The fairy's reply.

The fairy's reply.

A new short story...

Enjoy the little things.

J2H.

The devil may care.

He perched upon his great, grand throne

Of finest tooth and whitest bone

A fork of fire by his side

His clothes cut from rich sinners’ hides

And fanned the flames in the fiery pit

That warmed his feet whilst he did sit

And think about that bygone age

When those above still feared his rage

His blood did boil, his rage did swell

As he sat on his throne in his Kingdom of Hell

Like ageing porcelain, weathered and cracked

Veins lined his face with blood that was black

Then, all at once, he shouted a curse

So wicked it made even this damned place worse

He gnashed and thrashed and screamed and did shout

Then grabbed his fork, got up and went out

Time it was to have some fun

To wreak some havoc, rain fire upon

Those weak, soft bags of flesh filled with blood

To bring forth great suffering as only he could

He stamped his cloven feet and did call

For every creature that slithered or crawled

To do his bidding, spread forth his black seed

To undertake the darkest of deeds

He stood atop a lush hill and surveyed

The land he had chosen to bring first to dark days

A land that when last he’d walked on this Earth

Had been filled with happiness, joy and great mirth

He summoned forth legions of beasts from below

And considered how best to open his show

Pestilence, plague, brimstone or famine?

He smiled and set off for a night filled with damning

But wait, what was this? This couldn’t be right

Spread all around him, a pitiful sight

Men who had once stood proud and stood strong

Men who had fought and overcome wrong

Now brought to their knees, beaten and weak

Where once had stood heroes knelt only the meek

He searched high and low throughout that dark night

But hard as he tried found no good souls to blight

Old folk now dying, alone in cold beds

Good folk now used to remaining unfed

Sickness and poverty spread far and wide

Fear and hatred where once had lived pride

Filth in the streets and fear in sad eyes

A race of proud people now beaten by lies

Nick turned to his minions and sighed in despair

“We’re out of our league, lads, let’s go back downstairs”

J2H.

Noah's arc.

A number of years ago whilst researching my family tree I discovered that, several centuries ago, one of my ancestors had travelled to the islands of my birth from the Iberian peninsula aboard a ship…

…as part of the Spanish Armada.

He, like many others, had been forced to fight in a war that would in no way benefit him for a king he detested. A number of ships turned left at the Bristol Channel, their mariners intent on jumping ship and fleeing ashore to Wales where they hoped to live their lives as free men.

Back then (as now) the Welsh hated the English as much as the English hated the Spanish, so in a case of “the enemy of my enemy is alright by me, boyo” these oily looking, dark haired individuals were welcomed into the communities, becoming quickly assimilated.

This influx of migrants is, in fact, why the traditional Welsh doll is dark haired rather than being coloured in a more Celtic fashion, the gene pool having been forever altered in a way that would make a Brexiter's blood boil.

I’ve only ever been to the land of my forefathers once (Unless you count Ibiza, though the drug fuelled days of debauchery I experienced there gave me little insight into the place) and I wasn’t a fan. Still a child, I’d ended up at a bullfight and had had to sit, open mouthed and nauseated, as some blokes dressed as Copa Cabana showgirls went all ‘Joe Pesci’ on some cows.

Back home in England I discovered that the father of one of my classmates, a local butcher, was a bull fighter. His name was Frank, which seemed to me an unusual name for a matador, and he was forever on the local news being celebrated as the only Englishman to take part in the barbarism of the Plaza de Toros.

He was celebrated for being a bit of a twat to some cows and I said as much to his son and son’s friends. They didn’t dress as showgirls, nor did they stab me to death, but the severe dead arms I was given on the stairwell between lessons meant I struggled even to lift a pencil for several days afterwards.

Eventually, the sense and sensibilities of my countrymen caught up with my own and, rather than being featured on Granada Reports every summer, his business suffered. I seem to recall some rather ugly graffiti being daubed on his windows occasionally, I think there may also have been an arson attack and, eventually, his fame waned, at least in Britain.

