We live in an imperfect world, peopled by imperfect humans. 

Except the shining ones. The social media illuminati whose antennae are so exquisitely tuned and whose sensibilities are so perfectly nuanced that they take it on themselves to police the rest of offensive humanity.

They will have gained some notoriety, which they propose to use to bludgeon the rest of the world into their way of thinking.

They would be better occupied discovering whether or not there is offence being caused before exercising their opinions.

Do not rant on anyone’s behalf before asking, politely, if such is necessary, or acceptable.

Enticknapp was sitting among the cabbages considering his options. He knew he had been a bad puppy and he rather thought a spanking might be on the cards. 

Maybe he should just run away.

But if he ran away he would never see the small human again, and he loved her.

He cried a puppy tear and crept out of the cabbage patch to face his punishment.

Boss man spied him and bent to pick him up with gentle hands.

“Never mind, puppy,” he said. “It was my fault. I didn’t let you out when you woke up.”

Enticknapp smiled.

Jane Jago

Starship Troopers was not a book that one had any intention to read.

Ever.

The blurb made it abundantly clear it was about boot camp and killing insectoid aliens in great quantities and the antithesis of everything that represents fine literature. To one, such as oneself, raised upon more the most sophisticated themes and rarified tomes by She Whose Name One Is Unfit To Mention, it seemed like being asked to enter into a rugby scrum only after ensuring two weeks of torrential rain have softened the pitch.

So why would I do such a thing? One hears the single nonplused warble resonating from my myriad readers. You can be sure, gentle people, it was through no choice of oneself.

This is a cautionary tale that tells how karma always finds a way.

Last month I was prevailed upon to join the local literati gathering – or ‘Ben’s Book Club’ as it is is listed on the Community Centre noticeboard. Mumsie had declared that it would be of great value to my own written words were I to take more time to peruse those of others. She also threatened to evict me from my writing sanctuary and turn it into a hell-hole brewery for her own vile alcoholic distillations if I refused.

So, perforce, enforced by force majeur, I went. The torrid event occupies an entire afternoon each week, filled with in-depth and avid discussion and dissection. Then, once the local gossip is dealt with, the group spends a few minutes at the end considering whatever book Ben has chosen for the week and being assigned one to read for the next.  The first week I went it was Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.

My Review of Starship Troopers by Robert Anson Heinlein

A young man goes to boot camp and learns how to fight insectoid aliens so he can vote. The rest of the book describes the fighting. Spoiler: he doesn’t vote at the end of the book.

Stars: Four – for allowing me to learn sufficient juicy gossip from Ben’s Book Club members to blackmail Mumsie into letting me keep my writing sanctuary.

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.

They had come so far.

Anna carrying baby Nin while Caradoc had their few worldly goods and Gryff followed loyally. But now the way ahead was barred by a river they could see no way to cross.

Caradoc put his arm around Anna’s shoulders.

“We tried, lass. But life’s not a fairytale. Sometimes the bad people win.”

She buried her face in his shoulder to hide the tears that sprang into her eyes.

Gryff’s sharp bark made her look round.

There was a boat hidden in the reeds.

“So it was a fairytale after all,” Anna always told the grandchildren.

E.M. Swift-Hook

They called her Nanny Bee, although as far as anyone knew she had never been a wife or a mother, let alone a grandmother. But she was popularly believed to be a witch – so Nanny it was. She lived in a pink-walled thatched cottage that crouched between the village green and the vicarage. The Reverend Alphonso Scoggins (a person of peculiarly mixed heritage and a fondness for large dinners) joked that between him and Nanny they could see the villagers from birth to burial.
Nanny’s garden was the most verdant and productive little patch you could ever imagine, and she could be found pottering in its walled prettiness from dawn to dusk almost every day. People came to visit and were given advice, or medicine, or other potions in tiny bottles or scraps of paper – but they always had the sneaking suspicion they were getting in the way of the gardening.
But there again, digging is second nature to gnomes.

