Fairy Tale, p. 138: The Mysterious Shed

Self knew it, she knew it! SOMETHING is trying to get out of the padlocked shed in Mr. Bowditch’s backyard!

First, the dog starts barking, using her “Intruder Alert” bark.

• She was facing the shed, her ears laid back and her muzzle wrinkled to show her teeth. Foam flew from her mouth with each bark. I ran to her and grabbed her collar and tried to pull her back. She didn’t want to come, but it was clear she also didn’t want to go closer to the locked shed. Even with the fusillade of barks, I could hear that weird scraping, scratching sound. This time it was louder, and I saw the door moving a little. It was like a visible heartbeat. Something was trying to get out . . . Something inside the shed hit the door hard enough for me to hear the thud.

The MC, Charlie, has heard those sounds from the shed before. Since the door to the shed is padlocked, and he doesn’t have the key, he has taken to banging on the door. Whatever is inside quiets after that.

But today, the sounds are loud and manic. The dog, who is old and arthritic, turns tail and runs, “not a single sign of a limp.”

Mr. Bowditch comes outside and yells at the boy to “get away from there!” He straps on his gun, which “looked like something out of Gunfight at the O. K. Corral.” (Self is very impressed that an American teenager knows enough old movies to compare Mr. Bowditch’s gun to the one in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Surely Charlie wasn’t even born yet when the movie came out.)

Then, Mr. Bowditch does this very strange thing: he takes a key from his pocket, unlocks the padlock, walks inside the shed, and closes the door.

Eeeek! Don’t look, self! Cover your eyes! But she has to keep on reading, to find out what sort of strange, malevolent creature is locked in the shed. She hopes it’s not one of those creatures like the ones from the movie Signs. Or one of those click-click creatures from The Last of Us. She’s about ready to scream in terror, though it’s 8:18 a.m. and bright morning. She hopes she can sleep tonight.

Strangely enough, the barking dog’s name is RADAR. She is always the first to sniff out danger, so the name fits.

Stay tuned.

#amreading Agatha Christie, An Elusive Woman, by Lucy Worsley

Book # 3 of self’s 2023 Reading Year is a new biography of Agatha Christie: Agatha Christie, An Elusive Woman.

Whatever is old is new again.

Self found the movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile extremely entertaining.

Chapter 10, Love and Death, is about Christie’s first marriage, to a dashing member of the Royal Flying Corps named Archie Christie. Alas, the pilots (including Archie) were ill-prepared for WWI.

The British had inferior machines and training, and were losing four times as many planes as the Germans. Pilots arrived in France with fewer and fewer hours of experience. One newcomer to Archie’s base was asked how much time he’d logged.

“Fourteen hours. Fourteen hours! It’s absolutely disgraceful to send pilots overseas with so little flying. You don’t stand a chance . . . Another fifty hours and you might be quite decent; but fourteen! My God, it’s murder!”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Top Dialogue, Percival Everett, THE TREES

“How is the chili?” Jim asked.

“Do you like chili?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you will hate the chili. Catfish or burger?”

“Cheeseburger.”

“Do you like cheese?” Gertrude asked.

“Burger.”

“Wise choice. And what about you?” she asked Ed.

“Catfish.”

Gertrude came back with the food.

“That was fast,” Ed said.

“Luckily we’d already caught the fish,” she said.

Six-Word Saturday: Watching ‘Derry Girls’ in Northern Ireland

Self visited Northern Ireland for the first time in April. She spent a month in an artists retreat called River Mill. The other residents were teachers, writers, photographers, film-makers. A few were from Belfast, others from England, and yet others from Dublin. What joy to be with fellow artists after three years of pandemic lockdown. We all promised to keep in touch.

In the evenings, we had dinner together, then gathered in the living room to watch Derry Girls.

Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six-Word Saturday.