I doubt it did likewise in Spain. I've heard it seldom wanes in Spain.

What is deemed to be socially acceptable now may not be so tomorrow. The world changes, the inhabitants change with it. In my lifetime I have seen drunk-drivers go from being considered as “characters” to become scum, decent people no longer smoke in the presence of children or non-smoking adults, most dog owners carry plastic bags to clean up after their best friends and folk take their own, reusable bags to the supermarket. There is no shame in looking at a situation and thinking “That’s not right” even when most others couldn’t give two shits about the same subject. In such situations you’re generally just at the forefront of the zeitgeist. What you and I may consider insignificant your neighbour may find to be of the utmost importance and vice versa.

Like my distant ancestor, who took the Anglicised name of Noah upon arrival, I have recently left the land of my birth with no intention of returning. 

Once, many moons ago, I couldn’t have imagined ever wanting to leave, but leave I now have. Following a zig-zag course north I eventually ended up being done a kindness that I’m sure I didn’t deserve and given the opportunity to flee the country that had allowed me to rot. The fates have conspired to bring me ever closer to the land of my mutinous ancestor and the closer I get the more I wonder why on Earth he ever left.

Once upon a time there was an England that was merry. Then some bloke with warts decided he wanted those around him to work hard and he told folk some fibs based on an old book. 

Suddenly, instead of dancing, singing, loving and playing whilst occasionally doing enough work to sustain the lives of their countrymen, your average Englishmen began working as hard as they could to ensure that, once dead, they’d not suffer. Suffering for a lifetime to ensure they’d not suffer for an eternity. The fucking idiots.

Working hard, paying taxes, making the warty man wealthy with no benefit to themselves.

I’m genuinely unsure how long I have been out of the country now. I could easily check, but I just can't be arsed. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I live among people who work to live, they don’t live to work. I visit pharmacies and, instead of seeing professional wearing pristine white lab coats and bustling about busily I’m greeted by a chap in jeans and a grateful dead tee-shirt who asks me how I am and smiles a lot. Appointments give one a vague idea of when something may occur. Basically, if your appointment is for 2pm on Tuesday then that simply means don’t make any plans for Tuesday afternoon.

It’s wonderful.

The young and the old smile and greet one and other in the street, food is shared, homes are homes and not investments, jobs are slotted in between lives. The only exception to these “rules” are those other rules put in place by the economic migrants (apparently the French for “economic migrant” is “ex-pat”) who infest the one bar that’s owned by an Englishman in the town square and complain about having had to wait an hour for a bus. An hour during which, had they bothered to learn more of the language, they could have conversed with the locals who were waiting for the same bus and sharing food around.

They’d not want that food though because, apparently, French food is all shit.

I’m looking to head further away from the English channel soon, though if I could I'd remain right here. Like an abandoned galleon that eventually smashes into a beach many miles away I have no hand on the tiller of my life. But then, few of us ever have, we just think we have. I shall probably be in Spain by Christmas, completing the circle set in motion by my forefather and continued by myself. Maybe I'll find a way to stay here and not make it back "home", maybe the journey will remain unfinished, an arc rather than a circle.

It turns out that the warty man had mislead us and that life isn't a chance to earn enough merits for a happy afterlife but is, in fact, for living. Many a friend has told me they wish they could do what I have done and live how I now live. They won’t believe me when I tell them they can. They have jobs to pay for their mortgages, they have mortgages to provide a roof, they toil for much of the week and, one day if they toil hard enough, they’ll die and leave that house to their offspring, providing the government with a huge chunk of revenue and their children with a house to tie them into a similar drudge.

Many reading this will think me an idiot or, at best, a dreamer. But I'm not the only one. Raining punches onto our skinny arms on a dusty school stairwell won't convert us to your way of thinking. Don't be the last to realise what others have already realised. Modern life is as barbarous as any ridiculous, archaic tradition, though now the common man is the cow.

