“Hop, hop, hop” the eighth chapter

Greetings, blogospherians

Sadly, this week, I am rather late. I apologise for that, but things got a little on top of me in certian areas, so this comes to you a little less than on time (one week less, to be exact) but anyway, without further ado, here is “Hop, hop, hop”

She’d sat in her bed looking over the poem for a good three quarters of an hour straight before she finally gave up. No matter how many times she read it, she couldn’t get any sense from it, or indeed any semblance of sense. At least this time, the place it referenced to actually existed. You didn’t have to be a whizz at geography too much to know where Panama was and what its important function to the world was. That small central American country was the gateway between the Pacific and the Atlantic for a massive amount of highly vital shipping. But she couldn’t work out what the line about “Between the clouds in Panama’s new sky” meant. How could a sky be new exactly? Even in metaphorical terms it was all very twisted and strange. And it wasn’t as if it worked more when fitted with the first section. She’d gone downstairs and found a computer with internet access and printed out the first half of the poem from the copy in her “Sent” messages box. It still retained its mud-like transparency as it had been before. Sadly, she didn’t have access to the Pollock inspired music, so she would have to work out all this out some more later. She was at a loss still, but was, for the moment at least, not thinking about it.

          To get something else on her mind for a little while, she decided to head downstairs and browse the in-hospital newsagents. There would be something down there other than “Bella” and “Take a break” she hoped. Certainly, that was the top end calibre of the literature she could locate on this floor. She walked down the steps, passing doctors, nurses and others in suits or casual clothes, all making their business in the hospital that morning. She could not deny that as the various faces streaked past her, she was looking on their characteristics for ginger hair or olive skin and shaply defined eyes, but it seemed that Cosmo girl and her ginger companion had left her be for this afternoon, which was all for the good if not entirely to the explicable.

          The explanation she’d heard from the nurse only made her more suspicious. Why would plain clothes police officers be following her around these last few days. Yes she had been in a traffic accident that had involved some kind of politically motivated protest, but then she’d seen them in the Whitgift centre that day, long before the strange concrete statue had fallen off its pedestal and found itself on the front of her cars bonnet. She’d seen them there twice in fact, going into the bookshop and the café. Whatever was it they were looking for? Were they something to do with these weird poetic messages she was receiving. It didn’t seem likely, since the way they were spending their time looking for things earlier on, they must have been just as much in the dark about any potential meaning to all of these events as she was. Still, there was something vaguely sinister about the pair which she wasn’t at all happy with, and she decided that if she could, the next time she saw them she would talk to them directly.

          She reached the newsagents downstairs and was immediately less than inspired. The two principle genres of magazine that broadcast themselves most openly from the shelves could be summarised in “Lads” and “Glamour”. It was interesting how, looking at both of them, that attractive women seemed to be the order of business for both sides. It didn’t seem to work the same way for attractive men. Attractive women worked in the way that to men, the message was “Fworarrr” and to women it was “This will make you look attractive as this woman here…”. It seemed to be a double edged sword of advertising and it made Jane seethe. She decided to try digging below the traditional surface of the most glaring and glossy, and looked for the newspapers.  Sadly there was no sign of “Time”, “Newsweek” or “The Economist” anywhere too be seen, and a worryingly large number of copies of “TV quick”, “TV Times” and “What’s on TV”. She wondered if the journalism inside this stretched beyond the mere levels of high frequency radio wave entertainment listings, and from a brief flip through, the various synopsis’s of the plot lines of Eastenders, Corination Street, Home & Away etc, wasn’t inspiring.

          She was about to give up hope entirely, as her eyes now directed their gaze over the tabloids and the redtops, when she saw something on the lower headline of “The Sun” which made her extremely intrigued. The headline was “Hop, hop, hop”. She picked it up and read the titling synopsis “Missing British Harrier jump jet spotted off the Japanese coastline, over the Golan heights and finally crashed in the Pacific side of the Panama cannel”. She knew it was the middle of the silly season, when tabloids found stories that looked a lot like bizarre made up rubbish. Constellations of ‘Victor Meldrew’ and ‘Talking donkeys in Madrid’ were the ones that came immediately to mind, but this time Jane had a harder look as she read what the Sun’s military affairs editor had to say

          “On a routine flight exercise in the Caribbean, (which the RAF will not confirm the course of, although it is widely speculated to have brushed the outer edge of the Bermuda Triangle) Wing Commander John Harrowson seemed to disappear clean off HMS Illustrious’s radar and radio range. The last time the captain of the Illustrious heard anything from WC Harrowson was him making a standard distress call, complaining of instrument failure and sudden impenetrably thick fog emerging around his craft.

          Less than ten minutes later, the same ditress call was heard by Tojoki Oshinawaso, a coast guard radio control operator, working in the north eastern Japanese costal city of Hachinohe. Recordings have been gathered from both the Illustrious and the Hachinohe costal authorities, and the recordings frequencies and content match up exactly.

          Minutes later however, Syrian and Israeli jets were scrambled to intercept what both their airforces had confirmed was an unidentified object on their radars, on a course that was not entirely clear if it was in Israel or Syria’s airspace. Both sets of aircraft continued to receive Harrowson’s distress call for fully five more minutes, until it faded out of range once more. Both scrambled squadrons returned to their respective airstrips without launching a single missile. No official comment is emerging from either government at this stage.

          The final stop on this Jets rather bizarre triple jump tour of the world was to be found, crashed down, by the cargo ship Jottenheim, a Norwegian cargo vessel carrying consumer goods from Japan to Ireland, that was just about to pass through the Panama Cannel. The pilot was taken on board, only to be picked up by a Lynx helicopter sent to recover him. The Illustrious is now on route to salvage the Harrier, and investigate this incident further.

          The Panama cannel’s authorities had decided to shut down transit temporarily, until they are satisfied that it is safe for ships to pass through the region without encountering more downed aircraft. This comes as a blow though to Panama’s economy, since only last year work was completed on expanding the cannel to allow through a new breed of ‘super carrier ships’. The President of the small central American country made a statement that…” the bottom of the page said that this story was continued on page 5. Normally Jane wouldn’t touch a red top tabloid with a barge pole, but something today told her that there was something here more important going on. She exchanged 20p with the Indian proprietor of the shop, and went on her way.

“Forgotten Friends” – the seventh chapter

Greetings fellow blogospherians and apreciators of literature

I hope you enjoy this weeks chapter very much, as it returns to a quality that perhaps last week’s entry was lacking. As always, please leave comments at the bottom there, as well as chapter title ideas. Thank you all, and without further ado…

 

Contrary to the popular opinion espoused by the 2D cartoon animators of the world, when you regain your consciousness in a hospital after some form of accident or other, you do not in fact see the outline of your eye as a window to the world, framed by blackness all around. In fact, as far as Jane could see, as she reflected on this lying in the metal framed wheeled bed after she’d woken up, the television people had got it fairly accurate. When she had woken up a little over twenty minutes ago, the entire world had seemed to be a mass of hazy off-white creamy coloured light and the occasional faintly grey/blue coloured moving figure, encapsulated in a magnolia penumbra of a halo. After a little more focus came to her vision, it became clear now that said colours were those of neon strip bulbs encased in plastics that quite possibly were as old as the building themselves. After a brief glance at the clock, she could see it was quarter to seven in the morning, so she could quite easily forgive her parents for not being by her side. Anyway, it had also quickly become apparent that she was not in intensive care or any other such thing. She had only a small IV drip of what she quickly discovered was just water going into her to keep her hydrated, so all in all, for a traffic accident of those proportions, she was in relatively good shape. She had a look around some more.

          She was definitely in Mayday, central Croydon’s main hospital. She recognised the view outside from her occasional visits her when her cousin had been involved in some rugby based injury or another. Edward was a strong and healthy twenty two year-old for the most part, but sometimes Jane wondered just what kind of stunts the team was having him perform that he should come out with such bizarre injuries. Having a look across to the other beds, she didn’t see anyone else who was in any serious level of injury, so she considered herself by proxy to be in good health. Nurses were occasionally passing by in their pale blue uniforms, stopping off and checking over peoples beds, charts and drip feeds. There were also a few extremely diligent friends and relatives standing around the various other beds of certain people. One particularly impressive gentleman clearly had just returned straight from work to see his young daughter in hospital, on account of the fact his trench coat lay rolled up on the seat next to him, beneath his head, and he was sleeping in a set of judicial robes, complete with wig tin under his chair, and full suit and Pringle tie gradually becoming a crumpled mess as he lay on the row of chairs that clearly were not designed for regenerative unconscious use. He looked to be about in his late fifties with thin greying hair and overly defined expression lines and one or two liver spots. His daughter, two beds down from her, was a blond looking, short girl, most probably in her early teens. She had a few scars on her face and what looked to be a temporary cast on her right leg, but otherwise she seemed quite alright. The parental zeal Jane was seeing here was completely out of proportion to the child’s injuries, but then that just made it all the more impressive. It was indeed beyond the norm of such things in terms of degree, but it was expected in terms of what people did in and around hospitals.

          However the next few things she saw were, while not exactly out of the norm for hospitals, were more than a little confusing. She was once again reacquainted, at a distance, by two people who she was beginning to have a worrying inkling, were following her around places. On one level, it was indeed perfectly plausible that the bespectacled tall lanky ginger man and ultra cosmo daily mail reading girl were in fact on a perfectly routine trip to the hospital to see a friend of theirs, but there were a couple of things that bothered her about this theory. First of all, there was the issue of the fact that they did not seem to be stopping to pay any individual bed’s occupant any particular attention. She saw them essentially stop at each person’s bed, have a little look around at them, and then move along. They were feigning a medical examination, checking over charts and drip contents, but you didn’t have to have a Oxbridge class medical degree to see that what they were doing was essentially from the school of medical practise espoused by such wondrous figures as the Doctors Drake Ramoray or Gregory House. Convincing and engaging, but ultimately fictitious and inexpert. Also, they seemed to be looking around the beds, as if there was something they expected to find underneath them or around by the various chairs, and the way that they occasionally were stopping to talk to nursing staff, and upon walking away, each of the nurses possessed more puzzled expressions than had graced their faces previously. One of these confused nurses made here way to check the drip feed by Jane’s bed, and Jane managed to catch her attention.

“What’s with the odd couple walking by just then?” she asked, in a voice that was strong enough to make it clear that she was not seriously debilitated. This did not catch the nurse of gurard at all, as she scrawled some notes onto the writing patches of the bag

“Dunno” she spoke with a thick Croydon accent “Police or summing, asking some proper weird stuff mind”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Summing about some parcel? Said if they see someone with a shoebox, they should call in. Strange lot though. Come think of it, they didn’t show no badge”

“Hmmm yes…” Jane said “very odd lot…” she lowered herself into her pillow again and decided to catch some more Zed’s.

          When she next opened her eyes to look at the clock, it was quarter to twelve midday. Now she didn’t expect any visitation, what with both her parents work being on tight schedules of late. In either case it didn’t matter. After a brief conversation with a doctor, it became clear that there was nothing really to worry about as such. Her injuries amounted to no more than some slightly severe bumps and bruises, nothing to write home about exactly. The slightly nervous looking Polish doctor just told her that the hospital would rather that she stay in for a few days just so she could get some definite rest in their care. She wasn’t going to say no. She would only have more Primark duty to go back to, and though she did indeed resent all the “time off” everyone else had taken on Saturday, she hadn’t minded Josh’s reasonable medical excuse, and she also thought the others deserved to take up the slack from their time out. Also, she suddenly thought, she could indeed see if she could catch Josh while she was in here.

          She stayed in bed for another hour or so, before deciding to go for a wander around. Doctor Polaski (as she’d affectionately nicknamed him in her head, his actual name as she had read it on his badge, was rather difficult for a non Slavic linguist to pronounce) had said she was free to roam, as long as she was back in bed for at least fifty to forty percent of the day. She could more than cope with that, and after tying up the back of her hospital gown to make sure she was properly descent, she began to have a look around.

