The door slammed shut behind him and the solid sound of bolts shooting home followed, reinforcing the sense of finality. The room was a depressing dull grey from ceiling to floor. It was square with two beds, bunks, running the full length of one sidewall and essential facilities in the far corner. Zero privacy from either his cellmate or, through the door hatch, from the custodius. Above the door a vent the size of his fist was vibrating with an annoying humming-whine as it reluctantly circulated fresh air.
“Llewellyn? What did they drag you in here for? Sticking your nose too deep in someone else’s business?”
The voice was vaguely familiar, though Dai was slow to place it as the shaven head of the man sprawled on the lower bunk was not. His puzzlement must have shown because the man swung his legs over the side of the bunk and sat up.
“I don’t suppose you remember me. It was some months ago and I’m sure you’ve been a busy Submagistratus since then.”
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t…”
The other man laughed, which turned into a cough part way before he was able to speak again. “Gods! Politeness. Not heard a word of that since they locked me in here.” He pushed himself to his feet and straightened the green tunic, before offering a formal greeting. “Tertius Cloelius Rufus. It is an honour to share my captivity with you. A pleasure. You may recall we met in Viriconium before these unfortunate events.”
Dai found himself shaking the outheld hand as if they were at a social event or meeting, as his memory searched desperately for the name and face. When it came, he snatched his hand away and stepped back involuntarily.
“You were the cunnus of a medicus involved with a group holding vicious sex parties that led to the death of young streetgirls.”
“No need to use titles here,” the older man said brightly and then smiled at his own joke. “You can call me Rufus. It’ll make a change from seven-eight-one-one-two-six. It’s those little things you get to miss the most in this place. By the way, I hope you’re not hungry, you missed the evening meal. Nothing til tomorrow now.”
Dai felt a curl of cold revulsion in his guts.
“You disgust me.“
“Really?” Cloelius sounded unconcerned. “At least I’m not a traitor like you. That tends to evoke more outrage in our society at every level than any sexual adventures a man might embark on.”
“The difference is,” Dai snarled, unable to keep the contempt from his voice. “I am not guilty of the faked-up charges against me, but I know for a fact you are guilty as charged. I caught you red-handed, literally. And the blood of a good Vigiles was shed that night too.”
Cloelius sighed and sat back on his bunk. “Appearances can be very deceptive Llewellyn, and like it or not your guilt or innocence will be decided in a court of law not by whatever you might choose to say or believe.” He lay back as if reclining on a lectus. “You might discover that I am in fact the innocent one and you turn out to be guilty. Now that would be an interesting outcome, don’t you think?”
The chilling realisation that the corrupt medicus spoke the truth staggered Dai. The words leeched all strength from his muscles and he sank down to sit with his back against the cold grey wall.
“Why are you still here?” he demanded, when the moment of weakness had passed.
“What a strange question. It’s not as if I can just stroll along to the atrium or visit the baths, is it?”
Dai lifted a hand in protest. “You know what I mean. You must have been here for months. Yours was an open and shut case. I signed off all the evidence myself back in Martius. It only needed a hearing before an independent Magistratus to…”
“Sentence me to death?” Cloelius gave a rasping laugh. “You show yourself the true Briton, Llewellyn. There are people I’ve met who have been held here for the last ten years.”
Dia bridled at that.
“But it’s against the law. No Citizen can be deprived of his or her freedom. They are tried and if found guilty, sentenced either to death or whatever fine is due.”
“Ah, British logic,” Cloelius said, his tone shifting to that of a teacher explaining simple facts to a schoolboy. “Those I speak of are Citizens who stand accused of capital offenses and are awaiting their day in court. They all have powerful friends in Rome using every legal wrangle there is to keep them from coming to trial. Some of the crimes have to be prosecuted within a certain time limit, so if they can delay that day long enough they can walk free. Others are commuted by prolonged negotiation from death to a fine. Everyday is a barter day. But you worked here in Londinium as a Vigiles so you really should know that.”
It was true that he had heard the rumours so it was not really a surprise. But his day-to-day clientele at that time had been almost exclusively non-Citizen criminals.
“You have powerful friends?”
Cloelius hunched one shoulder in an exaggerated shrug. “Perhaps I do. Or powerful enough to keep me from trial so far. Don’t you? I am assuming you must do to have secured both Citizenship and a plum administrative appointment.” He leaned forward as if offering a confidence. “At the very least they might be able to have your Citizenship rescinded which would give you the chance of commuting your sentence to hard labour instead of the arena.”
That was something that had not occurred to Dai as a possibility before. It was true that committing any serious crime could lead to an application for the revocation of an awarded Citizenship – something given could be taken away. An option not open to those born with Citizenship status. But the kind of hard labour criminals were condemned to was brutalising.
“I don’t see that would be much better,” he said, hearing the bitterness in his own tone. “Just a slower way to die.”
“Perhaps. But at least, my British friend, you have options. Who knows? We may even grow old together in this cell.”

