I am an ardent fan of my favourite pastime, which is shouting at the wireless. I have mostly my own teeth and can still get myself to the bathroom without too many accidents. I prefer my wine both copious and red.
I am an ardent fan of my favourite pastime, which is shouting at the wireless. I have mostly my own teeth and can still get myself to the bathroom without too many accidents. I prefer my wine both copious and red.
Overhead, a quiet steel grey, with the odd clear blue patch, heavy with promises they had no intention of keeping. A sky that did not look good for a nice day out, but it was warm, despite the overcast. I glanced at the rearview mirror. Clara sat in the back seat, legs crossed, engrossed in some tatty old paperback, another charity shop special from a writer nobody had ever heard of. George, my boy, and the younger of the two was next to her, staring out at the fields and trees as if he expected something, anything, to appear between them and relieve the tedium of the journey. He was always like that, watching, lost in his own head.
Beside me, Ella folded the map again, tighter this time, it had somehow changed from a loosely folded sheet to a tight, neat little square in her lap. Her lips twitched, and I knew she was about to speak.
“You sure this is the right way?” she asked, her tone polished, clipped like she was just on the edge of losing her temper. She was always like this when we went out. Not content. Not happy. Except if you asked her, and then she was “fine.”
“Positive,” I replied, eyes locked on the road ahead. “It’s exactly where she said it’d be.”
The “she” in question had been a cheerful, overweight, smelly woman at the petrol station. She’d recommended the place. Like a conspirator. Like my mum letting me know I had bad breath, leaning in close as if the rest of the world couldn’t be trusted with the secret. “Perfect spot,” she’d said, winking disconcertingly.
The road narrowed, lined on either side with scraggy, thin-looking trees whose bony fingers intertwined above the sparse hawthorne. I’d been on roads like this before, but mostly on my bike. Not in a car that barely fitted between the hedgerows. The map hadn’t warned us how secluded this place would feel.
We reached the clearing, as described by the afore-mentioned petrol station bint. It was larger than I’d imagined, the grass short and spiky underfoot. I stopped the engine and the silence was instantly thick enough to choke on. A single picnic table that was slowly returning to its constituent atoms, squatted lopsidedly in the middle of the space, what few scraps that remained of its rusty-red paint, blistered and peeling. Beyond it, a lake shimmered like still mercury under the weight of the leaden sky.
“Here we are,” I said, trying to sound as chirpy as I didn’t feel. George was already out, standing with his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, eyes on the water. Saying nothing. Clara stayed in the car, unmoved, reading.
“Nice spot,” Ella murmured, though I caught the hesitation in her voice. It was in the air, too. Something about the place felt... still, expectant. Not entirely right, somehow. And the light cast a sort of yellowish tint under the overcast. Weird. But we were here, and I was not about to let some random strangeness, some fleeting downbeat mood, ruin the day, my first day off work in weeks.
I unpacked the car with, what I thought of as quiet efficiency. A lot like a mad gibbon emptying a pie shop Ella said. The wicker picnic basket Ella insisted on dragging out every time creaked under the weight of loads of food. An M&S Foodhall extravaganza. Clara emerged, drawn, as always by the food. She pretended not to like any of it as she wolfed it down by the sackful.
With the food, the mood lifted. “It’s as idyllic as…well, somewhere pretty idyllic,” I said cheerfully. Ella poured lemonade into cups, George lobbed stones into the lake, and Clara lay on a blanket, absorbed in her book. I chewed on a ham. And posh ‘hand-cooked’ kettle crisps. And cheese. Oh yes, and massive green olives, stuffed with pimento. I wondered what ‘hand-cooked crisps’ actually meant. Somehow, I couldn’t picture some chef-type frying up a few ounces of wafer-thin slices of potato in something resembling a large tea-pot. I was pretty sure it was more like immense machines loading tons of spuds into serried ranks of vast, stainless steel vats filled with boiling lard. Hand-cooked probably means there was some random person working the light switch somewhere in the factory.
