OH MY GOD LET’S DO THIS LET’S DO THIS LET’S DO THIS also I always think of it like a play because I don’t know how to write comic scripts LET’S DO THIS LET’S DO THIS.

mrgjohnson:

I’m always struck by how well it would work on stage as well. I’d kind of love to try that when we’re done. In my head it’s less big theatre production, more going round primary schools with a production we could put on in any sized space, teaching those little kids that gender roles are complete…

I trace clouds with my finger, and you trace the outline of me, your long hands shaping idly in the long grass. Far away, down below, the cows go, and we are so close to the sky up here, and your hand is on my hipbone, and my hands make pictures in the sky. There is a dragon, and a castle, and behind them the tall dark shapes of thunder.

-Cumulonimbus.

-Cumulowho?

-Cumulonimbus. Thunder.

You look at me with sleepy summer eyes.

You say, very solemnly,

-Thunder and lightning very very frightening?

-Very.

You roll me towards you, your hand on my hipbone.

-How long have we got?

-Long enough.

-Long enough?

-Long enough.

This is a lovely thing that everyone has been retweeting into my timeline.

This probably says many things about the homogeneity of the people I follow on Twitter.

Nevertheless, it remains a lovely thing. 

majsaleh:

“All property should be held in common and should be distributed to each according to his needs as the occasion required. Any prince, count or lord who did not want to do this, after first being warned about it should be beheaded or hanged.” - Thomas Müntzer

(via fullcommunism)

Merry Christmas, beautiful people.

I was going to write you a proper ost but I got caught up in Last Days Of Job and Packing. 

So, just love. xxx

I started off writing this story for @frizzychick’s little girl at the time of #spreadthelove. It’s not finished, but it’s gone a bit stale, and it’s giving me That Look from the corner of my hard drive. So. An unfinished story. 

Mr and Mrs Darcy’s Baby  

“Annabel,” said Mr Darcy to Mrs Darcy, “Have you noticed anything- anything funny about the baby?”

“Funny about the baby?” said Mrs Darcy. “Everything the baby does is funny. The way her little toesy-woesies waggle. The way her little headsy-weadsy wobbles. The way she blinks her little eyesie-piesies-“

“No,” said Mr Darcy. “Not funny- ha-ha. More, I should say,” said Mr Darcy, “like funny peculiar.”

“Funny peculiar?” said Mrs Darcy, and there was an icy edge in her voice.

But Mr Darcy, Titanic-like, didn’t even notice it (perhaps being brought up in the North had made him a bit immune) and so he carried on.

“Yes,” said Mr Darcy. “Something- something a little bit funny peculiar.”

Mrs Darcy drew herself up to her full height of four foot six.

“Edgar Darcy,” she said, and her voice was terrifying and glacial. “Edgar Wilfred Darcy. Did you ask me if there was something “a little bit funny peculiar” about our daughter? Our darling little daughter? Our beautiful beloved bonny bouncing baby girl?”

“It was the bouncing that I really wanted to talk to you about,” said Mr Darcy, seeing a little foothold in the ice and flinging himself at it with all his force.

“The bouncing?” said Mrs Darcy.

“The bouncing,” said Mr Darcy.

“The bouncing?!”

Mr Darcy considered his position. It seemed too late to go back and besides, he had been waiting several days to make this speech.

“Yes,” he said. “The bouncing. She bounces.”

“When we bounce her,” said Mrs Darcy, firmly.

“Not quite,” said Mr Darcy.

“Yes,” said Mrs Darcy. “She’s only three weeks old. She can’t bounce herself yet. All the books say it’s quite impossible.”

“I should say it would be impossible for most babies,” said Mr Darcy. “But it’s not impossible for ours, because I’ve seen her do it.”

“Do what?”

“Well- bounce.”

“You keep saying ‘bounce’,” said Mrs Darcy, with dignity. “But I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you mean by ‘bounce’.”

“It’s really very difficult to explain,” said Mr Darcy.

“Do try your very, very best,” said Mrs Darcy.

“She bounces,” said Mr Darcy, and seeing Mrs Darcy’s face, said, “She bounces out of her chair and off the playmat and out of my arms.”

“Out of your arms?! If you are trying to tell me that you DROPPED our INFANT DAUGHTER-”

“I caught her again,” said Mr Darcy, and added, before Mrs Darcy could even open her mouth. “And I didn’t even drop her in the first place. I keep trying to tell you. She bounced.”