From Dying to be Innocent the 9th Dai and Julia Mystery by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook

Money. When was the last time you saw any actual cash money?

Me neither.

Until.

The other day I had to waddle down the village to the post office (now tastefully housed in a very hygienic corner of the funeral director’s hushed premises) and acquire some actual moolah, because the plumber very kindly knocks off the vat if you pay him cash. The little girl behind the plexiglass screen very sweetly shoved the notes into a brown envelope I provided, so it wasn’t until I got home that I discovered  that twenties are now plastic.

I laughed so much that I right about pissed myself.

You aren’t going to tell me that you missed that little irony are you?

You are?

Okay, then, let me elucidate.

All around me are females (and a few very put upon males) of a certain age. Many of these bloody fossils are vociferous in their condemnation of the cashless status of society.

In the days when a game of euchre and a pasty was a possibility, the lounge bar would be full of these crusty old naysayers. I see them now, bellied up to the bar and waving fivers at the sorely harassed barmaid.

“You’ll never see me paying with plastic,” is their mantra as they waste hours counting small denomination coins into piles on the scratched mahogany of the bar.

Seems as if karma has caught up with them good and proper. You declare your aversion to ‘plastic’ Mrs Frobisher I think to myself, and then you go and wave a note above your head never once seeing that it is ‘plastic’ too…

That is seriously funny. Or maybe not.

Me?

I run up a modest bar bill and slap my card on the screen before tottering home singing immodestly.

My mate Mabel watched me do this for about three months then bit the bullet. She still don’t have a credit card, as the silly old moo would get in a right mucking fuddle, but she slaps her contactless debit card with all the je ne sais quoi of a  Kardashian in a high-end boutique.

In a rare moment of sobriety, I conducted a straw poll of the halt, the lame, the feckless and the demented as they sat their asses down for the last village OAP dinner before Armageddon.

Being asked why they don’t like to pay by card I got the following responses.

“I won’t know what I’ve spent.”

“I will run up a huge bill.”

“I like the feel of money.”

“My son/daughter/other ‘concerned’ family member doesn’t want me to.”

Struck me as so sad that I bought the buggers a round of sov blanc.

In a nutshell then…

On very rare occasions progress is A Good Thing. This might be one of them. 

It’s liberating.

I no longer need a purse or a handbag.

Got my phone in one pocket. My keys in the other. And my American Express card up me knicker leg.

Oh yes, you sad lot.