          A brief amount of investigation quickly told her that Josh was, for the time being, out of range. The doctors were now of the unanimous opinion that he did not have meningitis, despite the symptoms appearing similar, but he was still under observation, and not taking many visitors right now. Maybe in a few days, they’d said, but not much before that. Jane understood and left the information desk and moved on.

          Soon, she came across rainbows, sheep, a large wooden sailing boat, some foxes and a palm tree or seven. These things and more were all painted on a large mural on the paediatrics ward. It was an impressive work of art. Granted it was of the more sugary disposition, as the age group who were populating this area were still fully able to name all of the green Thomas the Tank engine trains from memory, but still even for cutesy art, it was all very well put together. A single large rainbow encapsulated the work, occasionally interrupted by clouds, birds, winged pigs or smiling purple and pink dragons. Below that was an area of what would (if it were a real world location) be described as a climactic anomaly, given that toucans and black sheep occupied a space of land barely fifty yards away from each other. At the far left hand edge, there was a soft cerulean blue ocean slipping out of view and across to where dolphins, hologram winged-flying fish and a yellow submarine could indeed be seen quite clearly. At the far right there were sheep, chickens, and the more conventional of the farmyard animals, along with a few members of the family Serengeti and some worryingly large but friendly faced insects. Jane was at least glad that there were no clowns spoiling the scene for children with more delicate mental temperaments.

          She walked along a little further and found a few of the children in the play area. Some of them were pushing around cars on a large carpet map of a town on the floor. Jane had had a very similar carpet car track when she was in reception, and looking at it now, she wondered a little if there was, somewhere in the world where there was in fact, a town which followed a map very similar to this one. She recalled then that chaos theory dictates, that with an infinite universe but a finite number of ways of arranging matter, it stands to reason that somewhere in the universe, such a town did indeed exist. She wondered just how aware the makers of this carpet rug car track were of the possible cosmic significance of what they had designed here. Probably not very, but it didn’t matter. Seeing the kids enjoying playing on it with the toy cars was most likely satisfaction enough, and although it was most likely well outside the range of a near light speed capable craft, never mind any of the currently available spacecraft, Jane had to admit that she wouldn’t mind seeing a place where there was an old red phone box that was as tall as a medium sized house. She walked along a little further, and saw that there was also a smallish ball pit, complete with brightly coloured plastic balls of the florescent coloured variety. Jane was just going to wonder if they were the same sort she had seen in Ikea and Children’s World when she was a child, when she laid eyes on something that she had in the past, held great affection for, and hadn’t seen for at least a good fourteen years.

It was a BBC educational supplies computer. In the early 1990’s these machines could be found across primary schools the UK over. With its rounded edges, television-styled VDU (as there were called back then. The notion of ‘screens’ on a computer was still too much everyday language for something so of the future world to come) and black background screen all the time. 16 bit colour was all it could handle, and don’t even think about the possibility of the internet. Back then, the internet, to most people, would have been a poorly pronounced, and thickly accented way of describing the ball’s resting place in the goal at a football match. She looked over, and indeed on the top of the VDU’s housing, branded into the plastic, were the words “BBC Educational Supplement Computer” and indeed the brand was “Acorn computers”. None of the children seemed terribly interested in the beige and black behemoth of old world computers, and seeing if nobody would mind, she sat down to reminisce in some of the old adventure games that she occasionally had played on in Primary school

“Welcome to Wizard Lore!” the words flashed in bright blue on the screen ahead of her, and it began explaining the story to her. It seems she was to fulfil the role of the young wizard’s apprentice, who had up to this point been studying the skills of the magic arts, and the knowledge of how to only use them for good. But the wizard has been kidnapped by the evil Queen of the great realm to the North East and being forced to use his magic for evil. However, fortuitously the wizard has left a series of magical pathways that you can use to come and free him, but you need to find the pieces of the map that are scattered across the Land of the great green Oak tree, and you must do so before Alkz, the North’s spymaster, who wants to…

          After a while, the storyline glossed over Jane as she began to wallow in slight nostalgia about her primary school years, in particular suddenly became curiously fascinated by the memory of the long pole with the S-shaped hook that you would use to pull open the windows. She’d never seen that pole anywhere else and she never knew why. Memories of multi-coloured sugar paper and PVA glue soaked hands transported her off so much, that it was fully five more minutes before she saw something rather curious on the screen that had been sitting there for some time now. A sixteen bit graphic of a wizard had appeared on the screen, and was talking to her in text. Except this talking to was a little more direct than usual

 

“Hello Jane”

 

Jane blinked a few times before she realised that the cursor was flashing below the typed words and it was presumably awaiting her next input. She was fairly certain however that the computer had not asked her to type in her name yet, so this was all very weird. She typed in an answer anyway, or rather a question

 

“Who is this?”

 

She waited a second before the blue text returned

 

“The Matrix has you Jane”

 

She was a little bit perturbed at this point, and the longish nature of the pause after her next word did not comfort her

 

“What?”

 

She waited more, eventually more text made itself apparent on the screen

 

“He he, sorry. My little joke. Communicating across like this it, it was funny you have to admit”

 

She was unimpressed, and continued her direct line of enquiry

“Who is this? Where are you coming from? Micro’s don’t have the internet, what is this?”

 

The pause was shorter this time

 

“Its just as well. The internet is cumbersome and unsecured, not safe for communicating messages of this importance”

 

The evasiveness of this person was beginning to frustrate her.

 

“What message? Who are you? How do you know my name?”

 

“You know about Mount Karkutai by now I trust?”

 

The little information she was receiving was now only giving her more questions, but seeing as said questions were not producing any actual answers, she decided to simply listen and answer rather than talk and ask

 

“I got the plaque if that’s what you mean, but I don’t know what it means yet. There were some sheets of paper with equations on that came with it. I think its some kind of code”

 

“Yes. That’s part of it. But you only have a fragment of the whole picture. I need to give you the next segment to make more sense of the picture here”

 

“What picture?”

 

Jane was once again finding this all more than confusing

 

“Why are you telling me all this? What is all this? And again, who are you?”

 

“There isn’t much time. You’ll need to write this down. There is a pen and some old carbon paper in the printer next to you. Take this down and make sure you keep it close to hand”

 

Jane looked, and found an old biro and a printer, complete with the dotted side edged carbon paper. She didn’t bother to ask how this person knew about all this, there didn’t seem to be much point any more

“I’m ready”

 

“While wandering about this world I fly

Between the clouds in Panama’s new sky

Do not fret at plans from between the bends

Forgotten friends will be the means to your ends”

“Wobbling concrete jello” – the sixth chapter

Greetings fellow blogospherians!

Slightly late (and significnetly below par quality, which I can only apologise for) here is chapter six!

Driving to church was something Jane both partially enjoyed and partially resented doing these days. It was not to do with the experience of church itself, she was very sure of her faith and always felt she took something out of the pastor’s sermons there. Nor was it the area here church was to be found in, South Norwood may not indeed be the most glamorous, greenest or generally well kept and tidy part of Croydon, but she kind of felt it was a logical place for her to be. It always reminded her of what she had and what others had, and kept in perspective in her mind the ultimate meaninglessness of wealth. The people she would see on the streets each week as she drove past in Sanderstead, Selsdon and Purley had very similar, if not more sullen expressions on their faces often than those north of the centre, and the children in both parts of the town seemed just as happy swinging away in the parks or whirling around on the turntops (???). In fairness the neatness comment, was, now Jane reflected on it, more than a little snobbish. Ok, yes, lots of South Norwood was terraced houses and there was a lot of graffiti around in some places, but you don’t have to look far in Selsdon to find graffiti, and northern Sanderstead had its fair share of unkempt compressed housing solutions. In reality she should keep her judgements more in check she thought. What she resented about the experience was the fact that she no longer got to indulge in the bizarre sessions of people watching that she would normally enjoy on public transport. She did have a car now, which took much less time and was much more efficient, and also enabled her to run errends for the family, which is why she did it, but she did miss the odd human experience that public transport ultimately was. Also, from a spiritual angle, she missed the freedom that public transport gave her mind. Not concentrating on gears and speed limits meant she could clear her mind more to prepare herself for what God might have to say to her that week. However, the privacy and general ‘my own space’-ness of the car was comforting, and she slightly increased the volume on her mix CD as she approached the centre of Croydon.

          Her old Citroën ZX pulled slowly out of the most driven over mini-roundabout in the UK, and up into St Peters road. It was British Racing green, which she had thought very considerate of a French car manufacturer when she’d bought it. A longish and much more spacious car than most of her friends were driving, which was always good should thoughts of a road trip ever emerge, the boot was big too. Having bough one, she suddenly developed a bizarre sense of self awareness, and discovered that in fact there were people with them all over Croydon. She guessed that’s the kind of camaraderie you develop when you use a piece of technology as often as you use a car. That sort of thing was probably a little glimpse into the reasons for the partial bizarre quasi-ferocity of Mac/PC divides there. One of the cool things about this particular ZX, was that to start it, you had to type in a four digit pin code before the engine would turn over. Normally she would see such things as just unnecessary over complications, but with this it felt like she was piloting a Thunderbird or an Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle with the amount of Andersonian security this seemed to give of. She pulled up to the traffic lights and sat patiently waiting. The sun was moving lower in the sky now, although it was still roughly mid afternoon time. The buildings were being given a hazy yellow orange sheen by the light. It was a pleasant, if a little close, afternoon. The humidity though was filtered out nicely by the convection of the fans. The trees were waving softly and in a fashion pleasing to the eye. Jane tapped the wheel to a gentle pace, only slightly impatient at the light to turn green. All in all, she was being seduced by the evening’s charms, and would have been quite relaxed were it not for what happened next.

          What happened next was the sound of police sirens. Or at least it sounded like police sirens. However it quickly became clear that the cars in question were not from the met. It also quickly became clear that they were not cars. The lights they had flashing round them were in fact red, and the vans themselves were black. There was a police motorcycle that rounded the corner first, but this lonely two wheeled upholder of traffic laws was not the supplier of the sound system that was punching out this noise. Out of the corner, after the motorcycle, came two exceptionally hefty looking vans, black with red diagonal stripes down part of their section. Jane thought she could see the word “Security” but was also worryingly sure she could see the word “Art” and the lack of sense this was making didn’t inspire here a great deal. However that was as nothing compared to the nonsensical nature of the object that was now approaching out of the corner on the back of what had probably been, in an earlier and now abandoned phase of its life, a car transporter. It stood a good twenty or thirty foot high at the very least. Jane could hardly tell, given the other attributes that were keeping her attention engaged. It looked as if someone had designed something the shape of an asymmetrical mountain of tetris pieces, except the pieces were metre cubes of concrete. And if that wasn’t enough, the colours were all varying shades of grey. No two bricks seemed to have identical shading, and it wasn’t gradual, it all looked quite random. However the thing that bothered Jane most about the whole thing, was the shaking. There were huge straps buckling the thing down and trying to keep it on the straight and narrow, but the composition wasn’t helping the affair. The joins between the cubes were stuck together with an oozing jelly like substance, not hard set like mortar, but allowing the cubes to shimmer and shake a little with the cars movement. Some of the bricks themselves were made of it too. It looked as if someone had taken Lego bricks and combined them with papier-mâché that lacked flour, not understanding that in fact, said plastic bricks will happily connect together of their own accord. Jane looked at it all with a horrible sense of confusion and wonder, not to mention incredulity.