“Babies don’t bounce,” said Mrs Darcy.

“It’s not quite bouncing,” said Mr Darcy. “It’s more like-“ (and here he hesitated) “-it’s more like flying.”

“Flying?!” said Mrs Darcy. She didn’t say it. She shrieked it.  And then she covered her mouth with her hand, because the baby was sleeping upstairs.

“Yes,” said Mr Darcy, who seemed to have gained a little courage from actually saying it. “Yes. Our baby flies.”

“Our baby- flies?!” said Mrs Darcy, but her voice wasn’t quite so shrill as before.

“Yes.”

Mrs Darcy sat down, heavily.

“Our baby flies,” said Mrs Darcy. “Our baby flies. It explains a lot, actually.”

Saulius and Sasparilla sat on the steps of Sacre Coeur.

“The world is too small nowadays,” said Sasparilla, her hands in the dirt.

“The world is too wide nowadays,” said Saulius, his fingers on the fretboard of his guitar.

Sasparilla looked at him, and her hands were making pictures in the earth.

“Too wide?” said Sasparilla, and her eyes were wide too. “How can the world be too wide?”

Saulius looked away and into the dark of his guitar, because he had lost too many things all out in the wide world to explain it properly to her.

“No, the world is too small nowadays,” repeated Sasparilla, and she looked out across the rooftops of Paris and into the clouds, as if there might be better worlds out up there, somewhere. 

A boy wrote me a story.

thenothingzone:

Last winter, while I was sitting by myself in a coffee shop, a girl walked in and sat down at a nearby table, and I fell in love with her. She was beautiful, and serious, and she was reading Stephen Fry, and sometimes smiling. She had brown hair. She had brown eyes. She had a white wool dress…

-I like very much your husband, she says.

-I like him very much too, says the American lady, laughing.

-It is nice, I think, to have a husband. To give the cuddles and do things together.

-It is nice, agrees the American lady.

I am sitting in Eavesdropper’s Corner, eavesdropping over my Russian tea. I can taste the vodka. It is not quite noon.

-Me, I have not the husband.

-But you have a boyfriend.

-A boyfriend, a boyfriend, yes.

-Shall we try talking a little bit about your boyfriend in English?

-My boyfriend, she begins, haltingly, my boyfriend is the better boyfriend.

-The best boyfriend, says the American.

-No, he is better. The better boyfriend is my boyfriend and he is nice to me and he has blue eyes. My boyfriend has red hair and he is from Germany. He says “you are very pretty” but I am thinking-

-In English we say “I think”, when we are talking.

-I am thinking, I think that he has another girlfriend because sometimes when we are having sex he says Sophia instead of my name.

It goes very quiet. am waiting to see how the American lady reacts.

-Gosh, she says. I want to applaud this sterling display of restraint. –That’s- that’s not good.

-It is not good, says the French lady. –It is not good because my name is nothing like Sophia so it is the name of another woman.

-Yes, says the American. –That’s what I’d think, too.

-It is a problem for me.

-It would be a problem for me, too.

-But the having sex is very nice, says the French lady, and the American woman is practically biting her lip.

-That’s- good, she says.

-The having sex is nice when he doesn’t say anything.

-Well- good.

-I like it better when he is completely quiet. In fact, she says, leaning right in and I have to crane my neck to hear, when he is completely quiet it is better because then I can pretend he isn’t there and I am just doing it all myself.

There is a pause.

-Shall we talk about something else?, says the American lady.

I pour myself another cup of Russian tea.

I was flogging a dead horse and I knew it; he had been dead for weeks. He was starting to go rotten, and to make matters worse, he wasn’t even a horse. But when the Brigadier gets an idea into his head, it’s very difficult to get him to change his mind, and frankly, I valued my position too much to even try.

I had lately been promoted to Second Lieutenant of the Everyman’s Tuppenny Army, and the idea of being demoted back down to Officer Cadet gave me the heeby jeebies. I had been an Officer Cadet for far too long. I shuddered.

Keep still, can’t you!, called Aximander, from his perch high above. I don’t know why it’s so damned hard for you new bugs to keep still on the dead horse.

It’s not a dead horse, I said. He’s a dead donkey.

He’s been the Dead Horse since I came here, boyo, and I’ve been here a lot longer than you.

This was true. Aximander had been the Sergeant Major of the Everyman’s Tuppenny Army since before I was born; he had a moustache that reached his toes, which he curled around a broom handle with the aid of some axle grease while he slept.

