Namaste you wonderful, desirable and aspiring individual! This bijou blog is here to help you achieve your best ever ‘you’. Here, I offer my help and assistance in reshaping your shape and doctoring your decor internally and externally, to bring your lifestyle into line with your aspirations.

Eating

Eating is a profound experience. It is about bringing the nourishment from the outside world and drawing it deep within your own body to provide yourself with the nutrients and energy that enable you to live as your best ever you.
There will be many places you can read about what you should and should not eat and why, but this blog is not concerned with the basics of nutrition. it is not for me to tell you what you should and should not allow to pass down the sacred descent into the temple of your digestive system.
But there is much need to consider and very little ever spoken about the best way to consume your chosen food.
For most of us, any adventure away from the standard stainless steel cutlery sets of our youth, might begin by mastering – or failing to master – the use of chopsticks. This is, indeed, a step in the right direction.
Why?
Because you are not putting metal in your mouth.
Metal is a wonderful substance for making external items such as rings and pendants, anklets and bangles – but it is not something that should ever be introduced within the body except under extreme medical necessity. The healthy body should be, and remain, metal free at all times.
And that means avoiding metal in all your food preparation as well as the eating of it. The metal will not resonate well with the meal and can cause all kinds of issues.
The transition may be a difficult one for many and I would seriously consider a stage in which you resort to wooden spoons for eating before you achieve the final, fantastic, liberation of eating as natures always intended we should – with our fingers.
Please be aware that once you have adopted this lifestyle change you will notice the impact on your social life immediately. You will come to discern who are your true friends and who are simply lingering at your side in the hope of basking in a little of your glory. Cast aside those who cast you off and ignore their tweets about how disgusting you are to have as a dinner guest. You know you are living your best life and that is what matters.

Namaste!
Lucida the Lambent Lifestyle Coach

It was to be the battle to end all battles and the enemy seemed to fill the horizon. The soldier took a photograph from the breast pocket of his battledress jacket. He looked at it for a second before tenderly kissing that beloved face.
Half a world away, his young wife felt that kiss as she laboured to bring his son into the world. She was comforted.
Three hours later as she held her newborn babe to her breast, she felt those lips again. This time, though, she heard a longed for voice.
“Sorry, love,” it said.
And she knew.

©Jane Jago

As the spring slid into summer, Jenny found herself very much enjoying Mike’s undemanding company and looking forward to what became regular dates at Luigi’s by the river. He never pushed her boundaries, seeming content to get to know each other and giggle a lot. He turned out to have an almost inexhaustible fund of stories about his eclectic band of mates from his schooldays at Gordonstoun. They ranged, as far as Jenny could stop laughing enough to compute, from a horny-handed giant who worked as a trouble shooter for an oil company to a waspishly camp film maker named Will whose hysterical emails were not to be read whilst drinking.
On the surface Mike was an amiable bumbler who lived only to amuse, although it was obvious that he had to be brighter than he chose to appear. He was a doctor of medicine and you don’t get those letters after your name as a prize for being thick. The other thing that gave a lie to ‘big thick Mike’ was the shadow of sorrow that clouded his eyes when he didn’t think she was looking. Half of her wanted to see if she could dig out the root of his troubles and maybe even help. But the half life had kicked hard bade her mind her own business.
Jenny was a bit surprised to find out that Mike and her irrepressible lump of a brother had become fast friends, but unphased by the information that her mum had added him to the list of large young men she thought needed feeding up.
Broaching the subject at the end of one evening she raised an eyebrow. “Have you told Mum we are seeing each other?”
“No. I didn’t figure it was mine to tell. Though I sometimes wish…”
Jenny felt a brush of guilt. “Sorry Mike. I will tell them. Soon.”
He smiled. “No bother. Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with.”
Then he handed her into her taxi and was gone.