I wondered why the petrol station woman’s secretive enthusiasm bothered me still.
Then, faintly, I thought I heard a noise, a low susurration, distant, almost, but not quite, like a distant flock of birds startled into the sky. Just on the edge of perception. I looked up. Nothing. Just the same scruffy trees and the silent lake. Same stillness. But something had changed.
“Do you hear that?” Ella asked, her eyes narrowing.
“Hear what?” Clara didn’t even glance up.
“Nothing much, I think,” I said.
George turned, a stone in his hand. “It’s probably the trees,” he said, shrugging. George normally said ‘probably’ with two syllables - ‘prob-lee’, or sometimes even ‘prol-lee’. This time, weirdly, he said ‘prob-ab-lee’.
’He’s growing up,’ I thought. He turned back to the lake, lobbed the stone in a high arc and watched the splash.
Well, maybe it was the trees. I don’t know.
And then the wind got up a bit. Actually, it got a bit unpleasant and gusty, with small sticks blowing about the clearing. With dried leaves and grit. Cold. Suddenly, not picnic weather at all. We packed up before the first drop of rain fell. The lake now rippled like someone was playing the thunderous bass notes of some vast cathedral organ beneath the surface. I watched it in the rearview mirror as we pulled away, the clearing fading into the trees.
“Good book, Clara?” I asked.
“S’alright I s’pose,” she said, as if speaking was a challenge too far.
Ella did some angry origami with the map while George watched the rain against the side windows of the car.
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egbert’s Waste embrowned itself moment by moment. Oliver Barnes and Percival Grigsby struck a solemn vow by the riverside that meandered muddily through the Waste. It was a ramshackle affair, marked by smudged ink on a scrap of paper and sealed with handshakes sticky with mud and the slime of the eels they had caught that afternoon. “By our honour,” young Oliver declared, “we shall one day meet in London, each a man of triumph, to toast the success of the other!” Percival, ever the dreamer, nodded gravely.
Years swept them into different distributaries. Oliver, industrious and grim, found employ in a counting-house where ledgers consumed his days and ambition gnawed his nightly dreams. Percival, meanwhile, flitted from pursuit to pursuit, his heart too full of poetry to abide the cold calculus of industry.
By chance, or fate, the promise came back to Oliver on another dreary November afternoon. A child’s scrawl on yellowed paper emerged from the recess of a forgotten drawer. Guilt pricked him, for he had not seen Percival in over a decade. “The fool likely wanders penniless,” Oliver mused, yet his conscience compelled him to seek his old companion.
Their reunion, arranged by letter, was no grand affair. They met in a dim tavern near a rundown, little used dock, suspended above the mud of the great river, where Oliver found Percival shabby, but aglow with talk of unfulfilled plays and unpublished novels. “London, my friend,” Percival cried, “may have endampened my spirit, but not the flow of my pen!”
Oliver, burdened by his own dull success, scoffed. “And yet we toast nothing,” he said bitterly, ordering ale with the reluctance of a man tallying pennies.
“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time;” said Percival, sipping his ale, “we keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts.”
“Oh for goodness sake. You always were a hopeless case,” said Oliver, putting on his hat and heading for the door.
Thanks to Thomas Hardy and George Elliot.
A poet is only as good as their verse, Their vision of life, the blessing, the curse. Is poetry rhythm, or chaos, or rhyme? A truth that defies the measure of time?
A poet is only as good as the spark, The voice that ignites in the silence and dark. If poetry’s meaning is vast as the sky, The poet must ask: how far will they fly?
For poetry breathes where boundaries cease, A whisper, a wail, a fragment of peace. To define it too sharply is to clip its wings A poet is only as free as they sing.
The universe, as any respectable physicist will tell you, can be a peculiar place. It is, after all, filled with peculiar things, holes (mostly black or wormy), dark matter, string, branes and so on. Come to think of it, there’s also the issue of toast. Specifically, its propensity to alway land. butter-side down. Luckily, there is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Also known as the ‘8th Wonder of the World’.
