The Glass Box

Shh, can you hear it?...

...there it is, listen...

...it's the sound of thousands and thousands of silent bloggers, myself included, sounding off to the world in general and no-one at all.

In my mind's eye I see myself flying over crowds of people from all over the world, all looking up, shouting, talking, singing, waving their arms about, drawing, painting, pleading, complaining, laughing, crying listen to meeeee.  All completely silent.

Why?

Why do it, I mean?

15 minutes of fame?  Something that needs to be said?  Catharsis?  A search for the missing 'community'?  Loneliness?  All of the above?  None of the above?

This is 'Speaker's Corner' for the 21st Century.  All of us the best Marcel Marceau ever to perform on the radio.

One day someone will find this frequency so that I can break out of this glass box.

Thank you for listening.

Limericks of the day

It wasn't like this in my day
Said the man as he gazed in dismay
At the bile from the press
He just knew a lot less
And found bliss in his ignorant way

On the whole, Man remains just the same
The barbarous still kill and maim
They do it for greed
They do it for creed
And indeed this will drive them insane

Just as sheep we are urged by a goat
To follow and offer our throat
For the will of the masses
Dons rose tinted glasses
And grumbles but won't rock the boat

A silly old blogger from Wales
Tried to understand mankind's travails
Tried to make it all rhyme
For he had too much time
What a stupid twat!

In the beginning... ...What?

It is said that Douglas Adams came up with the opening line:

"High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse."

And then didn't write the rest of 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' for several years.  The sentence just sat there in his notebook like a grain of sand in an oyster.

This legend has always fascinated me so I thought I'd write some opening gambits for possible future use.  I don't mind if anyone wants to use them as long as I get a credit somewhere in the book.  They may not be just one line and it's something that I'm going to be doing when the muse takes me.  Who knows, I may even get mused up so much that I'll take it further myself and produce a best seller.

...and then I woke up!

Here goes then...

Detective Inspector John Collier hadn't been to many murder scenes before.  His rural beat mostly served up a staple diet of theft and RTAs.  He wasn't even sure if this was a murder scene.  SOCOs had been there quite some time before he had been summoned and with what they'd discovered so far, who ever was the victim of this... this... incident, wouldn't be sat with their feet up enjoying a tin of Fosters and the final of 'Strictly Come Dancing', this evening.


There was so much blood.  Dark, congealed and everywhere.  All over the clothes, the floor and the walls of the small, lockup garage.  Strangeness and the macabre had collided, however, when it came to the 'victim's' identifying features.  That's all that there was.  Arrayed in and around the clothes as if the rest of the body had just dissolved were a full set of recently and roughly extracted teeth, the tips of the fingers of each hand and a sizeable chunk of flesh, the skin on which bore a distinctive scar.  This had been discovered when the otherwise empty shirt had been delicately pulled back from a suspiciously soggy lump and had been the cause of much whistling and cursing.


DI Collier's mind was a crowded room of eager thoughts, jostling for attention.  Why me?  Why not me?  Where's the rest of him?  Am I up to this?  Is this murder?  Is this a crime, even?  God, I hope Lynda hasn't done that bacon joint for dinner.


The room was cleared suddenly by Sergeant Hepworth's dream come true.  He'd always wanted to say this, ever since he'd opened his first Colin Dexter, "I think you should see this, Sir..."...


There it is, then.  What now?