Some have said I'm living the dream, but a dream is a sleeping fallacy, a flight of fancy over which we've no conscious control. A dream cannot be lived. This is no dream, we'll not one day awaken, bleary eyed and refreshed, into a life of leisure where we'll be reunited with our loved ones.

Or, if I'm wrong and we do, it'll not be because we did a load of overtime to pay for bricks and mortar that, in a few hundred years time, won't even exist anymore. 

You don't have to jump ship to live life as a free man. Work less, earn less, owe less, dream less...

...live more, love more.

Sorted.

J2H.

Dog days and pavement pizzas.

A few years ago I wrote some children's books, the Kissy Sizzle trilogy.

They're still available on Amazon and remarkably reasonably priced, though the price came down when no one bought them so maybe that's something to think about if you were considering making a purchase.

The books featured a little girl, a little boy, a yellow dog and a big dog, some time travel, some Nazis, several deaths and a legion of gorilla headed robot knights, the latter being my favourite creation. The children set off on a series of magical adventures, accompanied and protected by the dogs, visiting places I had visited and times I wish I'd experienced. I started writing them because I'd recently become a grandfather for the first time and, having no legacy to leave behind once the inevitable occurred, wanted to at least leave something for her to remember me by.

I'm estranged from my family now and, being a bitter old bastard, I truly believe that's the way it will remain. I doubt either of my granddaughters will have read them, nor do I believe they'll ever know anything about me. It's a situation with which I have come to terms. I was quite literally left to rot by those I'd once protected, so balls to 'em all.

Anyway...

Many of the adventures undertaken by the heroes were loosely based on real life (and far less exciting) events I myself had previously experienced. Some are just retellings of imaginary adventures I'd had during my own childhood, the gorilla headed robot knights being one such example.

Art, if that isn't too pretentious a word to use when describing one's own work, imitating life.

One of the characters, an old lady, was based upon a lady that once did me a great kindness several decades ago in a town square in southern France, a place not many miles from where I've once again found myself. This time, though, I find myself in the company of  yellow dog and a big dog.

Life imitating art?

The woman in question looked to be in her late fifties, though her gait was that of someone at least a decade older.

I saw her face only briefly, spoke to her for less than thirty seconds and then promptly forgot all about her for the best part of the decades that have blossomed and withered betwix then and now, until I needed to put a face to the kindly old lady in the tall tale for short folk that I wrote.

Recently, probably as a result of my new location, I keep seeing her face. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes in those moments when I'm enjoying a bowlful of my favourite tobacco and staring at a blue or starry sky and sometimes when I see a person glance back at me.

It was the summer of 1990 and, it turned out, the hottest day of the year. I was lounging on a dusty pavement in a municipal park with my back against my knapsack when we met. Some fellow backpackers and I were whiling away the hours whilst waiting for a ferry to depart, playing cards and enjoying the glorious sunshine.

"Pardon," She said as her shadow fell over us, "Are you Anglais?"

All of us with cards in our hands squinted up at her, though it quickly became apparent it was only me that she was addressing. The sun cast a bright halo around her head, obscuring her face.

"Oui" I replied, almost exhausting my French vocabulary.

"Pour vous..." She said, holding out a pizza box, the smell of the hot cheese and pepperoni emanating from within reminding me that food had been a scarcity for the last few days whilst simultaneously setting my stomach off grumbling.

I was mortified. The lady with the cheesy box clearly thought me to be a vagrant. I declined her kind offer, politely and with a smile.

"S'il vous plait, c'est, erm, it is clean..." She opened the lid to reveal the pizza, moist and deep and missing one piece. "...you look like my son".

I didn't know how to respond, I simply took the box from her and smiled. The lady turned away as I gazed after her.

Once she'd taken three or four laboured paces she paused and looked back over her shoulder. Now free of the solar-halo I was able to see her face clearly. Short, white hair lay in curls around a plump face that was both tanned and deeply lined from a life lived on the cote d'azur.

