Early memories

When did you form your earliest memory?

I only ask because I swear I remember my nappy being changed which must be a really early memory. Although I can't have been less than two, surely. But is that a usual age for the first memory?

Of course, one only remembers traumatic or unusual occurances. I think I remember only it because Nana changed me, which she never usually did, and I must have hated it; maybe I didn't trust her with the safety pins - they loom large for some reason - though I don't remember being pricked!

Green Boar - Part 9: Furies Tale continued...

The story so far... LeRoy is telling Leanne all about how the Furies came to be so.

He launched into the tales of the Furies great punishment just as the doorbell rang to announce the entrance of another customer.

***

The Furies, dear lady, once enjoyed themselves as the wives of the richest man in the whole wide world. He was the King of lands that stretched from the deserts of Tunisia to the frozen North where there were great dark forests full of evil creatures that would rip your head off the moment they laid eyes on you. So far North were those lands that even those impregnable woods would be covered by snow for a full nine months, and the people there couldn’t grow crops and only ate meat with tough skin for afters and walked on the sea because it became solid in the deepest darkness of winter and sparkled blue in the moonlight.

As wives they had everything they ever wanted, except independence. They were surrounded by pearls, rubies and more gold than one can wish for. And most of them forgot freedom, or never understood the concept to begin with. They were the happiest wives. For want of that priceless thing freedom turns a good room into a shiny cage. But even those who felt constricted still had everything else they could think of, and if they wanted more, well then one of their minions, or rather the King’s minions, would be notified and it would be brought to them forthwith probably tied up in a pretty ribbon and delivered with grave obsequiousness. His Magesty’s minions were generally noted for their obsequiousness, unless you stood on their toes which is when they simply became squeaky.

For this fine treatment the wives paid their dues in babies, having as many as they were able, and always at any one time having at least half of their number pregnant, suffering in child birth or feeding an infant. Of course, having children is an onerous duty in the bearing, and certainly not risk free, but the wives were comforted in their confinement by the thought that any children they bore would be always cared for and comfortable.

For unlike rulers in unkind fairy tales, this king would not sanction even the thought of harm coming to one of his own blood. Each tiny cut or bruise in tender infant skin it is said, he felt as keenly as if made in his own skin. Each baby wail would echo sonorously in his ears and filled him with the greatest anxiety so that stepping within earshot of his many nurseries would shoot arrows of pain through his skull. This kept him well away from the nurseries which suited new mothers, nurses, babies, reluctant wives, lazy servants and out of favour courtiers very well.

Harm to his children was ever present in the King’s thoughts. He was well aware of the awful precedent set by some prior incumbents of the many kingdoms he was now the careful owner of. Of the wholesale slaughter of innocent infants and their mothers, and to prevent his eventual heir committing the same, he was careful to preserve an edict carried throughout generations that meant that all royal offspring were guaranteed life, if not one of power, then of servitude to the nation in some other form.

Due to this the kingdom was, in most ways successfully, and in other ways less successfully, ruled by the whole of his family. He would say to each of his wives, his brothers, sisters, children and many cousins, ‘The king is the kingdom and the kingdom is the family and the king is no more than one of that family. I, who am king of all, am no more than my kingdom and all who are in it.’ And they would nod sagely in agreement and think he could have said that in less words, but they got the gist and thought it very wonderful because it guaranteed them a future full of life rather than one of looking behind them all the time or of wanting to see round corners and hope that nobody would jump round them with a nasty pointy knife.

However, being himself the seventh in the line of his particular dynasty, and it being the case of a particular profligacy, by this point so many of the king’s subjects were actually the king’s family; a family truly extended, so much so that one would expect to be related to a stranger rather than not, that it was felt that indeed, they were all in it together, and therefore should work with rather than against each other.

Dynasties are named appropriately, and it is not unusual for such to end in the kind of bloodbath that crops up in sagas and dramas centuries later willing and ready to be proclaimed great art. This King however had no eye for providing grist to playwrights. The means of performing peaceful family altercations, for there are always arguments, they can simply not be avoided, the knack is in conducting them with such aplomb that all participants exit feeling justified, were the first of all lessons taught. They were taught not only to the royal children, but all the children in the land.

Peace, not honour, nor lust nor pride, was drawn up in a code sewn with love and duty. Hence his kingdom was truly blessed with wisdom.

The tale is worth the telling just for this. For are there not already too many tales of the opposite? Of royal siblings wholly slaughtered on the assent of a new king to the throne? A pointless loss of life and learning.

