i looked at Danny aghast, and not for the first time in the thirty three years that I have known, and been infuriated by the bloody man, I realised quite how shallow he has always been. the motivating factors in his life have always been sex, money and power over people weaker than himself. I don't think that I have ever disliked him quite s much as I did then. I gulped at some more coffee, lit another cigarette and asked him to continue.
of course he started to talk about the two nubile young hitchhikers again, but I managed to head him off that subject with some difficulty, and tried to find out some more about these peculiar people who wee living as a family out in the deep woods. "Of course I didn't believe that these three people were Gods, they had to be just ordinary people who were better at social manipulation than the people who followed them. Its amazing what a few conjuring tricks and some masks will do to impress a bunch of stoned homeless hippies" he blustered, and for a moment I actually believed him.
"At least that is what I thought at first" he admitted, looking surprisingly shamefaced. "I found out a bit more later and was forced to change my mind, but at that stage I just wanted to get closer to the girls, if y'know what I mean", and once again he winked at me in a horrid manner and became the sleazy cocksman that I have learned to despise for all those years.
Realising that Danny's thoughts were once again verging towards the carnal, and wanting to find out what the hell this was all about, whilst still being only too aware that I had a long and difficult day ahead of me, and Danny's tomfoolery was just going to compound the problems i had to face. So I did my best to bring him back on track without actually grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and banging his head repeatedly against the wall. I am nit a violent man, but I am afraid that Danny Miles brings out the worst in me.
Back at The Westcountry Inn, Danny had apparently told the two girls, whose names - he informed me - were Sable and Araminta, that he wanted to meet the other members of what they described as 'The Children of The Three' and asked whether this could be arranged. Araminta, slightly nervously made a phone call on her mobile, and spoke to someone called 'Skullfuck' who she later described as the Sergeant at Arms. i pricked up my ears at this; back in my mis-spent youth, soon after I Had met Danny for the first time, I knew a biker in the South Devon village of Kenton with just this unlovely soubriquet. Surely there couldn't be that many people called 'Skullfuck' living in the Westcountry. Realising that if this was indeed someone that I used to know then I had an ace up my sleeve that Danny might not know about. Many years of dealing with the bloody man has taught me that when dealing with Danny Miles one needs as many cards in one's deck as possible, so I filed the information away for future reference, took another drag on Messrs Benson And Hedges's finest, and asked Danny to continue.
About half an hour later, Araminta's phone rang, and she muttered a conversation whilst making the odd furtive sideways glances at Danny, and giggling nervously. then, when the call was over, she lent over to Sable and whispered in her er. The two girls squealed delightedly, and dragged Danny to his feet. They danced around him, showering him with kisses as they did so, and then delightedly pulled him out into the car park to his car.
Danny asked me whether I knew the area at all. Of course I did. back in 1978 my father taught me to drive along these very lanes, nd long the min rod which led from Clovelly down to Bude. In more recent years I had explored quite a few of these back lanes at night with Corinna and one of our students, who was doing a project about the nocturnal fauna of this part of Devon, but although we were dutifully logging the badgers and foxes that we saw, we were really hoping that we would have an encounter with one if the big cats that are more and more commonly reported in the region.
I explained this to Danny, and he told me how the two girls, by now twitching with almost palpable excitement had instructed him to drive back in the direction of Kilkhampton for a few miles, until they came cross. Blind turning on the left. They drove down this little lane, and were now surrounded by the tall grey green pine trees of the Forestry Commission. Showing admirable restraint and far more common sense than I was used to from him, Danny was only driving at about twenty five miles per hour down what my Father used to describe as a 'Devon Dual Carraigeway', an unkempt road with grass growing down the centre leaving a separate 'carriageway' for each wheel. this was a good thing, because suddenly two dark figures stepped out of the undergrowth about twenty feet in front of the car, the two girls screamed "Stop!!!" In unison, and Danny slammed his foot on the brake, and they screeched to a halt, and Sable, who was in the back seat behind him, giggled manically, produced a hunting knife from up her sleeve, and held it to his throat.
The two figures who had stepped out of the bushes in front of them approached the car, and Danny saw to his horror that they were wearing grubby black dungarees, their faces were covered by realistic rubber pig masks, and they were carrying what looked suspiciously like semi automatic rifles which seemed far too big for them. It was only then that Danny realised that by their stature they could not have been more than ten or eleven years old.
Danny was frogmarched out of the car, a black bin bag was put over his head, one of the pig children took the keys from the ignition, opened the boot of the car and his four captors unceremoniously bundled Danny into it, slamming it shut a few centimetres above his head.
"Bloody Hell" I said, whilst - for the first time in about thirty years - actually feeling mildly sorry for Danny Miles.
The Apocalypse may well be Televised, but Xtul will ensure that you will be able to dance to it
Thursday, 6 November 2014
Wednesday, 5 November 2014
VB
Whatever I did after that it would be an anti-climax, so I polished off the brandy and Archie and I trotted off to bed to join Corinna and Prudence (Corinna being my wife and Prudence being a large, ungainly animal whose antecedents included bulldog and boxer, and who looks more than a little like a pygmy hippo). The excitement and the brandy proved too much for me and I was asleep within minutes, dreaming of a normal world, where normal things happened and I was not privy to the complex emotional history of a strange half human Godling who had ventured out of the deep woods in search of chocolate.
The next day I awoke with a mild hangover and got on with my daily business. The events of the evening before had been so strange, that I really didn’t feel able to talk about them with anyone, not even my wife, so when Danny Miles burst into my office in a state of what I believe the authoresses of historical ‘bodice ripping’ dramas would call ‘High Dudgeon’ I was not best pleased. As anyone who has read these memoirs so far will probably realise, I am not best pleased when Danny Miles turns up in my life at the best of times, but when he burst in through the door, yammering at the top of his voice and waving his arms about, before I had even finished my breakfast, and when my second cup of coffee had not yet dispelled the faint fronds of a hangover, it was really beyond the pale.
“What the fuck do you want?” I asked grumpily.
“What have you done with Panne?” he screamed at me with panic in his eyes.
I have learned quite a few lessons in diplomacy over the years, and I decided that it would be best if I adopted a position of what I believe the security services call ‘plausible deniability’.
“I haven’t done anything with her. What the hell are you talking about?”
“She has disappeared” he said, ashen faced, “and all hell has broken loose”.
Much against my better judgement I sat him down, entreated my darling Mother-in-law who was carrying out her own arcane morning activities with a dustpan and brush to make me another cup of coffee and give Danny one as well, and as I blithely ignored my vague resolution not to smoke in the mornings, I lit a cigarette and did my best to try and find out what on earth this was all about.
Danny was not the most articulate of people at the best of times. His strengths lay in getting people to do stuff for him whilst he took a load of drugs and played the part of some metaphysical Mr Fixit. In all the years that I have known him I have never before seen him in a state of panic, but when one considers the derivation of the word, somehow this seemed quite appropriate.
“The word panic derives from the Greek πανικός, "pertaining to shepherd god Pan", who took amusement from frightening herds of goats and sheep into sudden bursts of uncontrollable fear. The ancient Greeks credited the battle of Marathon's victory to Pan, using his name for the frenzied, frantic fear exhibited by the fleeing enemy soldiers.”
Slowly I got the story out of him. Although he has been portraying himself as Xtul’s Minister for Information, he is basically nothing of the sort. This didn’t surprise me overmuch. It has been many years since I was actually impressed by anything that Danny Miles said or did.
He was actually a fairly lowly go-between who had no real idea of who the three members of Xtul actually was, let alone their true nature, where they actually came from, or what they were doing.
He had got involved with them by accident, and – following his usual modus operandi – was just exploiting the situation as best he could in an entirely opportunist manner.
He was even cagier than usual about how he had got involved with them, but from what I could gather, at some point at the end of last year he had been driving up from Cornwall to visit his old friend and sometime lover Basil at his home which was in a hut deep in the Somerset Levels.
He picked up two girls who were hitchhiking along the A39 in torrential rain. Knowing him as well as I unfortunately do, I am sure that his motivation was purely venal, but whether his intentions we consummated or not he did not reveal, and I really didn't care. He was quite prepared to go off on some pulchritudinous tangent, describing how the two girls were "soaked to the skin, leaving little to the imagination" but I did my best to shit him up, and return him to the matter at hand.
It turns out that the unlikely trio stopped off at the Westcountry Inn for lunch, and according to his description, they were all over him "like a rash", considering him as "their hero" for having rescued them from the torrential downpour. I hate to admit, however that I doubted it. Whereas it is an indisputable fact that when he was younger, Danny had some indefinable magic which seemed to appeal across the board to young women who fell for his peacock prettiness, his silks and satins, and his air of debauched elegance. But he was a third of a century older, and whilst time has not been particularly kind to me, I have no pretensions as to being any kind of Love Machine, being quite happy in my self-imposed exile as some kind of middle aged hippy academic, with a wife, a mother-in-law, two stepdaughters, an infant granddaughter, two houses, mortgage and a couple of dogs.
Danny, however, was about five years younger than me, and had attained his half century unencumbered by responsibility, and still seemed to be trying to attain some personal Nirvana via the medium of casual sex and substance abuse. Now, I will admit that this was exactly what I was doing about seventeen years ago, but this phase only lasted a few years with me, in the aftemath of my particularly unpleasant divorce, and was over by the time I was about a decade younger than Danny is now. With the benefit of hindsight (good old hindsight) I can see that this was not a particularly dignified way for me to spend my time, but in my defence, I was only in my late thirties, and my life had just - very spectacularly – fallen apart. Danny (by now in his early fifties) sported a 'smart casual' haircut of the sort which looked tacky back in the late 1980s and merely looked ridiculous now. His rapidly greying hair was far thinner than he was prepared to accept, and his clothes were whatever the male equivalent of 'mutton dressed as lamb' is.
Although Danny had only one, mildly unsavoury motive in mind, he did his best to worm himself into the confidence if these two hapless young women, so he attempted to feign some sort of interest in their lives. And so when they told him that they were hitch-hiking across the country in order to meet up with the rest of their so-called 'Spiritual Family' who lived in a community where clothes and guns were optional, somewhere deep in the woods somewhere in North Devon, he suddenly started to show interest.
