When I'm old, by Izzy Ullmann

When I'm old, and not grey, nor full of sleep

I'll be dyeing my hair and watching films late at night,

And getting up mid morning, like a teenager.

I shall refuse to wear big knickers from M and S, and shudder at slip-on shoes,

And make a Yule Log instead of Christmas pudding.

I shall enjoy my bus pass, and get off at places I've never been before,

And sit alone in the pub, drinking a pint.

I'll play pianos in public train stations, with arthritic hands,

And read all of À la recherche du temps perdu.

My corpus, although ranting with pills,

Will delight in long, deep baths , if I can get in them.

I will frown at huddles of old folks

Enthusiastically expatiating about their maladies.

My dreams will be in the beech woods,

Picking mushrooms, or riding my bike,

Or walking the flint-sharp paths, listening to the blackbird's minims from Chiltern paths.

Charles Huntingdon, by Peter Shilston

 This is the foreword of my online historical novel. The complete novel can be read at pgvshil.blogspot.com

...............................................................................................................................................

 Charles Huntingdon was never a politician of the first rank, and even the great Sir Lewis Namier, in his famous surveys of Parliament in the 1760s, could find little to say about him. I knew scarcely more than just his name before the document I am publishing here came into my hands. 

   I was doing the rounds of the Cambridge colleges and the university library, conducting research into eighteenth century politics, when a young trainee assistant librarian, Ms. Whitmore, produced for me something she had found gathering the dust of centuries in the depths of what is euphemistically known as the “reserve collection”. It was a large wooden box, catalogued as having been deposited in 1775 by “Charles Huntingdon, M.P.”, with instructions that it should not be opened until after his death and that of his wife; but as far as Ms. Whitmore was able to ascertain, it had never in fact been opened since it came into the college’s possession. The box proved to contain the memoirs of the said Charles Huntingdon.

   Although Huntingdon was an obscure politician, he met many of the most important people of that period. He has left us descriptions of them, and he also casts a fresh light on the daily lives of the landed classes of his day. The most startling aspect of his memoirs, however, is that he reveals details of some extraordinary adventures in which he took part; and after reading these I can well understand why he did not want them to become widely known until much later.   

  It is for this reason that I am bringing his memoirs to the attention of the public for the first time. Some episodes, which appear to be unrelated to the main story, have been relegated to an appendix at the conclusion. With the aim of attracting a wider readership, I have modernised the spelling and punctuation and broken up the narrative into short chapters, for which the titles are entirely my own. The illustrations, which show various eighteenth century scenes, are also my choice.

  My thanks are due above all to Ms. Abigail Whitmore, without whose encouragement and advice my task would have been impossible. 

                                                       P.G.S.

Christmas 2024

 Happy Christmas! To celebrate here are some of the 6th-century mosaics in the basilica of St. Vitale, Ravenna

For those who enjoy grammar!

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

An invention of collective nouns, by Brian Bilson

Who's crazy? by Pauline Fisk

 We found the hand on the cliff-path at four o clock in the morning. We’d been up all night looking for Abe. The sky had turned from black to blue. Stars had melted, taking with them the night shadows. The sun had risen - and there it was.   

      We knew it was Abe’s because of the ring. Julia had the other half.  They were, in all senses, the perfect pair.  We found Abe’s other hand on the beach, and a foot on the shoreline as if thrown out to sea but washed back in.  Other bits appeared. We even found blood.  You don’t expect to encounter blood on a beach as beautiful as that one, the sea a strip of silver, not a sound but breaking waves.  As in all detective fiction, there were coincidences. Huw happened to be a forensic scientist, able to date Abe’s death from fingernails and gums [yes, we found his head]. Pete was a retired detective inspector.  Bluntly he announced what we all knew – that the evidence pointed to one of us.  This beach was private, he said, impossible to access except by boat.  The entrance through rocks was known only to the beach’s owner, and his special friends. 

  Well, it couldn’t have been Pete. He was the one who’d raised the alarm. Besides, policemen are upholders of the law - and you can’t dismember your own brother without breaking the law.  But it couldn’t have been Huw.  Noble Huw, whose life was built around the truth - the dedicated scientist people trusted to a fault. Life was his subject. He’d too much respect to ever take it away [though according to rumour he had a thing for Julia]. 

   And that brings us to the gorgeous Julia. It couldn’t have been .  Not Abe’s wife.  His right hand gal, he always called her, and she’d always mock-sigh and answer, ‘Yup, that’s me.’ 

So that leaves yours truly.  Could it have been me? Stalking through the night, cleaver in hand, chopping up and disposing of my best friend? We’d been through school together, everything. He knew my secrets and I knew his.  Could I once have sworn to get him, and now I had? 

  As it turned out, police work solved the crime in record time.  The murderer was a man of foreign accent discovered sleeping rough down the beach.  He protested his innocence, but Huw said forensic evidence pointed to him, Pete said that murderers always gave themselves away and Julia said she’d disturbed him shortly before the first hand. There’d been a moment when their eyes had met. ‘I thought then that he was crazy,’ she said.    

   And what do I say? What do I care? Abe was a beast. We three know that. One of us killed him. One of us lied – and to expect murder to be solved in just five hundred words makes this author crazy too.  The truth lies unrevealed, and I've just hit five-one-two. Which means it’s over to you.

Puss in boots: a fairy tale retold, by Peter Shilston

The miller's youngest son set out to seek his fortune, accompanied only by his cat, Puss. After they had walked for several days, they noticed a royal cortege approaching, and Puss told the young man to undress and jump into a nearby river.
   Puss then ran up to the King's coach, calling, "Help! Help! My master, the Marquis of Carabas, was bathing in the river, and robbers have stolen his clothes!"
   The royal carriage stopped, and the King motioned to the young man to stand up in the water, which fortunately was deep enough to come up to his waist.
   "Goodness!" exclaimed the princess,who was accompanying her father, "What a handsome young man!"
   "That's as maybe", said the King, "But I don't think I've ever met the Marquis of Carabas. Do any of you know him?" he asked the courtiers. But it turned out that none of them had ever met such a person either.
   "I must say", mused the Lord Chamberlain, "He doesn't strike me as being a nobleman. Look at his hair! Look at his hands! Now then", he said to the young man, "Can you name any nobleman who will vouch for you?"
   But of course the miller's youngest son couldn't.
   "He doesn't talk like a Marquis either!" was the Lord Chamberlain's verdict. "And if he is a Marquis, why does he choose to bathe in this muddy river? Hasn't he any lakes or streams on his estates?"
   The King considered. "Now look here, my man", he pronounced eventually, "I've no idea who you are. We'll give you some clothes to make you decent, then you'd better be on your way. If you really are the Marquis of Carabas, then I apologise, but you surely understand that we can't be too careful with strangers in these dangerous times".
   So the Lord Chamberlain gave the miller's youngest son a set of clothes and a few coins, and warned him not to come near the King again. 
   "The cat, however, is a different matter", said the King. "Just fancy: a cat that talks! Would you like him as a pet, my dear?" he asked the princess.
   "Oh, yes please daddy!" she exclaimed.
   So the miller's youngest son walked disconsolately away, but Puss was taken to the palace, where he lived happily ever after.