Perhaps the root of it can be found singularly in jealousy, but most likely it is in fear. Fear that a sibling would supplant the embryo kingship. A fear almost never justified by evidence. Of course, with comprehensive murder of infants would come that of mothers and sisters. For who would wish to begin one’s rule with the hot hate of grieving women at your neck. This king; this fairer husband, would not let this be. The furies’ downfall was not this. The story of their loss is a far stranger tale.

I need not explain to you now how powerful and despotic this King was, despite his very fine and generous outlook on the matter of family. In many ways, one of the reasons that he could afford to be so generous was because his position of power was absolute: He was the single ruler of every piece of land known to be civilised. Sure, there were primitive peoples beyond, but they were beyond and provided little of interest. He was secure in his kingdom but his interests were surely in it remaining that way.

His subjects, and by this term we do not exempt his extensive family, were expected to gift to him, in taxes, the best of what they had in order to prove their fealty and worth to the kingdom. In return they earned his protection and his agreement not to be nasty to them in some other way. This, of course, is how kings are, and it didn’t reflect on him personally.

But nobody liked to pay the taxes. Which is normal. It is always felt that one gets out less than one pays in, even if the reverse is true. So to help with this little reluctance, at the start of his reign when he was a young man he always referred to his kingdom in public as ‘Our kingdom’, and accepted gifts with a great show of humility and gratefulness. The problem with this was however that his subjects liked him for it and started to bring him extra gifts in order to elicit even greater praise. They were a little like a class of school children all vying to become teacher’s pet.

This rose to become a problem quite early on. For although there would always be room made for good eating sheep, cows, deer, pigs and goats, there developed a curious habit of delivering to him alongside the regular and expected goods beasts described in glowing terms as ‘most wondrous’ all dressed up in the most unbelievable costumes. It drove his courtiers spare. Once there was a rabbit dressed as a frog, with the frog’s front legs coming out of its head where its ears should have been. This was easy to dispose of: It was gifted immediately to a niece. As was the gerbil dressed as a loaf of bread and a very hot and angry cat costumed up as a lamb, badly; you could see its ginger fur peeking out from between the tied on woolly fleece.

However, it was far more difficult to find homes for the larger, more ferocious beasts... to be continued...
(sooner this time).

Someone in Vietnam bought Zog

I have to blog about watching the Book Depository live because it's the only thing that will stop me watching.

The Book Depository is an online book store. You probably know this. BUT... it has a page showing where its books are being bought in real time on a world map. It's here: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/live.

It's a peculiar kind of boasting, or customer research, or I don't know what. The thing is, it's fascinating to see which nations buy what. The Brits seem to like self-help books and the Northern Europeans culture and poetry. Someone in Singapore bought Manga, and then someone in the Netherlands: 'Goats for Dummies'. Brilliant.

Shake out the dust sheets...

and blow the dead moth off the windowsill. It feels like I haven't blogged for months. And it was all going so well...

Well, I seem to have stopped wanting to barf up all the time so perhaps I can flick pause off and carry on. Things are progressing without me and I feel like I have to run a little to catch up.

Though have things really changed that much while I was soaking in an is-this-really-happening-to-me-and-my-body limbo? I strongly suspect not. Not even for my uniquely distressful early gestation period nor my obviously genius future offspring will the world suddenly right itself and stop, sit up in class, listen for once and, after the umpteenth time of asking, finally behave itself. If it won't do it for Stephen Fry, then it won't do it for me.

So I think I've had enough of a break. Normality shall resume. More Boar - currently dallying around distressed king's wives - and maybe poems, and I have that jolly story set in the men's lavs to finish.

He snores

He snores downstairs
testing sonorous limits,
I've crept to bed
for precious minutes.

We have a plan:
If he is still there by 1am
He Stays.

Unloaded dice

I dreamt of falling cubes, slowed.
The faces turned, and turned
to face and passed. Memories gone
and to come:
A sepia stage, binding
tight and drawn tighter.
A chapter down is too trite, so
is another page to write,
speak easy
of a thousand diverse cases:
mine, yours, his, or hers
all in all different phases,
unknown as yet.
Always the unknown as yet!
A marvellous enterprise!
They tumble on the green baize.
You don’t know what you’ll get.

Sea lace

Sea Lace

 

Spinning, unravelling

Tumbling, heaving, a race

A moment, a pattern

Like Nottingham lace

Spun far away

From these bamboo limbs
And sand hotter than I’ve ever felt.

My ancestors toiled endlessly

but I sit on this shore

watching a stranded log

home to several gasping anemone

teetering

While he fetches a camera

To record the strange vision.