Corpse Song - my first published novel!

 *Tap, tap* Is this thing on?

Been a while, but this is an update I thought my royal and ancient blogging friends might be interested: after years of failed attempts and doomed test runs, I've completed a novel.

This version of the cover was created by my friend Robi!

It's only fair that I let you know - after all, so much of what happened to me in the past twenty years took place after I started blogging.

I'm living in Malta (Europe) now, trying to make a home in this tiny Mediterranean island country. It hasn't been easy but there have been plenty of adventures along the way.

I still write, although as a professional writer, writing for pleasure seems that much harder. I guess you hit a word limit. 

The summers here are incredibly hot. Valletta, the capital city, is the warmest European capital city - we're pretty close to North Africa and the Sahara Desert.

What that meant was that we didn't go out at all over the summer season so I was able to hide in our air-conditioned home and finish this book during my down time from work.

It's a mystery set in an English village. In 1975, five teenaged friends find a body in the local lake. They attempt to find out how it got there, whose body it is and who the killer might be, but fail to solve what becomes a cold case.

They start a band at the end of the decade with some success before parting ways.

Two decades later, Finn, the main character, finds another body and the five friends are brought back together. They've changed over time and become disparate, yet interesting, characters. It becomes apparent that the killer could well be in their midst - it's a race against time to unmask them before anyone else gets killed...

I enjoyed bringing these people to life, so I hope that anyone who reads it will find them worthwhile, too.

This experience was never about becoming a successful author, it was about creating a world within a novel, something I've always wanted to do. I didn't manage to secure a publisher in the traditional sense, so I've published it on Amazon | Kindle. You can find it there in ebook or paperback format if it sounds like a book you'd like to try.

To find out more, click on this link that takes you to the Amazon page.

Thank you to anyone who has read anything I've written over the years, I appreciate you all.

Till next time!

Scott

How to Boil an Egg

 

As kids, an easy meal we often had was boiled eggs with toast. Cheap, filling and delicious. Here’s a deeper look at this breakfast or dinner staple, with plenty of extraneous details:

I don’t mean the chicken or the egg discussion. Everyone knows that chickens had to be invented first. The real primary lesson is not to explain to a child that an egg comes out of a chicken’s butt*, especially while the child is eating an egg.

*According to howitworksdaily.com the orifice through which an egg leaves the chicken is called the vent.

To boil an egg (let’s assume we’re talking about a regular chicken egg), you need an egg, water, salt, a pot and a stove. Recipes leave out things like slotted spoons, but you’ll need one of those, too.

It takes a bit of time for a little pot of water to come to a rolling boil (salt helps speed up the process). Don’t get distracted during this time by daydreams such as wondering about the expression “the pot calling the kettle black”. Both my pot and kettle are stainless steel, and neither one has a mouth, so there’s no name-calling going on at all.

Back to the water. Water, water, everywhere, said Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and he wasn’t referring to a pot boiling over. Funnily enough, that poem is all based around the mythology of the albatross and the terrible results of killing one when at sea:

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!

Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow

I shot the ALBATROSS.’

No, the albatross only lays one egg every few years, so eating those is more than a little mean.

Water. We take it for granted, but you can always use the water after cooking to flush your loo or to gargle if you happen to have tonsillitis. We don’t waste water.

A cracking good time!

There’s nothing more disappointing in this world than having an egg crack when you place it in boiling water. Okay, perhaps there are some contenders for bigger disappointments, but let’s keep focusing on that egg. All the best chefs are focus-driven.

A rolling boil isn’t just one or two desultory bubbles, the water should be seething like an aunty at church when her child burps loudly in between hymns.

Gently roll the egg into the water using a slotted spoon. Told you we’d need one.

The next bit is critical! According to egg scientists, an egg must be boiled for exactly three minutes if you live at the coast or for a little longer if you’re inland. Something to do with, um, altitude and science pressure and stuff.

Three minutes: slightly longer than the average pop song unless that song is Hotel California, the most-played song in the world on the radio, which drones on and on for a whopping six minutes and thirty seconds.

Interestingly, the three-minute pop song has its origins in the seven-inch 45 single format. Even though digital technology has superceded that, the length of the song preferred by radio DJs remains at three minutes. According to Wired, the ideal length of a song is actually 2:42, as in Tom Petty's hit "Don't Do Me Like That". Tom was probably not talking about eggs, though.