          As the last of the rear guard of vans made its way out from the corner, her lights turned green and she pulled along in the strange convoy’s wake. Looking at it from the back, the things wobbling became even more obvious. There was only one layer of bricks, and so its shivering was very pronounced, and became even more pronounced when the first bottle hit it. Jane didn’t hear anything over the sounds of her CD player, as it was up quite loud now, but turning it off she saw people waving placards and throwing bottles and bricks at the convoy. She didn’t have the faintest idea what to make of any of this. They were all lined up along the overpass’s overhang and out by the shopping centre’s main entrance. What the placards said, she couldn’t see, but it wasn’t making much of a difference either way. The people here were clearly very determined that whatever this item was, it wouldn’t reach its destination. They were wearing masks over their faces, motorcycle helmets, hoods, towels, whatever it seemed they could raid from the fancy dress cupboard to hide their faces. Why this was exactly, Jane only had the briefest oppoutnunty to speculate because of the events that happened next.

          A Molotov cocktail flash in the air. A tyre screech echoing out from the buildings. Concrete and tarmac dust smarting the eyes, making them stream. The pale hot coppery smell of blood. An ambulance met by Jane’s car where it had collided with one of the security vehicles as the thing on the back of the transporter collapsed. She was just able to see the flashing lights as she drifted in and out of consciousness on the way to the emergency ward.

“Jackson Pollock’s Technicolor Jazzstick” – The fifth chapter

Greetings people of the blogosphere

This chapter is comming to you slightly early, due to the fact that I won’t be able to upload this tommorow as I shall indeed be traveling somewhat beyond the reach of normal civilisation, and into the heart of the New Forest, which shall indeed be a good week spent, helping out at a Christian youth camp my parents help organise. As such next weeks chapter will be delayed untill August 16th, but fret not, it shall indeed be of great interest, particually since its chapter title is “Wobbling concrete jello” which sounds highly fascinating. Anyway, without further ado, here it is

 

Contrary to conventional and indeed popular wisdom, Sunday mornings are not easy. This is not because they themselves are somehow more difficult to wake up in, the reverse is in fact infinitely true. In Jane’s case, getting up with the knowledge that she had to face down several chavs across a checkout counter, housed within an inferno of a prison designed with Al Gore’s worst fears in mind, made any day where that wasn’t the case feel as relaxing as the gentle lapping of the river Exe. The difficulty with Sunday mornings was to decide just how long to sleep in and how to play out the many and varied lucid dreaming experiences you have whilst slowly drifting in and out of consciousness in an extravagant and indulgently relaxed fashion. Church wasn’t till six this evening today as there was a tour of a few new bands coming to perform this evening and they decided to move the service back till then so they could share the gospel, along with the pop rock styling’s of Alabaster, DayWell and NovaGate.

As the time reached 10:45, the radio alarm clock by the side of her bed switched itself on. Tuned to the new Croydon & Bromley local radio station, it began singing away in sultry tones to tunes that Jane only partially recognised. It was the Sunday morning Jazz sessions, and sounds of the saxophone and other lilting instruments graced Jane’s ears. The somewhat curious squawks she was now hearing, made her remember that this was in fact the special abstract program which she’d heard mentioned a few times earlier this week, on a borrowed transistor radio used on the bus. It had a curious beauty to it, in a way that Jane was finding odd to define. The pattern was definitely repetitive, something quasi-minimalistic was afoot in the composers mind, but there was more to it. Layering was constant, not like most minimalist pieces where more instruments joined in as the piece went on. Instead there was a method and clarity to the way the pitch, timbre and volume interacted with each other, as if somehow what was being played was doing more than making aesthetically pleasing noises, but was actually trying to communicate something. The instrument choices too seemed deliberately clashing. The Saxophone had been given a kind of tinny mute to make it harsher and sharper, the xylophone seemed to be like an array of tiny toned quietly clashing cymbals and Jane was fairly sure she could hear the curious noises of a violin or other stringed instrument being plucked very painfully. After a few more minutes of this, it faded away into the background, and the voice of the presenter returned

“And that was the ‘Cassini variation’, the second of our pieces from the abstract arrangement. So tell me Hannah, what was it that made you want to write a piece about what was happening with Saturn” The African woman’s voice seemed to fit into the fact that this was a Jazz session (although rethinking this a second later, Jane did think it was more than a little patronising to associate Black people with Jazz, this wasn’t the 1920’s), but what she was saying was very curious. A boarding school accented English twenty something now spoke

“Well I’d heard a long time ago that you could ‘hear’ Jupiter, so to speak. It gives out radiowaves too which can be picked up by our technology and we can hear them. It did make me fascinitaed that God would have not only made us the stars to marvel at with our eyes, but with our ears also, which got me thinking about all this…”

“Which lead you to Cassini?”

“Exactly” The artist confirming what the presenter probably already knew “The probe sent back all its communications over the radio, pulsed and encoded, but computers at the other end of the dishes could make it out. I wanted to see if somehow I could create a piece of music that fitted in with the sounds Cassini called out back to Earth, to paint the picture of Saturn it did, but with instruments instead of computers”

“Well it’s certainly an original choice of inspiration Hannah, and we’ll be talking to you more about your new album later. But now we have a particularly special piece from another new artist, using notation in an alternative manner. Before I tell you what it is, have a listen to make it up in your mind…” the music began to play once again. Jane filtered it out of her mind slightly, she dozed a little more, thinking briefly about Josh and hoping that he was ok. She reached across to her bedside table and found her mobile phone, charging silently, shades of blue light pulsing lazily up and down its screen. This seemed to be superfluous now, since she was fairly sure it must have been fully charged by now, but for a moment, she let the shifting shades of cerulean and cobalt soothe her eyes with their quasi-massaging glow. She didn’t know how you would really massage your eyes, but this seemed like a good way to do it. After she was sufficiently indulged in the mesmerising light show, she typed in a quick message to Josh, just asking him how he was doing and that she was thinking of him. She thought of adding that so were lots of others, but that would detract from the exclusivity of the affection she wanted to show him. Guy’s are not ones for detecting subtlety, she’d play on his terms for showing her true feelings. She thought about yesterday and the weirdness’s there of. As she did so, the music seemed to get barely perceptibly louder. She turned and looked at the radio. The volume knob was still in the same place. It seemed to level out now though. She shrugged and decided to have a look over to see if Jon had sent her an e-mail in reply to the messages of yesterday. Sleep didn’t hold as much of an interest to her as those strange maths problems did. But after a few checks of her e-mail, she found nothing yet. Jon was probably busier than he thought with other things. She didn’t mind, she was happy at least perhaps to have some kind of an answer.

          She looked at the sheets again. The blue scrawling were somehow so very entrancing. Looking at them now, she felt as if they were written, not by someone trying to solve a complex code or a maths problem, but by someone who wanted the reader to solve the puzzle. It looked like it was incomplete, not in the way that Fermat’s last theorem was incomplete, but like a newly bought jigsaw puzzle is incomplete. As she looked at them, she was fairly certain that the music was growing louder and louder in the background. When she focused more on the music, the amplitude seemed to plateau out, but when her mind was focused on these sheets, it was as if the music was fighting for territorial hold of the zero sum resources of her attention. She looked at the sheets closer. The music was now firing off massive silos of loud but she knew it was just her mind playing tricks on her. And yet, as she looked at the sheets more deeply, maybe these weren’t tricks, but prompts. The music seemed to be embiggening her logic centres, or engorging her corpus callosum, or…something. Because she found as she listened to the sounds of the music, and watched the numbers pirouetting on the page, their dances and routines seemed to level out more and more sense. She could see solutions to problems she hadn’t fully understood the mechanics of yesterday, and had she had a pen to hand she would have been auto-writing more bizarre equations. It seemed as if the music was the instruction manual and the pages were the flat pack furniture. It looked like it was all coming together perfectly, and then the music faded out.

“Well…” the slight breathiness of the African presenter woman’s voice was a microscopic fraction of the frustration Jane was feeling at that moment “I think we can all agree that was indeed an exhilarating experience, and we are now joined by the artist creating that work, Mr Adam Delany” there was a slight round of applause before the voice of the artist could indeed be heard

“Thank you very much, but really this is only about fifty percent my work”

“Yes I wanted to ask you about that” Her voice took on a sense of urgency “because you didn’t use classic notation for this, and in fact the inspiration style is, as far as I can tell, quite unique”

“Well not exactly” Mr Delany seemed to want to keep a lid on the possibility of an over boiled ego, something for which Jane had to admire him, given the reception he appeared to be receiving. “I mean, there have been many pieces written about pieces of art before”

“Well yes, but none have used the artwork as a form of notation, tell us please about how that worked”

“Well its partly computer driven, but programming in itself requires levels of creativity. I always loved boundary breaking art, and felt that the works of Jackson Pollock were definitely one of the icebreakers of the contemporary art world, but I always felt his paintings were unfairly maligned for basicly being little more that splattering and scribbles on the canvas. So, taking my passion for computers, I tried to find the method to his madness…”

“..Yes I read your albums inlay pieces, fascinating stuff although I must say I didn’t quite understand it all! What exactly are ‘fragmented fractals’, I think most of our listeners will want to know more about those, since you say those are your main theme here”

“Well fractals” Mr Delany began “are a mathematical idea. Essentially they are patterns that get smaller and smaller and smaller the further down you go. Repeating, tessellating patterns. You might have seen ones looking like spirals of triangles or hexagons and the like, moving down and down. I theorised that in Pollock’s paintings, in particular his 1952 piece ‘blue poles’, that there were partial broken up pieces of fractal patterns, strewn across the page in a complicated pattern. Whether or not they were his intention, I don’t know, but the computer we used managed to find them…”

“So how did that lead to the, frankly rapturous, piece we just heard”

“Well fractals can be expressed in a number of ways, the most common way is visually, but they can also be expressed in sound. We worked out a coded form of notation, for the different colours and shapes found in ‘Blue poles’ and then let the computer convert it for us into normal western music notation”

“And how did you decide on the instruments, which to play where and the like, that must surely have been a complicated process”

“It was somewhat yes, but we listened to see which instruments carried the particular shape and style of fractal best, and worked slowly from that onwards. It was indeed quite intense at the labs, but we got there”

“Its fascinating to hear the idea of music being composed in laboratories Mr Delany. I hear you mention ‘we’ a lot here, who else was it with you”

“Well the whole project was a team endevor with the University of Bath, Exeter and Kent’s computer sciences departments. I was the director of the project, but the album as a whole was a pretty big job that I alone couldn’t possibly take credit for”

“Well thank you very much for coming in today Mr Delany, just a quick reminder, what was the name of the piece again”

“Technicolor, its on the album ‘Jazzstick’, which was released last week”

“Well thank you again Mr Delany, we’ll be hearing more of that again soon I’m sure. But now, more from Miss Hannah Felt’s new work, North West of Orion’s arm…” Jane didn’t really listen much more to what the interviewer was saying now, she turned off the radio. Something quite bizarre had just happened. She’d felt as if her mind had been temporally hijacked by mathematical miniaturising music. She didn’t know the next logical thing to do here, but then she had an answer.

 

To: Jon.Rouge@Gmail.com

From: J.Brunne379@hotmail.co.uk

Attached: Technicolour – Adam Delany et all.MP3

 

Hey Jon

 

I just listened to this very strange piece of music on the radio and…well have a listen to it whilst your reading the JPEGs I sent you and get back to me. You’ll see what I mean then, as I can’t really describe it. Hope to hear from you soon

 

Jane

“In the foothills of Mount Karkutai” – The fourth chapter

Greetings fellow trollers of the Blogosphere

As you may have been waiting slightly longer than usual for, here is chapter 4 of the ChaptersFromNotes story. I hope you all enjoy it and please leave your comments below

There was no mistaking what it was, given the pages she had just read. There had been a diagram referenced at the end of the chapter which had shown a picture exactly like what she had in her hands here. A cylinder of very thin looking glass, just under a foot long, with two domed ends. It was framed with what was probably once polished, but now heavily tarnished brass, with plain coloured rivets and seals keeping it all in place. Inside, was a long feather, with a metal tip and a short wooden holding staff. The feather (Jane suspected) was from a bald eagle, with its brown and white tones, long majestic sweep and sharply defined strands extending from its spine. She took it out of the packing material and held it gently in her hands. The feather itself was suspended in the middle of the tube by two small clips at either end, so it barely touched the outer glass. Jane could feel its lightness, as if somehow had it had air inside it would have been perceptibly heavier. It was curiously beautiful, and for nearly ten minutes she sat there, simply cradling the thing in her hand, angling it differently to the sodium glow of the lamps that were beginning to come on now that early evening was approaching.