Have plastic. Will travel…

Elron and his sister-wife Elanda dallied in the dappled shade of the forest. They walked hand in hand, stopping every few steps to kiss and caress. Elanda slipped away and ran a few steps, for the sheer joy of him catching her in his strong arms and bearing her down into the sweet loam to ravish her with tender savagery.
They strayed closer to the homes of the human creatures than was their habit, standing for a while to watch as the white-clad and silent women of the sanctuary bore a wrapped bundle to the flat rock of sacrifice, leaving it there before scuttling away on silent feet.
“I wonder what gift they spare to the old ones,” Elanda spoke idly, even as her beloved’s clever hands worked their magic. He bent her over a convenient tree branch and they began their unending game yet again.
This time the little mewing cries did not come only from Elanda’s throat as they continued even after she drooped like a spent lily.
“It’s a child. The old one will dine on child tonight.”
Elanda walked on soft feet to where the babe lay and pulled back the blanket from his fair features. She gazed enraptured.
“Look Elron. Is he not beautiful?”
Elron looked, without too much interest, but found to his surprise that the child was indeed of surpassing beauty. Gold of hair, blue of eye, and possessed of skin so thin and white that the blue veins could clearly be discerned beneath their fragile coverlet.
“He is indeed beautiful. Shall we keep him?”
“We could. But what of the old one?”
“I will call him up a fat boar. He will like that better anyway.”
Elanda’s smile was a thing of witchery, so the deed was done. They retraced their steps, only this time The beautiful fae had a beautiful child in her arms. Once away from the grove of the old ones, she stopped and seated herself on a sweetly scented bank of wild flowers.
“The child must feed,” she declared opening her garment.
Elron expected to feel jealousy at the sight of another mouth at his beloved’s breast, and he was surprised to find that all he felt was excitement as the child’s perfect lips encircled Elanda’s long pink nipple.
He watched for some while, until, impelled by some appetite he didn’t know he possessed, he bent his handsome head to suckle the other breast.
As quickly as a bolt of summer lightning, the child stirred in Elanda’s arms and struck like a viper sinking sharp and yellowish teeth into the pulse that beat in the big male’s neck.
Elron was paralysed and could only groan in agony as the creature drunk his life force. The eyes that had looked so blue in the sacred grove now glowed red as the succubus fed.
Seemingly unknowing, Elanda crooned a lullaby and stroked the baby’s milk-white skin…

Jane Jago

Alright you lot it’s me, Jacintha Farquar, here again to shine a magnalight of common sense into the weird and wacky dark spaces you writer types choose to inhabit, and brush away some of the cobwebs of illusion you seem to have draped all over your craft.
You still reading?
Good, then perhaps you might even learn something today – but I for one am not holding my breath.

Life Lessons for Writers – Nine: Why Do It?

I mean, why?
Seriously. There are over a million new books a year appearing on Amazon and most of them are written by someone exactly like you – a wannabe JK Rowling.
What amazes me is that you seriously believe that if you hit publish on whatever you just wrote somehow, magically, you are going to become a world famous author and have everyone praising your book to the skies.
Could it happen?
Yes. You could win the lottery too – in fact you probably have more chance of winning the lottery.

So, back in the real world.
Why do you do it?
If the answer is for the money, stop now. Go away and look at the top earning jobs and careers. Then cross off all those that require or bestow celebrity status and what are you left with?
Pick the one you like best and do that. Do not bother being a writer.

If the answer is for the fame, then you would do better to think about vlogging or just walk naked through the capital city of your nation with your body painted in tessellated shapes in primary colours. That would make you more famous than most of those who have a book for sale on Amazon will ever be.

You still here?
So it’s not for the money or the fame?
Then why do you do it?

This is a question you need to ask yourself very seriously in front of the mirror so you can see if you are lying when you answer, because I still think half-of you believe that you are somehow the special exception to the rule who will one day get fame and fortune, movie deals and TV mini-series.

The rest of you, hello.
I’m seeing two sorts here.

The first lot of you know exactly why you write and your ambitions are set at where you know you can pitch. You likely passed up doing that creative writing course for one in business and marketing because you figured early on that if you want to make a living as a writer that is what matters more than the content. Or you’ve learned the hard way and are now focused 90% on the marketing and 10% on the writing. And well done to you. I doubt you’ll ever be JK but you stand a good chance of being a self-supporting writer.

The second lot, well you know why you write too and it has very little to do with fame or fortune. It comes down to having stories to tell and knowing there are a few folk out there who will read and enjoy them. For you, it is plenty reward enough that someone somewhere has had a few hours of escapist entertainment because you wrote that book. Well done to you too – I loved your last one!

If you still don’t know why you write, you need to figure it out and fast, because if it is more about ego or money than telling stories, you are looking in the wrong place and wasting everyone’s time, mine included.
Now bugger off I’ve got important work to do catching up with the old crowd down the virtual Dog and Duck.

