A Drabbled History in Knowledge

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

From Tennyson's Ulysses

In knowledge we live and die.

 People retreated into distant corners and set up literal walls as the Romans had done many millenia prior. Caravans trekked the lands carrying loads of goods and people as they hurried to safety. Wary of each other of other things. Technology had brought much which was fantastic and forbidden to the forefront.


Shadows of nameless fear. Hidden societies. Secret cults. Inventions gone sour.

Among the chaos came the Druids. From the sky they came, riding upon bulbous clouds. They offered humanity their aid. Led by twin brothers these people from the sky beyond taught humans how to protect themselves from the shadows. They called it alchemy and it followed one sacred rule.

Equivalent exchange. So long as people put in something of equal value to what they wished to create or fix, anything was possible. With possibility in hand, humanity felt safe and in their safety they began to look further. Where did the Druids come from? What other worlds were beyond Earth? What other powers were possible?

The Druids would not tell and so suspicions grew. Just why did the Druids come when they did? Some said. Others stated they knew all along that the Druids were bad business. Technically the lot of insanity was down to a greedy human and a beautiful woman who too many people obssessed over, but that is another story for another day. Either way, what history came to call the Great War erupted and after, the Druids disappeared. Alchemy became outlawed as a new power sought to bring control to the lands. Remember, alchemy and love do not mix.

Under the Emperor Alexander the world prospered once more. Simply, albeit slowly and like life, this comfort was not truly comfort, was not truly felt, strongly and fully, until it was gone. Quickly. A short time it was. Only a hundred years and once again, shadows unknown whispered from the darkness. Alchemy trickled to the surface.

Humanities hunger for knowledge would not long sit starving and soon there was revitalisation of texts and tales. Those who were most hungry for knowledge; the ultimate quest for the truth of existence formed an organisation. The Rosicrucians.

Garbed in red they were. Trapped in gold chains about their wrists and foreheads, in symbol to their devotion to their quest and their duty; the seeking and protecting of all knowledge. As the Great War showed, lesser beings could not be trusted with such power. (Like kings. Or knights. Academics, whether they are alchemists or not, do spend their lives with their heads in towering castles so do try to understand their narrow stair perspective).

Which brings us to a covered wagon that rumbled along a Roman road. Still rutted, winding and narrow after countless millenia. It traveled to the village of Chesterfield, a haven caught between hills, river and forest and segregated from the world's wonders due to a great wall, put up to protect from nameless shadows, that was never felled.

But when the shadows come in human form, what is there to stop them? The human in question was a young man with a neat brown beard and twinkling eyes shaded by a cloth cap. A falcon was perched beside him and a barrel-chested horse pulled his home. Well, home it was to him. To you and me it was a sea of books, loose parchment, ancient scrolls, quill pens, broken clocks and an old gramophone. Caught between the past and the present this young man was admitted, albeit with the narrowed eyes of the gatesman watching him, to one of the last places on Earth to have not yet felt the fear of hungry knowledge.

Oh Chesterfield was full of intelligent people. They didn't lack knowledge. They just didn't have the tower-abiding sort. Or the sort which scrabbled and scrambled, pointing guns and and dropping traps on people for the bits generally belonging in museums. They were the sort who knew the land, knew the seasons and thanked the Earth for its generosity while whipping up in curious chatter when an itinerant tradesman huffed his way in, pushing a broken down lorry full of woven rugs from distant lands or the lady from over the hill came in her donkey cart piled with sweets.

When the alchemist came to Chesterfield this all changed. With him he brought knowledge which the village folk called magic. It simplified things. After all, what else can see a cold cured with a quick mix of a drink, rather than a fortnight of Nan's tangy teas or the your dropped pocketwatch could be fixed with a quick sketch of some symbols and a pile of spare gears to replace the bent ones.

He also brought peeping eyes to his shaded windows, and when he bothered to venture out for a client a wake of gratitude tinged with fear and anger followed his way.

He wasn't particularly polite.

Then again, when one is an alchemist who delights in the puzzle of broken things and can fix them with a quick brow quirk and other necessary bits, who needs to.

He did appreciate Matty's cakes though.

And that is where things went wrong. Well, started too. When she died things when very wrong, but really, haven't humans learned that alchemy and love never mix?