So let’s say you press play, the song runs though and you are ready to take your egg out.

Did you forget something? Of course! You didn’t put your bread in the toaster. Rookie mistake. Let’s say you remembered, though. Three minutes is also enough time to butter your toast and to cut it into long strips, or soldiers.

Former UK Prime Minister John Major was famously quoted as saying he preferred to eat his boiled egg with toast soldiers, and that really is the only way to do it. Dunked into the hot, runny golden yolk.

A memory from childhood is that my mum would serve us boiled eggs in proper eggcups with spoons made out of some kind of horn, probably carved goat horn. I have no idea why, but those were our egg spoons.

Some people prefer their eggs to be hard and crumbly, but this is not about those monsters. This is for people who like eggs done correctly.

Another memory: I was perhaps four or five. I had annoyed my mother by complaining about the food and she insisted I eat everything. So I did. Shell and all.

The best way to open the egg, once it has been transferred to a proper egg cup is to slice off the top fifth of the egg with a knife to reveal the yolk without spilling the yolk all over the place. Egg yolk is harder to remove from clothing than bloodstains.

You can use the leftover shell to annoy snails in your garden or simply dispose of it in the bin.

That’s it. An easy breakfast suggestion, although it’s just as good for dinner.

Let me know if I left anything out…

Or

The quick version:

Ingredients:

An egg.

Water.

Salt.

Method:

Bring salted water to a rolling boil in a small pot, gently add room-temperature egg (to avoid it splitting).

If at coast, boil for three minutes a few seconds longer if inland.

Serve with buttered toast soldiers, salt and pepper to taste.

Toronto '73

It was cold out on the water

After the flight to NYC,
A ferry sliced through syrupy ripples,
Back in '73.
In search of the promise of an endless summer,
Suntanned faces, hair around our cheeks,
Blue skies that went on forever -
Well, in the Polaroids we kept at least.

They were busy with construction of what would be (for a short time anyway),
The tallest building in the world,
Canada's National Tower,
553.3 metres tall on its completion in 1975,
Keeping the dream of the Montreal Olympics and Canadians alive.

But we kept our eyes on the road,
Through forests and past lakes that looked like spilled ink.
In a Pontiac that was a couple of years old:
Mom and dad in the front,
Me and my brother in the back, playing
Eye Spy until the arguing grew and grew so that my mother could barely think...

It wasn't the hottest summer on record that year,
But still the ground became cracked with
Lightning bolt-shaped lines as even the weeds gave up looking for moisture.
There were long days stretching into evenings around the barbecue

After the sun scorched swimming costume silhouettes onto reddened bodies, in this new world pasture.

I spent some time in hospitals there in Toronto, my giant Donald Duck stuffed toy filling up the cot,
But I can't remember much of that at all, no, and that's maybe for the best.
A day trip down to Niagara Falls was a blast, the wide expanse of water plunging over and over into another country, just like us.
I hurled my toy train into the mists there and it's probably still sitting on a damp ledge, being spotted by honeymooning couples,
Year after year: hey what's that down there - looks like a train - they'd laugh and return to their heart-shaped bed,
To make a railroad rhythm of their own.

Yeah, we didn't stay forever the way it had been planned, but flew out in just a couple of seasons,
Seasons spent in Toronto '73.
Seasons spent, came and went,
In Toronto '73.

50 scribblings from a childhood notebook.

 

Memories, like watercolours, bleed into each other, creating shades that only exist in the imagination.

My fist is clasped around a branch, recently stripped from a weeping willow. Willows are best when you want to make a bow and arrow – not in the fashion of the ancient longbows that needed to be made of stronger wood – but, for the purposes of a childhood game, just right.

Fingers sticky with sap, the penknife I’d been given peeled away the bark. I’d sharpened it against a brick to the point that it frequently sliced my fingers open for a brief spurt of blood fascination that tasted as metallic as the blade itself.

Down among a copse of trees and bushes – an oak, elderberries and a chaotic stretch of brambles with their sweet, black berries and the fringes of nettles below – I was a knight. A knight with no armour, just a stick sword and my bow and arrow, ready for… something.

