All Hallow's E'en

Hallowe’en! Pish!

Maybe, hundreds of years ago, Allhallows tide was a decent festival.

Maybe.

Perhaps, during samhain, festivities were wrought for the celebration of harvest festival and the guarding against the ‘Dark Time’. Winter.

Perhaps.

Nobody cares now. Everybody cares about knocking on doors and saying ‘Trick or Treat', whatever that means.

Nobody cares about the coming of the ‘Dark Time’.

As long as we get our sweets—candies they call them now.

Carve out the pumpkin and make jokes of the light that comes out of the grinning, toothy face. Possibly there will be pumpkin pie made from the scooped out innards of the great fruit.

That sums it up. It’s a joke.

Children dressing up in ghoulish costumes and pretending to be a mini-Dracula or a tiny skeleton knocking on the doors of people who, really, just want to be left alone for a quiet night indoors.

We are compelled to buy small treats in huge quantities to cater for the voracious demands of a horde of small people accompanied by older children or parents.

Corporate insensitivity doesn’t care about the old folk or the disbelievers—the killjoys, as they are collectively known.

Let’s get money.

For costumes, for make-up, for sweets and any other merchandising we can fob off on the people who love to revel.

It’s a joke.

Do you remember when it wasn’t a joke?

Do you remember the old times? When we believed in things that go bump in the night?

Do you recall the fear of the ‘Dark Times’? How we used to huddle together for warmth and comfort? When we had the animals in with us in the crofts and cottages to add their warmth and comforting presence?

Is the memory of the birds roosting up in the thatch to share the warmth still with you?

Longer and longer the dark lasts until the winter solstice. Then we celebrate that the light is coming.

Do you remember our faces? How happy we were when we knew that the darkness was losing ground to the light? When we knew that it would be warm again soon?

The corporations perverted our winter solstice festival for their greed. They turned it into a time of guilt if you spent less than your income on giving. If you spent less than lavishly on the eating and drinking to excess; the need to send cards and greetings to people you barely knew and never liked.

The magic in the mistletoe is lost; the power of the evergreen is gone.

So it has become with All Hallows E’en. The tentacles of greed reach ever further into our pockets.

Do you remember the time before the corporations? When there was magic and fairies that would protect us from the goblins and mischievous sprites.

We had people who knew how to ward off the succubus and the incubus that came to us in the eve of the ‘Dark Times’. They had potions and spells that protected us.

Now we have sweets—treats, and costumes. Mummery for children.

The ghouls and hobgoblins are toys of the infants; they are the stuff of fiction writers and television series. The makers of cheap films to frighten the foolish and send them home, giggling, to their warm beds and safe homes in the suburbs.

Of course you do not remember. You are dead.

I killed you when you were yet young.

You were imbued with the vigour and the desire to kill the wraiths that coiled around us and our homes.

I tried to warn you but you would fain listen to me, your guardian.

Now I am unable to discern your knock from the infants’ that come to my door for their annual booty.

I have put a sign up for their safety that warns them to stay clear but to no avail such is their ardent desire for sweet prizes.

Why can you not warn them, keep them away.

Hallowe’en! Pish! You are too weak to aid them in their petty little lives.

Every year the police come and ask me if I have seen yet more missing children.

Every year I tell them that I have not. That I gave out the sweets and limped back to my fireside where the warmth quells the arthritis in my aging bones.

Every year I have to stir the remains in the grate to make sure that the children have all gone...

My Name Is A Number

Some time ago I wrote a ‘Blog’, following pressure from certain quarters, that explained how I set up and wrote a story.

The ‘Blog’ involved several ‘Chapters’ that were spread over four entries during March, 2013.

At the end of the ‘Blog’ I wrote, “Finally, we have to read the story critically and examine whether it is worth pursuing. Not every story that falls out of our heads is going to dominate the literary market. Some might not even make it as far as the waste paper basket.

This one will make it to the bin. No further.”

I was in error.

The story was seen by other eyes and the result was that it was rewritten and passed to the publisher.

Khairul Hisham, of ‘Hishgraphics’, has produced a magnificent cover illustration and now the story is in the hands of the editor for final corrections.

'My Name Is A Number' should be published on 'Amazon' in the next couple of days.

I will confess that the story was inspired, to a certain extent, by the Rolling Stones song ‘2000 Man’, which I commend to you via ‘YouTube’.

So you will see that, whatever you write you should never throw it away.