After having glanced at her watch, she thought she should continue on her way back home and she started making a new well in the packing sawdust-like substance. As she did so however, more objects emerged. The first thing she noticed was the plastic corner of something that had been laminated. Upon getting the whole thing out she found it was a fragment of parchment that appeared to have been hand written on. The calligraphy however was very tough to decipher, and she couldn’t make out any of what it said. The parchment it was on looked to be extremely dated but it was parchment, and not papyrus or something ancient, so Jane could take a stab that this wasn’t any more than five centuries old at the outside. Of course that was a very wide margin of error and she wished the scrawled writing was clearer for her to make out. The second object however, was much more comprehensible. It was a blue sheet of very thin, but very old looking metal, a size slightly larger than that of a credit card, but the same shape too with rounded corners. Oddly enough, it looked very much like a miniaturised road sign. The blue shading was the same as was on motorway signs, and there was a white border all around the edge. The back too, was a perfect battleship grey and the font of what was written on the front was white and the same kind of clear crisp font that the Ministry of Transport held so dear. What was written on it confused Jane a great deal

“In between those lands wherein compass’s lie

In amongst the foothills of mount Karkutai

There beyond the site of much bearings lost

Heat in and of the sky will count our true cost”

Poetry had never been Jane’s strong suit. She’d gotten a D at English Literature A-level, possibly for mocking Marlowe slightly in the exam. So for this to be something she could critically examine for meaning was rather difficult. She looked around in the box for any other objects, and found another peculiar thing. It was an A5 sheet of paper from what Jane could only assume to be a maths book. Assuming this because firstly, having done GCSE’s in maths she knew that maths was the only subject where the exercise book had 0.5mm square grids across its pages, rather than the traditional blue lines and red margin for your average writing. And secondly, and much more obviously, the paper was covered in many and various strange and (to Jane) incomprehensible mathematical formulae. There were a few other pages of this in the box, which seemed all to have been ripped out of a notebook of some kind, ring bound she guessed, judging from the tears on the edges of the page. She searched around the box until she was sure she’d found them all. There were five in total, each covered in blue inked writing on both sides. Looking at the bottom corners of each, she noticed a small circled number that seemed to have nothing to do with the hyper-numerical scrawl going on over the rest of the page. These, she thought, must have been the page numbers. They did start at one, so Jane was at least satisfied that she had a reasonably logical fragment of the entirety of these writings. If they’d started at six or thirty one, or heaven forbid, four hundred and ninety five or some other such gratuitously large number, she wouldn’t have had any hope of making any sense of this at all. As it was, however, she stood at least a fighting chance. She wasn’t a mathematician, but she decided to see how far her GCSE B in maths would get her.

After having run her eyes over the pages for about half an hour, she had an idea of what the person who wrote this had been trying to do, but only a partial idea of how exactly he’d been doing it. Whoever it was must have also seen the strange blue plaque because on each of the pages there were copies of the words or fragments of it in different places, and the author looked to have been trying to find some kind of numerological significance to them. It was as if he was a code breaker, stranded on an island with nothing but a pen, a pad and this plaque. He seemed to spend a lot of time on the word “Karkutai”, more so than any other part of the poem. Jane had never heard of mount Karkutai, and it was in her mind somehow that maybe it wasn’t exactly real. This only served to make the fact that some one had spent so much time trying to “decode” it all the more intriguing. She saw a few mathematical functions she recognised. Sine, Cos, Pi once or twice, and various usages of squares, square roots and ‘to the power of’ type things (Jane was sure they had a technical name but she couldn’t think of it off hand). But the other stuff, symbols like an E with a sideways V in the middle, Greek letters and other strange type faced icons she’d never seen before, confused her. She thought about it for a bit and then realised she did have a friend who may indeed know what was going on here.

After five minutes of brisk walking, in order to avoid being any later than she had to be, she turned up at the door of her house, and was somewhat pleased to see that both cars were out. Mum was probably at the local Sainsbury or Tesco, on a weekend evening supermarket run. Dad had mentioned that he was meeting up with some friends this evening, out somewhere in Sussex so he most likely was still there. She got in and heard the noises of her brother playing “Halo Wars” on the Xbox. The sounds of plasma grenades and assault rifle fire happily masked her entry, and thus she avoided the question of why she was so late back with ease, and instead quickly skulked up to her room. Firing up her laptop and turning on a scanner that had been donated from her dads work, after having swept away her copy of “Cather in the Rye” and “The cold war: A very short introduction” off its lid, she ran the papers through to make up some Jpegs and then emailed them to someone whom she trusted with this sort of things.

Approximately one thousand kilometres East and slightly south, in amongst a sea of discarded CDs, trailing leads of chargers, power packs, external hard drives and the occasional Mars bar wrapper, a computer beeped tunelessly. This computer was far from alone in this particular task. The owner of the small, one bedroom domicile that these computers called home, knew of a great many ways to program a computer to beep tunelessly at times when normal computers would require several dozen clicks and words typed in before it informed you of these things. One black and silver computer was beeping tunelessly and in a different tone to inform those whose ears would listen, about the various people who were signing in and out of Facebook at any given moment. Another, with a curiously designed glowing green tower unit, was programmed to beep every time the words “Dating” and “Online” were put into Google as part of a single search, and then on the screen it would show from which country and narrow it down to a region of that country the search came from. A third, bathed in a low simmering bowl of blue neon, was programmed to run a sweep for the illegal use of Ebay ‘G of the Gone’ software, designed to purchase an item mere seconds before the time is up. The one that was beeping in particular, however, caught the owner of the domicile’s particular attention. Its beep was informing him of an incoming E-mail, of a particularly interesting contact. Coming away from a pizza he was enjoying in the kitchen, the five foot nine, stocky twenty five year old, sat down and clicked away till he got to the message. It read as follows:

To: Jon.Rouge@Gmail.com

From: J.Brunne379@hotmail.co.uk

Subject: Mount Karkutai?

Attached: StrangePoem.JPEG KarkuMath1.JPEG, KarkuMath2.JPEG, KarkuMath3.JPEG, KarkuMat…

Hey Jon.

Thought you might like to take a look at these. I don’t get them at all myself, was wondering if your logorhythmical brain could make more sense of them. Let me know when you’ve got something. Thank you

Jane.

Jon indeed was intrigued. He’d met Jane a long time ago through OKcupid, and they’d stayed friends for a long time, even though he was now based out in Prague, teaching English. It was only a temporary thing, though, and he was definitely going to spend more time with her when he got back. She clearly knew how to press his buttons still, as this did look like a very bizarre puzzle. Whoever had written these must not have had access to a descent computer set up at the time. It looked like they’d been trying to do complex trigonometry-styled encryption systems in his head. And from the way in which the pages had been written, it looked like they’d got some of the way, but not far enough. Jon flicked through the images again. They may not have gotten all the way, but to do all this without a calculator would require a very impressive mind. If Jane knew who had made these he would very much like to meet him or her. Fortunately for his own sake, Jon did indeed have a good few decrypting algorithm systems he used for his programming freelance work from time to time. He launched a few new windows and began his work.

Jane knew Jon was the best person to send this to. He’d finished a masters in computer science a year or so ago and would know the kind of things needed to make more sense out of whatever it was that was written on there than she did. Moreover, she could definitely trust him. He was an American by birth, but had lived in Europe for most of his education and planned on staying here long term. Also, he wasn’t the sort of person who would go blabbing, even if it was to his own benefit. They’d shared many a secret over Skype in the last few years, and she knew he never told anyone any of her private stories. Partly because no one in his immediate circle of friends would know her, and thus the stories would have no relevance, but also because he was a classic gentleman, and wasn’t that kind of man. Something about all of what she’d found in the parcel told her that it wasn’t safe to be revealing this to the wider world just yet. There was more here to be found.

After a few minutes of musings as to what this might be, her MSN dinged with the informing helpfulness that befitted it, telling her that Jon had sent her a reply:

To: J.Brunne379@hotmail.co.uk

From: Jon.Rouge@Gmail.com

Subject: RE: Mount Karkutai? – Intriguing…

Hey Jane

This is very weird, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone try trig-decrypt in their head before. I’ve got the comps working at it, but even they seem to be having some trouble. Most likely I’ll have an answer for you tomorrow, but until then this one’s going to remain a mystery. Thanks very much for this though, its very creepy math.

Talk soon

Jon

Jane had no idea what ‘trig-decrypt’ meant, if it meant anything at all. Jon did have a slight habit of occasionally making technical terms up to bamboozle people into submission in discussions. Still, she looked forward to knowing more about this. She tried doing a little research of her own. Opening up Google maps, she put “Mount Karkutai” into the search box. There were no results. Nor where there any with Karkutai on its own. This was not entirely surprising to Jane, but it did make it all the more curious. She would just have to wait till tomorrow now, she supposed.

“Undiscovered writing utensils” – The third chapter

Greetings people of the Blogosphere

As always, here for your intriguement, is chapter three of the continuingly randomly developing chaptersfromnotes story. Let me know your thoughts in comments

The upper level of Waterstones was relatively empty, Jane thought as she entered in, past the gentle blast of the air conditioning unit. There were however several reasons for this, she figured, not least of which was the fact that many more people had been attracted downstairs by the spectacle of the book signing. Also, the young adult fiction was on the bottom floor, which is where most of the liberated GCSE revisers would be spending more their time and money. The lower level also housed the ‘popular psychology’ section, which basically was, as far as Jane could tell, a euphemism for self help books and poorly guised new-ageism, and for some reason people always bought more of those in the summer. Possibly turning over a new leaf whilst they’re on their holiday perhaps. In any case, she was free to explore the fiction, history, politics, and all the other sections that the upstairs floor offered without significant interruption from others.

          Waterstones was, in Jane’s opinion, a very classily set out shop. It was all set out in a simple black and white decor, with only the wood trim of the middle part of the floor by the tills changing that. The shelves all reached pretty much the ceiling, but just before it, the shelf’s category was displayed in neat white Times New Roman on a black background. Everything was done so as to focus you on the books, not the environment around you. Unlike some book shops she’d been into where they try and pamper you to no end. She wondered, thinking that, who it was who had come up with the idea of mixing the coffee shop with the bookshop as an enterprise. It wasn’t a bad idea, sitting and sipping a latte whilst you browse over Tom Holts latest bizarre offering was something Jane could see herself enjoy doing, it was just that it got to the stage that bookshops seemed to want to turn the book selling function into a sideshow to the main events of just relaxing. She much preferred the ‘no-nonsense’ approach of just books, shelves and labels, with some helpful staff who know something about the books they are dealing with.

          Just as she was looking over some more of the literary fiction section, she came across a leaflet which had clearly been left without proper consideration, sticking out of one of the tops of the books. It wasn’t folded, just a single sheet of glossy paper, one lengthways third of A4. The cause it discussed however did catch her attention. Its design was that of an open, leather-bound book with a child’s face on a close up who was clearly deeply engrossed in whatever it was on the page. The words at the top said “No to age banding”. Skimming over a bit more she discovered that it seemed that several UK publishers were interested in the idea of branding books into age ranges, according to readership ability. Or at least that’s what the publishers claim, so the leaflet informed her. After a little further reading however it became clear that in the opinion of the campaign the people benefiting here would be the supermarkets, who would find it easier to deal with concerned parents trying to quickly get their children a new bedtime story filler, and the publishers themselves who would have more of a dedicated market share. Having a proper look through here, Jane felt she had to agree. She remembered well reading Enid Blyton’s “Hollow Tree House” when she was about eight or nine, and yes reading it now she looked at it in an extremely different light, that wouldn’t mean that she couldn’t have enjoyed it if she’d read it when she was fourteen, or fifteen. Not to mention the pressure that British kids were under anyway what with SAT’s and every other type of exams the government seemed determined to pile on. She read on a bit more to a few more comments by Philip Pullman that it seemed had been made the last time this issue had come around. They’d defeated it then, and from what Jane was reading, she hoped they would defeat it now. She folded up the leaflet and put in her pocket, with an intent to register her name on the website later that evening.