Imagine…
Somewhere, far, far away, in either this universe or another parallel one, there exists a pub. A fine affair with a majolica tiled exterior and fine, carved walnut fittings. A multiplicity of snug little bars and fine ale. It floats, comfortably, in a gravitationally ambiguous pocket of a universe. This pub, is, obviously, named The Event Horizon, and is frequented by the kind of travellers who don’t generally bother concerning themselves with things like “up” or “down,” “now” or “then.” Patrons range from hyperintelligent octopodes to android poets who, rather ironically, lack the ability to rhyme, or, equally, not to rhyme, depending upon when you listen to them.
One evening, an unusually large crowd had gathered in the pub’s central public bar. An alien cove, small in stature and with three eyes was pointing excitedly at a poster which, not unlike the travel posters of the early twentieth century English railways, showed a beautiful rendering of a scene on an idyllic planet. Across the top of the poster, a banner headline said ‘Visit Earth, the home of E=mc²’.
“Think what that actually means,” said the three eyed geyser.
"The Theory of Relativity might not seem like a “wonder” in the sense of a Taj Mahal, or a Niagara Falls. It’s more of a thought so vast and intricate that it reshaped how we understand the universe.
Relativity is about relationships. Not the kind between people, no ‘Albert Loves Doris’ carved into a tree or ‘that’s my Grandad,’ but about the relationship between space, time, matter, and energy. So everything really. It started simply enough with Special Relativity, a theory that introduced the famous equation E=mc². Those five characters revealed that energy and matter were two sides of the same coin, interchangeable. The same thing in different forms. Suddenly, the stars weren’t just twinkling, far off suns, they were engines of immense energy, converting tiny amounts of mass into vast outpourings of light and heat.
But Special Relativity was only the start. A decade later came General Relativity, an altogether more whacky idea. Suddenly gravity wasn’t some mysterious force reaching out invisibly through space and causing apples to fall off trees. Instead, massive objects like planets and stars had enough gravity to warp space and time around them. Space wasn’t just a flat stage; it bent and curved in response to the mass and energy within it.
A whole industry of analogies sprung up. Perhaps the best known is the old ‘heavy bowling ball on a trampoline’ malarkey. The surface of the trampoline dips around the ball, and anything smaller, a marble, perhaps, rolls toward it. This is how Einstein described gravity. Not a thing that just pulled; it was the natural consequence of objects following the curves of space-time. Now we have a framework that not only explains why apples fall but also why light bends around stars, why planets follow their elliptical orbits, and why time itself slows down near massive objects.
And the practical implications of Relativity are as astonishing as the theory itself. Take GPS systems in phones and cars down on Earth, for example. They rely on Einstein’s equations. Without accounting for the warping of time caused by Earth’s gravity, GPS satellites would be off by several kilometres every day. They’d be useless. Not to mention an endless stream of technologies like nuclear energy, proving that a tiny amount of mass could unleash unimaginable power.
Yet the true wonder of Relativity lies not in its applications but in its reach. And for all its complexity, Einstein’s vision was surprisingly simple. He sought to understand the universe in the clearest terms possible, to uncover its underlying elegance. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” he once wrote. It’s this spirit of wonder that makes his work timeless. That’s why it’s the 8th Wonder of the World not because it is visible, but because it illuminates the invisible. Nice poster too."
Another alien cove, a super-sized brown lipped snail named Brian took one look at the poster, slurped his pint of Gargle-Blaster, and said: “load of old twonk.”
There’s rhythm to moving forward a subtle weightlessness drifting between breaths where the world blurs.
Pretend that ice is not fragile that glimmering sweep of your passage in a fleeting line.
The trick lies in momentum even as it hums its own silent tune No missteps here.
But when you falter art is in recovery a graceful pretence and sharpness of edge its own grace.
When you feel your glide falter and sink into stillness keep moving forward you ghost of light.