Aximander’s Axle Grease was fabled among the men of the Tuppenny Army. It came in a jar wrapped tight in string and brown paper, and was delivered every Thursday by Pepper the fish man, in his van. It was rumoured that the reason it was Pepper who delivered it was because nobody else could stand the smell, and Pepper had no nose. It was true that Aximander’s moustache was a little pungent, but I had never seen any evidence that it was Pepper who delivered it.

The Dead Horse was an uncomfortable seat, but a necessary one. I wondered when Aximander and Daisy would be done drawing.

They were making posters for the Brigadier’s new campaign; they had been chosen from the ranks (or not the ranks, in the case of Aximander) due to their extraordinary skills with chalk.

It was said that Aximander had once duplicated the Mona Lisa in coloured chalk to such an extent that the Pope, on his annual Midnight Tour of the galleries, had ordered the da Vinci version to be destroyed, and the Aximander version to be hung in its place. Of course, the da Vinci version had not been destroyed, but according to some it had been- as the Mafia say- removed.

Daisy was the daughter of the former Attaché-Premier to Yugoslavia; I was a little in love with her, but she was secretly engaged to the son of the Brigadier. I was, as I think I’ve said, too fond of my job to consider a proposal a necessity, and to carry a wife along in the Tuppenny Army would have hindered me a little.

Not that Daisy couldn’t hold her own; she was one of the greatest soldiers we had. But in this context- for you must remember at the time I was flogging the Dead Horse the War of Walker’s Nose had barely begun, and the name of Maple Grove was not yet steeped in the blood of innocents it would later be so tainted with- in this context Daisy was simply an artist so talented with playground chalk that she was responsible for all the rations and quartermasterings.

As a child she had drawn herself a sister. Her sister’s name was Ysiad- “Eee-sha,” said Daisy, when she introduced us- and she worked in the typists department; she was not nearly so talented as Daisy and in places she had become transparent where the chalk had rubbed away.

What slogan are we doing today?, Daisy called from the top of her pillar. She had a lovely voice.

I thought for a minute.

“Join The Tuppenny Army and Be Like Me?”

Nobody asked you, said Aximander. I think, he said, squinting at me, I think we’ll do “Your Country Needs You” again. It’s been done, perhaps. But we’ll do it better. Our dead horse is better than their dead horse. Let’s see, Miss?

Daisy swarmed up the smooth pillar to Aximander’s perch.

That’s nice, that is. If he smiles a little more-

I smiled a little more, and I could hear the scratch-scratch of Daisy’s chalk on the paper.

-And if you, miss, if you put a tree in there, no, not there- hi, let me-

I heard Aximander roughing in a tree and Daisy’s little sigh as he changed her picture.

-I like the furs, though, miss. Nice touch. “You’ll Be Warm In the Everyman’s Tuppenny Army”.

-That’s what I thought, said Daisy.

-Can I see?, I said.

Daisy jumped from the top of the pillar and held it out to me.

-There you are, Lieutenant!

And there I was, smiling gravely on the back of my dead horse, the perfect poster boy for the Everyman’s Tuppenny Army. 

Well, dear, it’s only because you asked. But I want you to understand that our union was not the sordid stuff of imagination; I want you to understand right away that our union- no, our love- was the blessed holy stuff of the Bible, that we were always a little tinged with righteousness. You are imagining dreadful things, I know. You people always do. You come in here with your pamphlets and your strange thoughts and you look at the pictures on my mantelpiece and you think, aha, here is a heathen, here is a woman ripe for conversion.

And there you are wrong on all counts, my friends.