I have known Danny for a long time, but have always been ware of the unfortunate fact that he has had somewhat of a Charles Manson fixation ever since I have known him. This is something that I can understand, because back when I was about eighteen I had one too. It was the summer of 1978 and due to a concatenation of unfortunate incidents I found myself living with my cousin Pené and her first husband, in a house owned by the Devon and Cornwall Police in Plymouth.
That summer the Manson biopic Helter Skelter was shown for the first (only?) time on British TV and I was completely blown away. I was eighteen, unemployable, sexually confused, and completely lost, and I suddenly found something that appealed to me. Despite the fact that Manson and all of his main followers were (and still are) incarcerated or dead didn't put me off. The idea of an unruly tribe of social malcontents living a life of dune buggies, drugs and nudity in the sunshine of California's Death Valley, was completely irresistible to me.
Amusingly, the very next day after watching the second part of the film on BBC2,I was in Plymouth City Centre looking for a job. Well, I was supposed to be looking for a job. After having dutifully paid a visit to the Job centre, to find there was neither anything there that I wanted to do, or - if I am gonna be completely honest bout it - nothing available that I was able to do, I was wandering bout the City Centre with £1.50 in my pocket, trying to decide whether I was going to go to the pub, or have something to eat, when a smartly dressed young man approached me. "Do you want to turn your life around?" he asked.
Irritated, and assuming that he was trying to sell me some sort of religious experience, I turned round to him, and was just about to tell him to "fuck off" when I saw that he was accompanied by. Girl who looked just like Sadie Mae Glutz. She was massively beautiful, and underneath her semi transparent blouse she was not wearing a bra.
"Do you want to eat?" He asked. I was insanely hungry, and hoping that he was not speaking metaphorically, I nodded in the affirmative, whilst doing my best not to ogle the Susan Atkins lookalike.
"Susan Denise Atkins (May 7, 1948 – September 24, 2009) was a convicted American murderer who was a member of the "Manson family", led by Charles Manson. Manson and his followers committed a series of nine murders at four locations in California, over a period of five weeks in the summer of 1969.
Known within the Manson family as Sadie Mae Glutz or Sexy Sadie, Atkins was convicted for her participation in eight of these killings, including the most notorious, the "Tate/LaBianca" murders. She was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to life in prison. Incarcerated from October 1, 1969 until her death – a period exactly one week short of 40 years – Atkins was the longest incarcerated female inmate in the California penal system, having been denied parole 18 times"
The two peculiar young people took me for a long walk into the suburbs where they ushered me into an unimpressive suburban house where I found about fifteen young people, all attractive(ish) and all eating lentil stew. “This is Brother Jonathan” my new friend announced and the assembled company rose to greet me.
My introduction to the world of living in a cult was not a success. I cant remember whether they were The Moonies or The Scientologists, but they were very earnest and talked a lot about meditation and abstinence, when all I wanted to know was where the guns were. At e the meal I started to drop heavy hints about drug fuelled orgies, and was peremptorily shown the door
All this was a long time ago. I was young and psychotic at the time, and was so well balanced that I had a chip on both shoulders. I felt that I had been treated appalingly badly by 'straight' society, and that there must be something better out there. To a horny, unbalanced, and socially challenged teenager the idea of a love and terror cult had certain irrisistible qualities, although I doubt whether I would have enjoyed it much if I had actually joined one. A. Ore probable out ome is that I would have irritated the leadership of the cult as much as I did those 'straights' that I despised so much, and wouldprobably have ended up in an unmarked shallow grave somewhere on Dartmoor. But even thirty six years later I could understand why Danny had found the stories that his two nubile hitchhikers had told him so irresistible.
"So what happened then?" I asked with interest, momentarily forgetting that Danny was a near psychopathic nuisance who had commited the unforgiveable sin. Of bursting into my study before I had finished my breakfast, read my post, and perused my daily dose of Bad Machinery which, as my family knows, is an almost capital crime in my eyes
From what Danny told me, the Amusing irony about how the events of that rainy late autumn lunchtime transpired was that he had taken them into The Westcountry Inn planning to spend as little money as possible and seduce one or both of them. What actually happened was that he ended up maxing out his credit card on an exceedingly expensive lunch for three, and being seduced - both intellectually and emotionally - by his two young companions.
They told him how the three leaders of the group ("although we don't eeally have leaders y'know man, but they are Gods so we have to do what they tell us, especially Mr Loxodonta") had bought a piece of woodland in the middle of the deep woods. I knew from my own experience that there are quite a few online agencies which sell land like this which cannot be built on, and - indeed - I have often toyed with Idea of buying a lot myself in order to manage it as a nature reserve, and have a little bit of England to which I could retreat whenever the real world got too irritating.
The three leaders then, apparently, brought their divine powers into play and did something that would be difficult for a mere mortal, but not impossible, as Danny pointed out especially if one was an experienced computer hacker. Apparently they had paid a visit to the London offices of the Land Registry, and done something to their computer records, so as to all intents and purposes their ten acre parcel of trees no longer existed, and as it was surrounded by deep and tangled fir plantations, which had been planted in the early years of the 20th Century, just before, and during the early part of WW1, before Lord Lovat had become the first Chairman of the nascent Forestry Commission, and the owner had been killed at Pascendale where he drowned in a sea of mud, nobody actually knew who it was that owned the forest, so the trees could never be cut down. So this unruly band of raggle taggle gypsies lived safely impregnable on a remote slice of land that was untraceable by any normal, and most abnormal processes.
Here the three gods lived in seclusion with their ever growing band of neo flower children. They spent their days making music and lying around doing nothing very much. The two girls suspected that the three gods had some mysterious purpose in mind, but they didn't know what it was. And they certainly made music. They had some on a MP3 player.
"It was really good" said Danny.
"And when I heard about the cult family, and listened to the music some more, and looked at the two girls, I thought, 'I want a bit of that'"
And he leered at me in a most unsavoury manner and winked at me conspiratorially.
The next day I awoke with a mild hangover and got on with my daily business. The events of the evening before had been so strange, that I really didn’t feel able to talk about them with anyone, not even my wife, so when Danny Miles burst into my office in a state of what I believe the authoresses of historical ‘bodice ripping’ dramas would call ‘High Dudgeon’ I was not best pleased. As anyone who has read these memoirs so far will probably realise, I am not best pleased when Danny Miles turns up in my life at the best of times, but when he burst in through the door, yammering at the top of his voice and waving his arms about, before I had even finished my breakfast, and when my second cup of coffee had not yet dispelled the faint fronds of a hangover, it was really beyond the pale.
“What the fuck do you want?” I asked grumpily.
“What have you done with Panne?” he screamed at me with panic in his eyes.
I have learned quite a few lessons in diplomacy over the years, and I decided that it would be best if I adopted a position of what I believe the security services call ‘plausible deniability’.
“I haven’t done anything with her. What the hell are you talking about?”
“She has disappeared” he said, ashen faced, “and all hell has broken loose”.
Much against my better judgement I sat him down, entreated my darling Mother-in-law who was carrying out her own arcane morning activities with a dustpan and brush to make me another cup of coffee and give Danny one as well, and as I blithely ignored my vague resolution not to smoke in the mornings, I lit a cigarette and did my best to try and find out what on earth this was all about.
Danny was not the most articulate of people at the best of times. His strengths lay in getting people to do stuff for him whilst he took a load of drugs and played the part of some metaphysical Mr Fixit. In all the years that I have known him I have never before seen him in a state of panic, but when one considers the derivation of the word, somehow this seemed quite appropriate.
“The word panic derives from the Greek πανικός, "pertaining to shepherd god Pan", who took amusement from frightening herds of goats and sheep into sudden bursts of uncontrollable fear. The ancient Greeks credited the battle of Marathon's victory to Pan, using his name for the frenzied, frantic fear exhibited by the fleeing enemy soldiers.”
Slowly I got the story out of him. Although he has been portraying himself as Xtul’s Minister for Information, he is basically nothing of the sort. This didn’t surprise me overmuch. It has been many years since I was actually impressed by anything that Danny Miles said or did.
He was actually a fairly lowly go-between who had no real idea of who the three members of Xtul actually was, let alone their true nature, where they actually came from, or what they were doing.
He had got involved with them by accident, and – following his usual modus operandi – was just exploiting the situation as best he could in an entirely opportunist manner.
He was even cagier than usual about how he had got involved with them, but from what I could gather, at some point at the end of last year he had been driving up from Cornwall to visit his old friend and sometime lover Basil at his home which was in a hut deep in the Somerset Levels.
He picked up two girls who were hitchhiking along the A39 in torrential rain. Knowing him as well as I unfortunately do, I am sure that his motivation was purely venal, but whether his intentions we consummated or not he did not reveal, and I really didn't care. He was quite prepared to go off on some pulchritudinous tangent, describing how the two girls were "soaked to the skin, leaving little to the imagination" but I did my best to shit him up, and return him to the matter at hand.
It turns out that the unlikely trio stopped off at the Westcountry Inn for lunch, and according to his description, they were all over him "like a rash", considering him as "their hero" for having rescued them from the torrential downpour. I hate to admit, however that I doubted it. Whereas it is an indisputable fact that when he was younger, Danny had some indefinable magic which seemed to appeal across the board to young women who fell for his peacock prettiness, his silks and satins, and his air of debauched elegance. But he was a third of a century older, and whilst time has not been particularly kind to me, I have no pretensions as to being any kind of Love Machine, being quite happy in my self-imposed exile as some kind of middle aged hippy academic, with a wife, a mother-in-law, two stepdaughters, an infant granddaughter, two houses, mortgage and a couple of dogs.