“Louwina, I – I can’t live without you,” Woul stuttered, his eyes holding an acre of desolation and his sharp fangs glinting in the moonlight as his six-pack flexed in his distress.
She backed away from the head of the shifter clan, eyes wide in disbelief. Why was he being so mean to her? She knew at sixteen she was nothing special with her stick like body and bulgy breasts. Her hair was never exactly fashionable as it set her distressingly even featured face in a halo of golden curls.
She backed into the tall, muscular figure of Girald, the new boy in town who all the popular girls yearned to date.
“No, Louwina, your secret heritage calls to me. We are meant for each other,” he said, looking down lovingly into her eyes, sprinkles of fairydust falling like dandruff from his hair.
“My – what?”
“Well, you know how your parents both vanished mysteriously on the day of the eclipse and how your granny has that weird book engraved with the words ‘My Family’s Book of Ultra-Secret Witchcraft’?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything. She never lets me read it.”
The gorgeous hunks looked at her with longing and desire, adoration clear on both faces.
“You are the Chosen One and my chosen one,” Woul murmured, smirking.
“You are my chosen one too,” Girald echoed, his eyes sparkling in the starlight.
Louwina stood stunned by the revelation.
She was the Chosen One?
So that explained why everyone at school hated her and why her life had been so miserable so far. And now she had to choose between these two, equally gorgeous, half-naked eighteen year olds, who made her feel all warm and tingly in places she had never thought much about before.
But which one?
Louwina rolled her eyes.
How was she meant to choose between a Vampire Weresheep and a Fae Weregiraffe?

E.M. Swift-Hook

Prunella teaches you how to cook like a toff!

The nemesis of all right-thinking women. But sadly unavoidable. You can dig your heels in all you like, you can even have a lovely plebeian tantrum, but in the end you are going to have to buckle down.
The Hon. Rodney, or your own equivalent thereto, is almost bound to have a whole slew of exceedingly wealthy clients who choose his services above others because he’s a posh boy.
There’s no way to avoid it. Being the daughter of an impoverished Scottish Earl carries with it a certain cachet, and every so often one’s indecently wealthy (but infinitely less well-connected) spouse is going to want to take advantage of a lineage that stretches back to Macbeth and Duncan. In this house we have a bargain. Twice a year I will dust off his mater’s exceedingly ugly diamonds, and remember to smile while explaining that the Hon. Rodney won’t become a Lord until his pater (currently residing in a kindly home for the terminally bewildered, where he has a lovely time shouting at the television and only addressing his carers in Latin) shuffles off this mortal coil.
However. To the meat of this dissertation. What to feed the philistine hordes.
Keep it simple, hearty and wholesome. The men will scoff it and their thin, overproduced, wives will be able to feel superior.

To begin. Soup. Potato and leek (or tinned tomato) with grated sharp cheddar on top and bread rolls. NB. Do make sure the butter is at room temperature – there is little as annoying as trying to spread an iceberg of yellow dairy product.

Main course. Something that cooks very slowly and can be prepared a long time in advance. My own go to is beef in booze. Which is prepared the evening before the shindig.

You need.
(Serves 8)
3lb-ish beef skirt cut in about half-inch cubes (By weight about 12oz per person.)
6 large mild onions peeled and finely sliced
6 trimmed leeks also sliced finely
250ml passatta
2lb peeled chopped tomatoes (or the equivalent of canned)
2lb button mushrooms
4 large red bell peppers sliced
2 cooking apples peeled and chopped
4 large potatoes peeled and cut into small cubes
6 large juicy cloves of garlic
2 litres cheap red wine
1 can stout
1 tablespoon dried oregano
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp Dijon mustard

You will also need a large casserole dish with a very tight fitting lid. Grandmother’s for preference or something French, cast iron, and eye-wateringly expensive.

