The Watering Hole

This essay / piece of flash fiction helped me get my A in my English Language O'level, so I will always be grateful to it. It can also be found on my WattPad page.

The Watering Hole by Lorna Wadge

Candy sat in the pub with a double whisky, as recommended by ‘Kerrang’, and her boyfriend, Syd. She looked deeply troubled; since waking earlier that afternoon she found she was profoundly concerned for the future of Rock’n’Roll.

Syd was irritated. He stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ Candy asked.

‘You’re so depressing,’ he growled and left.

Candy was on the verge of arguing that she had not said anything all evening, but she thought better of it.

‘He’ll see the light,’ Candy thought, obviously not on the same wavelength as Syd, who had a mind like a cess-pit.

Syd was in fact the cleverest boy Candy had gone out with, he was ‘brave’ enough to drive a car and was the fastest ‘Rizzla roller-upper’ in the Black Dog. Candy had said of this latter accomplishment ‘you’ve got to have something in this life.’

Supplying the music this Thursday night was a pretentious wimp, who played the synthesizer and sang of love lost, love found and love in similar predictable situations, all of which left Candy seething and in a good mind to select ‘rip it up’ on the juke-box, but now found she was too legless to move.

‘This Evan Williams is strong stuff,’ she concluded, while setting fire to the wrong end of a Marlboro cigarette and struggling with an awkward packet of cheese and onion flavoured crisps.

The time was nine o’clock and the bar was filling up fast. The sound of the synthesiser player became weedier as people chatted about mundane matters such as ‘the washing machine's been playing up again’ and ‘I must see the chiropodist.’

Candy reminisced about the old days.

‘I remember the great guitarists,’ she told herself, ‘Shame about Hendrix.’

She also remembered Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and a joke about necrophiliacs paying death duties.

‘Huh,’ Candy stood up and smoothed down her bourbon stained ‘Pop Art’ dress. She blinked, tried to focus her eyes on the wall and her mind on her usual worries and hang-ups and she staggered over to the ‘Way Out’.

When she had reached the door, she turned.

‘Save Rock’n’Roll,’ she screamed and spent ten minutes trying to make a dramatic exit by slamming the saloon bar door.

Goodbye to All That (5B450)

2017 has ended up being quite a goal orientated year, mostly because of my idea for a 5B450 project which I had at the beginning of the year. The idea was to do five achievable things that I'd always wanted to do, but never got around to doing, before I reached my 50th birthday in November. These are the five things I achieved.

1. See a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre
One of our favourite London walks is between the Royal Festival Hall and Southwark Cathedral. Near the end of it is the Globe Theatre. Every time we passed it I thought 'we must go and see a play there'. We saw 'Romeo and Juliet' in May 2017.

2. Attend a School of Life event
I have been a fan of the School of Life since it was set up in the late noughties. The 'How to be serene' seminar I attended in June fitted in with my newly developed Stoical philosophy of life.

3. Get the house redecorated
Some of the house hadn't seen a lick of paint since we moved in over twenty years ago. I'd been dreaming of a pale orange landing (mango melody shade 3) for over ten years. Now I see it every time I exit my bedroom.

4. Join a book club
Always having my young daughter around meant not joining groups where I could socialise in the evenings. I finally joined an evening book club in early October 2017.

5. Visit New York City
The biggest of my 5B450s was my visit to New York City in late October 2017. I'd been wanting to go there since I was about 15. It felt like a dream when I rode in a yellow taxi from JFK to my hotel and sat at my hotel window looking out at Upper West Side Manhattan. I now have my photos and diary to look back on and I'm really pleased with myself for making that trip.

As well as these five things, I wanted 2017 to be memorable in other ways too. I made sure I had something special to do each month; whether it was a Bowie book signing in Kensington, a London walk, visiting Brighton and the Lake District, doing a craft fair or just enjoying a celebratory meal. I also had a few virtual goals too, like producing over 50 blog posts, making more use of Wattpad and writing more book reviews. I don't know what 2018 will bring, whether I'll attempt some goal free living, more in depth work or just help other people more. In the words of someone suffering from severe short term memory loss, I think I'll do 'whatever is beneficial'.

London Walks: a ghost walk

One of the highlights of my 2012 visit to Edinburgh was the ghost walk. Edinburgh is a great place for a ghost walk, an old Scottish-Gothic city with a murky past of fake witchcraft, over drinking and English nastiness. Cardiff in 2013 was too new for a ghost walk, but there is still enough of the old city of London to make for a substantial ghost walking experience. My ghost walk was a birthday treat on a misty chilly evening in November.

We started at Bank Station. I know from experience that Bank-Monument tube station is a tangled maze, so I was quite careful to get the exact exit to meet up with our guide and fellow ghost-walkers; the guide was an articulate English lady in a flowery hat. After the rules of the walk were explained to us we ventured out into the modern city. Most people on the walk were tourists and there was a little explanation of traffic protocol, in particular zebra crossings, before we proceeded into the shadowy alleyways of the City of London.

   

There are many old churches in the city, our guide pointed out one which had been bombed out during the blitz leaving it a particularly eerie looking sight on a moonlit, late autumnal night. We often found ourselves walking in the footsteps of Ebenezer Scrooge, down the alleyways of old London and within the earshot of the church bells that heralded the arrival of Scrooge's three redemptive spirits. The whole atmosphere and lighting of our walk did invite ghostly imaginings of half seen reflections and illusions, of odd shapes and figures.

There was talk of supernatural dramas and Harry Potter films around Leadenhall Market and our walk ended in the shadow of the Guild Hall. The London ghost walk was not as creepy as the Edinburgh ghost walk, but I'm glad we did it, maybe the Jack the Ripper walk would have proved more chilling.

Poppies in November

I buy a remembrance day poppy every year and think I will continue to do so, however I do find the regular poppies rather difficult to wear. After seeing Amy's godmother wearing a very pleasing crocheted poppy, one evening at our church concert, I decided to have a go at making one myself. I went on to make several poppies one of which now belongs to my niece.