Danny, however, was about five years younger than me, and had attained his half century unencumbered by responsibility, and still seemed to be trying to attain some personal Nirvana via the medium of casual sex and substance abuse. Now, I will admit that this was exactly what I was doing about seventeen years ago, but this phase only lasted a few years with me, in the aftemath of my particularly unpleasant divorce, and was over by the time I was about a decade younger than Danny is now. With the benefit of hindsight (good old hindsight) I can see that this was not a particularly dignified way for me to spend my time, but in my defence, I was only in my late thirties, and my life had just - very spectacularly – fallen apart. Danny (by now in his early fifties) sported a 'smart casual' haircut of the sort which looked tacky back in the late 1980s and merely looked ridiculous now. His rapidly greying hair was far thinner than he was prepared to accept, and his clothes were whatever the male equivalent of 'mutton dressed as lamb' is.
Although Danny had only one, mildly unsavoury motive in mind, he did his best to worm himself into the confidence if these two hapless young women, so he attempted to feign some sort of interest in their lives. And so when they told him that they were hitch-hiking across the country in order to meet up with the rest of their so-called 'Spiritual Family' who lived in a community where clothes and guns were optional, somewhere deep in the woods somewhere in North Devon, he suddenly started to show interest.
I have known Danny for a long time, but have always been ware of the unfortunate fact that he has had somewhat of a Charles Manson fixation ever since I have known him. This is something that I can understand, because back when I was about eighteen I had one too. It was the summer of 1978 and due to a concatenation of unfortunate incidents I found myself living with my cousin Pené and her first husband, in a house owned by the Devon and Cornwall Police in Plymouth.
That summer the Manson biopic Helter Skelter was shown for the first (only?) time on British TV and I was completely blown away. I was eighteen, unemployable, sexually confused, and completely lost, and I suddenly found something that appealed to me. Despite the fact that Manson and all of his main followers were (and still are) incarcerated or dead didn't put me off. The idea of an unruly tribe of social malcontents living a life of dune buggies, drugs and nudity in the sunshine of California's Death Valley, was completely irresistible to me.
Amusingly, the very next day after watching the second part of the film on BBC2,I was in Plymouth City Centre looking for a job. Well, I was supposed to be looking for a job. After having dutifully paid a visit to the Job centre, to find there was neither anything there that I wanted to do, or - if I am gonna be completely honest bout it - nothing available that I was able to do, I was wandering bout the City Centre with £1.50 in my pocket, trying to decide whether I was going to go to the pub, or have something to eat, when a smartly dressed young man approached me. "Do you want to turn your life around?" he asked.
Irritated, and assuming that he was trying to sell me some sort of religious experience, I turned round to him, and was just about to tell him to "fuck off" when I saw that he was accompanied by. Girl who looked just like Sadie Mae Glutz. She was massively beautiful, and underneath her semi transparent blouse she was not wearing a bra.
"Do you want to eat?" He asked. I was insanely hungry, and hoping that he was not speaking metaphorically, I nodded in the affirmative, whilst doing my best not to ogle the Susan Atkins lookalike.
"Susan Denise Atkins (May 7, 1948 – September 24, 2009) was a convicted American murderer who was a member of the "Manson family", led by Charles Manson. Manson and his followers committed a series of nine murders at four locations in California, over a period of five weeks in the summer of 1969.
Known within the Manson family as Sadie Mae Glutz or Sexy Sadie, Atkins was convicted for her participation in eight of these killings, including the most notorious, the "Tate/LaBianca" murders. She was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to life in prison. Incarcerated from October 1, 1969 until her death – a period exactly one week short of 40 years – Atkins was the longest incarcerated female inmate in the California penal system, having been denied parole 18 times"
The two peculiar young people took me for a long walk into the suburbs where they ushered me into an unimpressive suburban house where I found about fifteen young people, all attractive(ish) and all eating lentil stew. “This is Brother Jonathan” my new friend announced and the assembled company rose to greet me.
My introduction to the world of living in a cult was not a success. I cant remember whether they were The Moonies or The Scientologists, but they were very earnest and talked a lot about meditation and abstinence, when all I wanted to know was where the guns were. At e the meal I started to drop heavy hints about drug fuelled orgies, and was peremptorily shown the door
All this was a long time ago. I was young and psychotic at the time, and was so well balanced that I had a chip on both shoulders. I felt that I had been treated appalingly badly by 'straight' society, and that there must be something better out there. To a horny, unbalanced, and socially challenged teenager the idea of a love and terror cult had certain irrisistible qualities, although I doubt whether I would have enjoyed it much if I had actually joined one. A. Ore probable out ome is that I would have irritated the leadership of the cult as much as I did those 'straights' that I despised so much, and wouldprobably have ended up in an unmarked shallow grave somewhere on Dartmoor. But even thirty six years later I could understand why Danny had found the stories that his two nubile hitchhikers had told him so irresistible.
"So what happened then?" I asked with interest, momentarily forgetting that Danny was a near psychopathic nuisance who had commited the unforgiveable sin. Of bursting into my study before I had finished my breakfast, read my post, and perused my daily dose of Bad Machinery which, as my family knows, is an almost capital crime in my eyes
From what Danny told me, the Amusing irony about how the events of that rainy late autumn lunchtime transpired was that he had taken them into The Westcountry Inn planning to spend as little money as possible and seduce one or both of them. What actually happened was that he ended up maxing out his credit card on an exceedingly expensive lunch for three, and being seduced - both intellectually and emotionally - by his two young companions.
They told him how the three leaders of the group ("although we don't eeally have leaders y'know man, but they are Gods so we have to do what they tell us, especially Mr Loxodonta") had bought a piece of woodland in the middle of the deep woods. I knew from my own experience that there are quite a few online agencies which sell land like this which cannot be built on, and - indeed - I have often toyed with Idea of buying a lot myself in order to manage it as a nature reserve, and have a little bit of England to which I could retreat whenever the real world got too irritating.
The three leaders then, apparently, brought their divine powers into play and did something that would be difficult for a mere mortal, but not impossible, as Danny pointed out especially if one was an experienced computer hacker. Apparently they had paid a visit to the London offices of the Land Registry, and done something to their computer records, so as to all intents and purposes their ten acre parcel of trees no longer existed, and as it was surrounded by deep and tangled fir plantations, which had been planted in the early years of the 20th Century, just before, and during the early part of WW1, before Lord Lovat had become the first Chairman of the nascent Forestry Commission, and the owner had been killed at Pascendale where he drowned in a sea of mud, nobody actually knew who it was that owned the forest, so the trees could never be cut down. So this unruly band of raggle taggle gypsies lived safely impregnable on a remote slice of land that was untraceable by any normal, and most abnormal processes.
Here the three gods lived in seclusion with their ever growing band of neo flower children. They spent their days making music and lying around doing nothing very much. The two girls suspected that the three gods had some mysterious purpose in mind, but they didn't know what it was. And they certainly made music. They had some on a MP3 player.
"It was really good" said Danny.
"And when I heard about the cult family, and listened to the music some more, and looked at the two girls, I thought, 'I want a bit of that'"
And he leered at me in a most unsavoury manner and winked at me conspiratorially.
Thursday, 23 October 2014
V
Anyone who has ever been in truly excruciating pain without the benefit of analgesics will know what I mean when I say that for a few seconds after Panne’s horns rested upon my forehead I felt a brief lightning flash of electric blue pain, and then momentarily lost consciousness, but then – a few moments later – I woke up, and I was in the last place that I could ever have expected.
I was standing outside the main ward block of Hawkmoor Hospital, just outside Bovey Tracey, and it appeared to be sometime in the mid 1970s.
Now, this is where it gets weird. I like to pride myself on being a reasonably good writer, but here – quite literally – words fail me. I have always been mildly irritated when I read a novel in which a passage like this appears, but quite truly I cannot find words in the English language for what happened to me next.
As anyone who has read my inky fingered scribblings here and elsewhere will be aware, that over the years my central nervous system has not been a stranger to chemical stimulation. I am not one of these people who struts around the place figuratively wearing a T Shirt saying “I take Drugs Me” any more than I go around proclaiming my taste for sex, curry, alcohol, or the books of Robert Heinlein, but I have – at various times in my life – indulged in various drugs. Those days are largely over, but I remember the experiences vividly, and none of them were anything like this. I took psychedelic drugs (LSD and magic mushrooms) for a few months over thirty years ago, and have not touched them since, but even in the depths of my most profound excursions through the doors of perception I always knew what I was experiencing were hallucinations. What I experienced the other night was completely real!
The nearest analogy that I can give is what happened to me about seven years ago when Corinna and I were involved in a serious car crash when I was driving our new Jaguar on the M25 and a car jack-knifed into us after being hit by a lorry and we spiralled out of control. For a few moments, as I desperately remembered what my father had taught me when I was learning to drive, I tried to right the car, but we hurtled into the crash barriers in the middle of the motorway and I truly thought that we were both about to die. During those moments I felt remarkably calm, but my life did flash before my eyes, or at least selected scenes from it did. And this was what was happening now, Except that it wasn’t my life. It was someone else’s.
Peculiarly, however, bits of my own experience were interspersed within the narrative, which was more like a cross between a particularly lucid dream and watching a film in 3D except without those stupid cardboard glasses that always make my nose itch. Initially I panicked, but unlike when I thought that my wife and I were about to die in a tangled maelstrom of flesh and bone on the M25, I knew that there was nothing I could do about it, and so I decided to treat the experience as if I was watching a film. So, with the slight figure of a woodland godling bending over me with his/her horns pushed against my forehead, I sat back in my chair, reached for my brandy, and decided to see what happened. As I did so, Archie jumped onto my lap, burrowed his way under my blanket and went to sleep.
Hawkmoor Hospital was opened in 1913 as part of a national programme to build hospitals and sanatoriums for the treatment of tuberculosis. It became part of the NHS in 1948, but within a few years was well on its way to being redundant as new antibiotic treatments made TB as a widespread disease in Britain largely a thing of the past. It then slowly became used as a unit for residential care of long term Mentally Handicapped adults, which is what it was when I went there a few times during the summer of 1984. Its days were already numbered; the Thatcherite programme of ‘Care in the Community’ which was doomed to failure because – on the whole – the community not only didn’t care, but didn’t give a fuck, and the hospital was already scheduled for closure.