Not my place to interfere. I'm just a spectator. What are you? What will you do? What do you know?

(A/N: Thanks for reading! Just a heads up I am delving more seriously than I yet have in a long time in terms of properly completely a full novel so my blog posts will be relegated to photostory-esque drabbles like what I have been doing on and off. I'll work on fitting in more article-based things but at the moment I am wanting all my focus to go toward writing for the novel directly or expanding the universe it sits within. Hopefully in some months time this will be less of a priority and I will certainly go back to detailing travel-related experiences and tips as usual).

A Road Trip in Brains: Drabble

Did you know that mayonnaise is 5% milk?

Did you know that everyone has a unique tongueprint, as they do with fingerprints?

Did you know that the northern leopard frog swallows its prey using its eyes? (It uses them to help push food down its throat by retracting them into its head).

Did you know that Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the smiley?

Did you know that there are 274 different types of dust?

Did you know that bacteria lives in hairspray and in 2008 a new one was discovered?

Did you know that there are around 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body? (If you took them all out and laid them end to end, they’d stretch around the world more than twice).

Did you know that there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach in the world? 

As the road stretched out ahead. Deep into the peat moss mire and moors of Connemara, twenty seven brains on a bus ramble down their own lanes.

Some of it was true. Some of it was not. Mostly though, the thoughts were much of nothing. Though that's just a limitation of the English language. Nothing is impossible to quantify. So what is all of this. Really?

I'm bored. When are we going to arrive. Is this even worth it? I'm hot. I can't sleep. I'm tired. This bus is rocky. Look a sheep! Those mountains are gorgeous. I have so much work to do. This is the middle of nowhere. I wonder what Jeremy is doing? Yellow car! What am I going to do tomorrow? I want a chocolate muffin. Should I have a muffin? This is a holiday. Nine-hundred and ninety-nine stars in the sky, the sun is burning. What do I have to do when I get back? Pretty stream. Where are my sunglasses? It's so hot.

On wanders the brains of the twenty seven passengers.

The brain belonging to the wire rimmed glasses and bohemian blue shirt chatters a Connemara stream's worth of gossip about the next door neighbours to the brain of the brown messy bun and sensible white shoes. They've been friends for thirty years.

Behind the two middle-aged brains sits the brain of the textbook version of freshmeat business. A twenty-something in a sharp jacket and jeans who holds the hand of a svelte model with a camera bigger than a swan's neck. Together they are caught in a duet of money and expectations of love.

Over to the left is the brain of a bouncy castle. Well, not literally, but the way the mind leaps from sheep to cloud to the curiousity of Connemara sunshine versus the mystery of mist blown moorlands, one wouldn't be wrong to deduce so.

The brain at the front of the bus is full of burden. Burden at bearing patience at the long journey ahead of which, despite the declared time of two hours before the bus began trekking, cannot see an end. And now the brain feels accute hunger and needs the toilet quite badly.

Which brain is the best? The most normal? The wisest? The smartest? But who are we to give definition? Brains are brains. Presently there is a total thirty-nine living in yellowed jars at the Victorian pathology museum of St Barthomew's hospital in London.

And that means, as far as anyone knows, we are all normal here.

Brains are brains.

So take the hands, take the stream, take the road that does not seem.

Far beyond the fallen skies, beyond the rolling hills. Find future sitting in the southern lands and fantasy through a lean-to.

Come count these brains of the twenty seven. All together come as one, many and none.

That is all. 

Remember then, when people come, kicking the sky down from overhead, normal is not a destination, it is a stream of thought, trapped between grocery lists and restaurant recipes. It is the brain chirping "yellow car" for the umteenth time, just because it can. Especially if present in a country known to have a regular dose of yellow vehicles for reasons still unknown.

What thoughts pass by on the rocky roads, rolling, won't fit into the cutout squares where peat moss sat for billions of years. No, its more likely these thoughts will wash downstream with the pins and coins, the bones and toys of days long past which melted deep into the earth as it grew and died, grew and died, over and over. Cementing the brains of humanity into the very earth itself.

Sink deeper now, into the sheets of dreamland.

Don't live normal. Live your story.

