Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…

At fist I didn’t understand why Moth thought it necessary to look, but then I noticed just how many guards there were – seemingly lounging at their ease, but actually in a high state of alertness. They were watching a group of about a dozen young human males who were horsing around, but creeping closer and closer to a family, whose teenage daughter was combing her hair dry while her parents dealt with the business of getting three young boys out of the water. They were weres – wolves would have been my guess – and if the young men got too close to the daughter of the family there was going to be trouble. Even as I thought that it kicked off. Two of the young men moved to flank the young girl. One grabbed his crotch and made what must have been a spectacularly crude suggestion, because the girl immediately started to cry. 

Security grabbed the offenders and the girl’s mother leapt to pet and pacify the frightened teenager. 

“Stupid youngsters.” Mandrake muttered. “But the trolls have them.” He must have had a thought, though, because he spoke to Moth. “Why is it important beloved fae?”

“Moth don’t know, is just feeling.”

They both looked at me. 

“How about this? Those human males obviously thought themselves above common decency and in a position where they wouldn’t be challenged. We might want to put some effort into finding out why.”

“Indeed we might.” Mandrake snarled.

Moth just sighed, but I felt her contacting The Agency. “Is known, and being watched,” she said after a moment or two. Then she shivered.

Mandrake picked her up and shared warmth.

“Time to go home?”

We hustled a bit and were dry and dressed quite quickly. At the bottom of the stairs, the troll guard handed us our furs.

“If I was you,” he said conversationally, “I’d be cutting straight into the woodland. There might be unfriendly people on the road.”

At least Mandrake waited until we were outside the gate before he asked. “Unfriendly people?”

“Means Agency Deputies.” Moth explained. “Trolls don’t know we are agents.”

“So. Do we avoid them?”

“Fraggit yes. Some deputies are right pain in the arse. And if it’s the sort of ones they are likely to send to chastise badly behaved human adolescents, they’d probably find stopping us on the road highly amusing. Especially as we outrank them and they don’t much care for that.”

“In which case. Take me to the woods.” 

There was an old loggers trail about a quarter of a mile from the hot springs and I put on all the speed I could find to get there. Even then we were only just out of sight when the sound of heavy engines split the air. I drew the quad to a halt and motioned for stillness and silence. The bikes that rolled along the road were as different from my quad as chalk is from cheese. They were big and loud and smelly, and were ridden by a group of big, loud Deputies, who were also probably smelly. This group is dangerous to cross swords with. It takes its culture from the human place although none of the members are actually human – and they don’t make any effort to appear human. They call themselves Hell’s Angels and they are an assortment of orcs, trolls and demons who are mostly the kind of assholes you never want to meet in a fight, or on a pub crawl. But on the other side of the coin they are brave, strong and utterly incorruptible.

When they had passed we went home. Quietly.

Jane Jago

Ponies and Progeny or the graceless art of equine management as envisaged by the pen of Jane Jago and inspired by the genius of Norman Thelwell (1923-2004)

Today we consider the importance of finding the right mount for your pony-mad offspring…

***** ***** *****

Some whimsical words on whimsical themes…

“When shall we eleven meet again?” Even to her own ears that sounded silly so she hunched her scrawny shoulders and tried again. “Next month? Same time? Same place?”

There was a generalised mutter of vague agreement, before the oldest and fattest of their number unearthed a battered Tupperware box from somewhere About her person.

“Fudge anybody?”

It always seemed easier when they got to the eating and drinking, and quite a lively party ensued.

As the last acolyte drifted drunkenly homeward, still singing, there came an aroma of decay. 

Two demons regarded each other in some disgust.