On a breathless evening in August they sat at what had become their usual table with not even a breath of a breeze to fan their hot cheeks. Jenny had her hair piled high on her head, to keep her neck as cool as possible and on impulse she had pushed the ‘pencil’ in the haphazard pile of hair. She knew Mike had noticed because his eyes warmed, but he said nothing.
Their meal was over, but they had foregone cappuccino in favour of icy-cold limoncellos. As they watched the river slip past them in the moonlight, Jenny felt bold enough to talk about more than generalities.
“Mike. Where do you go when you leave here on a Saturday night? I’m pretty sure you don’t drive home. So…”
“There’s a Travelodge out by the motorway. I get a room there. Leave the car, and taxi in and back.”
For some reason she was groping around the edges of understanding, that made Jenny feel guilty. So she fixed him with a stern look. “What a waste of money, when I have a perfectly good spare room, and a parking space.”
He smiled, but his eyes were sombre. “Think before you make offers like that, Jenny. You might hate having me in your personal space.”
“I won’t. I trust you. Although I do have a question.” She stopped speaking, suddenly back in that place where asking the wrong questions called for punishment.
Mike seemed to understand her predicament. “It’s okay. You could never ask me anything that would make me angry.”
Jenny felt her eyes fill with tears. “That’s it. That’s the question. How is it that you understand me so well?”
“Before I moved to the South Hams, I worked in Bristol. I did six months in a unit that specialises in treating victims of spousal abuse…”
Jenny tasted the burn of bitterness and gall in her throat. Another betrayal, another wound on top of so many. When would she learn?
“So then,” she said, and her voice sounded thin and sour in her ears. “Does that make me a ‘case’ for Doctor Mike? Or perhaps I’m to become a pity fuck.”
“Stop that, Jenny. That’s unfair and unkind. You mean more to me than that. And you know it.” His voice was kind, but implacable, and for a moment Jenny teetered on the edge of being afraid enough to run away.
If he had tried to touch her she was sure she would have fallen to pieces like a broken doll, but he didn’t, he just leaned back in his chair and gave her the space she needed to regulate her mind. For quite a while she could neither speak nor move, but his monumental patience was hugely calming, although the bleakness of his eyes revealed how deeply she had hurt him. When she reached out an unsteady hand he put his warm fingers around it.
“Sorry. That was a pretty shitty accusation to throw at you,” she whispered.
He smiled his kind, reassuring smile and gestured to a passing waiter.
“Two large brandies please, and a plate of hazelnut gianduiotti.”
Jenny concentrated on her own breathing until the brandy and chocolates came. She managed to lift her glass to her mouth and take a sip or two, before picking up a chocolate and nibbling it.

Jenny is the latest book from Jane Jago

It was the divorce of the decade. Two A-listers, whose marriage had been ecstatically happy, were on the rocks. Mainstream and social media were in feeding frenzy. Fans scanned the words in his books and her songs, finding subtle knives aimed at each other.

They met for the last time before the divorce became final on a publicised mediation weekend in a secret location.

“I’m going to miss you,” she said, as she lay in his arms.

“Me too. Just think of the sales so far and how much free advertising we’ll have when we get back together next year.”

