Wednesday 20 January 2016

Two short stories short-listed for the Twisted50 project

This morning, the folk at Create50 announced the shortlist for their Twisted50 project, on which they have been so good as to include two short stories of mine, viz:-

*'Lolitasaurus' - fleeting episodes in the conscious life of a psychopath running amuck following his erroneous release from a mental hospital.

*'Disaster of the Will' - a criminal hiding out on a coastal campsite awakes one morning to find the place taken over by nudists, whose occupation promptly descends into internecine strife with unsavoury antisemitic overtones.

Here's a link to the Twisted announcement:-

https://www.facebook.com/Twisted50Book/posts/220850108249906:0

Thursday 7 January 2016

The Goatherd's Plaint and Lament - from Odour Issues Ch9

La queixa i llĂ grimes del cabrer

While in this close Arcadia I’ve dwelt,
careless and ignorant and quite at ease,
my thoughts being occupied with making cheese,
I’ve nought considered how it must have felt
to be shut up in rubber in a shed,
and lie all day on leaking waterbed,
subject to buggering by chaps with fleas.

For all my daily business was with goats
I got, to salve my loneliness, a gimp
loaned to me by a psychopathic pimp,
for which I paid in maculated notes.
I leavened then my pastoral eclogue
with bosky cottaging in my own bog,
at the expense of an ungainly limp.

A tolerable stasis now ensued.
The farming of a gimp, like planting trees,
entitled me to EU subsidies.
What better way, they asked, of getting wood?
For months our lifestyle was quite middle-class
while I made free with gimp’s capacious arse
and goats roamed unattended o’er the leas.

For all gimp favoured with its rash my bell,
which ever and anon oozed greenish pus,
I pardoned it, and didn’t make a fuss,
but loved my masked avenger passing well.
Its mute submission blithely I mistook
for acquiescence - with a funny look -
and manfully ignored its pungent musk.

But gimp more goaty than my goats now smelled -
its odour issue did invade my dreams.
One day I brought it to the babbling stream
and bade it bleach its mould’ring spandex pelt.
Gimp about nudity evincing doubt,
I lent a onesie I had lying about,
and anti-chafing prophylactic cream.

Respecting modesty, I turned my back -
I’d never seen its lissome form undraped,
not even on my covert webcam tapes.
I heard just then a duck’s protesting quack,
and turned again, anticipating now
to see my laundered gimp freshly aglow
with nicely warmed and buttered rectal gape.

Alas! The renegade had crossed the flood,
and in its onesie climbed the further bank
and fled pellmell across the pasture dank.
I heaved a sigh, trudged homewards through the mud
and, reacquainted with my solitude,
the pages of ‘Goat-Fancier’ unglued
and then embarked on a most joyless wank.

My gimp hath lately slipped its bonds and fled,
wherefore I do beweep my outcast state.
If swain of gimp would fain avoid my fate
keep chained thy gimp unto its waterbed,
nor suffer it to don, behind thy back,
that rude mechanical old onesie sack,
else only billy gruffs will thee fellate.

I found this hilarious Swiftian Modest Proposal on Twitter this morning, courtesy of someone calling him/herself Northern Variant

As a Labour MP, I'm often chased down the road by very vocal Labour supporters. I welcome this level of passionate engagement. It's ...