"Merci", I called, completing the exhaustion of my lexicon of Le Language.

Her lips were slightly parted and her chin trembled. Her steps seemed to stutter as if she couldn't decide which direction to take while she looked at me for the final time, an expression of sadness sadder than a stranger should ever be allowed to see spreading across her sun-kissed face. She smiled, turned and was no more.

That evening I caught the ferry to St. Tropez where I would, eventually, engage in a little ice-cream selling on the beach and salt-water scrubbing out in the bay. Everything did as every thing does and carried on regardless. I quickly forgot to wonder about my brief encounter with the woman.

The memory is crystal clear. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful place during a beautiful period of existence. I can replay the scene in that quality of HD that only memory can create whenever and wherever I want. I can pause, zoom in to count the stray hairs caught on the collar of her coat (a heavy, chequered coat that looked far too substantial for the climate) or examine the card I had been about to play. It was the queen of hearts, I'm not sure if that was ironic.

I've no idea what, for that lady, came next.

For me, it was pizza (the first I'd ever eaten that I hadn't taken out of a freezer) and many games of cards in the sun before catching my ferry. My day was rounded off with a night sleeping on a bench half way up a mountain whilst a pack of dogs tore open my backpack having been attracted to it by the scent of the single slice of pizza wrapped in a Super-Marche bag I'd tucked away in one of the pockets.

I'd awoken when I'd heard the snuffling and gentle growling of the hungry hounds. Peeping out from within my quilted, nylon cocoon I watched as they rifled through my worldly goods, pissing on a select few items. 

Frustratingly, I was aware that the most I could have done to protect my chattels would have been to hop at them and fall over, thereupon providing them with one of the biggest and juiciest chew toys a hound ever had. The sleeping bag would have provided some protection from the jaws of those hungry strays, though not for my succulent face. Also, rabies.

As my father always said, whenever faced with insurmountable odds, "Fuck that for a game of soldiers".

Those mangy, Gallic curs had left me with nothing but the orange shorts in which I'd been sleeping, a piss-soaked back pack, a couple of brightly coloured tee-shirts and a pair of shoes.

I say "pair of shoes" but, unfortunately, one of the pair was a Nike trainer and the other a leather sandal, so maybe to refer to them as a "pair" is somewhat misleading. My mismatched footwear did, however, provide me with a convenient conversation starter whenever I met someone new.

Hopefully, that slice of pizza that those beastly bastards had so coveted gave at least one of them the Brad Pitts.

I can never ask the woman about her son. I wish I had. Maybe her sadness was because she'd lost him to disease. Maybe he was killed on active duty with the military. Maybe he was very much alive but, because of some stupid misunderstanding, had chosen to keep turned the back he'd turned in anger and, if the latter of these suppositions were to be true, maybe the sadness was soon to be gone and she now spends many happy Sunday hours laughing with her grandchildren as my doppelganger and his wife prepare a delicious lunch for them all to share.

I wonder if she ever wondered about me and, if she did, what did she imagine? 

I'd imagine she'd imagine something nice, a better life for me than I've provided for myself. Conceivably, she remains alive today. Whether she is or not is just another one of those questions to which I'll never know the answer. As far as I'm concerned, she continues to live Schrodinger's life.

I hope she lives in a little house amidst the lemon trees and wears a hat in the sun. I hope her calendar is filled with the birthdays' of descendants, that her pension plan has proven sufficient and that she has her son and her grandchildren to provide her with the luxuries that she deserves whilst having already provided her with a plethora of memories, memories of good times and loved ones rather than memories of a foreigner who looked a bit like her son, playing cards in the dust, wearing orange shorts...

...and eating her bloody pizza.

Sometimes, we let our imagination take control of the tiller. Generally, this is a mistake. We think the worst. We assume the worst. With no answers to our questions we continue to question, each question requiring a satisfactory answer. Not the correct answer, just one that is satisfactory. The answer we can imagine in most detail. Satisfactory.

