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 E.M. Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

Tanker walked Ben to the gate and watched him get on the school bus. At home time he was waiting, but the bus never came. Instead Mum came out of the house with her face all streaked with tears.

“Come in, Tanker, the bus isn’t coming.”

Ben never came home. All Tanker could do was feel sad. One day Mum put on his car harness and smiled.

“You wanna see Ben?”

Tanker didn’t believe her. But then in a strange place smelling of ill people, he saw his Ben sitting in a funny chair. Boy and dog cried happy tears. 

©Jane Jago

Man shall not live by prose alone, so I offer here some bouquets plucked from my garden of the Muses. Perhaps they might inspire you to attempt your own meagre efforts at the high art of poetry. Do not be discouraged if what you dribble onto the page is vastly less illustrious than my own pure poems. It is not given to all of us to be the Chosen One of Erato…

Biker Biker

Biker, biker roaring past
In the street, night before last
What the hell possess-ed thee
To wake me up at half-past three?

On what distant motorway
Did you begin your ride that day?
On what tarmac didst you roll
From whence came you my sleep to troll?

And what hard shoulder fast depart
Could twist your manifold apart?
So that the popping of the sound
Could so reverberate around?

What did hammer your bike chain
To make it thunder in the rain?
What did make you choose my road
To burden with your heavy load?

When the stars – or sparks more like,
Flew from the tailpipe of your bike,
Did you wonder what fell fate
Left you back-firing by my gate?

Biker, biker roaring past
In the street, night before last
What the hell possess-ed thee
To blast me up at half-past three?

Rubaiyat Sonnet

Alas the Muse must vanish with the light
And close the manuscript of youthful fire
Why must I have so many thoughts in flight?
Why will not my Muse simply me inspire?
For every night a glass I have turned down
On this inverted bowl I call my desk
And bent my head for the laureates crown
To birth another written arabesque
But whence the bird forth from the branch hath flown?
How is’t Her brightness hence from me doth go?
Now here, abandoned, weeping, I do groan,
To ask why my Muse doth despise me so?

O Muse!

Oh Muse
How thou despitest me
With thine honeyed tongue in another’s ear
Oh Muse
How thou despiseth me
Wandering fingertips drawing another near
Oh Muse
What has thy servant done
That thou takes flight into the setting sun
Oh Muse
Oh harlot dancing veiled alone
If I thee beg on bended knee wilt come home
Oh Muse
How thou mistreateth me
Who but thy every torment loves
Oh Muse
How thou defeatest me
Thy servant and the tenderest of doves
Oh Muse
Oh fickle Muse!

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.

After twenty-two years of happy marriage, Bob and Carol marched into the guidance counsellor’s room wearing identical expressions of fury and heartache.
“He is utterly intolerable,” Carol declared.
“She is completely unbearable,” Bob countered.
“He says strawberry ice cream is best, which is obviously just wrong.”
“She thinks chocolate tastes better. How could she?”
The counsellor sighed. It was the usual problem.
“A good marriage is about compromise, you know. Do you agree on vanilla?”
They both nodded warily.
A short time later they left wreathed in smiles – and with a tub of Neapolitan ice cream in a carrier bag.