When eating brownies was first mentioned in the village, there was a certain amount of disquiet: cannibalism and all that. But when it was discovered that the brownies in question were delicious cakes that put an entirely different complexion on the whole thing.
The cake was delicious, dense and chewy and sweet, and the village embraced it with enthusiasm.
Nanny, however, was less enthusiastic and she found a surprising ally in the corpulent person of the vicar who came to air his disquiet.
“There’s no doubt the stuff’s beyond edible,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s safe. It’s from the future and shouldn’t be here.”
“Agreed. But I don’t know how it gets here.”
“Neither did I until this morning. I went out for a fly because the dawn was calling and I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“The baker. He’s found a wormhole and he’s swapping rocks from the spoil heap of the dwarf mine for trays of cake.”
“Where?”
He showed her and she had a word with the mine foreman. Who was unamused.
When the baker arrived at his wormhole the next morning he was driven back by knobbly dwarfish fists and his source of cake had been dynamited into oblivion.
It took a while, though, for the village to forget the forbidden savour of chocolate.

©janejago

Nowadays lives are all lived most virtually
Virtual pictures with filters applied
Everyone now can be kept in a pixel
And our photo albums in small phones reside

I recall times that we lived in monochrome
Black and white telly, and black and white snaps
Black and white memories stare from the photographs
Black and white moments our lifetime maps

Back before then they all lived in sepia
Sepia pictures in sepia frames
Formally posed with hands in laps folded
Gazing from history, lost – without names

Further before that they lived life in oil paint
Brilliant colours that spring from the past
Glorious scenes of magnificent ancestors
Whose mighty deeds will our own deeds outlast.

E.M. Swift-Hook

The Dai and Julia Mysteries by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, a  whodunit series set in a modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules.

“Who is it?”
“Treno Bellicus. You may have heard -”
“Of course I have.” She cut across him rudely as if wanting to reassert herself after the moment of weakness he had witnessed. “He is one of the contestants. He was reported missing days ago and now he is dead but you useless vigiles have done nothing about it.”
Dai took a breath and met her accusing glare with his own brand of gravitas.
“Well, you can be certain we are giving the matter our full attention now,” he assured her.
She snorted and stalked off.
“It strikes me that after two thousand years of unbroken Roman rule and all the incredible technological advances that has brought to the world, they would have figured simple things like that,” Bryn said, watching her retreating figure.
Dai glanced at his decanus, saw his expression and decided to bite.
“Things like what?”
“How to run a decent criminal investigation service. I mean clearly these vigiles she speaks of are cack. That poor woman, having to deal with such incompetents. It must be very trying for her.”
“I’ve met a few who really are,” Dai agreed, grinning, “but Roman Citizens just have to man up and make do with the inefficiencies and restrictions of Imperial rule out here in the provinces. She should just be glad we have the most essential basics like hovercars and the internet.”
“Yeah. I don’t know how the poor dears manage here in this primitive and barbarous land, so far from Rome where everything is always perfect.”
“If I didn’t know you better I might think you were abandoning Stoicism to become a Cynic, Bryn.”
“What? You have met my half-Roman wife? My mother’s half-Roman too. With those women folk I’m a Stoic, man, through and through. I have to be.”
Dai laughed and shook his head, then they both turned their attention back to the very unfunny reality of the corpse at their feet.

Action replay.
Same arena.
Twenty four hours later.
This time, though, there were two bodies.
One was another British contestant, Tam Docca ‘Fly Boy’, from the Valentia Game team, but it was the second corpse lying as if awaiting funeral rites that had Dai’s fullest attention. Quintillas Publius Luca – son of a Roman Senator and a proper one at that, from proper Rome – not one of those who sat in Augusta Treverorum, giving themselves airs.
Trev, as Dai and most Britons thought of it, was the capital of Prefecture Galliae, home to the man who ruled Britannia and much of the Northern and Western parts of the continent as well. It was one of the four original Prefectures, each governed by its own Caesar, established by the Divine Diocletian under his sole rule as God-Emperor of a new Roman Empire.
According to the information Dai was getting, Luca was not supposed to even be in the province. There were media images which showed him in some small provincial town, identified as Lutetia in Gallia Lugdunensis, sipping cocktails on a terrace overlooking a river, with his gorgeous patrician bride of a year, one Marcella Tullia Junius. The same article claimed Luca was away from Rome on a long-term project to regenerate and oversee the family’s estates in Gallia.
“You would think,” Bryn observed dryly, “that after last night they would have kept a watch. Security cameras all down still and I bet no one saw a thing, just like before. That’ll put a sour look on the face of that jobsworth Flavia.”
Dai shot his decanus a look.
“Shut up, Bryn, you spado. I’m thinking.”
The decanus chuckled.
“It ain’t often I can get the Bard to swear,” he remarked happily. “Let’s see if I can shake a few more curses out of those pure Celtic lips. You know they’ll sic a Roman on us? This is too big for us local yokels.”
“Yeah. Just as long as it isn’t Titillicus…”
“Oh, course you won’t have heard. Titillicus is no longer a factor. He got in a ruck with the Tribune, who sent him home to his mammy.”
“In disgrace?”
“Nah. In a body bag. Seems he pulled a knife.”
“Moron. But what was the row about?”
“As if you couldn’t guess.”
“He didn’t?”
“Yep. The Tribune’s wife under the very eyes of the family lares.”
Dai grinned viciously. He had never liked working with Titillicus, the kind of Roman who assumed he ruled the Province and owned every provincial he encountered. Surely whoever they sent from Trev HQ would have to be better than that?