Brown the beef and bung in the bottom of the casserole, fry the onion until darkly caramelised and put atop beef. Throw the leeks, mushrooms, peppers, apples, potatoes, passatta and chopped tomatoes in on top. Mix crushed garlic, stout, oregano, soy, and mustard and pour over beef etc. Finish with wine. Clamp lid on tight and shove in the slow oven of the Aga. Leave severely alone until lunchtime next day. Remove from oven. Check seasoning. Add more wine if gravy level looks low. Shove back in oven until it’s time to serve. (If necessary, gravy can be thickened with cornflour mixed to a paste with cooking brandy.)
Serve with mashed potatoes and peas.

Alternative main course – slow cooked lamb shanks from your nearest German supermarket, which you shove in your own casserole dish with extra wine and give another couple of hours cook. Same accompaniments.

Pudding: either Eton Mess or some sort of steamed sticky with custard. Or it can be glossed over altogether by providing a humongous cheese board and some of the Hon. Rodney’s aged port (or, better still, cheapo port in a pretty decanter or three).

Look out for more tips on how to cook like a toff next week!

It is strange how at January’s end
We all stop trying to pretend
That we’ll be super fit
Or we’ll size-down our kit
And #resolution‘s no longer a trend…

E.M. Swift-Hook

You can listen to this being read on YouTube.

When Cargo Freighter Zulu/973 found it, the sleek little flitter was floating aimlessly in space, sort of halfway between the mining belt at Beta#32 and the transport station that orbited Jupiter II. It was much more elegant and aerodynamic looking than the ugly cargo hauler that nudged it with an armoured loading claw. The claw poked a bit more firmly and it drifted, with no more sense of direction than any of the other bits of space junk the traders had amassed on their journey.
“Seems dead.” Captain Clearwater remarked to nobody in particular. “Let’s have a look then.”
His communications officer turned the cargo hauler’s docking camera to face the wreck. She seemed to be in going on for perfect condition – clean and shiny and with some sort of earthside oriental script scrawled across her slightly flared bow.
“Get Leah up here.”
Somebody scrambled. Clearwater wasn’t a man to be kept waiting. Leah Su arrived promptly. She was as poised and unruffled as ever, but her bulky escort was red-faced and sweating.
“Su reporting for duty, sir.”
“You’re the nearest thing to a linguist we have hereabouts. Can you read the writing on that ship?”
“More or less, sir. It says something like ‘sea of stars’. Very roughly. I guess it is the name of the vessel.”
“Probably is. Can you see an identifier?”
“No sir.”
“Me neither. And I reckon that makes it fair game. Whatever spoilt rich boy lost his toy out here, I’m thinking finders keepers. Even if nobody has put a bounty on her, she should fetch a few bob for salvage. I’m going over to have a look. Take the con Su.”
Clearwater may have been greedy and even unprincipled, but he wasn’t fool enough to go and inspect a possible salvage vessel on his own. He gathered up a sizeable force, and broke out the blasters.
In the end, there were a dozen space stevedores, wearing their exoskeleton work suits, in the airlock, along with the captain, his first officer and the ship’s metallurgist. The inside door sealed and they put on their helmets before Su began pumping out the air. It took a good ten minutes before it was safe to open the big doors into the blackness of space.
As the doors slowly slid back into their pockets in the hull, Clearwater straddled a jet scoot and headed for the flitter. First officer Ganges clutched the sissy bar behind his captain’s ample backside, and the rest formed a chain behind Ganges clipped together by lanyards attached to their tool belts. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to travel. But it wasted the least energy and Christopher Clearwater abhorred waste. Particularly if he was paying for whatever was being wasted.
The jet scoot gently nudged against the silent craft. Clearwater’s voice rasped in the ears of his party.
“Anybody have any idea how we get in?” Then. “Let’s at least look for a door before we break out the cutting gear.”
Nobody moved or spoke. Before the captain had chance to get properly irritated, Leah Su broke the silence. “Our docking camera view shows a touch plate about two metres to your right.”
Clearwater grunted and edged that way. He slapped a large gauntleted palm against the shiny ochre-coloured plate. To everyone’s surprise, the three leaves of an oddly shaped and almost invisible portal slid silkily apart. Clearwater engaged the electro-vacuum parking brake and effectively suckered the scoot to the side of the flitter. He climbed carefully off his seat and made his way hand over hand to the open portal with his crew following him.
Inside the portal was the expected airlock although the controls were rather closer to the ground than would be normal.
“You. Gamble. Stay with the scoot. The rest of you get away from the door. I’m going to try and operate this airlock.”
Being known as a bad-tempered bastard with heavy fists gets you obeyed speedily, so Clearwater didn’t even bother to look around before crouching by the control panel.
“Pictograms,” he grunted, “that’s handy.”
He touched one and the outer door closed tidily. A second button had air being pumped into the chamber.
First Officer Ganges fiddled with his meters and gauges. “Seems breathable, sir. A bit heavy on the oxygen but nothing problematic.”
“Okay. But we keep helmets on until we are inside. Officer Su. Can you hear me?”
There was no response.
“Gamble. Do you copy?”
“Sir.”
“Right. Open a channel to Su on the mother ship. I’m gonna be using you as a bounce station.”
“Done, sir.”
“You got me now, Su?”
“Yes sir.”
“Okay.” He turned his attention to the boarding party. “Right you lot. Blasters out. And stay alert. Opening inner doors now.”
Back on the cargo hauler the bridge crew heard a gentle hiss.
“We’re in. Seems deserted. Air is breathable if a bit oxygen heavy. We are removing helmets.”
The sound of heavy booted feet and muttered conversation went in for several minutes before the captain spoke again.
“This is a rum old vessel. Everything is of the most modern and the very highest spec. But it seems to have been built for dwarves. And not very bright ones of them. Every control has a pictogram. Makes it easy for us, though. I reckon I can manoeuvre this baby alongside you and dock her. Standby docking grabs.”
“Aye, aye sir.”
“Closing door and pumping out airlock.”
The next sound the bridge crew heard was a wet gurgling groan followed by what sounded like something heavy hitting a hard floor. Followed by silence. As Su frantically toggled the comms button the flitter disappeared. One second she was there, the next gone. For an instant there was an eye-wateringly bright bluish outline on the blackness of space, then even that was no more. Su knuckled her eyes.
“What the frag?”
“Continuum Drive maybe?”
“Too fast even for that…”
The helmswoman kept the levelest head of them all. “Some odd sort of drive sir. Pushed us three parsecs.”
“You sure helm?”
“I’m sure. My gauges are going apeshit.”
“How long to get us back?”
“About two days sir.”
“Gamble’s a dead man then.”
“Not necessarily, sir.” It was the comms officer who spoke in a very shaky voice. “Look out of our starboard window.”
A figure in a spacesuit floated just outside the metre-thick plexiglas waving its arms frantically.
“Fetch him in,” Su said, “let’s see if he knows any more than we do.”
He didn’t. So there seemed no point in going back to where the flitter had been. Instead, Su was elected Captain and life went on much as before – if with less enthusiasm for ‘salvage’.