          Turning round to move on to a different section, Jane collided with a short, skinny, longhaired twenty-something man, who was carrying a pile of books over to another part of the shop. The black polo shirt, black trousers and the fact that around his neck was a plastic dog tag with a big “W” on it, told her that he was indeed a member of the Waterstones staff, and not simply someone with far too much money and time on their hands, in the process of buying enough books for a small library. Most of the ones he was carrying appeared to be new history paperbacks, Niall Fergusons latest work on separatism and some Peter Snow pieces also, along with something about Mao by Ian Kershaw, who was clearly moving on to the left wing dictators now that he had exhausted all available material on Hitler. However, one book seemed to stand out to Jane, and as she helped pick up the debris created by her accidental collision in an extremely apologetic fashion, she picked it up and began to give it a more through examination. A brief nod to the staff member allowed her to continue reading undisturbed, as the work of paper, ink and leather in her hand was indeed gripping her fascination.

It was a curious thing to look at and hold, even before she had got onto the title and tagline. It felt much older than it looked. Or possibly it looked much older than it felt, Jane couldn’t be exactly sure. Its weight and texture seemed to lend itself to a book that had adorned the shelves for many an era and would spouse many a secret if its pages were in fact tongues and the dots over the “i” on the cover were in fact eyes. Yet at the same time, the edges of the paper felt clean and crisp, and the ink was well defined and not at all worn looking. And these facts too seemed to shift depending upon the angle she held it at. It was as if it was in some kind of ‘nature of existence’-hologram state. Just like how you can hold a CD up to the light at different angles and get scarlet through indigo, so how Jane held this book seemed to cause it to move through fresh off the press, to the relic of four generations of inheritance tax evasion. She was just beginning to get over this however as she opened the book to the first page, highly intrigued by its dust jacketed title. “The ink of history: Pens that wrote the story of the past, now lost to the ages”. Jane had to admit that on some level, the idea of a book of the history of pens wasn’t exactly the most appealing or engaging subject that she could ever think of to write on, but it quickly became apparent that this was not the case. A brief flick through the introduction and contents pages told her that this was something much more intriguing. Each chapter was the story of a pen. One pen in particular, that had been used by a particularly monumental figure to in turn write a particularly monumental document or draw a particularly monumental diagram or work of art. The myths and tales that surrounded these pens was, in Jane’s view, fantastic. Some of them had been recovered, some of them hadn’t. Jane looked over a few of the chapters while she had some time. She had resolved though to definitely buy this. The first one she came across was, logically, the first one in the book.
“The Needle of Kadesh” was the words that greeted her on that page. She read on “When you’re the absolute monarch of a desert country, with genitalia-deprived servants waiting on your every whim and limb without question, when you have more wives than hairs on your head and so much gold lining in your burial chamber you could easily give Fort Knox ‘vault envy’ you might think that the treasure that’s not going to be top of your Christmas list would be stationary. But then again, there were very few rulers like Hatusiliš III.

In 1274BC one of the most important documents in international relations history was carved by this particular engraving staff, and its design was ordered by Hatusiliš III himself. After the battle of Kadesh (now to be found in modern day Syria) neither the Hittites nor the Egyptians who had been fighting gained a significant advantage, and more importantly, neither side could afford continued conflict. For the Egyptians, there was the threat of Libyan tribesmen in the further west of the Maghreb regions scared them to the extent of building lots of fortresses along the borders, and for the Hittites, they were worried about the growing power of the Assyrians who had just taken over Hanigalbat, which was a small client nation-kingdom of the Hittites in what we would now call Iraq. So both sides, seeing the stalemate and that the other needed peace more than continued war, set up a marriage of convenience where they would defend each other from external threat as well as refrain from being a threat to each other. This document is considered the first known example of what we would now call a ‘collective security’ treaty, and is considered of such high importance by the international community, that to this day a replica of it can be found in the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Of course, being an absolute monarch, and signing possibly one of the most strategically important documents of his day, Hatusiliš put a bit more effort and flair into the device used to make it than you might normally expect. The document itself was inscribed on silver, the main reason being that parchment could have burnt or degraded in some way, but silver would last long and shine well. Its shine too was clear and distinct, not a glowing colour such as gold, also gold could have been interpreted as a bribe, so all in all it was a material to avoid. The pen itself, Hatusiliš had shaped, the basic starting point of a classic Egyptian obelisk, so as to please his new allies. However, in point of fact the twenty five centimeter engraving staff actually took on two obelisks in it shape, each meeting at the bottom. The reason being was that at the tip of one, was the preferred inscription nib design of the Hittites, and at the other, was a carving chisel which was the more traditional tool used by the Egyptians on such occasions. The design clearly pleased the Egyptians since they kept it as a personal gift from Hatusiliš himself, and Ramesses is rumored to have considered it to be such a treasure that it did not enter his vault to be passed into the next life with him, as he felt that to deprive this life of such a symbol of friendship would be to misunderstand the nature of what Hatusiliš had given him. He felt that friendship was not a treasure of the next life in the same way it was here, and that friendship between peoples was something Hatusiliš was offering here, not a mere strategic partnership. Ramesses saw this as an expression of brotherhood in this life, that was unique to this world only, thus the needle was not found in his tomb when unearthed by British archeologists in the 19^th century. Which is why, to this day, the needle of Kadesh remains undiscovered. Although we have many Egyptian and Hittite engravings regarding its design and the precious minerals there involved, no one knows who exactly Ramesses left it to, and who in turn they left it to etc. It is likely to remain one of the great lost treasures of the ancient world, and…” Jane paused, intrigued but also feeling impatient to gobble up others of the books treasures. After the much more ancient and other-worldly beauty of the artistic depictions of the needle she felt she wanted something with a bit more grit and reality to it, and came across something dated 1941 in the contents page. She flicked over to the page entitled as follows

“The nib of Shoah”. Knowing enough Hebrew to know what that meant, Jane was curious to read on

“It is a well documented fact that the occult is often associated with evil. It is an equally well documented fact that in the vast majority of twentieth century minds, the Nazis of Germany, were also a very evil force. It is less well documented however, that the occult and the Nazis had a close association, and one that many theorists, both online and elsewhere, would use as an explanation for the origins of the Nazis. The particular area of the occult in question here revolves around an object that has been given many names over the period of the last 2000 years which it has been written about. The Holy Lance, the spear of destiny, the rod of great power and the staff of the holy blood are just some of the designations it has known, but the story behind it in each case is the same. It is the legendary spear used by a Roman centurion to pierce Jesus’s side, which upon doing so, revealed blood and water flowing separately, which medically speaking confirmed his death. Of course, that is the more widely known story. Since that event, the lesser known tale is that it has passed through the hands of many rulers, who it is claimed, reached the devastation they did upon others as a result of the forces possessing them that surrounded the lance. Various Roman emperors are said to have owned it, at certain periods the English monarchy is said to have owned it. Napoleon was rumored to have taken it as a gift, and in most recent times, circumstantial evidence has come together that Hitler indeed captured it from France during the opening years of World War Two, and took possession of it on his one and only visit to Paris.

Hitler’s interpretation of the myths surrounding the forces of the spear, were naturally merged with his own dogma of purity of the Aryan nation. He believed that the spear would be a unifying force, that Europe was the holy realm of the original human race and that the powers of the spear wanted to bring unity to Europe that its power might bring the world to heal beneath an Aryan authority. Hence the ultimate failure of the Romans, the British and the French to bring the unity to Europe in their various wars. They were not purely Aryan enough. He however would be, and would bring a unified Europe together to dominate the globe. Or at least this was his plan.

According to this rumor, Hitler was so obsessed with the power of the spear, that he carved the pen that he signed all his most important documents with out of the metal of its tip. He had some expert craftsmen remove only the smallest slither of the metal, and used it to forge an ink nib pen which he would later use to sign all the documents ordering the so called ‘final solution’…” Jane stopped for now, but she was definitely going to read more of this later. She walked it over to the counter where the man who had been carrying the large pile of books this one was found in was now manning a till.

“How much is this?” she asked, passing it to him to be scanned. He scanned it, and was somewhat curious

“Hmm, odd price, its £5.73” Jane agreed that was a strange number to choose, but definitely not out of her affordability range. She got her purse out of her bag, and ferreted through the cash sections.

“Ok, this is even more strange, but…” she passed him one five pound note, one fifty pence piece along with a two and one pence coin “It’s the exact change I have left…”

“Hmm, fortunate…” and he took the cash and ran the transaction through the till. Jane knew she had plenty of money in her account she could get at, but was intrigued by the seeming inevitability of this purchase. As the barcode went through the reader, a little warning logo came up on the screen.

“Oh…yes…would you mind just waiting here for a second…” and he left her there to go into what appeared to be a storage room. Jane was a little confused, but she was also intrigued and so did as he requested. A minute or so later, he returned with a parcel the size of a small shoebox

“The book you’re buying was in fact a donation to the shop by a local collector, and he asked that whoever bought it would be given this parcel along with it”

“Oh…ok…” Jane was a little nervous, and the staff guy could see that, so he attempted to reassure her “Don’t worry, it was posted to us so its been scanned, nothing dangerous in there”

“Ah…good…well then er…thank you” and she proffered the bag that she had been given for the book back across the desk with the intention of getting a bigger one for the book, and the mysterious parcel

“Oh yes…I’ll just get one” and he rummaged around beneath the desk before finding a suitable receptacle. A minute or so later, she was out of the door. As she left however she saw two other people entering by the other door in something of a rather confused hurry. It was ginger wispy man and round Cosmo woman from the café, and they seemed to be in two minds as the entered the shop. On one level, they were both very much trying to get there fast. Jane had first noticed them because of the seemingly high speed at which they flashed by the windows which viewed out to the shopping centre at large. However they also seemed to only be walking, they weren’t running anywhere, just speedily walking, and trying to stay in step, as if they were trying to be fast, but didn’t want anyone else seeing they were so. Bizarre, Jane thought, but then again not something to dwell on. She left the shop and continued on her to the café. The rest of her day was not looking like it would be much fun.

          Several hours later, Jane boarded the four one two bus to head back home. She lived a little over five or ten minutes away, just on Upper Selsdon Road. The bus seemed not terribly full today, and it was nice to have chance to spend some quiet time with her own thoughts. The book and parcel had been weighing heavily on her mind since she encountered them both that afternoon. How did it do the strange aging-hologram trick, why had she had exactly the right change to buy it, and what on earth was in that parcel? She had wanted to open it the moment she got it, but something told her it was the kind of thing that you only opened once you were alone. She decided to try to let it leave her mind and loose herself once more in the history of important pens. She came across this entry “The quill of Liberty” and began to read “July 4^th 1776 was one of the most important days in American history. It marks the day when the thirteen colonies were in fact no longer colonies but instead declared themselves an independent nation, free from British imperial rule and free to do what they would do with their new found freedom. It is still celebrated to this day with fireworks, music and all round wondrous revelry in what became on that day, the land of the free. George Washington was one of the principal architects of this document and America’s constitution, and was also a man with more than a little sense of irony and humor about himself. He was a man who understood the power and influence of symbolism on a nations character, and after July 4^th, he wanted not only to deliver a message of great achievement and celebration to the American people, but he wanted to send a sharp, stinging insult back to the British. A message to their government that they would not be able to deal with the ‘colonials’ as subservient any more, and that they now felt not only free to live, but free to laugh. This would also be, for Washington, a well crafted political message, since a message of American smugness and general superiority of themselves was needed to encourage people to forget that it was in fact the French who saved the day at the last battle of the war. Washington did not want America to become a pawn of imperial power plays, and felt that the symbolism he had in mind would remind them of that. Upon signing the declaration of independence, he took the quill he used and went to some of the finest engineers of the day and ordered them to seal it in an airtight container, made of glass and framed of steel so that it could be put on display and seen by all. He claimed all this was for posterity, and the benefit of future generations, but that valve tube never got a plaque in the White House or Capital Hill. Instead, he had it sent aboard a smugglers ship, to be delivered by several underhand men of the sea, to England, and specifically to London. Once in London, the box itself may reach the king and only the king, but word of it would (Washington hoped) send chills of defeat down the spines of the British, and have them feeling demoralised at the loss of their precious acquisitions in the west.