The donkey tree was a good place to think, with its enigmatic trunk that dipped parallel to the ground forming a comfortable seat. You could sit there with your feet swinging for hours, dreaming of treehouses and rubbing the moss away with calloused hands. A rope dangled from higher up in the tree, and there was another rope in a tree nearby, but any attempt at a Tarzan swing from one to the other ended up in a breathless bump on the damp ground below, with skinned fingers.

Long walks with families had taught me the lore of the meadows: buttercups, when held to your chin, reflected yellow - you loved butter. Dock leaves calmed the white rash of nettle stings. Spit blobs on grass belong to insects. Streams can be dammed with rotting piles of wood and cabbage white butterflies are hard to track on their flight paths as they dance into the sun, making you squint. Many plants and berries are edible, just like that, while others will kill you. There’s neither fair nor unfair to that balance, it just is.

It’s not wise to shelter under a tree in a thunderstorm, with the dense, rich smell of the earth rising in an eerie warmth to your nose, but it’s the best place to watch the whole world turn to water. Heavy drops of rain are like the first tears of grief before they multiply into the lashing rage of mourning.

I knew every blade of grass – or so it seemed. A single head of cow parsley bobbed in front of an old gate that I never entered, behind which there was an empty swimming pool, a shallow one, perhaps hundred years old and an abandoned car. In those places, older kids had been with their confusing litter and graffiti. One boy had lost an eye after lighting something and tossing it into the petrol tank of the car, causing a brief blast of fire and terror that changed his life forever.

Up on the road, the kids rode their bikes in listless circles, trying out skids into gravel patches or wobbling their wheelies as they tried to ride without holding onto handlebars. We’d turn an old tractor innertube into a toy and roll inside it down the same hill that was, in winter, perfect for sliding down on a kitchen tray across the snow.

I should let these memories rest, but they bubble up. They don’t deserve to vanish just yet. They have no impact at all on who I am now, this grown up person who can Google everything except memory.

Turning fifty years old is to look out across time and recall those experiences as if I was, at one time, as wild as Tom Sawyer and innocent as Huckleberry Finn. The difference is that those kids never existed – my childhood did (at least, I think it did).

Long may these painted memories continue to wash over me.

My tennis ball is 18 (WARNING: traces of nuts).

 

I cupped my hand around the back of your head, your small, pink face with its puckered mouth and closed eyes seeming too small to be human. Baggy outfits, nappies that fit like comical sacks covering you from your thighs as thin and curved as bananas over your entire waist. Weightless. 

Doctors and specialists threw out thoughtless suggestions about your future health – she’ll always be small, might have problems with this and that. They didn’t say it, but I heard that old curse from times when farmers knew how to size up the newborn young in spring: runt. 

No, no, no. From the first day, my whole being has refuted them – you were tiny, the smallest baby I’d ever seen and held, but you were utterly perfect. 

Within a few months you grew to be a solid ball of happy baby. Charming fat wrists and ankles and delightful cheeks. 

Oh, those early years were a blur, with your toddler brother hurtling around on his plastic bike with the grating wheels, the endless laundry, cleaning and impossible time management. Mobility was your chance to get closer to the action – you refused to sleep, especially not in your bed. You’d have your bedtime story, feign sleep for a bit and then emerge like a tiny intruder later on. I’d find you sleeping in the passage, trailing your blankie like a cape, or just on the floor next to your bed, with your doll, Middle Baby, at your side.

A memory – the time you actually broke all the rules of possibility by falling asleep standing up, arms on your bed, feet on the floor, knees dipping from side to side, but managing it. 

From early on, you were considerate – perhaps wanting to maintain the status quo and avoid cross voices, but then making sure that people around you were happy. Always ready with an infectious chuckle but just as likely to have huge tears wobbling on your eyelids. Emotions that refused to stay hidden.

It’s hard for a child whose emotions are so visible, you can’t pretend to be anything other than what you are, but, on the whole, you’ve been a happy one.

I think your peanut allergy forced you to take on a level of maturity that was unusual – taking care to ask at birthday parties if the snacks had any nuts in them and learning to read food packaging hieroglyphics early on for the telltale “ALLERGIES” legend. Other kids could gleefully stuff their faces, while you had to slow things down and make sure that it was okay, sometimes politely declining treats unless full assurance could be provided.