On a barren lump of rock on the other side of a foreign galaxy there was unbridled joy among the arouraios kin. Those whose bones had been close to coming through their skin were now fed, and the freezers held enough sustenance to carry the whole colony through at least two turns of the mother planet. Captain Skrzzt looked at his mate and smiled to see the gleam returning to her dark fur and the sparkle of fun illuminating her eyes.
Not only was the colony saved, the big bipeds also had surprisingly tender sweet flesh and the idea of another raid into their space was already being mooted.
Skrzzt ordered his ship to be camouflaged with a wrap of dull-coloured polymer while he chose a crew from the hundreds who volunteered.
The last thing he did before turning his trusty ship back towards the areas travelled by the food creatures was to require the name to be painted on the bow.
The Marea Celestia winked out of the sky above her home asteroid…

© jane jago

One of the inescapable facts of being a twenty-first-century pensioner is that you have to deal with technology.
Oh yes you do!
Don’t try to tell me you live techno free. 
You need a bank. You need a phone. You watch television. And I bet you even FaceTime your grandkids.
Unless you live in a mud hut somewhere, with twenty cats and an effective system of barter, you are rubbing shoulders with technology every day.
And if you weren’t doing techno you wouldn’t be reading this erudite treatise.
*stops to light a ciggy and take a strengthening glug of Jim Beam*
So. Technology. I bloody hate it but I have to deal the same as you do. 
What’s to hate?
Numero uno. Too many choices. Mac or PC? Apple or Android? Laptop or tablet? Trackpad or mouse? The list is right about frigging endless.