But the satisfactory answer remains bereft of confirmation. No red tick from teacher to indicate we got it right, no smile from a question master on a television quiz show. Nothing.

So we continue to ask in the sure and certain knowledge that we'll receive no confirmation. What seems obvious at first is usually, though not exclusively, the correct answer. The woman with the pizza was most likely in mourning for a dead son. My appearance in her day had probably upset her and had cost her five sixths of her lunch. That is all I knew, know or can ever learn about the woman. On that day, at that time, she was sad and she gave a hungry teenager a pizza.

Maybe, later that evening, the lady that had fed me sat down to watch her favourite quiz show on the television, laughing and claiming to have known the answers to every question just a moment after the contestant had given their own answer to the immaculately coiffured quiz master and maybe, in passing, she'd mentioned our meeting to her husband. I imagine he was trying to read his newspaper while wearing the grumpy expression of a man too vain to wear reading glasses, squinting at the blurry words on the page. Maybe she told someone else about seeing her son's ghost in the park, maybe she kept it to herself.

If I'd taken the time to converse further with the lady then the rest of that day would've panned out differently. I would've found out her story. Maybe I'd have discovered that the son I reminded her of was fit and healthy, very much alive, and that she'd pitied me simply because she thought me too thin. Maybe her son had died in tragic circumstances, taken against the natural order of things earlier than she and leaving behind nothing for her to live for.

Maybe she'd once made a mistake and, as I now have, turned her back on her offspring, leaving him to rot whilst, to her, he continued to exist in some kind of Schrodinger's Offspring fashion, possibly alive and flourishing in another part of the world or posibly dead and decaying in a ditch.

Maybe I'd have become so engrossed in her story that I'd have missed the ferry and, therefore, not lost my pack to a pack.

One day, I came back to Blighty. One day, I settled down, albeit not forever. One day I had a son, then another. And a daughter. One day I got divorced and, on a couple of other days, I had a couple of heart attacks. During those days I continued to forget about the kind lady with the pizza, she being nothing more than the briefest of brief encounters many years prior, the beginning of a story that was never ended...

...until I wrote the ending.

Imagination, my friends, is the ultimate entertainment system.

J2H.

The time'll come when everyone will know.

As I mentioned in the post that immediately preceded this one, I've recently managed to escape the Hellish existence I'd been leading in a small northern town on a now irrelevant island floating off the shores of a disinterested continent and, at least for the time being, am living a life of luxurious poverty, lazing on a succession of sunny afternoons. How long this will last I have no idea, but even were it to end tomorrow it would've been well worth my giving everything up for.

Especially since I had nothing to give up.

Each morning, after having taken my hounds for a dip in the nearby river, cycled into the village to get myself some breakfast and having showered beneath a hose pipe with a watering can rose taped to it (my stable loft is equipped with many things, alas mod-cons aren't amongst them) I generally spend an hour or so sitting in the unglazed window and watching the world around me gently come to life, puffing on my pipe and grinning like a Cheshire cat at the locals while demonstrating the full extent of my French with a few hearty "bonjour"s and "ca va bien, merci"s as my neighbours wander beneath my dangling feet.

For the last five days I've watched three builders attempt to fit a door to an ageing cottage. Much to my dismay, the door they are fitting is brand new and constructed from uPVC. In my opinion it's a sin, but it's a family home and I'm sure that, come the approaching winter, the family in residence shall be grateful for the lack of draughty gaps that the previous, ancient, wooden door had. French tradesmen, it appears, don't do urgency.

Why should they? "You get nowt good from rushing" my dad always said. But five bloody days to fit a door?