At the time I was a Student Nurse working towards my RHMH qualification, and I was doing a placement with the Torbay Mental Health Community Team, who were pivotally involved with the management of the hospital during its final years. According to the Internet, by 1984 there were over a hundred patients living there, but I don’t think I ever saw more than a couple of dozen – severely mentally and physically disabled, sat in a row of wheelchairs in a room reeking of pine disinfectant positioned in front of a TV with the volume off for hours on end.
I found the whole place really upsetting and said so, which did not make me popular with the Community Charge Nurse in charge of my education at the time, so I was dismissed peremptorily, and told to make myself scarce. This I did, and I spent the next hour or so exploring what had once been a charming period sanatorium straight out of the pages of Agatha Christie. One could easily imagine Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings furtively sneaking about the place, avoiding the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli and searching for clues.
At the top of the hill was a handsome, but horridly run down, building which had once been some kind of pavilion. Much to my surprise, whilst pootling around on the internet while I was supposed to be working on something else, I found a photograph of the building in an article on Hawkmoor Hospital in one of the pdf magazines published by the Devon Historical Society. I remember it as being bigger, longer and more magnificent, both from my memories of my visits there thirty tears ago when it was used as a storeroom for broken and unserviceable hospital equipment and my experience of the other night, but it is certainly the same building, and mildly reminiscent of the Cricket Pavilion back at my rather shabby provincial alma mater. And just like the aforementioned Cricket Pavilion, when I went snooping around it back in 1984 it was showed every evidence of being used regularly by the locals as a place to indulge in sexual fumblings and smoke cigarettes.
The other night, however, I saw it restored to full function, with patients in wheelchairs enjoying themselves in the sun, and nurses in crisp blue uniforms bustling around with busy looks on their faces. Various people in mufti were also to be seen doing their own inimitable thing, and from the haircuts and footwear I would hazard a guess that the year was sometime post Ziggy and pre-Sex Pistols, approximately 1975.
Although I assumed that I was seeing the spectacle through Panne’s eyes, I saw a small girl on a tricycle with a teddy bear riding pillion. She was pootling up and down the path outside the front of the pavilion and as none of the other people who were obviously either resident or working there were paying her any attention it appeared as if this personable little girl with the bright pink dress and the teddy bear was an accepted part of the landscape.
This intrigued me. Even in the early 1980s when I first started working for the NHS, the once proud beacon of democracy, and – arguably – the only good thing to result from the Second World War was crumbling beneath the weight of bureaucracy and administration, and although it was many years before the Health and Safety Executive started to make this country impossible to live in, small children were not allowed to play unsupervised in the grounds of psychiatric institutions.
This intrigued me. I had to be seeing this little girl for some reason. What could it be? By an effort of will I discovered that I could change my vantage point and ‘follow’ her along the path as she happily rode her tricycle, and carried out a long) and presumably one sided) chuntering conversation with her teddy bear. So I followed her as best I could trying to find out who she was and what she was doing there. I had by suspicions about the former, but the latter was a complete enigma.
Strangely the fact that I was sitting in my armchair, underneath a blanket, cuddling a very cowed Jack Russell and swilling brandy like it was going out of fashion with the horns of a naked and hairy half goat half androgynous human pressed to my forehead didn’t phase me anything like as much as the fact that there was a small child playing happily forty years in the past in the middle of a residential hospital.
I zoomed in on the child and realised, not really to my surprise, that the little girl was Panne. Or rather she was part of what would eventually become Panne at some time in the future. I opened my mouth to speak but although brandy was perfectly able to go in, words seemed unable to come out. It was like one of those dreams when you try so hard to speak or shout, but find yourself unexpectedly and inexplicably mute.
So I tried to “think” the question. Maybe I could communicate with Panne in another way. And suddenly the scene changed again. Changed completely. And this time it was another devastating surprise. Because although I was still at Hawkmoor, but this time I was looking at a 24 year old version of myself. And I was completely alone.
I was reliving the events of the summer of 1984 when I was exploring the semi-deserted grounds of the hospital after having annoyed my supervisor so much that I had been cut loose to fend for myself for an afternoon rather than spending it attending a series of dull, but informative meetings to gain brownie points towards my nursing qualification.
However, here I have to say that I only have the vaguest memory of actually going to Hawkmoor Hospital at the time. Nothing important happened during my visit and it did not therefore impinge on my memory at all. So I am not sure whether what happened next actually happened at the time in 1984, or only happened to be in ur-space the other night, or whether these events had any objective reality at all.
The law forbidding staff in NHS institutions from smoking on the premises had yet to be brought in, but I was aware that I had already blotted my copybook more than I should have done, and as I wanted nothing more than to sit down, have a cigarette and read my dog-eared copy of The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein, I found myself furtively exploring the rear of what I had begun to think of as The Pavilion. The ground was littered with cigarette ends and as I approached, two surprisingly able-bodied looking patients each wearing the shameful stigmata of pre-frontal leucotomy shuffled away embarrassedly, adjusting their clothing as they did so. This was not a very wholesome place to be, but I continued my walk. I came to a pair of big French Windows, and looked in to see a pile of battered hospital beds, some Bristol Maid medication trolleys that had passed their best, and – in a corner – a battered red child’s tricycle and a dusty teddy bear.
I gasped. Panne pulled away from me with a start, and Archie started to bark. I was back in the present day, and sat alone in my armchair, there was no sign of Panne, and only a chocolate wrapper on the carpet gave any hint that (s)he had ever been there at all.
I was standing outside the main ward block of Hawkmoor Hospital, just outside Bovey Tracey, and it appeared to be sometime in the mid 1970s.
Now, this is where it gets weird. I like to pride myself on being a reasonably good writer, but here – quite literally – words fail me. I have always been mildly irritated when I read a novel in which a passage like this appears, but quite truly I cannot find words in the English language for what happened to me next.
As anyone who has read my inky fingered scribblings here and elsewhere will be aware, that over the years my central nervous system has not been a stranger to chemical stimulation. I am not one of these people who struts around the place figuratively wearing a T Shirt saying “I take Drugs Me” any more than I go around proclaiming my taste for sex, curry, alcohol, or the books of Robert Heinlein, but I have – at various times in my life – indulged in various drugs. Those days are largely over, but I remember the experiences vividly, and none of them were anything like this. I took psychedelic drugs (LSD and magic mushrooms) for a few months over thirty years ago, and have not touched them since, but even in the depths of my most profound excursions through the doors of perception I always knew what I was experiencing were hallucinations. What I experienced the other night was completely real!
The nearest analogy that I can give is what happened to me about seven years ago when Corinna and I were involved in a serious car crash when I was driving our new Jaguar on the M25 and a car jack-knifed into us after being hit by a lorry and we spiralled out of control. For a few moments, as I desperately remembered what my father had taught me when I was learning to drive, I tried to right the car, but we hurtled into the crash barriers in the middle of the motorway and I truly thought that we were both about to die. During those moments I felt remarkably calm, but my life did flash before my eyes, or at least selected scenes from it did. And this was what was happening now, Except that it wasn’t my life. It was someone else’s.
Peculiarly, however, bits of my own experience were interspersed within the narrative, which was more like a cross between a particularly lucid dream and watching a film in 3D except without those stupid cardboard glasses that always make my nose itch. Initially I panicked, but unlike when I thought that my wife and I were about to die in a tangled maelstrom of flesh and bone on the M25, I knew that there was nothing I could do about it, and so I decided to treat the experience as if I was watching a film. So, with the slight figure of a woodland godling bending over me with his/her horns pushed against my forehead, I sat back in my chair, reached for my brandy, and decided to see what happened. As I did so, Archie jumped onto my lap, burrowed his way under my blanket and went to sleep.
Hawkmoor Hospital was opened in 1913 as part of a national programme to build hospitals and sanatoriums for the treatment of tuberculosis. It became part of the NHS in 1948, but within a few years was well on its way to being redundant as new antibiotic treatments made TB as a widespread disease in Britain largely a thing of the past. It then slowly became used as a unit for residential care of long term Mentally Handicapped adults, which is what it was when I went there a few times during the summer of 1984. Its days were already numbered; the Thatcherite programme of ‘Care in the Community’ which was doomed to failure because – on the whole – the community not only didn’t care, but didn’t give a fuck, and the hospital was already scheduled for closure.
At the time I was a Student Nurse working towards my RHMH qualification, and I was doing a placement with the Torbay Mental Health Community Team, who were pivotally involved with the management of the hospital during its final years. According to the Internet, by 1984 there were over a hundred patients living there, but I don’t think I ever saw more than a couple of dozen – severely mentally and physically disabled, sat in a row of wheelchairs in a room reeking of pine disinfectant positioned in front of a TV with the volume off for hours on end.
I found the whole place really upsetting and said so, which did not make me popular with the Community Charge Nurse in charge of my education at the time, so I was dismissed peremptorily, and told to make myself scarce. This I did, and I spent the next hour or so exploring what had once been a charming period sanatorium straight out of the pages of Agatha Christie. One could easily imagine Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings furtively sneaking about the place, avoiding the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli and searching for clues.
At the top of the hill was a handsome, but horridly run down, building which had once been some kind of pavilion. Much to my surprise, whilst pootling around on the internet while I was supposed to be working on something else, I found a photograph of the building in an article on Hawkmoor Hospital in one of the pdf magazines published by the Devon Historical Society. I remember it as being bigger, longer and more magnificent, both from my memories of my visits there thirty tears ago when it was used as a storeroom for broken and unserviceable hospital equipment and my experience of the other night, but it is certainly the same building, and mildly reminiscent of the Cricket Pavilion back at my rather shabby provincial alma mater. And just like the aforementioned Cricket Pavilion, when I went snooping around it back in 1984 it was showed every evidence of being used regularly by the locals as a place to indulge in sexual fumblings and smoke cigarettes.
The other night, however, I saw it restored to full function, with patients in wheelchairs enjoying themselves in the sun, and nurses in crisp blue uniforms bustling around with busy looks on their faces. Various people in mufti were also to be seen doing their own inimitable thing, and from the haircuts and footwear I would hazard a guess that the year was sometime post Ziggy and pre-Sex Pistols, approximately 1975.