Lightbulbs: A Drabble

She wasn't a Betty. Or a Betsy. Not even a Milly, a Molly or a Mandy. Certainly not a Mary or a Charlotte.

Catherine was too pretentious and Elizabeth, too grand.

No, she was just Terry.



This is all learned the third time I met her. Directly, anyway. Though even as I say third time, it might have been the first, for all the two of us knew in the moment. It wasn't until later that I connected the other signposts together.

Either way, it held more weight than our first meeting. Now that one was more of a "pass the salt please" situation, let alone an afternoon's tittle tattle over tea or a duel of wits over drinks. It was born from the stupidity the human race descends into after months of grey lightbulbs suddenly getting switched over to halogen golden. Like flies to flame humanity descended outdoors. Coupled with the usual insanity around working hours, well, I found myself playing human Tetris as I navigated my way through a station and dive-bombed, Olympic style, through the closing doors of the train I needed.

The trials weren't over. Once on, I was still in such fast forward motion I tripped a pair of home-painted converse and slipped into the crack between a six foot five business man with discreet dreadlocks and a gaggle of Spanish girls in heels, only to nearly fall in the lap of an older lady with Einstein hair and a pink jumper with cherries all over it.

I apologised profusely and managed to gather my bearings.

"Up 'n at 'em dear. Don't want to miss your stop."

I apologised again. Righted myself properly and promptly buried my nose in my phone. Three stops later the lady was off and three more stops later the train was less like a can of beans but I was off anyway and back into fresh air and sunshine. I forgot the encounter.

The second time I met her I dropped the three avocadoes I was analysing. You can never tell with avocadoes. Ripe or not to be ripe. That is the ridiculous question and I spend more than enough time as it is, agonising over purchases at the supermarket.

I was bent down, mortified, when a weathered hand dropped into my vision and passed me one avocado.

"Perfect that'un."

"Probably."

"Is. See?" She knocked it with a fist. I winced, practically feeling the avocado squish. "You can always tell the squidgy ones. Bad for business having avocadoes. Don't want a squidgy business."

"Of course."

The old lady eyed me down, "work hard. Help's always wanted. Somewhere. And people always talk. Somewhere."  

"Thanks." I nodded and scarpered off toward the cheeses, even though I had no intention of getting any.

The third time my car had broken down near a canal. I plonked next to it to wait. On the bend of the water's edge was a boat called "Dances with Bears." I idly picked at the grass around my crossed legs and wondered if it was inspired by the film Dances with Wolves, when the boat began to move.

Slowly.

Inch by inch it chugged ahead. A man and woman of around fifty popped out of either side of the boat and jumped up onto the bank.

They began pulling at the levers to set the lock so the boat could move down to the next level as it slipped forward, nose close to the gate. At the back wheel was an old lady of nearly ninety, with Einstein hair and a pink, cherry decorated jumper.

I was nearly at the point of connecting the dots when a furry missile bowled me over. Stick in a drooling mouth, I realised a second later it was only a dog.

"June! Sit!" The old lady, who was presently waiting on the lock to fill with water, commanded.

The dog sat. Panting.

"She's missing a lightbulb today. Land-sick." The lady shouted over to me. I shuffled up from my position on the grass, just to be in polite talking distance.

"It's fine." I said.

The old lady harumphed. "Not on my watch. Been waiting years to command my own ship. A dog's not ruining it."

"Don't mind." I said.

"I don't need help. I said. I don't need help. I'm going to do this." The old lady ranted on, not quite noticing I was standing nearby. Helpless under her tirade.

"Your generation doesn't do anything. We did it all. All. Least my son's generation knew to listen. They had a lightbulb on somewhere." Her rant was cut short by a shout from the couple.

"Terry move 'er in!" They called. "We're ready!"

"Ah. Good timing. Have a lightbulb on me. Buy yourself a boat with lightbulbs." Words passed on, she turned her attention down the narrow strip of the lock and canal. "Come on girl. Let's do this." Inch by inch, the long boat slipped deftly between the narrow sides of the lock bridge and walls.

I cheered with the couple who watched from the other end of the lock.

"Happy trekking," Terry waved. "Places to be and all that."  She whistled with her fingers between her teeth.