The craftsmen turn up, they "ooh" and they "ahh" and they plot and they plan, then they go for breakfast. Upon returning they break out the hand chisels and the lump hammers and they chip away at the three foot thick wall around the doorway, puffing on Gauloises and laughing. They work like this until noon, when the sun enters it's hottest phase, then bugger off to do whatever it is that the locals do for the daily two hour period during which the streets are empty, returning later to smoke a few more cigarettes and prop the old door in position, making safe the property until the following day.

As a small boy, I had a big box of Stickle-Bricks. I spent many a Saturday morning with those colourful, plastic brickettes scattered around me, the tip of my tongue protruding from the corner of my little mouth as I struggled to recreate the magnificent models that were printed on the inside of the box lid. Bi-planes, cars, bridges, all manner of convoluted and colourful creations were assembled and disassembled over and over again until, bored by the limitations of the inventor of my favourite toy's own imagination, I began to attempt my own designs.

One fine Saturday morning, as Champion the Wonder Horse flickered his way through another grainy adventure on the crackling, monochrome tube in the corner of our lounge, I began work on my largest project yet, a castle of epic proportions. It included a keep, battlements, turrets and towers with arrow slits to allow my toy cowboys to shoot at the dinosaur riding Apaches that roamed the countryside beyond the safety of the citadel's walls. Walls thick enough to withstand the assault of the swiftest arrow whizzing from a bow or even the mightiest of cannonballs.

Alas, the castle was missing two pieces, the portcullis and the drawbridge. They were to be the final parts of the epic construction, but I'd used the last of the prickly pieces providing the ramparts for the Lone Ranger and his band of merry men to perch upon and take their potshots.

I asked my dad to help me, as all young men do when they realise they've buggered something up, and he gave me his empty Silk Cut packet to use.

I was less than happy with this solution and I told him so.

"Let's go out then, son." He said as he rose from is armchair, an unusual occurrence on one of those rare Saturdays on which he wasn't required to work at the timber yard.

"I've not finished though, dad." I moaned, but he said I could wear my cowboy outfit if I did and so, cap guns blazing, we burst through the front door of our house like Butch and Sundance.

I really hadn't wanted to go, but had I not then I'd not have found myself having a gunfight with another, similarly ridiculously dressed, preschool gunslinger. Nor would I have eaten a bacon sandwich at the cafe up the road or a choc ice in the park. I would likewise have missed out on being hoisted aloft to ride on my father's shoulders and wouldn't have seen the hungry fledglings in a nest that their mother had built atop the bus stop and, most importantly to to the rather mercenary four year old that I was, I'd not have strode back up our garden path two or three hours later clutching a new, slightly smaller and cheaper than the old, box of Stickle Bricks.

At last, the treasure of the cowboys would be safe from the marauding savages that coveted their riches.

I can remember every single moment of that brief trip to the shops in the nineteen seventies, Salfordian sunshine. I can further remember returning home to find my mother had "tidied away" [dismantled, stuffed in the box in a haphazard fashion and dumped on my bedroom floor] my construction and I can remember not caring a jot about the undoing of all my hard work.

The following Saturday, as my father emptied another pack of Silk Cut and read the newspaper, I rebuilt my castle, this time with all necessary security features, on the rug in front of the fire.

Seven days to fit a door?

You get nowt good from rushing, but plenty from taking your time.

J2H.

Ten feet further away.

Dearest reader,

I have been living this last half a decade or so in an alien land. A land of squalor, hunger, loss, regret and very little else. If you've visited a few of these posts in the past then you will have almost certainly come across at least one of the many tales that document my spiralling plunge from humble beginning to abject poverty.

If you've not, and if you're interested, then "Don't bank on it", "Don't look down" and "High fidelity" are three such posts. 

I fell from grace, landed in the gutter, bounced a bit, was run over by a juggernaut full of bleating sheep being driven at speed toward the abattoir and, finally, came to rest beside a tree, whereupon a series of scabby mongrels pissed on me whenever the fancy took them. My blog, like my pitiful exitence, has been a miserable place at times and it shall, on occasion, probably remain so, though hopefully those tales of struggle will become less frequent and, in future, shall relate to the past rather than the present.