Although I assumed that I was seeing the spectacle through Panne’s eyes, I saw a small girl on a tricycle with a teddy bear riding pillion. She was pootling up and down the path outside the front of the pavilion and as none of the other people who were obviously either resident or working there were paying her any attention it appeared as if this personable little girl with the bright pink dress and the teddy bear was an accepted part of the landscape.
This intrigued me. Even in the early 1980s when I first started working for the NHS, the once proud beacon of democracy, and – arguably – the only good thing to result from the Second World War was crumbling beneath the weight of bureaucracy and administration, and although it was many years before the Health and Safety Executive started to make this country impossible to live in, small children were not allowed to play unsupervised in the grounds of psychiatric institutions.
This intrigued me. I had to be seeing this little girl for some reason. What could it be? By an effort of will I discovered that I could change my vantage point and ‘follow’ her along the path as she happily rode her tricycle, and carried out a long) and presumably one sided) chuntering conversation with her teddy bear. So I followed her as best I could trying to find out who she was and what she was doing there. I had by suspicions about the former, but the latter was a complete enigma.
Strangely the fact that I was sitting in my armchair, underneath a blanket, cuddling a very cowed Jack Russell and swilling brandy like it was going out of fashion with the horns of a naked and hairy half goat half androgynous human pressed to my forehead didn’t phase me anything like as much as the fact that there was a small child playing happily forty years in the past in the middle of a residential hospital.
I zoomed in on the child and realised, not really to my surprise, that the little girl was Panne. Or rather she was part of what would eventually become Panne at some time in the future. I opened my mouth to speak but although brandy was perfectly able to go in, words seemed unable to come out. It was like one of those dreams when you try so hard to speak or shout, but find yourself unexpectedly and inexplicably mute.
So I tried to “think” the question. Maybe I could communicate with Panne in another way. And suddenly the scene changed again. Changed completely. And this time it was another devastating surprise. Because although I was still at Hawkmoor, but this time I was looking at a 24 year old version of myself. And I was completely alone.
I was reliving the events of the summer of 1984 when I was exploring the semi-deserted grounds of the hospital after having annoyed my supervisor so much that I had been cut loose to fend for myself for an afternoon rather than spending it attending a series of dull, but informative meetings to gain brownie points towards my nursing qualification.
However, here I have to say that I only have the vaguest memory of actually going to Hawkmoor Hospital at the time. Nothing important happened during my visit and it did not therefore impinge on my memory at all. So I am not sure whether what happened next actually happened at the time in 1984, or only happened to be in ur-space the other night, or whether these events had any objective reality at all.
The law forbidding staff in NHS institutions from smoking on the premises had yet to be brought in, but I was aware that I had already blotted my copybook more than I should have done, and as I wanted nothing more than to sit down, have a cigarette and read my dog-eared copy of The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein, I found myself furtively exploring the rear of what I had begun to think of as The Pavilion. The ground was littered with cigarette ends and as I approached, two surprisingly able-bodied looking patients each wearing the shameful stigmata of pre-frontal leucotomy shuffled away embarrassedly, adjusting their clothing as they did so. This was not a very wholesome place to be, but I continued my walk. I came to a pair of big French Windows, and looked in to see a pile of battered hospital beds, some Bristol Maid medication trolleys that had passed their best, and – in a corner – a battered red child’s tricycle and a dusty teddy bear.
I gasped. Panne pulled away from me with a start, and Archie started to bark. I was back in the present day, and sat alone in my armchair, there was no sign of Panne, and only a chocolate wrapper on the carpet gave any hint that (s)he had ever been there at all.
Sunday, 12 October 2014
IV
I got another one of Danny Miles’ stupid bloody “communiqués” in my e-post this morning, and it irritated me so much that I decided that I really had to break silence.
There is a well-known syndrome in both fact and fiction that someone to whom strange and inexplicable things happens refuses to tell anyone because they didn’t want to appear to be losing their sanity. This doesn’t apply to me. No-one has ever considered me to be sane, nor have I ever pretended that I was. All sorts of strange things have happened to me throughout my life, and I have usually written about them. The only reason that I have not been doing so over the events of the past few weeks, is that I don’t care. I have far more important things going on in my life at the moment than Danny Miles and his damn fool attempts at being a Black Panther, and even the fact that a strange Halfling from the depths of the forest has taken to visiting me in the middle of the night in search of chocolate pales into insignificance in comparison with my main concern of the moment. A few weeks ago I became a Grandfather for the first time, and the doings of the rest of the omniverse really do not matter a damn in comparison with that.
So I have been doing my best to emulate a proverbial ostrich; I have been sticking my head in the sand and ignoring everything else while I try to grok the biggest and most momentous thing ever to have happened to me.
I have never made any secret of the fact that I am bipolar. I am also not that far away from being a Paranoid Schizophrenic, and I also have a fair parcel of neuroses and personality disorders sprinkled here and there as well. Physically I am a fairly uncontrolled diabetic, I have a heart condition, arthritis and a number of other things wrong with me. I am also overweight, drink heavily, smoke more cigarettes than I admit to my doctor and occasionally partake in more exotic diversions, so both my physical and mental condition is pretty ropey.
I have tried to kill myself, twice. The last time was fifteen years ago and I don’t think I shall try and do it again. Russell Hoban described it best in Turtle Diary:
“It was absolutely uncanny, gave me the creeps. That woman actually thought I’d been thinking of suicide. I had been thinking of it right enough, often do, always have the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in the back of my mind. But I’d never do it. Well, that’s not true either. I can imagine the state of mind, I’ve been in it often enough. no place for the self to sit down and catch its breath. Just being hurried, hurried out of existence. When I feel like that even such a thing as posting a letter or going to the laundrette wears me out. The mind moves ahead of every action making me tired in advance of what I do. Even a thing as simple as changing trains in the Underground becomes terribly heavy…”
Over the last decade and a half I have acquired an ever expanding extended family, and the main reason that I don’t think that I will try and kill myself again is because of them, and especially because of my wife whom I love very much indeed. But the thought of it is always huddled like Hoban’s sick ape at the back of my consciousness, and I have never much cared whether I lived or died, as long as my departure from this world is not as unpleasant, painful; and undignified as most people’s seems to be. That is why I still drink, smoke and do other things potentially injurious to my health. Because my particular sick ape tells me that it won’t really make much difference whether I do or I don’t. But now things have changed. I have a reason to live. I want to see my granddaughter Evelyn grow up.
This is the biggest change in my mindset for decades, and I am trying to get my head around it, which is why Danny Miles’ damn fool nonsense has not really made much of an impact on me over the past few weeks. However, now I begin to think of it, the events of the past few weeks really do need to be written down whilst they are still fresh in my head.
The night that Panne turned up in my sitting room was the beginning of it all. (S)he had come through two locked doors without disturbing either of my dogs. Archie, the smallest and most volatile of them had been sitting on my lap as I vaguely scratched his tummy whist reading, listening to music and vaguely worrying about the journey to Norfolk which we would be undertaking a week or so later to be there for when Olivia gave birth.
The fact that even when (s)he appeared before us, Archie didn’t rush about excitedly, barking like a mad thing, but lay respectfully at her feet and silent as the grave was weird enough, but it was his/her completely banal request for chocolate that floored me. I smiled at him/her and went into the Dining Room which doubles as my wife’s office and broke about six squares of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut off a big bar that I knew that she had secreted next to her scanner. I went to the Court Cupboard that Lady Christine Hamlyn had given to my Grandmother as a Christening present back in 1898, and grabbed a bottle of brandy, the cheapest that Asda could provide, that I had bought at the supermarket the previous day, and went back into the Sitting Room.
Panne was still there; motionless and silent, with Archie supine at his/her feet. I passed her the chunk that I had pinched from my wife’s chocolate bar, and poured myself an enormous brandy and coke, lit myself a cigarette and wondered what I was going to do next.
I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that there was what appeared to be a naked Godling covered with hair standing in front of me eating my wife’s chocolate. I remembered Mr Beaver’s advice from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe:
“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
But I didn’t have a hatchet. Or rather I did – it was in the fireplace awaiting its task of cutting up kindling if the winter of 2014-5 is cold enough to warrant more log fires than we needed last winter. But Panne was between me and the fireplace, and my mobility is so severely impaired these days, that even had I wanted to I wouldn’t have been able to outfox her and get to the fireplace in time and grab it. And even if I had wanted to I wouldn’t have done it. I instinctively knew that Panne was good, or at the least morally neutral, and – even if I had been in possession of my hatchet – I was never going to use it to attack a creature that appeared to be a very sweet, slim fifteen year-old girl, albeit one covered in hair, with cloven hooves on her feet, and cute horns curling out of her forehead.
So I took a drag on my cigarette, gulped down a huge mouthful of brandy and diet coke, took a deep breath, and – for the first time – summoned enough courage up, and spoke to her.
“You know who I am, Panne. But who are you?”
Time seemed to stand still. She looked straight at me, and I gazed into her deep yellow eyes with the caprine vertical pupil, as she stared back at me in silence.
Then she slowly stepped towards me and – even more slowly – bent down towards me. For a few moments I stared back in horror, thinking that she was going to kiss me. I was still very aware that she may have been covered in hair, and may have had hooves and horns and the amber coloured eyes of a wild goat, but still in part appeared to be a naked teenage girl, and furthermore one who was (in some arcane way) allied to Danny Miles, who I have known for well over thirty years, and wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him.
I started to protest, but she put one finger over her lips in the internationally recognised symbol for silence, bent nearer and rested her two horns on my forehead.
Then everything changed forever.
There is a well-known syndrome in both fact and fiction that someone to whom strange and inexplicable things happens refuses to tell anyone because they didn’t want to appear to be losing their sanity. This doesn’t apply to me. No-one has ever considered me to be sane, nor have I ever pretended that I was. All sorts of strange things have happened to me throughout my life, and I have usually written about them. The only reason that I have not been doing so over the events of the past few weeks, is that I don’t care. I have far more important things going on in my life at the moment than Danny Miles and his damn fool attempts at being a Black Panther, and even the fact that a strange Halfling from the depths of the forest has taken to visiting me in the middle of the night in search of chocolate pales into insignificance in comparison with my main concern of the moment. A few weeks ago I became a Grandfather for the first time, and the doings of the rest of the omniverse really do not matter a damn in comparison with that.
