A summer seaside picnic

The glow through the curtain
reveals the news,
look out, to be certain
look at the view:
the sun’s finally shining
quickly pack up
the children stop whining
car doors slam shut.
Head off to the seaside,
buckets and spades
crammed in the boot beside
towels and sun shades.
‘Are we nearly there yet?’
every five mins,
first glimpse of the sea gets
shouts from within.
At last we pull over,
bagged the last space,
the children and Rover
have to make haste;
rush into the water,
have a quick splash
then run back to the car
thunder has crashed.
Again we’ve been beaten
so here we are
our picnic is eaten
inside the car!

Remember back in November/December 2013?

It was an amazing experience and what we all, every single person who signed the petition, achieved was wonderful.

Astronomy Outreach by GC

BBC announced, (well more like leaked) that it was considering scrapping the Sky at Night TV Show.

The Uk astronomy groups exploded in uproar, people were saying this cannot happen, it must continue!

Well, people decided to take on the Big corporation that is the BBC, Victoria Dews and Karen Barker started up the online petition to call for the BBC not to axe the show, in which time, they got others involved in it. Thousands signed it, and with the social networks of Facebook and Twitter, this petition became Huge!

Well, we are lucky to have spoken to Both Victoria and Karen recently, here’s what they both said about it!

Victoria Dews :

Saving The Sky at Night

Well, this started when I heard a whisper of a rumour that TSAN may be coming to an end in December 2013. In the middle of September, I opened a Facebook…

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An Life Writing piece written for my latest Open University A215 creative writing assignment.

One of the strangest parts of growing up in a Royal Air Force family was the sheer number of different schools I went to. This was an inevitable consequence of having a father, whose job involved being posted from one end of the country to the other. In addition there were sometimes postings to another country, although ironically these were always the longest duration. Within the UK, he was usually posted at least once a year, sometimes more frequently.

By the time I was due to start the first of my two ‘O’ Level years, my parents had decided that enough was enough, particularly as he was due to be posted to Belgium, and I was sent to a boarding school so as to provide me with some stability for the final four years of my education. This was to be my thirteenth, and final, school.

 

I started at St. Margaret’s at the beginning of the second term of the Lower Vth Form, which is the equivalent of the current Year 10. The dormitory I was put into, which was also shared with the IVth Form girls from the same school house, was a cavernous, rectangular room with old-fashioned metal framed beds arranged in two rows along either edge of the room, with eight or nine beds to each side. There was an oak-panelled partition running down the length of both sides of the room, behind the beds, though they didn’t extend to the full height of the dormitory. They must have been about six feet high and they were partitioned off at right-angles to the wall creating a small space, or cubicle, behind each bed which was about four feet square and had a curtain on a pole in place of a door for privacy. Each contained two drawers and a small corner cupboard for the storage of your clothes and other personal belongings. On either side of the door into the dormitory were two separate wooden rooms, known as horse-boxes,  which were occupied by the Dormitory Prefects, members of the Lower VIth Form, who were there to keep order at night.
There were several large windows along the long walls, one shared between two cubicles, and one enormous window at the far end of the dorm, in front of which stood the only radiator in the room. We always used to sit on that windowsill, huddled together around the radiator, which provided the only source of heat to the dormitory, although it was such a small radiator, in such an enormous room, that its heat didn’t even extend as far as the first two beds at that end of the dorm, which were approximately four feet away. Because it was so cold, each dormitory had a large box at the end near the door, containing several spare blankets which were rough and scratchy and which we therefore eschewed as additional bedcoverings in favour of the long, warm, woollen cloaks which made up the outer layer of the school uniform, rather than the more usual overcoat.

We used to spend all our break times and evenings in the dorm, but it was strictly forbidden to be up there during lesson times, even if you had a free-period. We had a free-period on the day in question so naturally we wandered off to our dormitory rather than to the library where we should have been and which was, unfortunately as it turned out, located immediately underneath our dormitory.
If we had gone to the library as we should have, we would have been gainfully occupied with ‘prep’(or homework), or reading, but because we had nothing to actually do in the dorm, we became bored after about five minutes and so had to find something to entertain ourselves with. I cannot for the life of me remember which bright spark had the initial idea, but it was seized upon by all of us immediately as brilliant. What we decided to do was to remove all of the spare blankets, and then take it in turns to be wrapped up in them all by the other girls. The idea was to time how long it took to free ourselves, and whoever did it in the fastest time would be the winner.

