Christmas

 A merry Christmas to everyone!

These splendid angels are from the Priory Church, Great Malvern, Worcestershire.

The Caucasus: Pagan Philosophy, by Peter Shilston

(I wrote this after a visit to the Caucasus. It took the Russians fifty years, in the first half of the 19th century, to conquer the tribes of this mountainous region. During this time, Lermontov set his nihilistic novel "A hero of our times", there, and Pushkin sent his hero, Eugene Onegin,to fight there. Tolstoy's early stories, like "The cossacks" tell of his experiences holding the line of the Terek river against the tribes, and his very last story, "Hadji Murat", concerns a Chechen chief who tries to defect to the Russians but as a result is mistrusted by both sides. At the end of the Second World War Stalin (who was himself a Georgian) deported entire mountain peoples, Chechens, Inguish and others, to Siberia, where about a quarter of then died before Khrushchev allowed them to return to their homeland - which,from a Russian point of view, was probably a mistake)

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The people are like their mountains

 beautiful, wild, untameable, hard, crushing any weakness, 

implacable in revenge on outsiders who show them no respect.

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 Silly people in the cities 

may speak of dying for a cause 

but a serious man knows 

that for your cause to triumph you must kill.

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In the end we all die. What matters is how we die 

and what better way to die than in defence of your home

 surrounded by the bodies of your enemies?

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The only true immortality is to live in legend 

when your children's children 

tell stories of your mighty deeds. 

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The mountains and their people

once inspired Pushkin and Lermontov and Tolstoy 

and now they inspire Vladimir Putin 

- a serious man. 

Psychoanalysis, by David Bingham

A psychoanalysis session conducted by Dr Oscar Schneider with the apparition of Frau Sabine

Bachmann, his deceased lover, at his consulting rooms in Vienna, 1909

He points to a painting 

of an Alpine scene 

and asks his patient what she sees.

‘I see rue Chabanais, that street of debauchery,

where high class whores pander to the wants

of privileged and powerful men.’

The good doctor lifts the cover from a porcelain plate,

decorated with red roses, and reveals a selection

of expensive sweets. ‘Please take one and describe its taste.’

She chooses a chocolate-coated truffle

and is immediately overcome with revulsion

as she recalls the acridness of bitter almonds.

He sets up his gramophone and plays

the famous soprano Jane Merey singing la Valse Rose.

‘What do you hear?’ he asks.

‘The prolonged and agonising cries of a fallen woman

reaching the end of her life

and then the whisper of her last breath.’

He picks a gardenia

from a bouquet of flowers and passes it to her.

‘Such a pleasing fragrance I think you’ll agree’

She puts it to her nose.

‘To me, it is like a rotting corpse left

in an unvisited room for many weeks.’

He reaches out to touch her.

‘Tell me how this feels?’ he says.

She grasps his hand; and, in shock,

he whimpers as drop by drop she drains the moisture

from his body, until all that remains is a skeleton

of dried bones covered in withered skin.

She looks down at what is left of him.

‘It feels good,’ she says,

‘it feels very, very good.’

© David Bingham, 2021 

Return to normal, by Peter Morford

 After more than a year I’ve got used to working from home. It was odd at first to wake at my usual time of 6am and be ready for the short walk to the station for the 7.10 up-train. I miss the regularity of

meeting my friends in the buffet car for our breakfasts. I say friends but we rarely exchanged names, all we had in common was a ninety minute trip from the coast to Victoria Station. We naturally broke up

into little cliques. There were the two chess-players who patiently ignored the misleading advice we gave them. There was the card school on table one. The argumentative set huffed and puffed about

the Government. There was the man who liked to tease the buffet attendant, who, in his best Jeeves voice, would ask how Sir would like his toast. After a moment’s thought Horace would say “Medium rare, my good man.” Sometimes, just to be awkward, he could demand “Very well done. I want to hear your smoke alarm.”

For more than a year one table hosted two women, two men. My friend Greene speculated about them. He also had theories about the men he called Trotsky and Churchill as they heatedly argued their left-wing-right-wing view of life and then politely shook hands as they left the train.

I remembered the retirement party for the old boy who had commuted for 45 years.

**

I took a spare bedroom for my home office. For the first week or two I dressed in my usual City suit, white shirt, regimental tie, shiny shoes. After a while I gradually dressed down. I was respectable above the waist in deference to the daily Zoom meetings, but below that – jeans, shorts, flip-flops. Only two vital things were the same. I was always at my desk 9.15 to 5.30, took 45 minutes for lunch. After a tea break I was back at the keyboard for another 30 minutes, the time I had always spent working on the home-bound train.

Now there is talk about a return to the office. We’ve all been vaccinated months ago and tested weekly. It should be safe, we are told. My colleagues viewed the prospect in different ways. Some would miss the freedom and trust they had enjoyed. The Bank ruled that, as long as all tasks were completed on time, they were happy.