"Get on ye runt!" She shouted at her dog. "This bear waits for no creature."

Inspired by the luck of catching a boat moving through a lock on a canal in Wales and my favourite spoken word poet, Shane Koyczan, who grew up not far from my little hometown. Below you'll find the specific poem if your curious. Formally it's known as "Help Wanted" but in the spoke word circles it's got the nickname of "Grandma's Got Her Game On."

Moony.

Season's Greetings

Swinging her bumble-bee coloured wellies while attempting to dive-bomb bread crumbs onto the heads of unsuspecting goose subjects, the little girl gained no attention from her human relations.

Relations being a loose term by the way. For various reasons.

Mostly though, it lies within this particular day of baby whisper breezes, and one tentative cherry blossom who had had too many seasons of being destroyed by wayward footballs to come out too full for too long. Not to mention it hit zero the night before anyway.

It was supposed to be the season of new starts and Winter was on a mission despite having recently retired only a few days prior. As he approached the girl, better known to himself and other folk of nature as Spring, she landed a bit of crust on the head of a bobbing goose, causing it to squawk, spin around and pull the others nearby into a frenzy of waddling argument.

"Don't the humans do enough of that already?"

"Nope." She replied popping the "p." She tore off another piece and held it up near her nose, one eye closed and the other squinting an angle of aim. "It's fun."

Winter snorted and gracefully folded his six foot plus frame onto the bench. Spring turned her head sideways to Winter and giggled.

"Still carrying that face? Don't you get bored. Looking like cracked brownies? I would." 

Winter raised a brow at her sugary metaphor. Last time he had seen Spring she had resembled the cartoon version of a Roma. In other words, a lithe dancer the colour of chocolate with a voice of drum beats. "No," he replied."Besides, looks neither here nor anywhere this side south of the Arbor. It's your turn. Where's the weather gone? Cherry blossoms don't count either. Percy came back yesterday so Demeter's all jubilant."

"Bored. Bored. Utterly bored."

"You could do your job."

"Boring. Did you see that exhibition last week? The beard one? Humans like that sort of thing. And cats. They love cats." With each sentence Spring lobbed a bread bit at a goose, letting out a little "ha" of triumph when the targets lost balance.

"They also like warm weather which facilitates the growing of cherries and strawberries." Winter added with all the patience required of one who tries snowshoeing for the first time. Spring dropped her bag of bread and hopped up on the bench, leaning, elbows on the back of the bench, toward Winter, who merely raised a brow as she exclaimed.

"Do they really. Really? Cause I couldn't see my feet yesterday. I think I was somewhere in Asia. In a field of white stuff."

"You don't say?" Winter drawled.

"Not done yet! Obviously not snow. Plastic probably. Bags. Wasn't really noticing. Cause the moutain was a million, trillion times better than snow. Not cold either. They wouldn't like real strawberries. Too squishy. Too much juice."   

Winter opened his mouth but Spring interrupted with a "oh look! See. See. That's why they don't care. Strawberry ice cream." She pointed at a five year old boy trailing behind his mother, occupied with breaking up a duel for a plastic giraffe between twin girls in the stroller she pushed.

"Give me one reason. One. Why should I give humans a new set of lives this year? Got my geese games. They've got cat pictures. Even. Square. Haven't Anansi and Loki gotten back from the tour yet? Time to move on."

"And leave the storytelling to the Greeks? Have you really fallen so far?" Winter pushed up from the bench in a huff. "You've lost me my best toque."

Spring snorted. "Toque? Seriously? You care about that?"

"I can care about lots of things. One happens to be my favourite hat."

Spring hopped off the bench and looked up at Winter. "Who'd ya bet?"

"Echo." Winter sighed and scuffed his boot in the mud looking more like a child than Spring. The geese who had lingered in hopes of further food scattered, calling Winter various names unmentionable in polite company.

Spring growled and pull off a true tantrum of stomping, fist punching and unintelligeable noises. One goose, either a bit slower in the head than most, or a bit more stupidly brave, got caught in the crossfire of one particular lash out of her bumble-bee wellie.

"Well then. I'll just have to prove that empty girl wrong. Words mean mud and I've got plenty to turn over. Some seeds to plant."