So I have been doing my best to emulate a proverbial ostrich; I have been sticking my head in the sand and ignoring everything else while I try to grok the biggest and most momentous thing ever to have happened to me.
I have never made any secret of the fact that I am bipolar. I am also not that far away from being a Paranoid Schizophrenic, and I also have a fair parcel of neuroses and personality disorders sprinkled here and there as well. Physically I am a fairly uncontrolled diabetic, I have a heart condition, arthritis and a number of other things wrong with me. I am also overweight, drink heavily, smoke more cigarettes than I admit to my doctor and occasionally partake in more exotic diversions, so both my physical and mental condition is pretty ropey.
I have tried to kill myself, twice. The last time was fifteen years ago and I don’t think I shall try and do it again. Russell Hoban described it best in Turtle Diary:
“It was absolutely uncanny, gave me the creeps. That woman actually thought I’d been thinking of suicide. I had been thinking of it right enough, often do, always have the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in the back of my mind. But I’d never do it. Well, that’s not true either. I can imagine the state of mind, I’ve been in it often enough. no place for the self to sit down and catch its breath. Just being hurried, hurried out of existence. When I feel like that even such a thing as posting a letter or going to the laundrette wears me out. The mind moves ahead of every action making me tired in advance of what I do. Even a thing as simple as changing trains in the Underground becomes terribly heavy…”
Over the last decade and a half I have acquired an ever expanding extended family, and the main reason that I don’t think that I will try and kill myself again is because of them, and especially because of my wife whom I love very much indeed. But the thought of it is always huddled like Hoban’s sick ape at the back of my consciousness, and I have never much cared whether I lived or died, as long as my departure from this world is not as unpleasant, painful; and undignified as most people’s seems to be. That is why I still drink, smoke and do other things potentially injurious to my health. Because my particular sick ape tells me that it won’t really make much difference whether I do or I don’t. But now things have changed. I have a reason to live. I want to see my granddaughter Evelyn grow up.
This is the biggest change in my mindset for decades, and I am trying to get my head around it, which is why Danny Miles’ damn fool nonsense has not really made much of an impact on me over the past few weeks. However, now I begin to think of it, the events of the past few weeks really do need to be written down whilst they are still fresh in my head.
The night that Panne turned up in my sitting room was the beginning of it all. (S)he had come through two locked doors without disturbing either of my dogs. Archie, the smallest and most volatile of them had been sitting on my lap as I vaguely scratched his tummy whist reading, listening to music and vaguely worrying about the journey to Norfolk which we would be undertaking a week or so later to be there for when Olivia gave birth.
The fact that even when (s)he appeared before us, Archie didn’t rush about excitedly, barking like a mad thing, but lay respectfully at her feet and silent as the grave was weird enough, but it was his/her completely banal request for chocolate that floored me. I smiled at him/her and went into the Dining Room which doubles as my wife’s office and broke about six squares of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut off a big bar that I knew that she had secreted next to her scanner. I went to the Court Cupboard that Lady Christine Hamlyn had given to my Grandmother as a Christening present back in 1898, and grabbed a bottle of brandy, the cheapest that Asda could provide, that I had bought at the supermarket the previous day, and went back into the Sitting Room.
Panne was still there; motionless and silent, with Archie supine at his/her feet. I passed her the chunk that I had pinched from my wife’s chocolate bar, and poured myself an enormous brandy and coke, lit myself a cigarette and wondered what I was going to do next.
I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that there was what appeared to be a naked Godling covered with hair standing in front of me eating my wife’s chocolate. I remembered Mr Beaver’s advice from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe:
“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
But I didn’t have a hatchet. Or rather I did – it was in the fireplace awaiting its task of cutting up kindling if the winter of 2014-5 is cold enough to warrant more log fires than we needed last winter. But Panne was between me and the fireplace, and my mobility is so severely impaired these days, that even had I wanted to I wouldn’t have been able to outfox her and get to the fireplace in time and grab it. And even if I had wanted to I wouldn’t have done it. I instinctively knew that Panne was good, or at the least morally neutral, and – even if I had been in possession of my hatchet – I was never going to use it to attack a creature that appeared to be a very sweet, slim fifteen year-old girl, albeit one covered in hair, with cloven hooves on her feet, and cute horns curling out of her forehead.
So I took a drag on my cigarette, gulped down a huge mouthful of brandy and diet coke, took a deep breath, and – for the first time – summoned enough courage up, and spoke to her.
“You know who I am, Panne. But who are you?”
Time seemed to stand still. She looked straight at me, and I gazed into her deep yellow eyes with the caprine vertical pupil, as she stared back at me in silence.
Then she slowly stepped towards me and – even more slowly – bent down towards me. For a few moments I stared back in horror, thinking that she was going to kiss me. I was still very aware that she may have been covered in hair, and may have had hooves and horns and the amber coloured eyes of a wild goat, but still in part appeared to be a naked teenage girl, and furthermore one who was (in some arcane way) allied to Danny Miles, who I have known for well over thirty years, and wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him.
I started to protest, but she put one finger over her lips in the internationally recognised symbol for silence, bent nearer and rested her two horns on my forehead.
Then everything changed forever.
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
III
Oh how times have changed. I am not talking about the Scottish independence vote, or the events in the Middle East, but - for once - for me personally. As regular readers of my blog will know I have done something unpleasant to my neck and because this unpleasant something is exceedingly painful, I am now on a complex cocktail of muscle relaxants and narcotic pain-killers, which is pretty much the cocktail of chemicals that I used to use for recreational purposes about a quarter of a century ago. The results are fairly similar (except that I am not dancing around the office to the On U sound system) and I am what I used to describe as "out of my gourd".
The weird thing is that now, instead of finding it a pleasant sensation, I am feeling mildly nauseous, very drowsy and wondering why I ever paid good money to feel like this. I wonder if I put 'The Happy Mondays' on, whether it will make the sensation any better. It always worked for me back in 1990. (I tried. Sadly, it didn't)
But as a result of this new chemical regimen, I am keeping peculiar hours, and last night, after everyone else was fast asleep in bed, I was downstairs with the smaller of my two dogs listening to music on my iPad, and reading Brandy of the Damned by John Higgs, which is an extraordinary book about which I shall be writing in some depth at another juncture. But my mind is as ephemeral as a newly hatched mayfly, and if I go off at a tangent and talk about Higgs’ book, I will never finish telling you what I want to talk about. So I won’t.
I was sitting with Archie the Jack Russell in my favourite armchair, lost to the world, when he began to whimper and cower in submission. I looked up, and Panne was standing there looking down at me.
***
My father was a strange man. He suffered from the dichotomy of being a devout Christian of the old-fashioned Anglican variety, and also having leanings towards Paganism. His mother had been a witch and had introduced several of my cousins to the craft, and whilst my father knew this and occasionally alluded to it in his conversation whilst the old lady (and, believe me, she was very much a lady) was alive, I don’t think he ever completely accepted it.
However, despite being a Churchwarden and a Lay Preacher, he could also divine water (as can I) and charm warts (which I can’t) and I will always remember one day when I was about nine. We had left my beloved Hong Kong for six weeks, and were on a family holiday on Dartmoor. My little brother (now in his early 50s and a high ranking Army Chaplain, who – I suspect – doesn’t really approve of the path that my life has taken) was unwell, and my mother and grandmother were back at the B&B looking after him. My father was saddled with the job of taking the 10 year old Jonathan for a long and brisk walk.
My father was a Dartmoor man born and bred, and he knew far more about the place than he ever let on. On this occasion we parked the little Mini Clubman that he had hired for the duration of the holiday in the carpark next to Hound Tor, where these days there is usually parked a mobile café with the greatest title of all time – Hound of the Basket Meals and walked up the narrow incline towards the tor itself. For those of you who do not know such things, the tors of Dartmoor are great formations of granite – fossilised volcanic cores – that stick out of the top of moorland hills on Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. I have always thought that they look like enormous stone cowpats, and they dominate the landscape making it look unearthly and more like something from the cover of a 1970s progressive rock album than something that one expects to find in a National Park in southern England.
My father and I walked up the hill in silence. We had always had a difficult relationship, and for some reason I had the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in my head as it began to drizzle and we trudged on. The tor itself was seething with holiday makers and so rather and climb to the top, we walked on past it, and down the hill on the other side in a vaguely easterly direction to find somewhere where we could have our lunch.
Eventually we found ourselves in a patch of ancient woodland that I have never been able to find since. Much of the woodland that you can see if you examine the area on Google Earth is relatively modern, coniferous forest, either planted by the Forestry Commission, or by private landowners, who – in the years following WW2 – had done their best to jump on the bandwagon and turn unproductive wilderness into the location for a lucrative timber industry which usually failed to materialise, but scattered amongst these dark green and regimented fir forests were small pockets of native deciduous woodland, not as gnarled and overtly witchy as places like Wistman’s Wood, but still with their own ancient magickal vibe.
We sat down, resting against huge boulders and ate out sandwiches and crisps, and it was whilst masticating on our desert of individual Walls fruit pies (I always particularly liked the black-currant ones) when we heard a noise.
It was an eerie, low, pulsating sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was the wildest and most exciting noise that I had ever heard; it was recognisably music. But it didn’t sound like any other music that I had ever heard before.
“W-w-what’s that Daddy?” I asked, hesitantly, not sure that anyone but I could hear it. Even at such a young age I was aware that I could sometimes here things and see things that no-one else could, and I was always afraid to admit such a fact (although if I had done, my psychosis would probably have been treated decades before it actually was).
But I needn’t have worried. Just one look at my father showed that he was as enraptured as I, but it seemed to be more familiar to him. Unlike me, he didn’t seem scared.