Two days later, he found out.
He stood outside the Prefect’s office feeling as if he had been grilled like a flatbread on a griddle. The Prefect seemed to feel it was all Dai’s fault too, on top of which she was seething they had not sent one of her extended family’s clients from Trev. They had sent someone direct from Rome.
“This is a client of the Praetor himself so if you mess this up, Llewellyn, you make one mistake, or upset her at all, you will be stuck in the Pit monitoring security footage until you reach your dotage.”
“Domina.”
The Pit was a room under the main HQ where failed vigiles would be sent to serve out their term going over the endless amount of security footage the AI decided needed a human decision. The chances of making the wrong call were high, and too many of those, would get you a missio ignominiosa – meaning you’d be thrown out of the vigiles with nothing and little chance of getting any decent employment anywhere, ever. The idea of a future life as a nightclub bouncer in one of the shadier suburbs did not fill Dai with a warm fuzzy feeling.
That and the fact this was his turf, his case and he was going to have to solve it somehow, whilst keeping some place-holding sycophantic client of Praetor Marius Aurelius Naribus distracted enough not to get in the way.
In the lift back to the main office he had time to contemplate the implications. Bryn must have seen his mood, because the decanus wisely said nothing when Dai gestured to him to follow. The two of them made their way to the plush reception room where important people from Rome could be properly accommodated and entertained. Dai ignored all protocols and strode in, then stopped so fast Bryn pushed into him and he heard the decanus swear under his breath. But Dai barely noticed because he had just realised that this was going to be worse than he could ever have imagined. This wasn’t a woman, it was a little boy in leather trews and bristling with weapons.

From Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook

I can get my head around espresso and cappuccino, but what are the other seven hundred and forty three things on the bloody menu?

I don’t know. I don’t care. I have no wish to be enlightened.

When you come to take my coffee order and I say I would like a large cup of black coffee with a small jug of cold milk on the side, just nod.

Do not. If you want the big fat tip it is my habit to leave, laugh gently and say.

“Oh you mean an Ameicano with a chilly side.’

I know what I mean….

The problem with having little legs is you keep getting left behind. Shorty was so lost he just laid back his head and howled. But missis never heard him. He sat on the cold pathway shivering in the thin rain.

Then a gruff voice spoke.

“Are you lost, little chap?”

Shorty whined. 

“Ain’t passed anybody back that way…”

He picked Shorty up and his legs moved so fast they would surely catch missis soon.

When Shorty heard her voice calling desperately, the man speeded up. 

The advantage of having little legs is that big men rescue you – and missis too…

©️jj 2020

Time is certainly a tricky thing. Mumsie seems to have scant grasp of it for sure. The amount of occasions she has declared she would be visiting the local tawdry tavern for ‘a quick one’, vowing to return within the hour, only to roll back inebriated post-midnight, are too numerous to count.

Indeed, it was whilst awaiting her return one such evening that I came upon a slender tome, a mere novella, which claimed to be a true classic of speculative fiction by a gentleman who preferred to be known by his initials, as is now such a modern trend. I recalled reading some platitudinous parable by the same author when I was at school, the story of a sighted man who discovers a country where everyone else is blind. But this, the cover blurb assured me, was no such. It was science fiction!

My Review of The Time Machine by Herbert George Wells

A man makes a time machine and is doing a lecture tour about it. He uses the device, goes hundreds of thousands of years into the future and lands in a social allegory. Here the effete and pretty Eloi (think elves) are hunted by the troglodytic Morlocks (think orcs). Our hero completely messes up when he tries to save the day, loses the girl (who is killed) and runs off in his time machine. He then stops at a couple more pointless and empty places on equally ridiculous timescales, before he somehow winds up back where he started in time for his next lecture.

One star for encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit by advocating lecture tours for scientists.

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.