The bookstore was quiet until ‘thud’! Two heads collided over the last copy of “Time and Other Tangents.” Filbert rubbed his temple, laughing awkwardly.
“Sorry! I didn’t think anyone else wanted this,” said the stranger, her voice warm, her smile a bright flash in the subdued lighting.
“Guess great minds think alike,” Filbert said, holding out the book.
“You take it.”
“No, really…”
“How about we share it? Coffee first, read after?” she suggested, surprising him.
Filbert’s heart raced. “Deal.”
Later, over lattes and laughter, Filbert thought: maybe time tangents weren’t the only mysteries worth exploring… maybe muffins next time?
This world, this place called Earth, had become a bit of a dump really. As parched and brittle as a biscuit left too long in the sun. No longer the tiny blue dot of legend, more a rusty blemish. Most people, of course, had long since launched themselves off into the diaspora of space, endlessly frozen in cryo-cabinets until their vast transports finally arrive at the blue-green planet of their choice. Defrosted, they’ll be decanted to colonise, multiply and destroy. Parasites, that’s what the inter-galactic council classifies the bald monkeys as. And they’re probably right. Parasites every one. But back here, on Earth, Horace McNubbins was after a job. And not just any job. In fact, there remained only one truly desirable job: Archivist of the Last Tree, and Horace McNubbins intended to become that archivist.
The Tree stood in the middle of what had once been an ocean. Now, that ocean was a salt flat, clouded and stained with the remains of chemical pollutants, it is nevertheless dazzlingly pink-white in the blistering sunlight that occasionally managed to breakthrough the almost interminable cloud cover. The Tree was the only green thing left on Earth, and that meant it was precious. How it survived, nobody really knew, but survive it did. It was said that those who got close enough to smell its leaves either burst into tears or spontaneously composed poetry. Some shockingly profligate extrovert types did both.
“Desirable”, in job terms, was, of course, subjective. The Archivist’s role involved both ensuring the Tree’s survival and documenting the lives of those who visited it, which ranged from the pointless, but nasty, that is to say, politicians seeking inspiration for re-election speeches to the merely pointless ascetics wanting to absorb its mystical aura. There actually weren’t many other sorts of human left on Earth. But for Horace McNubbins, most importantly, the Archivist was allowed to sit in its shade and this was more appealing than immortality. Horace had strong views on immortality since, as far as he could tell, living forever meant having more time to regret your life choices. This in a time when almost every bald monkey was able, through longevity medimachines and cryo-cabinets, to live for multiple centuries. Shade, was something. Shade, especially the type of dappled shade The Tree provided, was a luxury. Shade was hope.
The job interview took place in the bowels of FoodSys Corp, the planet’s sole remaining food production company. FoodSys was not only a vast monopoly, but also owned the rights to the land the Tree stood on. FoodSys Corp made food for half the galaxy. Nobody was entirely sure what they made it from and nobody dared even ask. Horace was one of three finalists for the job. His competitors were Doris Flample, a no-nonsense bureaucrat who could calculate just about anything faster than most people could look it up through an AI implant, and Grogg M’Thrak, a seven-foot-tall humanoid, not a baseline bald monkey but something worryingly close. Saying his name out loud sounded a lot like a belch.
They sat in a semi-circle before the Interviewer, who was wearing the ceremonial robes of the Arboreal Order, although actually, he was just some HR twonk in a pointy hat, there having been nobody in the Arboreal Order for five hundred years. The robes and pointy hat were impressive though. Made of synthetic silk, obviously, because silk moths, like everything else, had gone extinct centuries ago. But still, very swishy.
The Interviewer cleared his throat. “Candidates, welcome. The position of Archivist requires diligence, wisdom, and the ability to resist the urge to hug the Tree. Do you possess these qualities?” He asked each candidate in turn.
Doris replied with a snappy, highly logical set of sentences which boiled down to “I’m immune to sentimentality”. Grogg boomed on at length, flexing his not inconsiderable musculature while he did so. His pitch, essentially boiled down to “I respect the Tree”.