          However, the plan did not go quite as Washington intended, or rather, it did but more so than he wanted. The underhand men of the sea were in fact so underhand that when it reached London, the secret was maintained under the impenetrable veil of the British stiff upper lip. No gossip, no demoralising, no chills. Just the continued British spirit of ‘carrying on’. The quill did reach the King, sort of. King George the Third was, at this time, still somewhat out of his mind, and according to the records, at the time of the case’s arrival he believed himself to be one of the original purple carrots, that had remained pure despite the Dutch and their attempts to make every fruit and vegetable a pure and effervescent orange. Thus the British civil servants who received the package were not of a mind that thought that His Majesty could be dealing with this kind of bizarre shock, and so a plan was hatched. Washington’s insulting pen was to be ‘lost’ in the labyrinthine network of the Royal Post office. By lost, meaning that it was intended that it would perpetually bounce between many fictitious addresses in the network and be kept from prying eyes for perpetuity. It is said that this quill is one of the generally most closely guarded secrets of the British establishment to date, since it has still not been found and…” Jane closed the book as her stop was approaching. Taking up from her seat on the top floor of the bus she walked down, and was somewhat astonished again by who she saw. Cosmo girl and Ginger wisp were sitting in the seats near the bus’s midway exit. They were softly conoodling it seemed, so Jane didn’t pay them too much attention, but it was odd how they kept turning up around her today. She stepped out of the door and the bus pulled away.

          She walked a little way along the road. It was earlyish evening, but it was still summer so the sky was only slightly grey, and the sun was a yellowy golden colour as it got lower in the sky. She sat down on the park bench she sometimes rested at to look over the scene. She didn’t know why today though. After dealing with all those chavs right now she just wanted to be home and flop down in front of a rerun of Farscape. She sat there though, just looking out at the sun dappling the leaves in a russet red shade of light. It was eerily beautiful. She then suddenly realised, she was alone now, and she suspected she wouldn’t be again for a while when she got home. Her brother would be home from school, probably with a friend or two and dinner wouldn’t be too long after she closed the door behind her. She wanted to open that parcel and she wanted to open it now. Slowly edging it out of the bag, it felt as if it deserved a level of elegance and care, like there was something very valuable but also highly fragile inside. She looked at the paper that enclosed it. It was quite old looking, and bound also in some fairly hairy string. String, also, not cord or twine, but string. This was old world packaging, the brown of the paper had thick lines in it, that clearly in someone’s mind were meant to be stylish. On the side, she hadn’t noticed before, was what looked like a faded address, written in the style of a professional calligrapher. It was addressed to a place that she couldn’t make out, but the name of the recipient was one “J. Brown”, although this didn’t shock her much. Brown was the UK’s third most common surname, after Smith and Jones, and it wasn’t as if names that began with J were in short supply either. She took her nail scissors from her purse, carefully cut at the string and then made an incision all around where she assumed the lid of the box to be. Removing the top layer of paper and putting it back inside the bag, she then lifted the old cardboard lid. Most of what was inside was like the nesting material that you buy for hamsters from the pet shop, but when she got through that, what met her gaze made her gasp.

Next weeks chapter selection has been made as “In the foothills of mount Karkutai” by Ben_Tro. Anyone who knows where that is would do well please to contact me! Hope you enjoyed the chapter and look forward to more next week (although it may be slightly delayed again)

“The sword was mightier than the pen” – The second chapter

Greetings people of the blogosphere!

We now move into the second chapter of the ChaptersFromNotes story. As always please feel free to leave your thoughts etc in comments. Hope you enjoy

The Whitgift Centre. Croydon’s modern commercial answer to the Greek’s ancient medicinal Asclepions. The high roofs of the great temple to mass trade were too made of the same transparent, fragile material that had caused Jane so much stewing in her place of work. Except unlike Primark’s cheap bosses, the councils architects had thought ahead and installed extractor fans at several points across the roof, so the air was far more free to traverse the three dimensional terrain of the space above and around both Jane, and all the other shoppers.

          As she walked in, she made a decision today to be slightly healthier than usual and head to the café near the centre’s bus and subway entrance, which served organic sandwiches made with fresher vegtables. It wasn’t exactly cheep, but Jane had been there once or twice before and the taste had been worth it. Besides, it gave her a chance to walk through the main squares and rows of the centre and engage in a favourite pastime she had slowly aquired as a result of working in retail. People watching.

          She was now on the upper level, which did give her the best vantage point for looking down and out over the mass of people outside streaming past the plaza (if indeed such a sophisticated term was applicable to this south London suburb). However the first group of people who caught her social observation antenna were those sitting in the café she would normally visit, to her immediate left, and she began to make her slow way round while just making casual but detailed observations about the various patrons.

The one that she first noticed was a man sitting by himself, reading what appeared to be a glossy magazine, except it looked too thin and he seemed too engrossed for it to be “Cosmopolitan” or “OK”. Certainly, at the very least, he didn’t look as if he had any of the characteristics of diminished heterosexuality that you would associate with a male reading magazines such as those. He was wearing dark blue jeans, that were in fact so dark, that were they not illuminated by the noonday sun, Jane would have been unable to distinguish their colour from the darkest black. Across his torso was a slightly baggy sky blue shirt which read on it simply in black lettering “Under the circumstances, this was the wittiest T-Shirt I could find…” which made Jane smile. Sat next to his magazine on the round table with the slightly unbalanced third leg, was what appeared to be a turkey and ham baguette. It was clearly in the process of being consumed, as she could see several large chucks had been removed from its far end, but given that no more had been taken, and that the glass cup of a deep brown liquid with pink and yellow froth appering from the head (a Chocamellow Jane assumed) was still practically full, Jane guessed he had happened upon a particularly fascinating page in his publication. It must have been towards the beginning too, given those pages resting to the left of the spine were vastly outnumbered by those to the right. A brief gust of wind from the open entrance way below, revealed the front cover to Jane’s peeled eyes. She didn’t really recognise the seemingly abstract symbol of the world from top down in a blue and white grid map and it melting like a Salvador Dali painting, but the top of the magazine with the words “The” and a longer one with something “ist” at the end in a red box, so she would look out for that perhaps in the newsagents on the way home, to get a better idea of what he’d been reading.

          A few tables across, there was, what seemed to Jane, an oddly mismatched couple. She never had quite gotten over the idea that couples are supposed somehow to look ‘right’. She didn’t exactly understand it, but there was this thought in her head that if two people are in some kind of intimate relationship, they really should look like they ‘fit’ together in some way, as if they were two pieces of furniture in a well decorated room. These two however, from they way they looked, seemed to be very mismatched. The gentleman, though he was sitting down, Jane guessed when standing up, would have been at least six foot seven. He was exceptionally pale faced, of a very Germanic temperament, Jane assumed. She had at first thought him to be in his earliest twenties but revised that estimate when it became clear that his expression lines dated him beyond that boundary. His hair was something of a bizarre oddity. It was as if his head was a conical flask and the reaction taking place inside gave off a pale ginger-ish coloured gas that was slightly heavier than air. Thin in quantity, but thick in shade was the best way Jane could think about the strands of protein that adorned his crown. A blazing hot tone yet slightly dulled, like an old fire wiping in the wind. Wearing a greyish faded jacket and a red shirt and off white linen trousers, Jane didn’t know these two well enough to know what his companion saw in him, but she hoped it wasn’t his fashion sense. It was true however that the thick, black rimmed, rectangular glasses he wore though, did give him an air of the cute nerd slowly emerging from his shell, which Jane could see as being to some girl’s taste.

The woman who sat opposite him was very different. She was much shorter, Jane guessed she would only go up to his elbow when she stood up. She had a much rounder figure as well, proportioned but clearly well padded. Not anything like the people on the shop floor earlier, thank goodness. This woman knew how to dress for her shape, wearing a tastefully loose black shirt, long denim skirt, and a pale blue Kashmir scarf which looked to have been removed from the wearing around her head. Jane thought that could mark her out as a Muslim, but she didn’t know of any Muslims who took it as a point to remove their head coverings for sitting down for coffee with a friend. She had a beautifully dignified air about her, in the same way he had an endearing sense of eccentricity. Her long hair reached down to just below her shoulder blades and it was as black as the gaps between the stars. Her eyes looked to be slightly of the far east, but not as far as say Japan or China, but perhaps intermingled with some more anglo-saxon heritage somewhere down the line. Her complexion too was a curiously Mediterranean tone. Not the shade of tan brown you would associate with Arabs or women of the orient, but a more olive brown. She clearly was a very cosmopolitan women, and he didn’t fit that archetype at all. Jane was slightly shocked to discover that to her left hand on the table, there was a W.H.Smith bag which contained a copy of “The Daily Mail”. She shook her head in bewilderment, and headed into the other newsagents to pick up her preferred reading material.

A minute or so later, after a brief exchange with the proprietor of the establishment, Jane walked out with a copy of “Time” magazine rolled up and poking out of her jeans pocket. As liberal and left leaning a publication as it might be, “Time” could be a ruthless border patrol guard when she needed it to be, protecting the Nokia in her pocket from the illegal immigration of pick-pocketing hands in a manner that would make Chuck Norris proud. She headed on along the top floor towards the café, the sun casting her shadow with clear definition on the polished tiles below her feet. She looked at it, with a degree of fascination as to how she could see the shadow becoming less defined the further up her body the part that was being outlined was. There was a soft focus blurriness to the shadow of her head, while her feet had theirs picked out in high-def. She knew the reason for this of course, but that didn’t stop her admiring the mystery to it. As she walked though, another mystery seemed to appear in the dark outlines on the floor. Just above her own, she saw a somewhat irregular yet moderately clearly defined shadow scurry its way across the glass tiles. She was looking at the shape, and thought it was too large to be a bird or someone’s cat that had somehow got loose, and was about to look up when it instead sent something down to her.

She jumped backwards with a shock, as in front of her, almost grazing her head, dropped a thick black rope, with a leather-bound weight on the end. Looking at it, her first reaction, aside from the obvious internal ‘What the heck’ was that it was a pretty substantial looking thing for what it was. Old rope it seemed, that had been painted black for one reason or another. A second or so later, another one dropped through the glass a few yards away from the first, and then another. Within less than twenty seconds, five of the things were hanging from the roof, and not just where Jane was standing. She looked over too other parts of the centre, and across the other side of the top floor there were five more, and yet another five over by the far corner. As Jane looked up, she saw who was coming down from them. Sliding down the ropes, in highly dramatic style, were five men, all quite well built and fit, their exact frames however concealed within a slightly loose fitting single piece black cotton costume. The only area of their skin exposed to the elements, were their eyes, which darted around with purposeful menace. Secured by a sash to each of their backs, was a sword, a curved Japanese sabre in a black sheath, and tied to their belts there was a coil of rope with a grappling hook, along with sundry other smaller swords and equally scary pointy objects. Jane knew only one word to describe someone looking like that. Ninjas.