"Is she still playing in the human's fashion world?"

"Yep."

"Still obsessed with Narciss?"

"Yep."

"Brilliant. Laters Winter. I've got me a field of narcissus to grow."

The Clouds

A/N:  Clouds are amorphous individuals who are about as rare as any of the Wee Folk. They have strong opinions about being captured on camera and yet they are permanently captured in our imagination. As such, the following drabble and upcoming travel post were both inspired much more by the magic of imagination than anything so dull as a common photograph* (according to the resident cloud experts being the persons known only as Just Argument and Unjust Argument who are most commonly located in The Middle of a debate on Proper Education**).

Below find two piquant examples of the wisdom of The Clouds:

How can I study from below, that which is above?

ARISTOPHANES, The Clouds

The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.

ARISTOPHANES, The Clouds

Clouded Perspectives

Just so you know, we see you all as you grapevines of hairless ape, see fish. Flowing, occasionally or often (depending on the day), across a sea of checker boards.

Other occasions (not birthday parties, unless you're the parent), struggling against a sea, turbulent and tumultuous. Strenuous and solitary.

Travelling in schools, learning in boxes begotted by boxes.

How you lot manage to stand inside four walls when you're a stick of angles and elbows we clouds have yet to discern a reasoned method. Much like how you lot have yet to figure out the dolphins have been experimenting on you for a millenia. Those clicks and clacking? They're laughing. At you lot.

Honestly, just take a moment to think. How is it even possible to survive in the sea of the world if most of the time is spent secreted away within the coral concrete of boxes. Windows are a measly invention. Again, the four corners and sides thing. And only just so far in four directions and a single distance. Unless there happens to be a tree blocking the view and then, what's the point in living? A tree is blocking your view. (And don't chop it down. Another one will grow by the time you all have gone extinct via apple-crate suffocation).

We haven't even delved into the dissolution of touch but that'll be in a whole other epoch dictating the Misinformed Melodies to various monstrosities of the Modern Age.

Technology is one. That scrawny boy, Commerce, is another.

But we have gotten side-tracked while we stand on this soap bubble for a moment.

As creatures of the sky we are free from your boxes. Untangeble. Poor old William Wordsworth tried desperately to contain us in a poem.  That didn't work out by the way. If you haven't read it, we'll spare you the pain and just say he ended up realising being human is terribly lonely business. Stuck in bodies and minds which ooze a combination of gangreen and ice cream. Simultaneously. How exhausting.

We come with less of the toothpaste ooze which combine humans and physical bodies and more sequence. The closest available metaphor to this particularly narrow word happens to be a classic game of cat's cradle. Done to the tune plucked on the skeins of a lyre.

Do that childhood thing again. Watch us for a while. Pearly bulbs, grey streaks, bulbuous black masses which fall across blue skies, turning all to shadow. Then, slowly, on a breath of wind we flow away, leaving a mass of pale grey blue which encircles the land from green hill to green wood.

Until you have been a cloud, spread eagled over grassy parkland, untouched by picnic baskets and playthings, you won't learn the truth of the universe.

A truth which is a cloud, coming up the lake on an August afternoon.

Moony.

*This thereby meaning my next travel post on the Isle of Skye got centred around the notion of clouds when really, after the fact, I realised captured more photos of hills and picturesque cottages then clouds.

**See Aristophanes The Clouds for further Proper Education on methods of rhetoric disguised as a rather hilarious comedy between a father, son and Sophocles himself.

Be Destiny

Long ago I lived. Deep in the heart of the belly button of the world.

It revolved around me and I, around it.

I made cities fall under seas and told Zeus where to strike. They called me a prophet even but truly, I was an imaginist. I saw starlight in sand and the heavens in a bloody heart.

When you live here, you are on top of the world. You are destiny. You are fate. You are fortune. As far as the sea scape goes. Forever and ever, never actually dropping off a cataclysmic cliff. The world simply goes rounf and round and I am its voice.

Come, I entreat you. Stand here. First, look up. Then, look down.  Last, look all around. What do you see? What is the world to you?

There to take. There to appreciate. There to make. There to forsake?

I am no prophet. I am an imaginist. You tell me. What will you do?