 

My friend, Fiona, who was quite tall and fair – it wasn’t till we were adults that I noticed that she was a true beauty – very clever, but totally scatty, was the first to volunteer and we proceeded to wind as many blankets as was physically possible around her to the accompaniment of gales of laughter.
Suddenly the most horrendous crash made us all jump, and we turned to look, no doubt with expressions of a mixture of guilt and horror, at the heavy oak door to the dorm. This had been opened so suddenly and with such force that it had slammed against the wooden wall of the horse-box making the loud crashing that had stopped us in our tracks.
Filling the entire doorway was a vision to strike fear into the bravest of school girls: Miss Hassel (yes really). Never had a teacher been so aptly named. Miss Hassel was the school’s Latin teacher and Librarian, and she was extremely strict, she was the most feared teacher in the school, apart from possibly the Headmistress and physically, she put me in mind of the wrestler Giant Haystacks in drag. She was extremely tall and broad and always wore a tweedy skirt-suit, with her grey hair scraped into a bun, and she seemed ancient, so she was probably only around fifty. The scene from the first Harry Potter film where Hagrid bursts into the hut on the rock in the sea always reminds me of the moment when she burst into our dormitory.
She gave us short shrift and sent us packing to the library. We went as fast as we could get ourselves out of the doorway as we had got away with only a telling off, which was better than we could possibly have expected and it definitely wasn’t worth risking more of her anger by dawdling. We scuttled into the library with Miss Hassel right behind us, sat down around the nearest free table much to the obvious interest of the girls already in there, pulled out our books and did our best to look like the studious girls we were expected to be.
After a while I thought it would be safe to raise my head from my books and looked around the table. Then it hit me. I must have gasped or something because my fellow miscreants all immediately looked up at me.
‘Fiona!’ I hissed as quietly as I could. ‘Where is she?’

The others all glanced around the table and looked back at me, eyes wide, and without another word we all jumped up, swept our books willy-nilly into our bags and left the room, breaking into a run as soon as the door had closed behind us and sprinted up the stairs and back into the dormitory. And there we found her.

Apparently, when Miss Hassel had burst into the room, Fiona had managed to jump to the side so that she would have disappeared from view down the side of the horse-box and somehow Miss Hassel had not spotted her as she did so. She had continued to bounce along between the wooden wall of the horse-box and the adjacent bed and then through the curtain into the owner’s cubicle. The drag from the curtain, had unbalanced her as she went through it and she had toppled over and ended up wedged at an angle across the width of the cubicle and that was where she was when we found her.

Being completely wrapped in the blankets with her arms clamped to her sides and unable to bend her body, she was totally powerless and could do nothing to extricate herself from her predicament. When we arrived, she was very hot which had made her scarlet in the face and she was also, understandably, extremely cross. My overriding memory of this is that she looked just like the illustration of Tom Kitten being made into a pudding, in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. Needless to say, the rest of us took one look at her and collapsed into fits of laughter which didn’t help either Fiona’s situation or her mood in the slightest and this delayed her escape even further as we were completely helpless for a while until we recovered ourselves. When we did finally managed to drag her out from inside the cubicle, which was no mean feat in itself, and unwrap her, her she flounced off in high dudgeon and didn’t speak to any of us for ages, but despite all this I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in my entire life.

Poor Fiona; she did forgive us eventually and we are still friends to this day.

 

The One Night Stand

This was a short story (2000 words) written for the second assignment of my Open University Creative Writing Module.

 

Julia blamed her sister, Janet, of course.  This whole lunatic idea had been Janet’s from the start.  It had been two weeks ago that they had been sitting at Julia’s kitchen table enjoying a glass or two of wine after the children had gone to bed, while their respective husbands were at their regular Tuesday night photography club.

‘You’ve not very talkative tonight, Jules, not like you at all!’

Julia had smiled at the teasing tone; she had firmly occupied the position of ‘family chatterbox’ as soon as she’d learned to string more than two words together. She had opened her mouth to say that she was fine and promptly burst into tears which had thoroughly alarmed Janet as this was even more out of character for her usually ebullient sister than even her earlier quietness had been.