E.M. Swift-Hook

The sort of afternoon where bees drone lazily and even geeks feel the pull of nature. The oracle and Watson had just enjoyed scones and cream donated by the wife of an important man who had had his certainties shifted by the old woman and her mountain.
Watson stretched lazily. “You never did finish telling me how you came to stay here.”
“No. I didn’t, did I?” She grinned and he was put in mind of a crocodile in a zoo that had terrified him when he was a small child. “Now where was I?”
Having come to understand that the oracle possessed a mind like a gin trap, Watson wasn’t actually surprised when she homed in on the exact moment when she broke off her story.
“Yes. Right. Anyway. Once the consortium that owns this place understood I was preparing to up sticks they came in with a much better offer. So I stayed.”
“Do they pay you?”
“Yup. I’ve got a nice little nest egg against the day winters up here get too hard for me. Plus, of course I get good food delivered and my living cave is snug and cozy…”
She stopped talking at the sound of laboured breathing from the vertiginous path from the valley gate.
“Scram, boy. And remind me to find out why the bell ain’t working properly.”
He shot into the cave where he composed himself to listen.
The head that appeared over the ridge was balding and red, and glistened with sweat. The rest of the figure was spare and muscular and dressed in the serviceable gear of a well-to-do working farmer. Watson thought he looked rather more sensible than the average supplicant. But looks can be deceiving.
The man bowed and put the basket he was carrying at the oracle’s feet.
“Fresh bread. Our best cheese. Honey from the apple orchard.” Then he stood and sort of scraped his boots on the gravelly ground.
The oracle’s laugh wasn’t unkind, and when she spoke it was without her usual mockery.
“What can the mountain do for you?”
“A man needs a son.” He blurted it out then said no more.
“We could debate that point, but if we pretend I agree with you how is that the business of the Oracle of High Places?”
“Because my wife has given me only daughters.”
“Five, I believe.”
He nodded. “But a man needs sons to carry on his name. It don’t matter if he loves his daughters they say. It don’t matter if he…” He stopped speaking and his face was a study in misery. But he pulled himself together and carried on though it obviously cost him dear. “I have been advised to put Bertha aside and take another wife.”
The oracle hissed. “Advised. By whom?”
“My neighbour. Who put aside his barren wife and took a young widow. She was brought to bed of a fine son last month.”
The oracle sighed and Watson saw the second she rolled her eyes back in her head, because the farmer lost his ruddy colour. She spoke in the rolling cadences of the oracle and her voice echoed around the hilltop.
“Beware the advice of fools. Your way does not march with that of a man who is giving his name to bastard seed.”
She stopped speaking while the man in front of her squawked and shuffled his feet.
“But. But. But…”
“But what?” The oracle was using her normal person acerbic voice.
“The mountain said…”
Then he bethought himself and closed his mouth.
The oracle chuckled. “Oh. One of them things was it?”
He nodded mutely. “Seems like I won’t be getting a son to leave the farm to.” He sounded as if the news weighed him down greatly.
The oracle laughed. “You’ve years in you yet. Go home and await the birth of the tribe of grandsons I see in your future. Don’t be blaming your wife for what fate decreed.”
Watson saw the farmer smile. “That’s true. And me and the old girl have been through a lot together. I wasn’t looking forward to life without her.”
Then he bowed deeply before hurrying off, a much happier man than when he arrived.
The oracle turned her spectacularly gummy grin on Watson.
“You’d have thought a farmer would have a better grasp of biology…”

Jane Jago

You said. When I die
If you see a butterfly
And it lands on your hand
You will come to understand
It will be, the soul of me
Come from far beyond to see
Your dear face, with a living eye
Which is why, butterflies, make me cry

jane jago 2023

Dermot and his brothers had been diggers all their lives. They earned their living digging, but they also dug for fun. Thus it was that the summer solstice saw them underground on The Plain setting to rights some tunnelling that was in more than the usual disrepair. 
They were making good time so they stopped for a supper of doorstep sandwiches and ochre coloured tea with condensed milk from Erkie’s thermos. When they finished, Dermot, who was a being of few words, belched and cocked a thumb at the workings. 
It was a goodish while later when their pickaxes hit rock. Or, to be more accurate, they hit one rock that stood smack in their way. It was a big one and seemed to have been driven right through the workings. Erkie give it an experimental shove and it rocked slightly.
“It’s as loose as a rotten tooth,” he grunted. “Do us take ‘n out?”
They looked to Dermot who licked the rock and sniffed carefully around the soil at its base. For a minute he frowned, as if trying to call something to mind, then he shrugged his meaty shoulders and gave Erkie and the lads an upward pointing thumb.
They set to work, scrabbling and scrooging in the dirt. To the uninitiated their approach would have looked shambolic, but there must have been some science involved, as the stone slowly began to list to one side. 
“Aisy do it boys,” Erkie recommended, “us don’t want ‘n down here in the tunnel with we.”
The wisdom of this was generally acknowledged and the work slowed to a snail’s pace.
Above ground in the predawn darkness the men in white robes danced around the stones. The Henge had been there since before the ancestors of their ancestors, but the Druids still came there on certain nights to enact their rituals and pray for the souls of those who had already gone to the God. As the sun began to rise the dancers felt movement beneath their feet. This was not something they had ever known before and one by one they grew still and a little afraid. As the light reached the standing stones they watched, with a sense of horror that reached deep into their souls as the giant that was the king stone rocked on his foundations and began to tilt drunkenly. The High Druid would have rushed forward but his acolytes held him back by main force.
It was as well they did, because there came a sort of a sucking sound from the bowels of the earth and the stone that had stood proud for millennia fell to one side with an earth-shattering crash. As it hit one of the sarsen stones it cracked along its mighty length and dropped to the greensward in two sharp-edged pieces.
In the absolute silence that followed this disaster a brown face poked its way out of the earth beside where the stone had stood and a pair of bright, brown eyes blinked in the dawn light.
Dermot took in the scene of devastation, the broken stone, the weeping druids, and the rising sun that no longer lit the king stone in glory. He was so moved that he used up two days’ worth of words in one go.
“Oh bugger,” he said, before disappearing into the tunnel and signalling his crew to get back to work.