“Witches today…”

Jane Jago

An everyday tale of village life and vampires…

It wanted five days to the start of the new month and Ginny spent most of them trying to find all the things Stan and his pals had laboriously hidden in the wrong places.
She had got back from the shop to find them already in their van and about to go.
“Don’t worry about that cuppa,” Dan/Ian/Stan told her, as though he was doing her a big favour by letting her off making it. “Me and the lads’ll get going right away.” 
So she had tipped them and they were gone before she’d walked back into the house.
She had been careful to mark each box with its destination room, but they still seemed to have decided for themselves where each should go.
The room she planned to make into her study-office-come-reading nook, which had a wonderful view over the back garden, was so full of boxes she couldn’t even get through the door, whilst her bedroom had nothing in it except her bed – not even the bedding, which was presumably somewhere in the study under the boxes of her books. Fortunately, she had a sleeping bag in the boot of her car which meant she didn’t need to excavate frantically that evening, but she did ponder whether she might have been deliberately misled by Stan the removal man when he suggested she went to the shop.
The next day she was sorting the kitchen, unpacking things into drawers and cupboards whilst singing to the radio about how the sun always shone on television, when a shadow fell across the threshold of the kitchen door, left open to let in the fresh air.
Like most dwellings, the cottage had a front door which opened – via a short path and a fringe of grass – onto the road and was where visitors were expected to present themselves. The kitchen door was in the side of the house, accessed by a path with a high hedge that led to the back garden and was blocked by a gate at the front. So the sudden appearance of the shadow was startling and unexpected.
She spun around heart pounding and found herself looking into the eyes of the man she had bumped into on the way to the shop. Only now he was fully clothed. Jeans and a short-sleeved black Armani shirt, with a white dog-collar.
“Hello there,” he shouted. “I’m your vicar, Doug Turner. I did knock but the music… ”
Blushing furiously, Ginny grabbed at the DAB and turned it off.
“Sorry,” she mumbled and then managed to get out something about making tea and would he like one.
He accepted with a dazzling smile and for a few moments she was able to consume herself in finding and rinsing two mugs and dropping a regular tea bag in each.
Could you even give a mug of tea to a vicar? Didn’t it need to be bone-china cups and saucers and a teapot of Darjeeling not a ‘Happy Price’ teabag from the local shop?
By the time she was done he had leaned his muscular frame against the wall and he graciously accepted the proffered mug.
“What, no cucumber sandwiches?”
Ginny gaped at him blankly.
“I-I’m sorry?”
He shook his head and grinned at her and she noticed his teeth seemed a little large at the front.
“An old joke. One we vicars often get.”
“Oh. Right. I’ve not met many. In fact, I can’t think of any. I don’t think I’ve lived somewhere that had a vicar before.”
For some reason he found that hilarious and Ginny watched the tea in his mug slop dangerously close to the rim as he laughed.
“Everywhere in the country has a vicar,” he said when the laughter subsided and as if that explained why he had been so amused. “You’ll’ve had a vicar before but never knew it.”
Ginny tried to take control of the conversation again.
“Do you call on all your…” She fell at the first hurdle. What did vicars call their community? Flock? That sounded archaic. “…on all new people?”
Vicar Doug took a slup of tea and pulled a face. Ginny wasn’t sure whether that was a response to her tea making or her question.
“I try to get to meet new parishioners when I can, but I did want to apologise for running into you the other day. I thought you were a tourist.”
He made it sound as if running into tourists was perfectly acceptable behaviour. And perhaps it was in a place like this where tourists were no doubt seen as an annoying fact of life.
“Oh. I see. Well, I’m not.” She realised belatedly she hadn’t introduced herself and stuck out the hand not clutching her mug. “Ginny Cropper. Pleased to meet you.”
His hand stopped half-way as if he was having second thoughts about the shake.
“Not the Ginny Cropper?”
Her heart sank. She found herself resorting to an old line.
“Depends what you mean by that. I’m certainly a Ginny Cropper.”
“I meant, are you the woman behind the Virginia Creeper lifestyle brand?”
His hand completed the journey to hers but barely touched her fingers before withdrawing, the intensity of his gaze upon her.
You couldn’t lie to a vicar, could you?
Could you?
Ginny dropped his gaze and turned to look out of the small kitchen window, through it she could see the wheelie bin and a cat sitting on the recycling box. There was nothing to offer her an escape or inspiration.
“I was,” she admitted. “But I’ve retired – sort of.” 
There was a long silence behind her and in the end she had to turn around.
Vicar Doug was gone.
His unfinished mug of tea sat on the floor where he had been. 
As startled by his departure as his arrival, Ginny picked up the mug and emptied it into the sink, washing it out without really thinking. It was, she realised, her British Wildlife Society mug, which had a picture of an endangered species of native bats on the side.
Sighing, she decided she was going to find it more trying than she had realised to get used to life in Little Botheringham.