Horace, who felt more than a little nervous said “I’ve never met the Tree, or even seen one, but I think I’d like to ask it some questions. About what it’s seen in its long years of solitude. You know.”
The Interviewer raised a rather supercilious eyebrow. “You are aware that the Tree does not speak?”
“Oh, I know,” said Horace, “obviously. But it listens, doesn’t it? I mean, I just think someone should listen back. We might learn something. We might understand enough to help keep the Tree alive. We might even, one day, be able to propagate more trees.”
There was a long silence. Doris had a face like someone sucking a lemon, not that there were any actual lemons in this spiral arm of the galaxy anymore, while Grogg just tilted his head, flexed a deltoid or two and looked perplexed. The HR twonk considered the implications for the bottom line of FoodSys Corp.
The Interviewer’s gaze lingered on Horace. “Curious. Very curious indeed,” he said.
Later that day, as Doris drank a glass of faux-bubbly with her circle of faux-friends to celebrate getting her new faux-job. Grogg moved some heavy things about and sweated. Horace sighed and wondered, not for the first time, why nothing seemed to make any sense.
Once upon a time…
The sleepy village of Merribelle nestled in the bliss of an autumnal morning. Nothing untoward ever happened in Merribelle. It was as idyllic a place as any idyll would want to be. A kitten named Clover tumbled from the wicker basket where she had been napping. She stretched her tiny paws as she blinked up at the golden sun spilling across the cobblestone street. Curiosity stirred in her small heart as she padded excitedly after a fluttering leaf that danced on the breeze, piquing her curiosity. Clover, being only a tiny, fluffy little kitten, was unaware of the dangers that might lay ahead.
Clover, who was no bigger than a teacup, playfully chased the leaf to the edge of the village and out into the lane beyond, and then on to where Eldenwood began. Clover, of course, had no idea what Eldenwood might be but it was a place well known to the villagers as somewhere of whispered legends and forgotten paths. A deep, dark, dank forest that you would be wisest to avoid. As soon as Clover’s soft paws crossed the threshold of gnarled roots and mossy shadows, the world shifted. The air grew thick, and the rustle of leaves became a chanting of whispers.
The leaf disappeared. Clover was lost.
She mewed pitifully, her small cries swallowed by the vastness of the forest. Her coat, a patchwork of orange and cream, glimmered faintly as the forest gloom settled. Hunger began to gnaw at her tiny belly, and fear, something she had not known before, pressed heavily upon her. Her wide green eyes glistened as she curled up beneath the shelter of a luminous mushroom. All she wanted was to be back in the warm, safe lap of her human, the girl with ribbons in her hair who had once promised, “I’ll always protect you.”
But the girl was not here. And she didn’t know how to find her.
Then, Clover heard a sound, a soft, chiming melody. She got up and followed it, stepping and stumbling over roots and leaves that glowed faintly under her tiny, trembling paws. The music led her to a glade with trees all around it, and at the centre stood a figure cloaked in a flowing robe of glimmering starlight: the Queen of Eldenwood.
“Who comes to my court, so small and alone?” the queen asked, her voice both gentle and terrible.
Clover mewed softly, her ears flattened with fear. “I’m lost,” she meowed, her tiny form quivering. She nudged her nose against the queen’s shimmering cloak, seeking comfort.
The queen knelt, her otherworldly beauty softening as she gazed at the fragile creature. “A soul so pure does not belong here,” she murmured. “Your heart aches for home.”
Raising her hand, the queen summoned a wisp of light, which transformed into a glowing thread that wound gently around Clover. “Follow this,” she said, her voice tinged with sorrow as she put the kitten back on the ground.
The thread tugged Clover forward, guiding her back through the trees. Just as the evening sun kissed the distant horizon, she stumbled into Merribelle once more. The girl was there, her tear-streaked face alight with joy as she scooped Clover into her arms. “Oh, Clover, I thought I’d lost you forever!” she sobbed, cradling the kitten close.
And everyone lived happily ever after.