Go now. Stop staring, wishing, wondering and asking. Go. Make your own destiny.

Believe what you want.

Moony.

Be Memory

As a carrot for an upcoming post I have a drabble first and then a destination to follow. I felt rather sunny and colourful this weekend and the destination I'll be detailing which is the home to the following picture, is definitely that. Colourful. In all sense of the word (and a heavy emphasis on the artsy side). And yet, in all this overwhelming wash of colour, I loved best the moments when I sat. Foot-sore and tearing into food (finally). Then. Watching, breathing in the air, the smells and the sounds.

The best travel experiences are often the ones when you aren't actually engaging in the physical act of travelling.

The horse had seen people. Many smiles.
The horse had held many riders. Many laughs.
The horse had turned many circles. Many times.

Too many to count.

The world was a blur of colour and as much as the horse adored the laughter drawn from his back and his fellows, he loved best when all was still.

When the music ran down and he began to bob slower. Slower.

That was the magic.

Remembering reality.

Was in stillness.

Not in spilled ice creams and screams. Nor giggles and cartwheels or fresh paint and streaking sunlight.

No, it was in the floating dust, bobbing up and up, down and down in the future of one day. When, between the shaft of light cut out from the tearing off the wood slats nailed up over fragile windows, a hand would reach out. It would brush faded wood while lips would breath over the dust, sending it twirling in carosel circles.

Cherishing.

I encourage you to travel back to a piece of your childhood this week. Go, dig it up. It's just as important experiencing new places as it is to remember old ones and what you found there.

Moony.

Be Curious

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The dog poked its head beyond the threshhold of the glass windows and wood of the front door and the tangy scent of lemon, dust and porcelain plates, dotted with gardens and dancing girls. 

Beyond the threshhold sat a bike with a wire basket, peoples' feet tumbled forward like the rapids of the River Cam, some way outside the town. People hurried upwards and downwards. 

Few stopped. 

Mostly, these few frozen individuals had tunnel vision for mobiles and maps only. A pidgeon could have sat on their heads and they wouldn't have had a care.  

It was terrifying. But the dog couldn't help looking. So many sounds and smells. Pasties and pies, bicycle bells and school-boys. Vegetables in baskets and voices braying. The dog loved going out on market days, but his human didn't much like to anymore. Walking hurt, he'd said just this morning.

A huge truck rumbled past then. The dog wondered from where it came. If the grubby capped human inside the machine had a dog. Or maybe a dancing lady. The dog wanted to meet one of the dancing ladies that were on the porcelain plates in the shop. His human used to dance to loud music.

Uncounted minutes past as the dog continued to look back and forth, as if following a tennis match. Humans absolutely everywhere. Big, tall, small, skinny, round, straight, wavy. They all couldn't fit in the town could they? The dog wondered. They did move ever so fast though. Never stopped. Except when they bumped into each other. They never stopped to talk to the dog either.

Except for one. 

This human came rolling toward the dog as quick as any other, except their strides were long and languid rather than seconds from a jog. The human paused upon coming up beside the shop, bent down, smiled, and said, 

"You're a true keepsake, you are. Worth more than all the plates in the world." 

The dog yipped as the human patted its white head.

"Have an adventure for me," said the stranger tipping their tweed cap. "The world is curiously big."  

New Content: Drabbles

In addition to becoming a blog more focused on places I've visited and my experiences in them in terms of people, places and things; or in other words, more of a travel blog, I am also a writer and a photographer.

Travelling teaches you many things and I want to share with you all the things I am always learning from travelling, have learned and wonder about learning through a style of writing known as a drabble.

For those unfamiliar with the writing world, a drabble is a self-contained moment in time, which can either be present or reflecting on the past.

I love the drabble format, particularly in terms of travelling because it forces you to see, feel and most of all, be in a single moment.

In a world that rushes about non-stop, being in a single moment, cherishing it, is as often hard to come by or as hard to do as the splits.

On a final note, sometimes my drabbles will pull an image from a previous post and have to do with the things I learned in that place, other times the drabbles might have an image from a completely unrelated area, but at the present moment I might have had cause to reflect back on that experience.

Either way, don't forget to pause in your day. At least once. Look at the sky. Look at the ground. Look all around.

Moony.