Just as Jane had begun to be suppressed about the shear bizarreness of having at least fifteen ninjas descend into the middle of the shopping centre of her town, a noise greeted her ears from the lower levels that was equally not at all in place for a temple of commercialism. It was a series of throaty laughs and what sounded like birds swarming. Except this noise was not the kind that the flying rats that normally populated the region made. There was also, she was sure, the faint sound of an engine. Jane looked down to where the sound seemed to be emanating from, and was wondering as she looked, just how much more bizarre this day was going to get. It was on wheels. That much was a great comfort to her. She couldn’t see all of the wheels but she knew a float parade when she saw one, and the wheels logically were buried beneath the strange circle of what appeared to be paper-mache ocean. Out of the middle of this bizarre circular affair, rose a rather impressive looking wooden galleon. It didn’t conform to any of the actual design specifications of any of the real seafaring craft of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, but Jane could clearly see historical accuracy was not what this performance was about. The first and most obvious thing about the whole affair was that this was indeed clearly, a pirate ship. It was flying the Jolly Roger high upon its middle mast, above the crows nest. Jane was impressed though with their keeping to true piraticalness of the past when she noticed a slightly faded and bedraggled looking Spanish flag a third of the way down the pole. Not many people knew that the reason that in modern times, copied DVDs/CD’s etc are called ‘Pirate copies’ is that in the reign of Elizabeth I when piracy on the high seas was indeed something of the classic image we see today, Pirates ships used to sail with forged flags of prominent sea fairing nations such as the Spanish, English or French. Official nation’s flags in those days, were like those holograms you got on the jewel case of your latest Matrix film, impossible to get illegitimately through official channels, extremely expensive to buy and very difficult to replicate without access to very inaccessible resources. So a pirated flag would be a fake, poor quality copy, just like a pirate DVD today.

However, besides the flag, historical re-enactments were not the main order of business here. The captain, or at least the man who Jane assumed was the captain, upon looking down, had indeed all the hallmarks of a much more modern image of a pirate. One leg was merely a wooden crafted stump, one hand was merely a fork (a little different from the traditional hook, but then there was originality and law suits to be considered, not to mention Abu Hamza) and he wore the horizontal red and white stripes along with a tri corner hat, which it itself was also emblazoned with the skull and crossbones of the jolly roger. He also had what looked to be a very well crafted leather waistcoat, with lots of multicoloured embroidery in it, which Jane couldn’t help think made him look a little camp for the role of pirate captain. But from his belt hung a well polished cutlass with a brass handle and on his shoulder, a golden beaked lime feathered parrot squawked away, so from a piratical point of view he was still perfectly masculine. All along the boats upper deck (and only deck, since it was too small to have a lower one) there were many other men wearing variations of the same costumed theme. Complete with eye patches and large puffy trousers, they were pirates all right. And having spent enough time on the internet, Jane knew that when you had this many ninja’s and pirates in one place, only one thing could happen.

The ninja’s nearest Jane threw their grappling hooks across to those on the other side of the floor, who duly attached them to the railings. Then they swung forth, jumping across in an effort to board the Pirates vessel. It was indeed quite a spectacle. The first ninja fell to the floor after a small gangly looking pirate in the crows nest jumped down and severed the swinging rope with his cutlass. He fell onto the paper-mache ocean and then carefully rolled backwards and out of view. After that happening, Jane was fairly sure the event was in fact carefully choreographed, but then again if it was anything but that, she suspected the police would have been arriving by now. Other Ninjas had successfully boarded the ship, and were now in the process of exchanging blade swings with the pirates. Things seemed to be proceeding at a level pegging, the two groups displays of swordsmanship being equally flamboyant and competent. However then, a flurry of arrows seemed to join in. The whole time the boat had been making its way along the lower floor and the ninja’s along the other side had now drawn out some very elaborate looking bows and arrows. Two of the Pirates then fell into the ‘sea’ with the arrows held tightly between their arms and rib cage. Whoever had planned this was a very impressive choreographer, Jane thought, if they could get the arrows to be caught so exactly like that. The boat then turned a corner, and was beginning to move out of Jane’s immediate line of sight, so she followed it, and as she rounded the corner, she now saw where it was most likely heading.

Just outside the local branch of Waterstones was a crowd of teenagers and slightly younger children, most of them holding a copy of a book. That was not an illogical thing in itself, since indeed Waterstones was a very prolific booksellers, but combined with the events of the afternoon, there was only one explanation. And the next sound Jane heard confirmed that. There was a great horn blast, a trumpet sound, and from across the top floor, a figure could be seen. He was in much more modern dress than all of the others, A Nike branded shirt and pale blue jeans, except his clothes were rather ragged and somewhat dishevelled looking. He wore a red bandana also bearing a skull and crossbones, and from his belt there was a short, straight edged sword sheathed in place. He reached across from his back and took out a crossbow. Shooting it across the wall, it stuck with a twang, a rope dangling from it, which he then swung from to the next lower floor, where he began to repeat the manoeuvre again. On the second swing, one of the ninja’s tried to stop him with a throwing star, but with a brilliant move, he caught it and sent it hurtling back. As a result, the ‘corpse’ of the injured ninja then sent two others hurtling with it, into the implied expanse of water. The mysterious modern pirate then swung down onto the boat and, with expert swordsmanly skill, began to push more and more of the ninjas off the boat. Finally there were none left and the boat ‘docked’ just next to a strip of red chain ropes which had been cordoned off from the crowd. Jane made her way over to the floor above Waterstones to see what was happening next, and when she got there, she was impressed by the quasi vulgarity of the spectacle. A door in the side of the boat crashed open, with a long wooden extended door reaching across the paper mache sea, and from the end of that, a red carpet then rolled its way down the gap. A voice then emerged over the internal PA

“Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big Croydon welcome for the creator of the Jake South series, Mr Adam J Kingsbury!” there was in fact, despite it being a Croydon welcome, a rather substantial applause. The people in the crowd outside the shop went wild. Now it all made sense to Jane. It was a book promotion exercise. A very impressive one, possibly the most impressive advertising stunt of any kind she’d ever seen, but at least now she knew the building wasn’t being invaded by beings from a parallel universe (secretly she did harbour a wish that could happen one day, as she’d always wanted to know if there was a universe where the British won the American war of independence). The Jake South series were indeed very successful, and as it was now a few years or so since the last Harry Potter book had flown off the shelves in the way only a Nimbus 3000 would, teenagers and younger readers were once again looking for new adventures to fill their bookshelves and imaginations with. This latest one, “Jake South and the Shanghai Swashbuckle” was the fourth in the series. It followed on the story of Jake South, the Cornish fourteen year old who had somehow been taken accidentally back in time to the days when Pirates truly were the black flagged menace of the high seas. Here, Jane had read, they headed to China, where they discovered that the word ‘Junk’ didn’t really translate in terms of Chinese warships. Jane watched the tall, gangly looking, forty seven year old author make his gleeful way down the red carpet, signing books and greeting many cheerful fans on the way. She had to admit, that that display of martial arts and swordsmanship had drawn her attention far more than any of the writings about the book ever could have. Looking down at her watch, she saw she still had a good three quarters of her lunch break left, shrugged her shoulders and decided to pause for a brief browse through the bookshop, to see if Mr South’s adventures were indeed worth the praise they had been offered.

Any thoughts on what the fourth chapter should be entitled, please, as always, leave them in the comments. The third chapter, as selected in the video, will be entitled “Undiscovered writing utensils”. Look forward to seeing that next week, hopefully. I am leaving the Czech Republic rather soon, so as such I will be rather busy and this chapter may be delayed by one or two days. Hopefully no more than that. Either way, please leave your chapter title ideas in comments. Have a good day!

“Understaffed, Overcustomered, Overqueued” – The first chapter

Greetings people of the Blogosphere

The first chapter of the “ChaptersFromNotes” story is now ready to be published onto the world wide web. Hope you all enjoy it!

It was hot. Very hot. This was not in itself an unusual set of circumstances considering it was mid June. However the heat in question in Jane’s particular case, was amplified well above and beyond what you would normally expect. The shop front, on each of the five floors was entirely plate glass. The roof, though occasionally shaded by waywardly tall trees and bird droppings, was predominantly plate glass. The sides of the building, though partially covered by the other shops directly adjacent to them along North End, where it was exposed to the elements, was almost completely comprised of plate glass. Standing behind the till on the top floor of this newly vertically expanded branch of Primark, was like standing in Kew’s tropical gardens with the humidity control box on the fritz and stuck on “mid Capricorn”. She was glad she didn’t have to move too much, but she was still stewing away in the sun.

The Primark new shop floor staff uniforms for women weren’t helping either. They were all black, tight T-shirts and pencil knee-length skirts. The slight variations in colour provided by the Primark logo on the left breast and the turquoise blue trim did little to deal with the problem of the suns rays and the speed at which their heat is carried into black cotton. She imagined herself as something of Grettel, but instead of being in the oven, trapped in the slow burning boiler and wishing the heat would hurry up rising as the stewing slow speed was too much for her to bear.

If the heat wasn’t bad enough, the hypocrisy and incompetence of the management made it worse. A year or so ago, Jane had heard the first whisperings of the plans to build this new extra floor and also to revamp the entire shop in the process, and one of the features that had got everyone excited, was air conditioning, on all floors no less. Then things seemed to go slightly bad for mass produced cheap clothes, with their more lefty and ‘ethically sourced’ rivals taking a bigger market share, and so they scaled back the whole thing, and the air conditioning units were replaced with some fairly unattractive and ineffective ceiling fans. Jane had only got a B in GCSE double science, but she knew enough about basic thermodynamics to know that hot air, the vast majority of the time, goes up. Thus ceiling fans were something she could never quite get her head round, since all they were doing was blowing hot air back down onto your head. Ok, yes there was a degree of convection involved in the moving of the air taking heat off of her, but still…she wasn’t impressed. In her mind replacing air conditioning with ceiling fans due to budgeting concerns is like replacing a U2 gig at the Millennium Dome with a Doors covers band performing at the local Wetherspoons.

Of course, the cause of her fuming was not merely the continued pumping of high levels of infra-red radiation from the thermonuclear fireball that sat neatly a few dozen million miles away. It was also a level of frustration towards the Saturday morning’s rota, or rather the failure of those on it and those who drew it up, to plan properly. It had been set up by the boss and had fallen flat on its face, since it involved everyone being absolutely there every time they were needed. Unfortunately, the management had failed to consider the trinity of employee rights granted by the department of work and pensions, infectious bacteria/viruses and just general bone idleness. The restructuring had principally been the idea that no one should be considered an alternate or a stand in, for two reasons. The first was the kind of namby-pamby politically correct one, where the employers felt they would be hurting someone’s feelings if they labelled them as anything less than being the first person on duty, and the second was that they were running the logic that if you give people more responsibilities, they will behave more responsibly. A noble truth, but one that didn’t really consider the context it was being applied in. On the bank of seven new tills that had been set up on this floor, only two were currently occupied.

Janet, who was supposed to be there too, had, as far as Jane could tell, skived off. She had’t taken any sick leave, and she’d spoken to her on the phone yesterday and she’d been fine. So unless she’d come down with a debilitating illness in the last twelve hours or so, her absence wasn’t terribly well justified. “Lazy bimbo cow” was the expression that came to mind when Jane thought of her. She was short, with long, slightly wavy golden blonde hair, had an irritatingly almond shaped cute-sy face, and had disproportionately ample chest for her frame. Jane wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t spending this stolen time with some form of unsuspecting young ‘gentleman’ who was, of course, beguiled by her exquisite personality, even if all she used her limited supplies of brain cells for was storing the latest news from the big brother house.