            ‘It’s nothing really’ she had sobbed, adding ‘No honestly!’ when she had seen the look on Janet’s face.  ‘I’m just feeling a bit miserable at the moment, take no notice of me’.

            ‘Oh OK then. I’ll just ignore you having a nervous breakdown in the middle of your kitchen and bake a cake or something while you get a grip shall I?  Got any eggs?’ Janet had retorted which had elicited a small smile from Julia.

            ‘It is really nothing, it’s just that I’m bored rigid with staying at home with two small children all day every day. I thought when Thomas went to school I’d be able to go back and I’ve spoken to Mick Johnson, you remember him: my old boss, and there is a job and I could even go term-time only but I’d have to work full-time when I was there and we just can’t stretch to full-time childcare for Amy plus five lots of breakfast-club and afterschool club for Tom.  I’d been hanging on for him to go to school thinking that that would be my ticket back to work and it’s just not going to happen now.

It’s all right for himself, he still gets to go to work and mix with proper grown-ups every day, his life hasn’t been affected by the children at all really, but the only adults I ever get to speak to are other stay-at-home mothers most of who are NCT types, you know, the sort of women who knit their own lentils and I hate it.  I’ve got nothing interesting to talk about to anyone, him least of all and he barely speaks to me when he comes home from work any more either.  Just baths the children, puts them to bed and reads them a story.  In fact, he gets the good bit at the end of the day, whereas I get all the tantrums and the slog.’

Julia had paused to take a large gulp of wine and Janet took advantage of this to announce imperiously ‘What you need, my girl, is a One Night Stand!’  Julia gasped and inhaled her wine.  Once she had finally stopped coughing, and had mopped up the worst of the spillage she looked at Janet but her first genuine laugh of the day had frozen on her face immediately as she had seen without doubt that Janet had been deadly serious. ‘Oh, Dave and I do it all the time’ Janet had added, sounding rather pleased with herself.

‘What?  But.  What?’ Julia had trailed off weakly. ‘Fuck’.

‘Yes, that’s the general idea’ Janet had added airily.

Julia looked at herself in the ornate hotel room mirror and was pleased with the unusually immaculately made-up face which was reflected there.  Having the time to get ready, slowly and without constant interruption, had alone been worth every penny of the cost of the hotel package, even if it had been a special offer from an internet buying site.  Her barely lined blue eyes smiled back at her, acknowledging the joke.  Even an illicit night in a hotel room had to be done on a budget with only one salary coming into the house.

Her stomach clenched as she remembered what she was doing there and she stood up and resumed walking backwards and forwards across the rather garishly patterned red carpet.  She paused in front of the full-length mirror near the bathroom door and looked at herself properly.  Still slim despite two pregnancies, the obligatory little black dress, which she had bought for her husband’s work’s Christmas party last year, emphasised her waist and the neckline, lower than she was accustomed to wearing these days, showing off the rather spectacular cleavage that was the only visible legacy from the pregnancies.  And now she was about to go down to the bar and display it to anyone who cared to look because her sister had somehow persuaded her that a night ‘on the pull’ was exactly what she needed to perk herself, and her marriage, up and she in an episode of madness – what other excuse could there be? – had thought her sister’s argument had seemed not only reasonable but also easy to carry out.  She now had an awful feeling, however, that rather than ‘spice up’ her marriage, she was in great danger of destroying it irrevocably if this all went horribly wrong.  Taking a deep breath, she placed the room key card into her ridiculously small bag and stepped out of the room into the long corridor, pulling the door firmly shut behind her and trying to dispel an impression of the film ‘The Shining’ and a feeling of impending doom.

Her heart was pounding as she exited the lift, and walked through the wide, open foyer into the more enclosed bar area and as she climbed up onto a stool at the long side of the L-shaped, polished wooden bar she noted that she at least looked cool and calm, if a little pale, in the mirror behind the bar, even as she surreptitiously wiped her damp palms on the fabric of the bar stool.  ‘A Disaronno and coke, please’ she said to the barman who had materialised, as if from thin air, as soon as she sat down.

‘I’ll get that’ said a voice and she looked across to see a smartly dressed man sitting around the corner of the bar.  She panicked and said the first thing that came into her head.

‘Thank you, but I’m meeting my husband here in a while’.

‘That’s a great pity’ he replied, smiling at her chest.