The music filled me with strange, exciting longings. The nearest that I have ever come to being able to describe it was in the lyrics to a ‘Pet Shop Boys’ song I heard a third of a century later: “IU feel like taking all my clothes off, and dancing to the Rite of Spring, but I wouldn’t normally do that kind of thing”.
I wanted to rip my clothes off and dance naked amongst the ancient woodlands, but my father was there, and of course I wouldn’t do such a thing in front of him.
So I asked for the third time, and this time he answered, in a strange, soft voice.
“It’s Pan, boy. The God of the Woods. Those are his pipes, and what you are feeling is Panic”.
I had, of course, read Wind in the Willows and my favourite chapter of it had been ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ in which Portly the lost baby otter is discovered in the care of the hornéd God of the ancient woodlands, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. I started chattering excitedly and this broke the spell, and my father’s eyes filled with an immense sadness, and I realised that I had just done something else to him that he could add to the long list of things for which he would never be able to forgive me.
In the ensuing years I have heard snippets of what I thought could have been those pipes again. But never as clearly, and I have never felt that full-blown rush of feral joy course through my veins. I have heard it in the wilder parts of England. Once I heard it in the hills of Hong Kong, and most recently, during July 2004 in the El Yunque Forest of Puerto Rico. When I was younger I tried to invoke it by dancing naked in the woods and screaming out Crowley’s Hymn to Pan but to no avail.
But, like the protagonist of the ‘Waterboys’ song The Return of Pan I know one thing beyond doubt. I know that the “Great God Pan is alive”.
***
But what was the relationship between Pan and Panne?
Even before I had heard these verses, I had always tried to follow the moral compass given:
At sea on a ship in a thunderstorm
On the very night that Christ was born
A sailor heard from overhead
A mighty voice cry, "Pan is dead!"
So follow Christ as best you can
Pan is dead, long live Pan!
From the olden days and up through all the years
From Arcadia to the stone fields of Inisheer
Some say the Gods are just a myth
But guess who I've been dancing with
The great god Pan is alive
And now I had this little goat-footed soul standing before me for the third time. This time (s)he was alone. Archie treated Panne with a respectful deference that I had never seen him do to anyone or anything before. I had already figured out that (s)he was neither human nor animal, and I didn’t feel like I was in the presence of a God. As I have tried to describe before, Panne had the slight, boyish figure of a teenaged girl, but was covered with short, wiry, chestnut brown hair which simmered in the reflexion of the light from the fishtanks in the corner of my room. I got the overwhelming impression that (s)he was not male, and not female, but whether Panne was neither – or both – was something that I have not yet been able to work out.
Back in a previous life, when I was the acting Night Nursing Officer at the long defunct St Mary’s Hospital in Axminster, I had looked after a middle aged person with a hermaphroditic disorder. This person had been raised as a woman, and I always thought of her as such, but between her legs, as well as a vagina she had a small, but – apparently – fully functioning penis and testicles. She was not only severely clinically subnormal but was dying of cancer, and was bedridden. I had to bed bath her often, and her dual physical gender both repelled and fascinated me. The fact that she sprung an erection every time she was bathed and powdered for bedsores was particularly disturbing. But this patient of mine was a freak. The psychic vibes that she gave out were of a wrongness that even surgery could never expunge. Bother her body and her soul were deformed due to a teratological anomaly and she had been doomed to a long, horrible and unproductive life in hospital, and I was relieved and happy for her when she died.
But Panne is not like this. Whatever (s)he is (and I still have no idea) (s)he is perfect and healthy and exactly the way (s)he is meant to be. And, peculiarly, I am not in the slightest bit scared of her. And the fact that (s)he had suddenly turned up in my sitting room in the middle of the night without warning, didn’t seem in the slightest bit disturbing.
I looked up at her.
“Hello Panne” I said.
(S)he looked back in silence.
“What can I do for you?” I asked, feeling slightly embarrassed at asking such a banal question under such extraordinary circumstances.
Panne stared back at me with her unblinking yellow eyes with their vertical caprine pupils.
“Have you any chocolate?” (s)he asked shyly.
The weird thing is that now, instead of finding it a pleasant sensation, I am feeling mildly nauseous, very drowsy and wondering why I ever paid good money to feel like this. I wonder if I put 'The Happy Mondays' on, whether it will make the sensation any better. It always worked for me back in 1990. (I tried. Sadly, it didn't)
But as a result of this new chemical regimen, I am keeping peculiar hours, and last night, after everyone else was fast asleep in bed, I was downstairs with the smaller of my two dogs listening to music on my iPad, and reading Brandy of the Damned by John Higgs, which is an extraordinary book about which I shall be writing in some depth at another juncture. But my mind is as ephemeral as a newly hatched mayfly, and if I go off at a tangent and talk about Higgs’ book, I will never finish telling you what I want to talk about. So I won’t.
I was sitting with Archie the Jack Russell in my favourite armchair, lost to the world, when he began to whimper and cower in submission. I looked up, and Panne was standing there looking down at me.
***
My father was a strange man. He suffered from the dichotomy of being a devout Christian of the old-fashioned Anglican variety, and also having leanings towards Paganism. His mother had been a witch and had introduced several of my cousins to the craft, and whilst my father knew this and occasionally alluded to it in his conversation whilst the old lady (and, believe me, she was very much a lady) was alive, I don’t think he ever completely accepted it.
However, despite being a Churchwarden and a Lay Preacher, he could also divine water (as can I) and charm warts (which I can’t) and I will always remember one day when I was about nine. We had left my beloved Hong Kong for six weeks, and were on a family holiday on Dartmoor. My little brother (now in his early 50s and a high ranking Army Chaplain, who – I suspect – doesn’t really approve of the path that my life has taken) was unwell, and my mother and grandmother were back at the B&B looking after him. My father was saddled with the job of taking the 10 year old Jonathan for a long and brisk walk.
My father was a Dartmoor man born and bred, and he knew far more about the place than he ever let on. On this occasion we parked the little Mini Clubman that he had hired for the duration of the holiday in the carpark next to Hound Tor, where these days there is usually parked a mobile café with the greatest title of all time – Hound of the Basket Meals and walked up the narrow incline towards the tor itself. For those of you who do not know such things, the tors of Dartmoor are great formations of granite – fossilised volcanic cores – that stick out of the top of moorland hills on Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. I have always thought that they look like enormous stone cowpats, and they dominate the landscape making it look unearthly and more like something from the cover of a 1970s progressive rock album than something that one expects to find in a National Park in southern England.
My father and I walked up the hill in silence. We had always had a difficult relationship, and for some reason I had the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in my head as it began to drizzle and we trudged on. The tor itself was seething with holiday makers and so rather and climb to the top, we walked on past it, and down the hill on the other side in a vaguely easterly direction to find somewhere where we could have our lunch.
Eventually we found ourselves in a patch of ancient woodland that I have never been able to find since. Much of the woodland that you can see if you examine the area on Google Earth is relatively modern, coniferous forest, either planted by the Forestry Commission, or by private landowners, who – in the years following WW2 – had done their best to jump on the bandwagon and turn unproductive wilderness into the location for a lucrative timber industry which usually failed to materialise, but scattered amongst these dark green and regimented fir forests were small pockets of native deciduous woodland, not as gnarled and overtly witchy as places like Wistman’s Wood, but still with their own ancient magickal vibe.
We sat down, resting against huge boulders and ate out sandwiches and crisps, and it was whilst masticating on our desert of individual Walls fruit pies (I always particularly liked the black-currant ones) when we heard a noise.
It was an eerie, low, pulsating sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was the wildest and most exciting noise that I had ever heard; it was recognisably music. But it didn’t sound like any other music that I had ever heard before.
“W-w-what’s that Daddy?” I asked, hesitantly, not sure that anyone but I could hear it. Even at such a young age I was aware that I could sometimes here things and see things that no-one else could, and I was always afraid to admit such a fact (although if I had done, my psychosis would probably have been treated decades before it actually was).
But I needn’t have worried. Just one look at my father showed that he was as enraptured as I, but it seemed to be more familiar to him. Unlike me, he didn’t seem scared.
The music filled me with strange, exciting longings. The nearest that I have ever come to being able to describe it was in the lyrics to a ‘Pet Shop Boys’ song I heard a third of a century later: “IU feel like taking all my clothes off, and dancing to the Rite of Spring, but I wouldn’t normally do that kind of thing”.
I wanted to rip my clothes off and dance naked amongst the ancient woodlands, but my father was there, and of course I wouldn’t do such a thing in front of him.
So I asked for the third time, and this time he answered, in a strange, soft voice.
“It’s Pan, boy. The God of the Woods. Those are his pipes, and what you are feeling is Panic”.
I had, of course, read Wind in the Willows and my favourite chapter of it had been ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ in which Portly the lost baby otter is discovered in the care of the hornéd God of the ancient woodlands, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. I started chattering excitedly and this broke the spell, and my father’s eyes filled with an immense sadness, and I realised that I had just done something else to him that he could add to the long list of things for which he would never be able to forgive me.
In the ensuing years I have heard snippets of what I thought could have been those pipes again. But never as clearly, and I have never felt that full-blown rush of feral joy course through my veins. I have heard it in the wilder parts of England. Once I heard it in the hills of Hong Kong, and most recently, during July 2004 in the El Yunque Forest of Puerto Rico. When I was younger I tried to invoke it by dancing naked in the woods and screaming out Crowley’s Hymn to Pan but to no avail.
But, like the protagonist of the ‘Waterboys’ song The Return of Pan I know one thing beyond doubt. I know that the “Great God Pan is alive”.
***
But what was the relationship between Pan and Panne?
Even before I had heard these verses, I had always tried to follow the moral compass given:
At sea on a ship in a thunderstorm
On the very night that Christ was born
A sailor heard from overhead
A mighty voice cry, "Pan is dead!"
So follow Christ as best you can
Pan is dead, long live Pan!