We had all saved money. My Bank balance is padded with the unspent £5000 for a yearly season ticket and I would guess, £3000 for lunches in The Bistro.

Old stagers like me had certain figures on our minds. I was a 30-year commuter. Think of the numbers. I had made the 140 miles round trip about 7000 times, over a million miles. I had spent 21,000 hours on dusty seats or, on the homeward trip, waiting for a seat. I had the skills of a homing pigeon. If I dozed I knew instantly where I was when I awoke, in darkness or light. I had never missed my stop. Did I want this return to The City? I could retire or, perhaps find a local job. But what would I find in a sleepy seaside town?

Fear, by Pat Askew

 I found myself on the outskirts of a large burial-ground. The light was murky. Some distance away, with her back to me, a young girl in a red dress was laying flowers on a grave. Closer to me, but somehow much less distinct, was another figure, who seemed to be a woman in beige, watching the girl. I was seized with a terrible fear that they would turn round, and I would find they had the faces of werewolves; or even worse, that they would have no faces at all. I decided to tiptoe quietly away. The figures did not move, and I realised the scene was only a picture. But then I discovered I could not move either, and that I was part of the picture too. 

The Great British Fake-off, by Mark Lovett

 A bald man and a Goth stared at an Autocue. “Bakers, welcome back to the tent for your Show Stopper Challenge”, shouted Matt,  “today Prue and Paul would like you to bake, not one, but two cakes”. 

“That’s right”, opined Noel, wiping mascara from his eyes. “One should be an image of how you see yourself, whilst the other should be how others see you; no Doppelgängers allowed!

“On your marks, get set – Fake!"

Weighed down by a surfeit of hair gel, Paul Hollywood sashayed across towards an overweight blonde baker.

Alongside Paul stood an eighty-one-year-old Dame from Cape Town, looking like a Mondrian painting with glasses.

“Now, Mr Johnson tell me about your cakes”, queried Prue, “How are they different?”

 “Well, yes and no, whilst on the other hand, maybe. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is the key to this culinary triumph you see emerging before you. By the way would you like an intimate dinner this evening; Carrie is away”.

“I’m sorry Mr Johnson but I am 24 years older than you and my son Paul is now one of your MPs!”

 “I don’t care about Backbenchers and what is more, 24 years, is nothing – that is exactly how much older I am than Carrie”.

Remembering that Johnson had insulted Scousers in 2011, Paul Hollywood adjusted his stare to warp speed eleven and sneered at Boris. “Answer Prue’s question!” 

“Oh, I never do that, people might at last realise that behind the charisma lies a mendacious fraud. Vox populi is not in my Latin Primer.”

Thus, they had to wait to find out that Boris’ first cake was Winston Churchill in a blonde wig, whilst his second was Pinocchio.

Johnson didn’t win the Star Baker apron. That went to Emmanuel Macron for his two gateaux of Napoléon and Napoléon.

Angela Merkel was a close second with Catherine the Great and Mutti, whilst Joe Biden was third with Franklin Roosevelt. He failed to produce a second cake as he could not decide between Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets.

Boris didn’t actually finish, as Pinocchio’s nose kept on growing; he wondered why. Non ducor, duco Boris whispered to himself, although he worried whether Vincit qui se vincit still applied.

As the detritus was being cleared away, Matt and Noel sat in the corner. “Before I met you” said Noel, “I used to think Alopecia was a mythical European State, much like Ruritania”. 

“If only that were true” replied Matt, “then we could make Boris the King and get the Brothers Grimm to write his speeches”.

Lost Content, by Martin White

 At the back of a room of junk and forgotten things, I find a cardboard box. Inside, a tangle of lifeless wooden heads and knotted limbs; the remains of a troupe of marionettes that were part of the puppet shows that my friend and I presented at children's parties and village fetes a great many years ago. We had a rudimentary theatre: proscenium arch, wings and backcloth, which we would quickly set up. There were over a dozen puppets to unwind and hang ready for the show. This varied cast of characters had trod the boards of the fit-up, long consigned to the tip.

   Pelham puppets were a poular children's toy of the time, and we added to them puppets we had made ourselves. And so there would be a variety of turns, presented to music on the Dansette record player: Lullabelle with her maracas and grass skirt on the fringe of racial parody as she danced to a West Indian beat; clowns, acrobats and jugglers in a circus sketch; and Mr MacBoozle, a red-faced Scot, always ready to raise a bottle of whisky to his lips and stagger across the stage; Wag the dog enthusiastically running here and there; and, most popular of all, two skeletons cavorting to the tune of Danse Macabre, limbs flying apart, heads rising into the sky, bringing gasps and screams from the young audiences.

  These puppets had lain lifeless for years, their strings knotted and entwined, until a friend with more patience and dexterity than I could muster untangled them so that they might be able to move again.

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forgotten puppet troupe

   I still remember

 which strings to pull