‘Room 312’ She told the barman quietly, showing him her key card then placing it on top of her bag on the bar.  He smiled and nodded conspiratorially.  She sipped her drink and absorbed the atmosphere of the ancient coaching inn, trying to relax.  The dark wood panelling glowed with the reflection from the enormous log fire barely contained within the inglenook fireplace, which although it was on the opposite side of the large bar area still managed to extend its warmth across to where she sat.  She had just noticed, with great interest, a large bookcase against one wall, bursting with leather-bound volumes when the barman interrupted her train of thought.

‘Excuse me, Madam’ he said apologetically, ‘but the gentleman wants to know if you would like a drink’.  She turned curiously to see a man in a golf jumper, who must have been at least 60, smiling eagerly at her.

‘Please could you tell him ‘thank you, but no’?’ she replied having a quick look in the bar mirror to see if she was inadvertently sitting underneath a lit sign emblazoned with the word ‘Slapper’.  It was then that she noticed the man approaching the bar from behind her.  He was tall with damp, reddish hair and was carrying a sports bag.  He approached the bar and ordered a glass of red wine, then glanced around him, catching her eye in the process.  He looked away then did a double-take that almost made her laugh out loud.  He looked away again hastily and paid for his drink, then moved across towards her and asked if she minded if he sat on the stool next to her.  She met his eye, said that she didn’t mind then hastily looked away, which was rather unfortunate as she caught the eye of the man at the corner of the bar who glared at her before slamming his glass down on the counter and marching off towards the restaurant.

‘Hi, I’m Steve’ the red-head informed her, smiling enquiringly at her.

‘I’m Julia’ she replied fiddling with a curl with one had, whilst rapidly stirring the straw in her drink with the other.

‘So, do you come here often?’

‘No!’ she replied indignantly and felt the heat rising in her cheeks.  ‘No’ she said again, more calmly, ‘I came here once about 10 years ago, but I’ve not been back since.  What do you do?’ she asked, hastily changing the subject.

‘Oh!’ He sounded surprised. ‘I’m an accountant.  I sit in an office all day with four other accountants an actuary and two trainees sorting out the financial details of a dozen, or so, companies, half a dozen business men, a well known golfer and an even more well known actor.’

‘Oh, that must be so interesting’ she enthused.

‘No it’s not.  I hate it.’

‘What?  Seriously?’

‘Well, that was probably a little strong, but it can be incredibly tedious.  Accountants don’t have a reputation for being boring for no reason, I can assure you.  I also feel like I spend all my time at work and hardly any with my family.  My kids aren’t going to be young forever and before I know it they’ll be surly teenagers who want nothing to do with me – I know, I was one myself once’.

Julia laughed at this and said ‘You are married then?’

‘Oh yes.  I’m definitely married.  My wife stays at home with the children so is able to really enjoy them whereas I get a short time with them when I get home and they’re half asleep.  I only get play-time with them at the weekends.’  He grimaced.  ‘I wish I could work part-time, maybe three days a week, and stay at home with the children for the other two.  I have put feelers out at work and apparently gender discrimination works both ways, so it would be possible, but we couldn’t afford to lose the money.  We’ve already lost my wife’s salary since the children were born, and I can’t possibly ask her to go back to work, it wouldn’t be fair.  She is their mother after all, and I’m only their dad.

Julia positively gaped at him.  ‘I think you might be surprised’ she said firmly.  ‘I used to be a hospital pharmacist before I had my babies.  When I was the on-call pharmacist I used to have to run around the hospital – literally – with a bag of drugs attending crashes and helping to save people’s lives.  Now, the nearest I get to the front line of medicine is putting a plaster on the odd scraped knee or even administering a dose of calpol in extreme circumstances.’

She added wistfully ‘I’d love to go back to work.  I’ve made enquiries too and I can go back term-time only, which is a perfect balance I think, but we can’t afford the childcare we’d need for five days a week during school terms.  Don’t get me wrong.  I adore my children, I can’t imagine life without them but I just don’t have a chance to use my brain properly any more and I admit that I miss the excitement of work, not to mention the company of people who’d like to talk about more interesting subjects than the goings on in ‘In the Night Garden’!’

‘Like talking about the goings on in ‘Coronation Street’ you mean?’ he teased and she laughed again displaying a row of straight white teeth framed by lips that held just a hint of a deep pink lipstick.