From the olden days and up through all the years
From Arcadia to the stone fields of Inisheer
Some say the Gods are just a myth
But guess who I've been dancing with
The great god Pan is alive
And now I had this little goat-footed soul standing before me for the third time. This time (s)he was alone. Archie treated Panne with a respectful deference that I had never seen him do to anyone or anything before. I had already figured out that (s)he was neither human nor animal, and I didn’t feel like I was in the presence of a God. As I have tried to describe before, Panne had the slight, boyish figure of a teenaged girl, but was covered with short, wiry, chestnut brown hair which simmered in the reflexion of the light from the fishtanks in the corner of my room. I got the overwhelming impression that (s)he was not male, and not female, but whether Panne was neither – or both – was something that I have not yet been able to work out.
Back in a previous life, when I was the acting Night Nursing Officer at the long defunct St Mary’s Hospital in Axminster, I had looked after a middle aged person with a hermaphroditic disorder. This person had been raised as a woman, and I always thought of her as such, but between her legs, as well as a vagina she had a small, but – apparently – fully functioning penis and testicles. She was not only severely clinically subnormal but was dying of cancer, and was bedridden. I had to bed bath her often, and her dual physical gender both repelled and fascinated me. The fact that she sprung an erection every time she was bathed and powdered for bedsores was particularly disturbing. But this patient of mine was a freak. The psychic vibes that she gave out were of a wrongness that even surgery could never expunge. Bother her body and her soul were deformed due to a teratological anomaly and she had been doomed to a long, horrible and unproductive life in hospital, and I was relieved and happy for her when she died.
But Panne is not like this. Whatever (s)he is (and I still have no idea) (s)he is perfect and healthy and exactly the way (s)he is meant to be. And, peculiarly, I am not in the slightest bit scared of her. And the fact that (s)he had suddenly turned up in my sitting room in the middle of the night without warning, didn’t seem in the slightest bit disturbing.
I looked up at her.
“Hello Panne” I said.
(S)he looked back in silence.
“What can I do for you?” I asked, feeling slightly embarrassed at asking such a banal question under such extraordinary circumstances.
Panne stared back at me with her unblinking yellow eyes with their vertical caprine pupils.
“Have you any chocolate?” (s)he asked shyly.
Saturday, 19 July 2014
II
This is the busiest time of my year. In mid August each year I promote the CFZ Weird Weekend, and a motley mix of scientists, academics and oddball researchers descend upon North Devon. I have had quite a lot of problems with this year’s event due to some intransigence and internal politics on the behalf of the local community centre where we have held the event for the past eight years. On top of that, I have been having some serious problems with some of my associates who have been running me ragged and robbing me blind, and so as a result of the stress and my ridiculous work levels, I have been keeping very strange hours. Often I am awake all night and only get too bed for fitful sleep at round about dawn, and so it was on the night that I had my latest strange visitors.
Corinna and Mother had gone to bed, and I was sitting in my study working on an article about yellow legged tortoiseshells. It is possibly symbolic of the strange times in which we are living that at the time that I write this we are undergoing an interesting invasion from Eastern Europe.
In 1953 a single specimen of an eastern European butterfly called the Scarce or Yellow Legged Tortoiseshell was caught in Kent. Another specimen was found dead in the Shetlands in November last year. But now, following a huge invasion of western Europe, they have turned up in some numbers in eastern England. There is now speculation that they might breed here.
I said to Corinna that as my stepdaughter Olivia lives in Norfolk she should give the forthcoming baby the middle name of Xanthomelas in honour of this extraordinary invasion, and she just looked at me with barely disguised disdain.
I am a fairly heavy drinker, and I was sitting typing with Archie the Jack Russell asleep on my lap, and a bottle of cheap bourbon by my side. I was also listening to the first solo album by Damon Albarn, which is my favourite record of the year so far and I was fairly deeply engrossed in what I was doing, so I didn’t hear the door open. I just looked up and there was Danny Miles grinning at me knowingly. He was accompanied by a slight figure in a long black hooded robe, with the hood pulled down so I couldn’t see its face.
“’Lo Jon” he said. I grunted in reply. I was not in the mood for dealing with any more of his bullshit. I was enjoying the music and the whisky and was engrossed in my task, and didn’t want to hear any more of his nonsense about demi-Gods performing hiphop. “What do you want?” I grunted rudely.
“There’s someone I want you to meet”, he said. “Say hello to Panne”, and the robed figure spoke to me shyly in the voice of a young teenage girl, “Hello Jon”.
I was still unimpressed. “Look man” I said to him, rudely ignoring his companion. “I don’t wanna be rude to either of you, but I am not in the mood for this. I have got lots of work to do, and I don’t want to be distracted… by anyone”.
Danny looked at me smugly. “I know that you found the story that I told you hard to believe, so I thought that I should try and convince you”. He gestured to his companion. “Take your robe off Panne”.
She did as he asked, and with horror I saw that she was wearing nothing underneath it.
I am nearly 40 years too old to be having naked teenage girls in my rooms, and I reacted with horror! I have told you before how I have never liked or trusted Danny Miles, and how he was already attempting to blackmail me into helping him with his insane schemes. Back in the late 1990s, after my divorce from Alison, I was having an affair with a married woman who was not only notorious in her own right, but was then married to a well known and very influential businessman in the computer games industry. Danny had already intimated that he would make this affair public, if I did not help him with his project.
What he didn’t know was that not only did Corrina - my second wife - know all about it, but that the lady in question was now divorced from her influential husband and married to someone else. We still send each other Christmas greetings on Facebook and occasionally swap Leonard Cohen bootlegs, but that is the extent of our relationship these days.
They say that when you are close to death your entire life passes before your eyes in slow motion, and as Corinna and I nearly died in a car crash on the M25 about seven years ago, I can confirm that this is actually true. As I stared at the naked figure before me, exactly the same thing happened. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Danny had decided to take advantage of the current socio-political situation following the revelations about the late Jimmy Savile and the conviction a few weeks back of Rolf Harris; he had brought a naked girl into my study in order to attempt to blackmail me further. It is exactly the sort of thing that the bastard would have done. Then I realised something: the person before me was indeed unclothed, and had the slight figure of a thirteen or fourteen year old girl. But she was covered in silky brown fur, she had two cloven hooves where she should have had feet, and two – rather cute, I have to admit – tiny horns peeking out from the curly hair on her forehead.
Then my inner zoologist kicked in, and I noted – clinically – that she (I still thought of her as female) had no external secondary sexual characteristics, and that the shape of her face, shoulders and forearms were such that whatever she was….she was certainly not human.
“Fuck!” I said, and took a deep swig from my whisky and coke.
Corinna and Mother had gone to bed, and I was sitting in my study working on an article about yellow legged tortoiseshells. It is possibly symbolic of the strange times in which we are living that at the time that I write this we are undergoing an interesting invasion from Eastern Europe.
In 1953 a single specimen of an eastern European butterfly called the Scarce or Yellow Legged Tortoiseshell was caught in Kent. Another specimen was found dead in the Shetlands in November last year. But now, following a huge invasion of western Europe, they have turned up in some numbers in eastern England. There is now speculation that they might breed here.
I said to Corinna that as my stepdaughter Olivia lives in Norfolk she should give the forthcoming baby the middle name of Xanthomelas in honour of this extraordinary invasion, and she just looked at me with barely disguised disdain.
I am a fairly heavy drinker, and I was sitting typing with Archie the Jack Russell asleep on my lap, and a bottle of cheap bourbon by my side. I was also listening to the first solo album by Damon Albarn, which is my favourite record of the year so far and I was fairly deeply engrossed in what I was doing, so I didn’t hear the door open. I just looked up and there was Danny Miles grinning at me knowingly. He was accompanied by a slight figure in a long black hooded robe, with the hood pulled down so I couldn’t see its face.
“’Lo Jon” he said. I grunted in reply. I was not in the mood for dealing with any more of his bullshit. I was enjoying the music and the whisky and was engrossed in my task, and didn’t want to hear any more of his nonsense about demi-Gods performing hiphop. “What do you want?” I grunted rudely.
“There’s someone I want you to meet”, he said. “Say hello to Panne”, and the robed figure spoke to me shyly in the voice of a young teenage girl, “Hello Jon”.
I was still unimpressed. “Look man” I said to him, rudely ignoring his companion. “I don’t wanna be rude to either of you, but I am not in the mood for this. I have got lots of work to do, and I don’t want to be distracted… by anyone”.
Danny looked at me smugly. “I know that you found the story that I told you hard to believe, so I thought that I should try and convince you”. He gestured to his companion. “Take your robe off Panne”.
She did as he asked, and with horror I saw that she was wearing nothing underneath it.
I am nearly 40 years too old to be having naked teenage girls in my rooms, and I reacted with horror! I have told you before how I have never liked or trusted Danny Miles, and how he was already attempting to blackmail me into helping him with his insane schemes. Back in the late 1990s, after my divorce from Alison, I was having an affair with a married woman who was not only notorious in her own right, but was then married to a well known and very influential businessman in the computer games industry. Danny had already intimated that he would make this affair public, if I did not help him with his project.
What he didn’t know was that not only did Corrina - my second wife - know all about it, but that the lady in question was now divorced from her influential husband and married to someone else. We still send each other Christmas greetings on Facebook and occasionally swap Leonard Cohen bootlegs, but that is the extent of our relationship these days.
They say that when you are close to death your entire life passes before your eyes in slow motion, and as Corinna and I nearly died in a car crash on the M25 about seven years ago, I can confirm that this is actually true. As I stared at the naked figure before me, exactly the same thing happened. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Danny had decided to take advantage of the current socio-political situation following the revelations about the late Jimmy Savile and the conviction a few weeks back of Rolf Harris; he had brought a naked girl into my study in order to attempt to blackmail me further. It is exactly the sort of thing that the bastard would have done. Then I realised something: the person before me was indeed unclothed, and had the slight figure of a thirteen or fourteen year old girl. But she was covered in silky brown fur, she had two cloven hooves where she should have had feet, and two – rather cute, I have to admit – tiny horns peeking out from the curly hair on her forehead.
Then my inner zoologist kicked in, and I noted – clinically – that she (I still thought of her as female) had no external secondary sexual characteristics, and that the shape of her face, shoulders and forearms were such that whatever she was….she was certainly not human.
“Fuck!” I said, and took a deep swig from my whisky and coke.
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