the sky, and got caught up in the moment watching it swoosh up and down. Bit of a silly thing to do really, as one side of the wall had a steep drop, with large boulders at the bottom of the drop. The other side was a lesser drop to the concrete pavement. My attention was grabbed by Superman – I was, and still am, a huge fan – and imagined all sorts of things. I imagined I was flying. I wasn’t – I’d actually walked off the wall, but luckily for me, not off the steep-drop side. I crashed to the ground, and then woke up from my daydream. To laughter. I was fine, apart from my right index finger, where I couldn’t touch the finger tip. I had to learn a different way of writing, as I couldn’t even hold a pen. The finger tip ballooned. It was sore and swollen for the rest of the holiday, and when we were back home, I was taken to the doctors, who said I needed to go to hospital to get it checked out. I remembered the three days I spent there with my ears, and wasn’t keen, but this time I wasn’t staying in. I’d had a pulp infection for some reason, and the only way to make it better was to slice the finger tip, which the doctors and nurses did. Whilst squirting water on it which made no difference to the pain whatsoever. I was glad it was over when it finally was I’ll tell you. It hurt a bit more afterwards too… at least it was flat again! The weird thing was I heard one of the nurses saying that my finger was just the same as another boy’s the day before. I imagined him falling off a wall as well to get his pulp infection.
I really must try to think of some more recent tales to tell. These older memories are starting to make me realise that I am not as young as I once was…
Sitting… watching folk go by
Creating tales… I don’t know why
Strangers… leading their normal day
Lead characters… they tend to play
Faces… change into someone new
Illicit affairs… if they only knew
Vampires… that young couple there
A pirate… sitting on that chair
Dancers… running quickly past
Time-travellers… they won’t be last
Astronauts… who’ve just come home
Secret agents… chatting on their phone
Lawyers… no, that’s not right
They’re singers… preparing for tonight
Shopkeepers… dentists… builders… vets…
Supporting artists… and all the rest
Appear… within my movie-mind
Yet not one knows… and that’s just fine!
Another repost today, I’m afraid. Time issues have left me needing to do more than three things at once, which, although being busy is fine, being busy also makes the time go faster… and having the feeling of not having enough time to start off with seems to exasperate the situation somewhat. Sigh. Never mind.
I recently wrote about my Iceman persona, and my work in a telephone exchange. This post delves further back in time, weeks, in fact, before Iceman ever existed…
I started work just before my eighteenth birthday. Well, I started working in a ‘proper’ job just before my eighteenth birthday – I had worked on a Youth Training Scheme before then which should have been for art, design and printing, but mostly entailed cleaning out the gent’s loos. Oh, I did do some art, design and printing. And a little video photography. And quite a bit of rub-down letter transferring. I left there after a few months as the toilet cleaning was preventing me from learning how to transfer the letters in a straight line. I would have loved to have continued in that line of work. The arty side, that is.
Anyway, things moved on. I left, and after a few more months of being out of work, I started working on Directory Enquiries.
I was a nervous wreck. I’d managed to get through the training by the skin of my teeth, because of my nerves. Luckily for me, I had to endure two months of listening in to the calls before my training commenced, so I was literally being paid for doing nothing apart from watching and listening.
Part of my nervousness was due to the fact that I had never before spoken on a telephone. As strange as that sounds, we never had a phone, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I do it all the time now, but back then my expectations were somehow far higher as to what it would be like to speak on a telephone. I know: random. But that’s how my mind works…
So, I got through my training with flying colours. Ahem. I was set free into the mystical and magical world of Directory Enquiries. The place where no-one could ever get through to straight away. The place where everyone thought we were all filing our nails and chatting about things outside of Directory Enquiry-land. Of course, this was exactly what we were doing. And drinking copious amounts of tea, eating cakes and biscuits, and getting up every now and then to answer one of the phones that were on the tables around us that just never stopped ringing. We never had any directories by us. If we knew the number off by heart we gave it out, if not, we’d say “Sorry, there’s nothing listed” or “Sorry, that number is ex-directory”.
OK. Just to shatter the illusion for a brief moment. We were sat around, or rather sat in long rows in an office with diffused up-lighting and old stylee green screen computer monitors, and if we were really unlucky, we were surrounded by hundreds of microfiche folders that contained the names, addresses and phone numbers of almost everyone in the UK. Instead of phones, we wore headsets that looked as though they came out of the ark. Great big trumpets and clamps that held them in place on our heads. And the phones never rang. They simply clicked, one second after the previous call had finished. We didn’t need to answer them – the caller was there, automatically on the line. Usually asking if we had enjoyed our nail filing, cup of tea or cream cake! We just had to play along!
After a couple of years on this job, I was able to move up slightly, and received more training to work on the switchboard, answering 100 operator assistance calls, and the emergency service number of 999. This switchboard also looked as though it had come off the ark… I think it was built to match the headsets! In front of us, we had two rows of six plugs on cords, in which we answered the call with the back plug, and through connected the call with the front plug. We were in serious trouble if we’d forget and answer the call with the front plug. How dare we! Luckily, we didn’t do that often. And the people calling us on 100 usually wanted to know what time our colleagues’ breaks would be over on Directory Enquiries. The whole building would shake if an emergency call came through. A bright red light would glow at one end of the switchboard, and an extremely loud buzzer would sound as well. The good thing about this was, if all of our cords were in use and the buzzer went, we were allowed to disconnect one of the calls to answer the emergency call. Well, not good if you were on the call that had been disconnected I suppose, but the emergency calls always take priority.
There were about three male operators when I worked there. Everyone else was female. We were all greeted the same way each morning by the manager who would regally walk into the switchroom and bellow “Good Morning, Girls!” at the top of her voice. It was strange at first, but I got used to it.
One day, a man called through on 100, and was in an extremely chatty mood. He asked me to ask the colleagues around me to come up with a good collective name for a group of telephone operators. We were ever so professional, and came up with terms such as a ‘conversation of operators’, or a ‘connection of operators’, or an ‘engagement of operators’. He said they were good, but liked his suggestion better. A ‘gossip’. Charming.
Not only was I a girl, I was now a gossip.
Never mind. The man went on to ask how I liked working as a call girl.
I’ve done a variety of jobs in my lifetime so far. Versatility could be my middle name, but if it were, I’d keep it quiet. Being a call girl has to be the strangest job I’ve never done. Having said that, the biscuits were very nice.