Sentence of the Day: Claire Tomalin

Had they been able to read his Diary, some at least would have marvelled at the achievement of a man observing himself with scientific curiosity, as he voyaged through the strange seas of his own life.

— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, p. 252

Drowsy, Then Wide Awake

Self has been suffering from lack of sleep lately, not sure why.

This afternoon, she dozed off (finally), with the television on. Suddenly, she sat upright, wide awake. Did she imagine it, or did she really hear Erin Burnett saying that a Russian general was overheard on the army channel saying, “There is no way we can win the war through conventional means. We have no choice, we have to use the nuclear option.”

Every cell in her body was lit. She looked at the screen.

There was Erin Burnett saying, “Tonight, air raid sirens are going off, all across Ukraine. And troops are on the move in Belarus.”

AARGH! NOW SELF REALLY REALLY CAN’T SLEEP!

A London Walk: In the Footsteps of Samuel Pepys

The best way to know a city is to walk it. And here is a particular walk that Samuel Pepys took on his inspections of various shipyards (for his work):

He very often walked along the south bank of the river, into Redriff (now Rotherhithe), and on through the meadows and orchards and meadows to Deptford, Greenwich and even Woolwich. He enjoyed walking, and adjacent countryside were so little frequented that he often read a book as he followed the familiar grassy footpaths, breaking off to find stiles. You can take this route today through housing estates, past grimy churches and scraps of garden and over the foully polluted River Ravensbourne, your imagination struggling to clean up and empty the world as you go. The river was unembanked then, and at low tide a wide beach appeared. There is still a Cherry Garden Pier marking where he bought cherries in the orchards close to the river, and an inn at the water’s edge between Southwark and Rotherhithe on the spot where he often stopped for a drink. The fifteenth-century tower of St. Nicholas’s Church also remains at Deptford, where skulls grin over the churchyard gate. The green hill of Greenwich, rising solidly before you as you round the loop of the river, has changed little in three hundred years, and for Pepys this was one of the most familiar views in his working life.

— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, p. 136

It is so lovely to think of this layering of history over physical space, and London continues to be my favorite city because of these kinds of twinned pleasures.

Samuel Pepys: A Diary

In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously . . . even if he had no idea what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.

He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally, there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration.

— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin, p. 79

Claire Tomalin, wow. Just wow.

This is a re-read. The first time she read it, she was on her way to Berlin to give a reading. She had it on her lap the whole flight, but it turned out her seatmate was a young Finnish architect who was going home after making a bid on behalf of his architectural firm for a building in Beijing. He ended up explaining Berlin to her, making little drawings on her notebook: here’s the Brandenburg gate, here’s Oranienstrasse, this street has the best Turkish food, etc.

She remembered being amazed, not just by Berlin, but by the book. Who knows why she decided to re-read it now (motives will be examined, later, in her journal, lol). She didn’t expect her re-read to evoke the same spark of excitement that it did on first read, 15 years (!) ago, but for some reason the above passage read really fresh.

(To be continued)

Cloak and Dagger: The Accomplice, by Joseph Kanon

Joseph Kanon channeling Ernest Hemingway:

Aaron got up, passing under the low branches of the tree, and headed down the street, the white basilica gleaming on his right. Café Napoli. If this was the right day. His other lifeline. No Panama hat this time. That had been left behind in the rush out of Ortiz’s office. Clothes rumpled after the safe house. A bandage on his forehead. Not a leisurely meal — impossible when you’re this alert, watching everything. Maybe just a glass of wine, something to hold the table, until somebody turned up with an envelope.

— The Accomplice, p. 247

The Christmas Dinner to End All Christmas Dinners: Still Story # 6

If anyone anywhere ever forgets the title of this story in the John Weir collection Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, it is “Katherine Mansfield”:

“And your Mom ingeniously seated me next to your twelve-year-old cousin, who’s blonde and sulky as the kid in Death in Venice.”

— “”katherine mansfield”, story # 6 in Your nostalgia is killing me