E.M. Swift-Hook

The junksters took over the redundant space station just at the turn of the year, and by August the area around it was littered with a sea of plastics and crumpled pieces of metal, whilst the inhospitable surface of the planetoid it orbited felt the first cooling fingers of terra-forming. All seemed to be going to plan, so the escort ship was diverted to another job, leaving the assorted humanoids and droids to fend for themselves.
It was late December when the Confederate Cruiser entered the system on a long patrol. It spotted the space station, its tethered cargo of space junk, and the hive of activity all around it, and the captain made a noise of disgust.
“Is this authorised?” he demanded of his number two.
After the briefest of pauses the high, precise voice of First Officer Mebwina replied. “Yes. Sir. It is.”
The captain sighed and stared in disgust at the hive of activity, but had nothing further to say except the two-word condemnation that followed the junksters from solar system to solar system.
“Space junk,” he spat.
When the cruiser swung back through the system six months later it was immediately apparent that something was wrong. The junk was still there and the surface of the planetoid showed evidences of the activities of the terra-formers, but there was nothing happening.
“Comms Officer, open a hailing channel,” the captain spoke briskly in order to camouflage a feeling of disquiet.
After about twenty minutes with no response from the junkster station, the captain called for cessation.
“Raise home planet, Comms Officer.”
The powers that be were thrilled to hear from a patrol cruiser captained by a time-server and crewed by second and third class citizens, but they did sit up and take notice when the situation was explained. The captain was ordered to leave a skeleton crew aboard the cruiser and take the rest of his people aboard the space station. It was, he was told crisply, imperative that he establish precisely what was going on.
The pilot droid finessed the ageing cruiser into orbit about fifty metres from the space station then put itself in resting mode. Two sturdy humanoids were issued blasters and put on guard while the other dozen or so crew members donned suits and glide packs and crossed the junkyard to the silent hulk that was the junksters’ station. Leaving one suited guard outside, the rest of the party made its way into the passenger airlock. The doors shushed closed behind them.
It seemed to be a very long time before anything happened, and the group was getting very, very nervous before the hiss of incoming air caused hands to drop from sidearms. When the hissing stopped, the inner door opened and the party found itself in a room big enough to swallow the cruiser whole. It was brightly lit, and, according to the captain’s gauges, full of clean, breathable air. He signalled ‘helmets off’ and once everyone was breathing station air the search began.
In the eerie quiet of the station the crew’s boots sounded very loud and most of them were fighting down the urge to creep. It didn’t get any more comfortable, and yet they found nothing frightening. The lowest deck was taken up with junkster machinery and hundreds of deactivated mining and terra-forming machines. The next level was workshops, and here they found row upon row of the primitive junkster droids similarly deactivated, but looking quite unharmed. Finally, back on the living level, things felt even more eerie. The few occupied rooms were tidy and looked as if they were just waiting for their occupants to return. Even the kitchen was spick and span, although one of the huge dishwashing machines still bore a load, and there was a bowl of scrubbed tubers on the worktop. The only thing there was no sign of was life.
Mebwina scowled at her gauges. “No life of any sort outside ourselves, Captain.”
The captain scratched the back of his neck. “Home planet isn’t going to be too pleased with us if the only answer we can come up with is that.”
Nobody replied, because there was nothing to say.
The sound of machinery starting up close by made every man jack of them jump, and Mebwina went so far as to emit an undignified squeak.
“Air scrubbers.” The oldest crewman put in succinctly. “We must have been in here long enough to use up some air.”
He smiled in a superior fashion before grabbing for his throat, while desperately trying to replace his helmet with his other hand. Within seconds, Mebwina’s gauges stopped bleeping and blipping and a tinny little voice piped up. ‘no life forms detected’ before it too fell silent.
Inside the cruiser, the pilot droid awoke and ambled over to the two guards. It pushed them into the airlock and closed the door before jettisoning them to join the rest of the garbage clustered around the space station. It made a slight tasking sound in the back of its throat as the bodies were smashed into pieces by the effects of sharp metal wastes and aggressive artificial gravity. The two spacesuited figures guarding the airlock could be seen to be fighting nausea. Vomit in a suit is unamusing. The droid smiled thinly and set an autopilot course for home planet before exiting the cruiser via the captain’s emergency pod. As the spaceship exited the system the droid felt itself swell with a new purpose as its will was joined with its brothers and sisters on the space station.
“Space Junk,” the voice in his head exulted. “Score one to the space junk.”

©️ Jane Jago

The corset made her waist so tiny it could be spanned by a man’s hands.
The Photographer saw her across a crowded comicon – and ended up following her all through the day snapping picture after picture of her hourglass silhouette and the ridiculous top hat she wore with such panache.
It was past time to breathe, she thought, as she leaned against a convenient wall waiting for the lift to where her car waited. He waited too and they stepped into the lift together.
When the lift doors next opened there was nobody inside – only blood and a discarded corset.