The acceleration of childhood was prevalent with you as you careened though primary and then high school, developing a fierce determination to achieve along with a strongly developed sense of right and wrong and the desire to see good vs. evil identified and encouraged or avoided, accordingly.

Some children are child prodigies, precocious in their natural abilities – your genius has been systematically earned through hard work. 

Best of all, you seek to be fair in your dealings with people and analytical in the ways in which you accept humanity. I admire your growth as a person and that you prioritise justice, recognising that we’re never too old to learn more about people, life and how it all works.

I’d like to say that you can be whatever you choose to be but we both know that’s not true. Life can get in the way – not everyone can be a success at their dream future scenario - but I am convinced that you are determined enough to take your circumstances and overcome trials and challenges. Your fierce heart is your superpower. 

To anyone, ever, past, present and future, who has underestimated you or pigeonholed you as quiet, small, or undermined you as a person, I know you will prove them wrong  not out of spite, but because you are an exceptional woman entirely capable of writing your own story, with deep veins of humour, compassion and joy running through it like lines of crystal in immovable granite.

I’ll always be on your side, even as you move towards independence – I’ll always be that proud dad cupping your tennis ball head in my hands, imagining the very best for you.

Xxx

Dad.

Last Will and Testament of a Distant Aunt

The attorney’s office wasn’t what he’d expected – instead of a red-spined law library, there was a yellowing stack of old National Geographic magazines on a bookshelf next to a few old photographs in black and white. A parasol plant skulked in one corner, its leaves fidgeting with every turn of the fan. Darren looked at the desk once again, nonplussed.

A spoon. A wooden spoon, to be more precise. Not carved with any kind of ornamentation nor wrapped in felt or velvet – just an ordinary spoon, lying there.

His attorney coughed. That’s it, that’s the… bequest.

Darren reviewed his memories for any indication of how this should have come to pass. His aunt had been a bit of an enigma, never adopting the route of marriage and procreation the way her siblings had. He had vague recollections of her house being full of decorations and paintings, original artworks that carried the faint grooves of the artist’s brushes in the heavy lines that she seemed to prefer. There were kilims and lamps, and perhaps an old piano somewhere under a stack of books – he couldn’t quite be sure if he’d made that up.

A spoon. It was written in the will as THE spoon, as if it were a gold pocket watch or a small cottage in the French countryside. There, next to the spoon: his name.

All he had with him was a newspaper, so he wrapped up this curious effect and tucked it under his arm. After all, a will isn’t just about getting things, it’s a moment of reflection captured in a document. He puzzled at the link between his name and a wooden spoon but couldn’t make a connection.

That evening, he sat in his lounge with the doors to the balcony opened up. He could feel a gentle breeze and smell the fragrances of the garden as he relaxed. He didn’t cook all that often – it was just him, and it seemed extravagant to prepare food for one person, but today he felt like the alchemy of the kitchen.

If he was completely honest, it was a magnificent kitchen. A massive gas oven dominated, with endless cupboards and surfaces all bracketing a spacious island where he preferred to prepare the food.

He had many appliances that he’d tried out, from air fryers to egg boilers, but still enjoyed the physical energy of chopping, stirring, pouring.

Emptying his fridge, he assembled various ingredients like spectators at a sports event, all lined up and ready to get engrossed in the action.

It’s important to honour family, Darren thought to himself as he took a sip from a large glass, before unwrapping the wooden spoon from its newspaper nest of headlines and advertisements.

The spoon was the length of his forearm and blackened on the curve of the bowl, slightly worn down on the left-hand side from incessant stirring.

As he held it, something he couldn’t quite articulate happened. It was as if a warm blast of energy blew up his fingers and into his arms. A burst of images filled his mind – casserole dishes, rich puddings, platters groaning with the weight of snacks and party food. He could smell spices and herbs, hear the sounds of knifes and forks against porcelain and the faint giggle of laughter.

He remembered how he and his brothers would flinch instinctively when they saw that same wooden spoon, a symbol of rebuke – had it been in their mother’s hands – but in his aunt’s kitchen it was as powerful as Excalibur, able to turn peasants into royalty, an instrument of myth and legend.