This is my second lesson in this respect.

Many moons ago I wrote ‘The Hags of Teeb’ as an exercise in exorcising the story from my head. After completing it I threw it, wholesale, into the rubbish bin from whence it was extracted by delicate fingers and scrutinised with an intense scrute and smuggled out to the publisher. It is now a top seller on ‘Amazon’!

[Note: It is being caught up by ‘Rhittach’—watch out behind you, Hags!]

On the other hand, other stories that I wrote have been much admired by me (how arrogant is that?) and yet have failed to pass the ‘first reader test’! One such is ‘South From Alaska’ that appeared in the ‘The Write Stuff’ ‘Blog’ on 23^rd June, 2012. I loved that story only for it to be rejected even after rewriting.

You just can never tell what will make it and what will not.

A friend of mine is a great chef. He is the master at turning plain food into a heavenly delight. He is called Gerry Buxton, a big, down-to-earth fellow who is easy to get on with and has a great sense of humour and no legs.

I asked him, years ago, how he manages to cater for so many different tastes amongst the people who eat his food?

He told me that he did not. He cooked for himself. If he liked it then it was good enough to go out to the guests.

I remembered that.

I write for me. I write to make myself happy.

If you like my stories then I am happy; if you do not like my stories then I am also happy because it shows that you have, at least, read it/them and have cared enough to write a review telling me what it was that you disliked.
[See ‘Amazon’ reviews for ‘Crater’.]

You will never please everyone. Never. The main thing is to please yourself.

Sometimes you will not be pleased but it is always worth keeping your work because somebody might love it!

Never give up. Everything you do is practice. Overnight success comes to very few. Success comes to those who work at it.

See you on ‘Amazon’.

Viva la Différence

Men and women are different.

This will become visually apparent at every step in our lives although, truth to tell, I have had the occasional difficulty in determining which is which over the years.

Aside from the fact that women are, by and large, shapely and pretty it is equally certain that men are... well... not. At least, they are not to another man; I have no other viewpoint.

It is not only the graphic image that is different it is the psyche.

Men and women are different in their heads.

Feminists can argue all that they wish about their form of equality that means, in effect, that women are more equal than men. It is a communist ideal. They can argue, with all the vehemence that they can muster, that women are treated as sex objects, as chattels and that the media stereotypes are subjecting them to a second-class place in society.

Example:

http://www.upworthy.com/the-next-time-someone-says-sexism-isnt-real-show-them-these-shocking-role-reversal-images?g=2

Well, that may be true, in part. But the fact remains that men and women are different. Undeniably.

You will observe that I use the word ‘different’ and not ‘superior’ or ‘better’.

Women are equal to men and always have been. The response that often occurs is because there are weak men who feel threatened by women or men who are unattractive to women feeling ‘left out’. These men are the sort that will attempt to subjugate women; strong men will not do this.

It is entirely possible that, prior to written records or tales passed on from father to son, women and men were regarded as equal.

There is no reason to believe otherwise; indeed it is entirely possible that the human race as a species would not have survived and developed if women and men were not regarded as equal in primitive times.

But equal does not mean ‘the same’.

Millions of years ago*, when we first roamed the Earth, we began a process of mental and physical evolution that has culminated in our present state of being.

That process was based almost entirely upon survival. It is the same process that squirrels and wart hogs are undergoing even now.

Men and women had different functions. Men were to protect the tribe or village – the collective group, as well as go out hunting for meat to bring to the table (figuratively speaking, of course). This mindset requires a male to see the big picture; he needs to focus on what he is hunting as well as look for danger to himself from something that is hunting him.

Women would be in the cave/hut looking after the children and chewing skins. Their focus was on detail. The kind of detail that would need their attention all day every day.

Even now, it is women who are preferred in factories where close attention to fine detail is required for sustained periods; men cannot do it. A man’s mindset is different to a woman’s.

It is impossible to change the way that people have thought for millions of years* overnight.

We may believe ourselves to be frightfully civilised but we are not. Our minds still live in the wild where we have been for so very long. Agriculture, settled living in groups, is still new to us.

Men and women, even now, have different places in society. The advertising media, as well as the entertainment industry, have long recognised this and use it shamelessly.

Feminists can wring their hands and complain all they like but the fact remains that men and women are different.

Equal but different.

And that is why every man likes an adjustable wench.

*10,000 years if you are a Creationist.