Part 6 of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and Eleanor Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

Because life happens…

Exploring the mysteries of life through the versatile medium of limerick poetry.

Glorious Dance

Life is a glorious dance
Where your partner is much down to chance.
You might find your true mate
On a casual date
Or from friendship develop romance.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

One might never have read this book had it not been that Mumsie decreed it a winter project last year. One resisted as best one might, but in the end it is never wise to argue with one’s mater as a clout around one’s ear with whatever the woman has in her hand at the time can be injurious to both health and beauty.

One attempted to ask what particular merit the uninspiring looking volume was hiding under its brown paper dustcover. But Mumsie merely looked up from her copy of some other boring old book and slapped one large, square hand hard on the boards of the dining table.
“You,” she intoned in a doom-laden voice, “call yourself a writer. So you better effing well learn to write, and you just might do that by reading some people who actually can. Bloody read it. And don’t skip. There will be questions.”

Knowing when discretion is the better part of valour is just one of the things a public school education teaches. So I read it. And here is my review.

My review of The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

This is absolutely black, plain and black. There is no artistry in the choice of words. No beauty in the language. No heroism. The story is told as colloquially as if the ‘hero’ (if one could call him such) was talking to his rough chums in some public house. There is no attempt to elevate the story of his struggle beyond the mundane and everyday.

Something happens and lots of people go blind. Then some plants start walking about killing people. And there is a girl.

There is not even a decent happy ever after. Does humanity triumph? Or do the plants win?  I couldn’t tell. I was left dissatisfied and unsettled. This is not a nice book.

Two stars. Awarded for proper spelling and punctuation.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

It’s been a few years together
And we’ve picked up some shite on the way
We have weathered all sorts of weather
We’ve seen blue skies and black skies and grey
We’ve had the odd trouble along the road
And some pretty spectacular fights
But I wouldn’t swap you for your weight in gold
Even though that sounds awfully trite
We can number our wrinkles one by one
And the white strands in our hair
But no one can take away the fun
And the way you have always been there
I guess you know what I would say
If push turned into shove
We’ve had some lovely nights and days
And you’ve always been my love