©️jane jago

An everyday tale of village life and vampires…

Wednesday lunchtime meant a meeting of the committee of the Ladies’ Association and even more than the usual amount of irritatingly halfwitted ‘ideas’ to attract ‘new blood’. Em had, in the end, just vetoed the lot – which hadn’t done much for her personal popularity, but at least it headed off any of the possible complications that any sort of blood would bring to the equation.
However, the meeting had ended with a bucketload of bitchiness and backbiting, and Em actually felt tired enough that Agnes’ Parthian shot on leaving had made more impression than it would have done on a better day.
“Anyway Emmeline Vanderbilt, we aren’t quorate any more. How can we be a seven when there are only six of us? It’s been more than a year since Florence passed. And you’ve yet to do your duty.”
Em had replied with a spectacularly rude gesture she would probably regret if she thought about it. So she drove home deliberately thinking only about the dilatoriness of the council in the matter of the bats in the belfry. It was, she thought, time for a ‘gentle reminder’.
But when she got to her house there was a far more pressing problem blocking the driveway. It was her supermarket delivery. On the wrong day. At the wrong time. The delivery driver, who knew her of old, cringed as the Citroen missed the back of his van by about three centimetres.
Em leapt from the driving seat like a scalded cat. “You are here today because?”
“Because I’m delivering your groceries.” he essayed a smile that sort of slid off his face as Em placed her hands on her skinny hips.
“I can see that. But why today?”
“Somebody cocked up?” the driver hazarded.
“Indeed somebody did. And it wasn’t me.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t. Will I take this lot away then?”
“What? And have the next available delivery slot be three weeks Thursday at five am? No. Bring it in and I’ll check it off my list.”
The driver winced but began unloading. By the time he had the second box out of the van Em had in front of her incontrovertible proof he should’ve been at her house at eight am. Tomorrow. She ground her teeth and went straight for live chat. 
“You might as well put the kettle on as you are going nowhere until I get this sorted.”
The driver shrunk even further into his skin, making him look like a pissed-off tortoise, but he moved the kettle onto the hot plate before stoically carrying on with his unloading. When he finished, Em handed him a printed list.
“You want to check my delivery for me, while I explain to Morag in Edinburgh why it’s not acceptable to move my delivery slot without telling me. Oh and make a pot of tea while you are at it.”
Being aware that he wasn’t going to get away before Em was satisfied, he obliged. Once the  tea was properly brewed, he poured two mugs, handing one to his ‘hostess’ and burying his own nose in the other before getting on with checking the goods against the order.
He had just about finished his check when Em gave a satisfied chuckle. “I thought she’d see it my way in the end. Now. How much of the delivery is wrong?”
The driver indicated a neat pile at the end of the table.
“That much.”
“And how much of that is sensible replacement?”
“Ummm. About none.”
“Right, scoot it this way and grab yourself a biscuit. Brown tin on the dresser.”
He grabbed the tin and sat down, morosely eating ginger biscuits while he tried to calculate how far behind this little fracas was likely to have made him. He reckoned it’d be the best part of two hours before he escaped and his mind’s eye saw the darts match and a buxom barmaid he very much admired disappearing over the horizon. He sighed gustily and Em flicked a hand at him. He subsided into injured silence, whilst Em carried on castigating the unfortunate Morag.
Twenty-five minutes later she sat back in her chair.
“Are you still here, man?”
“Until you move your car from behind the van here is where I’ll remain.”
“Oh yes. I’d forgotten that.”
He knew she wasn’t the type of female to forget anything, but he also understood that anything other than absolute obedience wasn’t going to get him released to finish his deliveries in time to at least get a pint before last orders. This being the case he ducked his head.
“Am I taking this lot back?” He indicated the pile of incorrect goods with a thumb.
Em showed two rows of excellent teeth in a wolfish grin. “No. You’re leaving them. I’m just not paying for them. Now. Where’s my cold stuff?”
“Fridge and freezer. I don’t like to see waste.”
“Oh. Thank you.” Em looked at the unprepossessing driver whose uniform fleece and steel-toe-capped boots only served to emphasise his skinny wrinkled frame. She felt unusual stirrings of guilt and scrabbled in her handbag for a tip. She rooted out a twenty and shoved it at him. 
“Here. Get yourself a pint  and a pasty.”
She whisked out of the kitchen and was backing the Citroen out of the drive by the time he managed to gather his scattered wits…
Once he was gone, Em found herself unaccountably depressed and not even the prospect of a battle of wills with the laodicean council employee tasked with the collection of data on protected species offered any prospect of joy. She was just wondering whether or not to phone Agnes and offer an olive branch when the cheerful pipping of a car horn lifted her from her lethargy. 
It was Agnes.
Of course it was.
Agnes and a box of fresh doughnuts. Dumping the doughnuts on the table Em’s oldest friend pulled the kettle onto the hot plate.
“Sorry Em. I was bang out of order.”
“Me too. I’m just a bit out of sorts right now. And I’m not entirely sure why.”
“Me too and me neither.”
“There’s something isn’t there?”
“Yes. There is. Ruby says she has been feeling irritable in her skin ever since this vicar came to the parish. Reckons there is something not right about him.”
“What? Even more not right than being very well aware that he’s wet dream material for every impressionable female for miles around? And not above making use of it!”
“Apparently. And she is very far from being an imaginative type. If it had been Petunia…”
“Indeed.”
Em became aware of a thought that had been itching away in the back of her head for days. Maybe Erasmus would help. But she kept that thought to herself as Agnes wasn’t really a bat person. Instead of giving voice to a very nebulous idea she helped herself to a large jam doughnut and made two tall mugs of the special tea that she and her sisters used to sustain themselves.
An hour later Agnes set off home and Em felt very much better. So much so that she reached out a hand for the phone intending to sort out the council once and for all. But before she could pick it up it uttered its shrill command for her attention. Leaving it to ring five times she looked at the number and for a moment she thought it was Florence Maybush calling her from beyond the grave. Em mentally admonished herself before picking up the receiver in a not entirely steady hand.
“Em Vanderbilt speaking.”
The voice at the other end of the line was fussy and wispy and bore traces of London hidden under its careful middle-class modulation.
“Good afternoon Ms Vanderbilt, my name is Virginia Cropper and I have recently moved into Maybush Cottage.”
That explained the number and Em felt a surge of relief. She injected cautious bonhomie into her voice.
“Welcome to Little Botheringham, Mrs Cropper.”
There was a verbal buzzing noise from the phone.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said ‘Mzzz’. I’m not married. Well, not anymore and even when I was I wasn’t Mrs. Cropper that’s my… Oh well, I’m sure you aren’t interested in all that. I’m wittering. Don’t mind me.”
Em was glad she was on the phone and her smile wouldn’t show.
“Then welcome to Little Botheringham, Ms. Cropper,” she corrected.
“Oh. Thank you. It seems a beautiful place and I’m sure I’m settling in well. I was calling because I understand that you are the person to speak to about joining the Ladies’ Society.”
A small voice in Em’s head laughed sardonically at the thought of another ‘lady’ from that address, but she kept her voice neutral.
“New members are always welcome. Our next meeting is on the first of the month in the village hall at seven pm. Just pop along and I’ll be delighted to sign you up.”
“Oh. Right. Thank you.”
“We will look forward to seeing you.”
Em put the phone down and suppressed an inward sigh. This female didn’t sound a bit her sort, but the society needed new membership. Consigning the woman to the back of her mind Em geared herself up for an enjoyable verbal punch-up with the county council as represented by the dragon who woman-ed the switchboard and the lazy sods in animal protection.