A week or two ago I awoke, coughing and spluttering as my diseased lungs tried to expel the mould spores that had spent the night colonising my blackened bellows, put on a set of clothes that were more holes than fabric and took my dogs for a walk, scanning the pavement for loose change that those wealthier than I had dropped (Always pay special attention at bus stops, people are forever dropping change as they frantically rifle their own pockets in search of their daysavers) in the hope that I'd find enough dough for a loaf of bread.

I didn't. I never do. Times are hard, people will stoop to reclaim any dropped coinage in times such as these.

The dogs and I returned home more quickly than I generally would have liked. It had begun to rain and my sock was soaking up moisture from the pavements via the hole in my right shoe. It was shaping up to be a very bad day indeed.

I'd recently found that what little money I was supposed to be living on had been surreptitiously diverted. I had two sacks of dog food, some bacon, a few pies and enough credit on the gas and electricity prepayment meters to last a fortnight.

Maybe even longer, if I didn't cook the pies.

So I buggered off. Not right then, but roughly a week later, having sold everything I had that I could find a buyer for. I even bagged up any clothes that wouldn't fit in my suitcase and weighed them in at a 'Cash-For-Clothes' shop a couple of miles away. I scraped up every penny I could, closed my bank account, cancelled my phone contract, popped my keys in a padded envelope and the envelope into the post box and only then did I depart.

It was scarier this time than last. The last time I threw everything up in the air and disappeared it was in a converted school mini-bus with enough money to last me six months. This time I had money for a week or two and had to scrounge lifts to get where I was going, but where I was going I eventually got.

I'd headed north, to Scotland, having fallen out of love with England through a combination of the poverty into which I'd been dumped when some bankers had done some bad things, the EU referendum result and the fact that nothing around me made me smile anymore. I felt, and feel, none of the pride I once had in my country and my countrymen. There are tens of millions of lovely people in my home nation, but the scales have tipped recently, meaning that the lovely are no longer the majority.

I first revisited an area of Scotland that I'd fallen in love with many years ago, the spectacular Forest of Argylle. I'd hoped to find work there through an old acquaintance but, upon settling into my first night in a static caravan at the back of an old barn, I realised that I'd been here and done this before. I stayed a short while to clear my lungs of spores, then continued zig-zagging around for a little while.

Then, before very long, serendipity struck.

A friend of mine from another lifetime was relocating to the continent and needed to drive her car there, a mammoth undertaking that she was unwilling to undertake. In return for my doing most of the driving, she paid for fuel, for the crossing and for food along the way, all I had to pay for was rabies shots. But, even better than all this, her new employer has given her a house in which to stay that has a stable around the back, above which is a small loft with no glass in the window, one plug socket, a day bed, a rusting bistro set and a hose pipe. What more could a man ever need?

So here I am, the best part of a thousand miles away and turning a lovely shade of mahogany as I attempt to learn a language that I really should have learnt in school. I've even managed to earn a little more money, walking dogs for those who have grown used to the beauty in which they reside and who can no  longer be bothered. Sometimes, mainly around bus stops, I find enough money to buy a loaf of bread, people here having none of the money worries that those in my last permanent residence had.

It's fucking brilliant.

If I'm honest, I didn't expect to see this day. I could see no future, wanted no future. Had a chance conversation not taken place I'm sure that, by now, my hounds would be under new ownership and I would be missing, never to be found. As it is, I have my two dogs, a tan, food, wine, laughter and I'm missing, never to be found, in an alien land. And I found a pushbike under a pile of sacks in what I laughingly refer to as my loft-apartment. As in England, my roof is full of holes. Unlike England, this results in my getting a suntan in bed rather than a cough.

This journey isn't over and I have no idea where I'm going, but I do know one thing...

...I'm never going back.

Enjoy the little things, folks. It's very important.

J2H.