‘Well, to be honest, I was hoping for something a little more stimulating than that, but even that would be an improvement, yes.’  Her eyes sparkled with mischief and she visibly relaxed.

‘Would you like another drink?  Or,’ he raised an eyebrow, ‘I don’t suppose I could persuade you to give me a guided tour of the mini-bar in your room’ he said quietly, nodding at the key card on top of her bag.

‘Do you know?  I think you could’ she murmured, standing up and looking straight into his hazel eyes which were framed by thick eyelashes which she thought were totally unfair on a man.

He reached for her hand as the lift doors opened and, thanking all the gods that he had accepted without question the instructions in the cryptic text she’d sent him that morning, she looked up into her husband’s face and returned his smile.

Orion

A photo of Orion I took from my garden the other night.

Watching

This is a short story I wrote for my first Tutor Marked Assignment for my Open University Creative Writing module (A215).  We had to do a prompted freewrite on a choice of titles then develop a story of 750 words from that.  I chose ‘Walking At Night’.

I have been walking the streets at night since I was a small child; introduced to it by my mother who used to love to walk past people’s houses where the lights were on but the curtains left open, bleeding lamplight into the street outside and providing a vista of bright colour, or cool, calm sophistication to anyone who cared to look.

            I was embarrassed by her of course, by the way she would slow down and make no effort to disguise her nosiness, ensuring that she saw as much of the room as possible.  I was too young to realise that the people inside couldn’t see us, blinded as they were to the darkness which enveloped us by the very brightness which attracted us, like moths, to their homes.

            Mother said that she liked to see how people arranged their rooms, to take inspiration from their choice of furniture and colour schemes.  I, however, started to look at the people inside.  I grew to enjoy seeing a snapshot of their lives, like a tableau or a window-display in a department store; grown-ups sitting companionably talking, children playing with each other, whole families sitting together around a table, sharing not only their meal but also the story of each other’s day.

            These scenes, which I watched with an increasing sense of longing, were so different from the reality of our own home where, because it was just Mother and me, there were no large family gatherings around the table and no siblings to play and fight with.  Whatever inspiration Mother had from looking through those windows, it never did transfer to our home which remained dark and dingy, the shabby pieces of uncomfortable furniture and our few clothes all smelled of the damp that inhabited the walls.

Many years later, though Mother is long dead, I still like to walk through the streets at night and to look through people’s windows.  I try to stay in the shadows as much as I can so as not to draw attention to myself.  There is an undercurrent of danger in the darkness these days, which wasn’t there when I was a child.  The smells that fill my nostrils are more mechanical, the acrid whiff of engine oil and wet concrete has replaced the floral scents from my childhood.  The rustling sound behind a hedge is unlikely to be the innocent scuttling of a hedgehog or field-mouse.

            I sense, rather than hear, movement ahead of me up the street, which causes me to startle and pause, my breath catching in my chest.  I feel the familiar surge of adrenaline course through my body as my heart begins to race and I hear my pulse and the swish of my own blood coursing through my veins.  My instincts are validated when I see a distant figure passing through the golden glow from a street-light, approaching me steadily.  I press myself against the hedge beside me, which, to my relief, yields accommodatingly to envelop my form within its thin branches.

            I can hear footsteps now as the walker comes closer, striding briskly and with purpose, the beat of footfall resonating slightly, echoed by the surrounding buildings and now joined by staccato breath sounds, audible because the exertion of walking quickly, but when combined with the noise of tread, amplified to a clamour by my hormone-induced heightened sense of awareness, and I know that they’re almost upon me.

            Taking a deep breath, I step out of the shadows and register the look of shock, quickly replaced by terror, as she sees me materialise in her path.  Putting my hands quickly across her mouth, before she can do more than gasp in shock, I feel the warmth of her body as I wrap my other arm around her and drag her backwards into the alley behind me.

            She won’t be going back to the house which I have been watching for the last few weeks, which will be bathed in the warm glow of lamp-light and where her family will await the return of the wife and mother who will never arrive.  Instead, she will be joining Mother, and the others, all of whom are to blame, just as she is, for their own destiny.  After all, as Mother always used to say to me: ‘Son, if they didn’t want people to watch what they were doing, they would have drawn the curtains’.

Perigee Moon