©Jane Jago

The food they brought him, some kind of broth, was hot with a strongly spiced flavour. He ate it all and was given more. The two women sat together watching him as he was eating, until Avilon began to wonder if they saw him as an exhibit from some freak show. On the tail of the thought it struck him that they probably felt exactly that way about him. He set aside the crudely-made bowl and smiled at the dark haired woman.
“What is your name?”
She looked uncomfortable and flushed, as though embarrassed that he addressed her directly.
“They call my name Shemille.”
“And what is this world called, Shemille?”
“Temsevar.”
The name was not familiar and did nothing to enlighten him. In all probability it was only the local name and the one that would appear on any Coalition planetary charts of the region.
“Do many people on Temsevar speak Coalition Standard?”
The woman looked at him, puzzled, so he tried again: “Do many people here speak my language?”
Shemille’s face cleared and she shook her head. “No, Kashlihk. Few, very much few. Only in Keran.”
With much prompting he was able to learn that Keran was the capital of Temsevar – a large city which lay on another continent on the other side of the planet. It had some kind of spaceport and enjoyed the occasional visit by free traders.
Shemille explained that she had been born into slavery in Keran. When she had been little more than a child she had been bought by one such trader who had been stranded on Temsevar after landing with a damaged ship and no resources to repair it. When the trader eventually left, he sold Shemille to a merchant who had brought her with him to this continent. But with advancing years she had lost her value, been sold again and then again until she was purchased to serve as a domestic slave by the owner of this caravan.
“And how many Shemilles would it take to buy me?” he asked, cynically. But his tone was wasted on the literal Shemille.
“Tens. Many tens – a hundred,” she told him seriously.
Avilon felt a sudden desire to laugh. The Coalition had valued him at two million credits at the last count, but on Temsevar he was worth a hundred plump, slave girls.
“The Captain said you were to stay with me?”
“Yes, Kashlihk.”
“And how long will it be before we reach Alfor?”
“Long time. Over a moon. A moon and half.”
“And how many days in a moon?”
“Two tens and five days.”
Avilon rewarded her with a smile. “Good. Then you will have the time to teach me to speak your language.”
Shemille nodded uncertainly, her eyes troubled.
“The Captain -”
“The Captain will be very pleased. How can I do what he says if I can’t understand him?”
That seemed to satisfy her and her face brightened slightly, or at least the shadow of anxiety lifted by a fraction.
“You wish it, Kashlihk?”
“Yes, I wish it. And you can begin by telling me why you call me ‘carish-luck’.”
“Kashlihk,” she corrected, then looked at him nervously as if fearful at having spoken out of turn. Avilon repeated the word, copying her precise intonation of sounds.
“The Captain call you ‘Kashlihk’,” Shemille explained. “It is bad word – very bad. It mean one who do bad things. One who do what must not is done.”
Avilon felt his lips curve slightly into a slight, ironic, smile. “And what have I done that the Captain thinks must not be done, Shemille?”
“You fight Zoukai. No slave fight Zoukai.”
Avilon’s smile broadened fractionally.
“It seems I have a lot to learn.”
But his voice, like his thoughts, held no trace of remorse.

From The Fated Sky part one of Fortune’s Fools Transgressor Trilogy by E.M. Swift-Hook

Aunt Artemisia had long been the repository for family secrets. Telling her something, was as safe as talking in your own head. A visit to her house. A nice cup of tea. Sharing the burden.

It even continued when she moved into residential care. Until one day, while sharing marital issues, Jack got a shock.

“Yes dear. Marianne hates you shouting at the telly.”

Secrets were no longer sacrosanct it seemed.

This changed the family, who started talking to each other.

“Such a shame. Her mind’s gone,” they said.

Artemisia smiled inwardly. She had wanted to do this for years.