©️ Jane Jago 2018

Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…

Mandrake scratched his head. “Why am I thinking that’s only half a story.”
“Because it is. The ones who don’t believe in lycanthropy are no problem, as they neither look for us nor see what we are if we do meet. But the other lot are dangerous to all trueborn. They are enchanted by fae, particularly flower and frost fairies – even though they would keep the small folk in cages like songbirds. However the rest of the races would, if they had their way, be little better than enslaved labourers.”
“So why are we going among humans now?”
“Because the crowd that owns the hot springs is fully enlightened, and we are safe under the eyes of their security guards – who are trolls in their human form. And because Moth loves the hot springs.”
He rubbed his big hand up and down my spine. “Let’s go then. But I think it might be better for you to carry on driving.”
As I rather enjoy driving I wasn’t about to argue. Instead, I speeded up and we bowled down the road in fine style.
The wind was a fresh, cold northerly and I was beginning to feel the chill even through my riding suit when we got to the gates of the hot springs place. When he saw me, the security troll dropped his human simulation and saluted before letting us in.
“It’s a cold one,” he said, “snow before too long, if I don’t miss my guess.” Then he dropped his voice to a low rumble. “I’d take a private pool if I was you. Proddy young males in the big pond.”
“Thanks for the advice. What’s vacant?”
The troll checked his hand-held computer. “Sleepy hollow or High View.”
“Get us High.” Moth whispered urgently.
“Can you book High View for us please?”
He swiped the hand-held before offering it for my palm print.
“Done.”
“Many thanks.”
He grinned. “I’m here all day, if you and your dragon friend want to leave the furs.”
Mandrake offered a fist and they bumped knuckles.
“Why are we leaving the furs?” he asked.
“Because it’s a climb up to High View and the changing room is small.”
He shrugged his shoulders and climbed out of his bear fur riding gear.
I put my hand on a palm plate in the rock and the door to High View slid open. It was only about twenty stairs, but they were steep and spiral and I discovered myself to still be not as fit as I would have liked. I stood on the apron of rock at the top feeling out of breath and grumpy. Moth hovered in front of my face and smiled encouragingly.
“Is effect of bad drug. But you will better soon.”
“I hope so.” I turned to Mandrake. “I usually run up the steps.”
His smile was understanding. “I’m impressed you managed at all, after effectively being poisoned only a couple of days ago.”
Which made me feel better enough to manage a smile for them. Moth fluttered about chattering excitedly.
“Hurry. Hurry.”
I slipped off my clothes and stood shivering in the frigid air. Moth came and sat on my shoulder – taking a firm grasp of my hair.
“You ready?”
“Moth is ready. Hurry now.”
“Hold on tight then.”
I ran to the edge and jumped. We landed in about twenty feet of blissfully hot water and I swam towards a place where there was a shallow pool safe for Moth to swim in. The splash behind us was surprisingly quiet and Mandrake beat us to the ledges where the hot water ran down like healing rain.
Moth chortled. “Old dragon swims good.”
She jumped from my shoulder into a shallow pool where she could safely play and splash. Mandrake took that as some sort of invitation because he dived deep, coming up beneath me and trailing his fingertips over my most sensitive places. I reached down and grabbed him by the ears, pulling him up so my mouth could meet his. We kissed for a long time, drifting down until our feet met the stony bottom before kicking back to the surface to catch breath.
I had a sudden snap of guilt, but Moth was grinning from her steamy puddle.
“If you two plays in deep, Moth stays here.”
She grinned and we felt her telling us to play without her. I smiled my thanks as Mandrake’s hands began their magic. That was the last time I thought about much, except what exceptional breath control Mandrake possessed, for a good long time. Floating languidly I became aware of how vibrations through the water had enabled Moth to feel what we were feeling without leaving her safe place. She smirked at me and I blew her a kiss.
We swam over to the seat-like ledge beside her and for a few moments we just sat. Moth stood up and shook her wings.
“Waterfall?” she said hopefully.
“Okay. But then it’s towels and home. We’ve been in the water for long enough.”
Moth chuckled rudely. “Yes mother hen.”
She climbed on my back again and I stood up, walking carefully through a narrow passage that was almost hidden in the rocks. Mandrake followed, having to walk crabwise as the crack in the rock wasn’t wide enough for his heavy shoulders.
We came out behind a curtain of very hot water into a place of steam and rainbows. It was as beautiful as ever and the three of us stood enchanted until Moth poked me with a sharp finger.
“Must to window now.”
“Must we?”
“Yes. Is important Moth thinks.”
There is a place where the curtain of water is parted by an outcrop of rock and it makes a window from which one can look down on the main pool.

Jane Jago

Ponies and Progeny or the graceless art of equine management as envisaged by the pen of Jane Jago and inspired by the genius of Norman Thelwell (1923-2004)

Today we consider the perils of being overly driven by ambition…

***** ***** *****

Some whimsical words on whimsical themes…

Though I’m old, I can still dance the dance
I can still feel the thrill of romance
And I yet know the bliss
Of a cuddle and kiss
And of nookie, when I get the chance

Jane Jago