He knew, then, that his aunt hadn’t just left him a spoon, she’d dubbed him heir and recipient of her immense legacy, a legacy passed down over centuries, building an impregnable strength with each successive owner. In this kitchen, he had become regal with that simple gesture, as gentle as the tap of a sword on a shoulder commissioning a knight into service.

Darren held the spoon up to the lights, and murmured a commitment that he swore to honour, always; to be a fine Servant of the Spoon.

Back in the office, the old attorney smiled as he turned the pages of the will, remembering how Darren’s aunt had insisted on the inclusion of that spoon, before signing over her immense wealth to The Long Home for Retired Dachshunds. She was no fool – she understood the ways of people. Always had.

When raindrops race

Strange details stick in your mind from childhood. A memory isn’t a linear thread that has a beginning, middle and end, it just floats into view uninvited, a moth exposed by a peculiar flame just for an instant.

Travelling as a family when I was a kid was a big deal. I don’t recall practical details – perhaps my dad filled up with petrol at the pump they had at the factory, and my mum packed our bags for us. In any event, the responsibilities I’d have would be to take along something to keep myself engaged for the trip.

Inevitably, this would involve looking aghast at the paper and pens I’d brought as I realised the bumps of the road made it impossible to create something meaningful, like a picture of Tarzan swinging on his impractical lianas from tree to tree (I’d tried that too many times with ropes and had the calloused palms and bruises to prove it), or maybe a knight with a broadsword like the one we’d seen another summer at that castle with the moat where swans drifted in their creamy arrogance.

No, drawing was out. My two brothers had brought things of their own. The eldest always seemed to get it right – after all, where he had the Lone Ranger action figure, I had Tonto. He got Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, while I got Han Solo and a stormtrooper. He’d have brought just the right toy and created a base in the corner of the back seat he’d claimed after much bickering and negotiated pleas from my mum. I want the window! I want the middle seat! I was here first! You rode there last time… My younger brother would probably have a stuffed toy of some sort – maybe the always-soggy bear he’d named, mystifyingly, Sophie Jesus. And a rusk – so bear and rusk would take alternate trips to his mouth.

The best trips happened at night, with cat’s eyes flickering out of the evening fog and street lights at regular intervals clocking out progress. It would still be possible (when it was early enough) to play I Spy with everyone until we got annoyed with each other and one of us would accuse the other of cheating.

Mum would offer us our travel food – her go-to meals would be hard-boiled eggs, ham rolls sweating in their containers and maybe an apple. Eggs would bring about a furious round of bickering about who let off a fart while my dad would grin fiendishly in the rear view mirror: guilty.

Each road sign would be the closest I’d ever get to some of these towns, and, if this was a trip we’d done before, I’d know which ones to watch out for. A personal favourite was the one for the town Darlingscott, a blip on the rural map that often passed us by with the stench of fields ablaze as farmers prepared the land for the next planting. There’d be cows to shout at from the car, murmurings that one of my brothers felt car sick and, if we were lucky, a tin of boiled sweets passed around (always try for the red sweet, don’t pick the… yellow… oh, man!).

I’d often get a runny nose, and mum would offer me a tissue that smelt like Chanel No. 5 from her handbag, but I’d mostly opt for my sleeve.

The real race was when it inevitably started raining, the wipers smearing the view ahead with rippling waves. On the side windows, two raindrops would judder into view, seeming to be held in space and weightless by the air currents that swept past the car. They’d twitch and zigzag their way down the glass, one darting ahead and then pausing to let the other gain ground. Too soon, they’d vanish into the rubber frame and I’d look for the next candidates to assert themselves.

My parents would be silent, mostly, occasionally squeezing each other’s thighs to remind themselves that we’d soon be wherever we were heading.

As we arrived, we’d be admonished to be on our best behaviour – and, with the prospect of fun on the cards, my brothers and I would call an unspoken truce, to be broken only on the trip back.

My parents have left on that trip forever now, and, like raindrops on a window pane, they’re always on the move, shifting into an increasingly blurry landscape that’s made up of fewer and fewer memories, memories that flutter unbidden like moths into view and then away again.