Josh, Jane already knew about. He was actually sick, and had been for the past week. He had had symptoms which had appeared meningitis like, so his parents had rushed him to the hospital. She didn’t harbour anything against his absence, though she did wish that his parents hadn’t told her about this last night. Had she known a bit earlier, she could have called someone through to come take up the slack. But it wasn’t their fault. The last thing any parent would have on their minds in a crisis like this was their sons weekend place of employment not having its full staff quota that day. Jane sincerely hoped Josh was ok. Apart from her general goodwill towards him as a member of humanity, she harboured something of a slowly growing crush on him, what with his thick raggedy hair, a slight goatee beard he was nursing and sexy, if slightly nerdy, glasses, and she was pleased that he wasn’t interested in Janet’s line of conversation, proving to her satisfaction, that good cleavage was not as hypnotic to the testosterone infused fifty percent of the human population as many may have her believe.

As for Jon and Jack, they had registered their ‘sick leave’ along with Jessie, but Jane knew exactly where they were. They had headed to Thorpe Park for the day, and had been MSNing her about it all last night. In truth, had she been able to, she would have gone too, but she was in the middle of her gap year and was saving the money for the start of university.

So here she was, only her and James manning the tills today. And it was getting manic. It was, possibly, the single three worst possible combinations of periods of time for the shop to be understaffed. Study leave had just kicked in, so all the pre-GCSEers who should rightfully be at home chained to their books (Literally in Jane’s opinion) were in fact cluttering North End with intention on spending their parents money in more droves than usual, now that they had the extra time to do so. Also, it was Saturday, so those who had spent the week proper revising, were now feeling justified in their efforts and pouring forth off the busses and into the town, and it was summer, which mean people who thought ‘getting outside’ meant swarming to the temples of consumerism, would be arriving also. In fairness, Jane thought, she wasn’t exactly immune from hypocrisy in some of these complaints. When she was on her GCSE study leave she had to admit that she had done her share of Whitgift centre browsing while she really should have been reading up on the Klaus Von Staufenburg, Quadratics and the properties of the different chambers of the heart. However, she was convinced that some of these people had been here three times this last week, and thought that unless they were doing some kind of study into the economic systems of Croydon’s commercial regions, it was a bit excessive to say the least. She shuddered slightly as one of the regular visitors over the last few days made her slow, sweaty way to the till desk.

It was a Chavette, wearing, of all things, a classic bridal outfit of her kind, a white tracksuit with the name of an American city that she probably couldn’t point to on a map, let alone had ever visited, emblazoned across it front. During her sociology A-level Jane had done a small research project setting to gather evidence supporting the idea that the definition of a Chav was essentially someone who had access to middle class levels of resources, but had no conception of middle class values, taste, culture or etiquette. She had enough material proving this point from working here to produce a post graduate level thesis proving the point. Gosh this girl had no taste! The clothes she was buying were mediocre for her at best. Looking at her excessively full and extremely padded out frame, the unsightly creases in her top and trousers created by the bulges protruding from her chest and the rear of her hips, she couldn’t help thinking that the size selections she had made here were more than a little optimistic, and wondered if she had bothered to revise basic numeracy this morning. She had half a mind to intentionally deface the receipt so that this blob of a potential human being wouldn’t be able to return the ripped cotton produce, which it would be once she had tried to adorn it to her flesh, but that kind of prank could cost Jane her job, so she refrained, begrudgingly. Of course, it wasn’t the clothes that really made he keel over. It was the semi-transparent undergarments that lay hidden beneath the pile of skirts and tops that had now been deposited into the logoed bags. The idea that there was someone somewhere with some credentials of being human who would want to see what lay beneath that polystyrene blend Boston sweatshirt was buttock-clenchingly sick. The gentle smile and ‘have a nice day’ she had to force from her lips as the Chavette left, were efforts of herculean proportions, and all the shudders she had pent up inside her up to that point, were released in a single burst.

“Things getting hot for you Jane” James said to her, over the side of the desk

“Somewhat…” Jane replied, and looked across to see fortunately for a brief moment, the shop floor was filled with people browsing, rather than finished up and paying.

“You want a quick, quasi-legit break…” he offered, with a slight smirk

“Oh…you have no idea…” She began, but then looked at him slightly quizzically, when the tone of his voice registered itself more in her mind “You serious?”

“Watch this…” and he reached into the space underneath the desk, and produced a long strip of semi-flexable plastic. Looking at it from the side nearest her, Jane could see what was written on it and was shocked, but had to admit in a small amount of awe. He reached up to the side of the sign with the words ‘Pay here’ hanging over the desk, and slid out the plastic sheeting with the words on. The one he replaced it with was ‘Customer information – Please pay elsewhere’

“You…” She hesitated to find the words to describe what he’d just done

“Thank me later” He grinned as a he spoke, a grin with the pride of a small child knowing he’d just gotten away with something monumentally mischievous “The information desk downstairs is closed, not enough staff, so I figured the least we could do is help them out”

“But…don’t we have the wrong computers if someone comes over”

“When was the last time one of this lot…” James gestured his thin arms over the mass of the unpleasant social phenomenon “asked a question that actually needed a computer to answer it?” Jane took the point. She found one of the swivel chairs that she really shouldn’t be sitting on behind the counter, and slumped down upon its air suspension set up cushion. Her expression said it all

“Zonked?” James’s enquiry was met with a single look which said it all “That bad eh?”

“Yeah…” Jane replied, and craned her neck back to face the ceiling in the vain hopes it might catch some of the more refreshing oxygen molecules still left around the place.

“You think this is bad, you should have seen the Oxford street branch, September of 07’”

“Oh yeah…” Jane wasn’t terribly interested in the suffering of other branches, not nearly as intrigued as by the quest for fresh oxygen. James saw that, and decided to jump a few steps in the story to spice things a little

“The police had to get riot batons on the ready, just in case. Two vans of arrests were taken from the scene.”

“mmm….” It took a second or so before she properly registered what he’d said “Wait, what?” James’s boyish grin returned

“That’s right”

“What the heck…what happened”

“A mixture of the stupidity of the mass mob and the stupidity of the isolated leaders” James began. “See, the police had been at a good half a dozen openings of Primarks across the country already. The prospect of cheap clothes from a half descent brand is like honey to the wasps of brainless Chavs. Anyway, this one was made a lot worse”

“How…why?” Jane was now intrigued, and James was putting on his storytellers voice

“Well you see Jane…” and then immediately began to smirk with the Jackanory quality of all this “The crowd outside the door were massive, very massive. Far more massive than the police could have ever seen before. That sea of colours and faces was astonishing. Like a fat, tasteless, polyester ocean, of Boston jumpers, Nike tracksuits and New Yorker caps. The police didn’t know what to do. They didn’t have the manpower to deal with that much social ugliness. They would have called in more people but more were coming by the minute…”

“Why?” Jane was eager to know “They can’t have loved Primark that much”

“No, it wasn’t that” he continued, and reverted back to his old bards tone “It was the internet, that last great electronic democratic frontier that undermined us so harshly that day. Some foolish fool of a user had perpetuated the idea that everything in Oxford Street’s Primark on that opening day would be reduced cost…”

“A sale?” Jane didn’t get it “What kind of sale gets a riot of chavs in?”

“The kind of sale where everything in the shop is £1” James concluded. Jane gasped, but then remembered who she was talking to

“Come on James, you expect me to believe that”

“Hey, how’d you think I got that mark…” James pointed to a slowly fading scar on the line of his jaw. It was barely visable, but Jane had heard it mused over before

“The last time you brought that up, it was a fight with a particularly vicious coat hanger”

“Yes, but who was wielding it, that’s the question…”

“I’m going to guess Hedwig…” her line of talking was cut short as there was a commotion and a clatter over on the far distance of the shop floor. They craned their necks and saw two Chavetes who, it seemed, whilst fighting over the same double D cup bra, had knocked over a stack of 3/2 slim fit plain tops. The irony was not lost on them. Jane sighed, and looked at her watch
“I’m heading off for lunch” she said, and began walking out

“What? And leave me at this lot’s tender mercies” Jane turned round and smiled

“You survived the 07 September opening, you know what to do” and she headed out down the escalator.

 

 

Let me know your thoughts in comments! For those of you interested in next week’s offering, it has been selected and entitled

“The sword was mighter than the pen” by Helmet Comedy

If you have any more chapter suggestions, I’d be intrigued to hear them. Please leave them either on the facebook groups wall or thread, or in the Yotube videos comments. Hope you all have a good day and hope to see you soon! Bye!

Welcome to “ChaptersFromNotes”

Greetings peoples of the Blogosphere, welcome to “ChaptersFromNotes”

A little explanation here is necessary in order to follow through a little bit of what exactly is going on here. “ChaptersFromNotes” is a multi-platform, quasi-collaborativelywritten novel writing project. The way it works is as follows. Starting from a particular Saturday, I collect random suggestions from you, the readers of this blog, along with viewers of my Youtube channel and members of my Facebook group. “Suggestions of what?” you may ask, and the answer is, chapter title suggestions. Every Saturday I will post on here a chapter of a story, written by my good self, based heavily in its inspiration, around a chapter that was randomly selected from the many suggestions I receive from the people of the blogosphere, youtubers and facebook members.

Sadly, I wasn’t properly introduced to the blogosphere until quite recently, so this blog has been set up a little later into the scheme of things than perhaps should have been the case, and as a result, we already have one selection made. The first chapter will be out on the 5th of July (two days from now) and is entitled..

“Understaffed, Overcustomered, Overqueued” and was suggested by one GarethJThomas of Youtube

But its not too late to be involved, since we are in the very early stages of the project thus far, and theres still many more chapters to be written. Also, the effort is cumulative, so please don’t think if you didn’t get selected one week, your out of the running. Your suggestions stay in the pot still and continue into the next round. Its not a “One per customer” policy either. Put as many in as you like. Some people have put one in, others seven or eight, and many other numbers in between. There’s really no limit there.

A few FAQ’s to be sorted out, which have come up in the other areas

1. “I don’t know the plot/what the story is about/where/when its set (etc) so I don’t know what kind of chapter suggestion to make” – That’s exactly the point! I want you to come up with as diverse a spectrum of suggestions as possible, in order that I, the writer of the story, am challenged to make them all fit together well.

2. “Do I need to make my chapter suggestion fit last weeks chapter?” – NO! And in all honesty, I’d rather that you didn’t. As was said in question one, I want as much variety as possible and for the story to go on a twisting, weaving path. So the more strange and divergent from the chapters you’ve previously heard, the better…

3. “How long will each chapter be?” – A good question, and unfortunetlyone I don’t really have a good answer to. The best answer I can think of is that it has to be short/long enough to fit into/fill up ten minutes at maximum when read aloud. It could theoretically be more than that, if I planned to make a double length chapter and make two youtube videos with it, but probably not, unless I have a really good idea.

4. “How do you make the suggestion” – Each chapter title is put into a notebook, numbered, and then a random number is pulled from a hat and the chapter bearing that number is selected for that week. So for example, “Understaffed, Overcustomered, Overqueued” was number 23.

5. “I’m not creative/I don’t know what to think of for a chapter title idea” – I recently made a video on the youtubechannel as an attempt to deal with this very issue. Hope it helps you out. The link is below

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=w48hqoaJHdw

But inspiration isn’t as hard to come by for something like this as you might think. If you use models such as “The *adjective* *noun*” or “The *noun* and the *noun” or a strange question, or a twisting of a phrase or a bizarre sentence, etc.

If you have any other questions, or if you’ve got some chapter suggestions, please leave them in the comments below! Hope to here from you soon!

PS.

http://uk.youtube.com/user/ChaptersFromNotes <— The Youtube channel

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17366063923&ref=ts  <— The Facebook group

PPS.

Some examples of past suggestions to maybe help you along

“Why are the chimpanzees having so many babies” – 19Becky87 of Youtube

“Elle, oh Elle” – Hades_Krypton of Facebook

“The Croydon conundrum” – Forever_Parklife of Facebook

“Mysterious yet reassuring” – Aiden of TheStudentBar

“Water, water, everywhere” – Catmowat of Youtube

“The Cushion in Space” - Rebeccaisastar74 of Youtube