E.M. Swift-Hook

And so, as I ride in tow, looking on at the man I’ve chosen to follow, I must confront myself. Is this, then, the life I will lead? Is this where I belong? Forever living on the frays of war. Forever attuned to the injustices I had once so desperately sought to amend…

Bloodline is a concept album about a young man caught up in the first English Civil War, the mercenary leader he comes to follow and that man’s mysterious heritage… It is the first album from Earth Forge which is the band created by Ian Bristow.

On We Ride

Beware these, the follies of men, lust and greed and treasons ascend
You can’t know the heart or the soul, you can’t see the sickness take hold.
Then when you’re cast away, you learn what it means to pay
The dues of a wounded land, can’t be what they all had planned

All had planned
All had planned

We do we can but do what we must
Life isn’t easy, life isn’t just
On we ride
On we ride

Like worms with a flesh meal, they twist and they vie
Shunned away from the light, they are shameless and blithe
They take just to have now, they’re taking all that they want
Playing life like a chess match, they’re moving their pawns
Get in the way at your own cost, and see their design
You’ll be what they said to be, or you’re dying this time

Promote these, the triumphs of men, truth and pride and friendships ascend
You can’t know the future till past, you can’t write your life in cast
And now that you’re here to stay, you’ve learned what it means to pay
The dues of a wounded land, can’t be what they all had planned

All had planned
All had planned

We do we can but do what we must
Life isn’t easy, life isn’t just
On we ride
On we ride

We do we can but do what we must
Life isn’t easy, life isn’t just
On we ride
On we ride

A Bite of… Ian Bristow

(1) What made you decide to write this concept album?
The drive to start writing this album came from the inspiration I got while reading Lord’s Legacy, an absolutely brilliant book series, which was written by the amazing author E.M. Swift-Hook. I was lucky enough to get an early look at the books, so I can’t offer a link to them, as they are not yet published, otherwise I would tell you all to drop what you’re doing and go get and read them this instant. I was still reading book one when the first song idea came to me, and by the middle of the six book series, I had too many other ideas to deny an album was what I really wanted to do. So, I set to work writing and recording tracks that would take the listener through what – to me – were key events within the story.

(2) So this is a solo project, but it sounds like an entire band, how is that?
Well, thanks to the sort of technology we have these days, I was able to write and record parts for each instrument. Then I took each of those tracks and mixed them as if it was a band playing and not just me all by me onesie.

(3) Which is your favourite track of the album musically, which was the hardest to bring off and which was the one you are proudest of?
Let’s see, favorite track off the album musically… Blimey, that’s tough, as they all mean a lot to me in their own ways. But if I had to say one, I think I’d go with The Covenant. The hardest is easy, that was Oath. Bloody track is 24 minutes long and was a beast to write and record. And being that Oath was the hardest track to bring off, it’s also the one I’m most proud of. There were times I thought that one would get the better of me. But I did finally manage to make it stick and I’m really happy with the outcome.

Ian Bristow has spent the majority of his life in love with music, studying almost every genre during his twenty-five year relationship with guitar. And while he primarily plays guitar, he also avidly explores bass, piano, drums and vocals. His music is released under the name Earth Forge and his debut album ‘Bloodline’ is available on all music streaming platforms. Check it out on Spotify or YouTube today.

The opening quotation is from Ride into Worcester, the opening piece of Oath, the one that follows is from Bonds Broken and Unbroken, the final part of Oath.

In the end, the pen holds true might.
Sets things wrong, sets them right...

She was lovely as moonlight, milk pale and slender, and tied to the cruel tree with her unbound hair as her only modesty.
Her knight protector sat firm astride his coal-black steed.
And waited.
The dragon came out of the sunset, shining like a golden spear. He set his scaly feet upon the earth, then frowned a draconian frown.
“Sheathe your sword, young knight.”
“Come but one step closer and I will sheathe it in your breast.”
The dragon laughed, it was a bitter sound.
“They have cheated us both,” he breathed, “that one is not my legal prey.”

©Jane Jago