Of course I do understand why you come, and why you think that; but this picture, right here- this was the happiest day of my life. Look at my slender arms, there. Look at the way the lace of my dress billows. My sister made me that dress and she put the final touches to it the day before an express train going from London to Oslo mowed her down outside Buckingham Palace station. That’s why there’s that little band of black, of course. In memoriam. I had rosemary in my bouquet, too, which is unusual. But you aren’t looking at the finer points of my dress, are you? I’m almost blind but even I can see that your eyes are fixed on Michael. Michael was the world’s first deep land diver, which is why he’s wearing that. I’m sure you know it’s traditional for men of service to wear their uniforms to be married in; and of course, Michael very deeply believed that he was in essence a serviceman to the very soil of Britain. We had Rule Brittania at our wedding, and there was a very nice trombonist who danced afterwards with my sister- my other sister, I mean, not the dead one who made my frock- but he turned out not so nice after all, if you know what I mean, because nine months later you’ll absolutely never guess what, but we’d suspected for a while, a baby, yes, a baby, and he turned out to be absolutely gifted at the trombone from the moment he could first hold it in his pudgy hands. What’s that, dear? A miracle? Oh, no, just talent. Innate talent, it’s in the blood, they tell me, music. Yes, we used to take Little Michael, for of course my sister couldn’t take care of him so we took him in and brought him up as if he were our own- for of course Michael and I couldn’t have children of our own- and he never knew any different- oh yes, he’s dead now, everybody is dead now, it was a very long time ago! Sometimes I wonder how I’m still hanging on in here, but I am- where was I? We used to take Little Michael (we being Big Michael, my Michael and I) to the opera and one day, you’ll never guess, he leapt from the seats we had right up in the whatchamacallits, straight into the orchestra pit, and of course Michael and I were terrified, but he never broke a bone and he leapt right in and went on conducting as if he’d been doing it all his life. The conductor was so surprised, I can hardly tell you, but he offered him a permanent position, which Big Michael and I were absolutely glad of, because of course Big Michael was very busy with his deep-land diving.

I can’t tell you very much about the deep-land diving, except that that was how we met, Michael and I, went he came surfacing up through the floor in the parlour, clad just like that, and we fell in love at first sight.

Of course, there were things to discover about the other that perhaps one might not have suspected- I cannot tell you how much of a shock it was on our wedding night, dear- but we did, we fell in love across a parlour floor, and mother’s best rug torn where he had erupted through it like Vesutrius (it is Vesutrius, isn’t it?) and earth sprayed all across the primrose curtains. I fell in love with the glassy roundness of his helmet and the strength in those arms and the way I knew always that he would be absolutely solid. What did he love about me? Oh, gosh dear. It was a long time ago. Perhaps you should have asked him, but he died in an accident many years ago now. Let me remember. I do remember- well, gosh- I do remember one day he told me that I was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, and it was the first time anyone had told me that. You see, as a child when they had dressed me in sailor suits and tried to make me wish to join the Navy they had been most averse to calling me beautiful, for chance it should give me the wrong ideas, although these silly people never seemed to understand that the wrong ideas had been most firmly planted in my head by the hand of God and Miss Lennox, who had one day by sheer misfortune dressed me in the frocks meant for my sister (the one who would later be so unfortunately struck down) and my sister in the breeches meant for me, and although for my sister this was nothing short of torture for me it was a revelation; and so when Michael told me so many years later across the ruins of my mother’s parlour he thought I was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen it meant rather more than most, if you see what I mean. I did love him so dreadfully.

I missed him awfully as well, for he spent a lot of time under the ground, searching for things; he brought many treasures back; on the first day of our courtship he brought me a bouquet of bones, it was beautiful. I had it fashioned into a flower and I wore it in my hair for our wedding, and look! you can see it right there in the photograph, dear.

He was a lovely husband, my Michael, and I loved him ever so. We were married in church, all right and proper, and it was a lovely wedding, and then they took this photograph lest Michael should have to go off again, and of course he did. Married to the job, was my Michael, but he was married to me too, and he used to read me bits out of the Bible about breasts and you can’t say that wasn’t proper because it was out of the Bible.

We were always very proper, my Michael and me, and we brought up Little Michael to be the same. He did very well for himself, married a nice little girl from Brackby and they had a brace of children, sixteen children, and I can’t keep up with the great-grandchildren, there’s a deal of them as well but they come and see me nice as pie and kiss me goodnight and complain when they think I don’t hear about my prickly whiskers, which perhaps I’ve more of that some grandmothers but each to their own; Michael used to shave my face when he shaved his, every morning, all delicate, which tells you how kind Michael was when he was home. He didn’t like me to see his face- and tell you the truth I didn’t like to see it much either, for it wasn’t the face I fell in love with- but he would use the inside of his helmet as a mirror and do it that way.

It was- I think I’ve told you- a bit of a surprise on our wedding night, but we worked it out; we were very young and very naïve, but we worked it out. Yes, dear, it was a little sad we couldn’t have more children after Little Michael, but he’s a splendid young man, and all in all, I think we did quite well.

I’m just waiting to join them all now, thankyou. So you see why I don’t need your help. But thank-you very much for coming, dear. You can take your pamphlets with you. Bye-bye. Thankyou dear. Bye-bye now.