So what to do about it if you’re over the age of *coughs* and technology might as well be magic for all you can figure it out?

One: everybody has a grandchild, nephew/niece, child of a friend who is a geek. Have this young person brought before you. Give them a budget (twenty per cent less than you want to spend because the little shit will overspend) and tell them to go to it. And when (s)he has spent your hard-earned (s)he gets to set up the system and teach you how to use it.
At least that is what I did, got my nine-year-old great grandson and his dad along to sort me out…
Had to call young wossname (poor little sod has some schoopid middle-class name like asparagus or something, so him and me agreed on wossname)  back a few times until I got the hang of it but we are mostly okay now.
What did he get me? Laptop and dimphone. And a sinister looking thing with a blue light in it that sneers at me from behind the telly.

Two: do not be sweet talked into buying a smart phone. They are fucking expensive and you WILL break it. And the monthly contracts are eye-watering. My dimphone was twenty quid from a leading supermarket and it’s pay as you go. So I stick in a fiver now and again, and I wasn’t too bothered when I got wazzed and dropped it down the john.

Three: passwords. Do not use the same one for everything. That’s dumb. Do not use your name and date of birth. Only twats do that. Finally. Do not assume you will remember them. You won’t. Keep a hidden list. 

Four: Do not allow yourself to be talked into one of these streaming services. Unless you really do watch a LOT of television/movies/musicals. In which case discuss it with your geeky niece or nephew not the pimply excuse for a human bean behind the counter at computersrshite 

Five: whenever your broadband contract comes up for renewal refuse to pay whatever they are asking. If you can’t get it below last year’s price you haven’t whined enough.

Six: have unlimited broadband. You might think you  can never use forty-three helicopters (or whatever the things are called), but you will and then the grabby bastards will want your firstborn child and a Lamborghini to pay for the two days you ran over.

Six-point-one: do not buy an ‘upgrade’ it will make your laptop explode and your geek will sigh at you…

Right. That’s all for now. I’m going down the pub to see the male stripper 

The feeling of grass between her bare toes encouraged the young girl to run across the sunlit meadow, laughing for the sheer joy of being alive.

The black-clad child hunter watched her from beneath his woollen cowl and smiled thinly. The girl would be an easy capture, he thought, and would suffer greatly for her truancy and the pleasure she was feeling now. The equally dark-clothed woman at his side exuded menace and gloating pleasure in about equal parts. He placed an admonitory hand on her muscular arm.
“Wait,” he ordered in sibilant tones. “Waiting will make your pleasure even greater. And will increase tenfold the shock and shame she will feel.”

Although vibrating with anticipation, the woman did as she was bid, contending herself by watching the girl with hot, hungry eyes.

All unaware of what was happening behind her, the young girl sunk to her knees in the flower-strewn grass and raised her face to the cerulean blueness of the afternoon sky.
“Thank you, lord,” she said softly. “Thank you for joy, and beauty, and for each day.”
She thought she felt a breath on her cheek and a hand at her forehead.

“Enough now,” the man whispered. “You may go and fetch the child to face her punishment.”
The ugly-minded raw-boned woman strode across the grass towards the kneeling figure, with a rope halter in one hand, and her lips pulled back from her yellowed teeth in a travesty of a grin.

She reached the kneeling girl and stretched out a bony hand to grasp her prey. But she found herself holding only a sleeve of rough homespun cloth.

Her scream could be heard for a very long way and it brought the cowled figure running.
“Gone,” she bewailed, “my pretty is gone.”

For a moment, the air shimmered with the laughter of an unseen entity that seemed to have nothing but contempt for the ugliness in the souls of the black-clad man and woman.

Under their feet the white flowers opened to the sun and a butterfly took flight.

© jane jago