Part 5 of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

I can’t stand bloody freesias. Had them in my wedding bouquet. They were white and pink and smelled like summer and happy ever after.

Only I ain’t gonna get neither by the looks.

I’m stuck here in perpetual winter, and the asshole I was stupid enough to marry has sashayed off back to his momma in sunny Florida.

Last week he sent me the divorce papers I been kind of expecting. I signed them and found myself smiling for the first time in months.

This morning my big bear of a neighbour brought me freesias. These ones smelled like hope.

©️Jane Jago 

Summertime is the perfect time for sitting outside and enjoying a good read!

So here are some specially selected short reads for you to enjoy on those sunny days – and all are FREE to good homes for the next five days through the midsummer days of 21 – 25 June!

All at Sea
A weekend on a super yacht turns very ugly.
Thriller with modern-day pirates.

The Newsreader
The man they call ‘sex on legs’ has a secret.
Urban Mythology

Honorine
Sometimes being beautiful isn’t enough.
Historical Fantasy

Maybe
Sometimes we walk the very edges of reality.
Occult Horror

Dying for a Poppy
Organised crime and an anti-Roman British terror group pull Dai and Julia into danger.
Alternate History Whodunnit

Dying for a Vacation
Antiquities are being stolen and Dai’s investigations uncover a conspiracy with danger to Julia.
Alternate History Whodunnit

All books from Jane Jago – some with a little help from E.M. Swift-Hook!