Animals of October

As this blog winds its way down to its end, I have some exciting and delightful news. Yesterday I signed a contract to have my collection of animal-based short stories published at some point in 2021. These are the weird tales I've been peddling for the last six or seven years as individual pieces, and I'm absolutely stoked that they're finally being corralled together into a collected menagerie. The collection will be titled Fauna  and will be published by a super-cool, socially conscious independent press (I won't say who they are yet as they want to finalise their 2021 catalogue and announce it all properly together). It will include stories about a mimed elephant, time-travelling horses, a mysterious panda, guinea pigs in the underworld, vengeful birds, and a pig with skin made of bacon. They are, true to form, very weird stories that don't necessarily behave in the way that stories should - but that's kind of the point. When it comes to animals, we have our...

Half an hour's run away from our house lies the UK's largest municipal cemetery, the Southern Cemetery in Chorlton. It is a vast place, with graves and tombs as far as the eye can see, ranging from your fanciest granite obelisks and mausoleums guarded by stone angels, to unmarked paupers plots. There are a few famous folks buried here, including Manchester's favourite artist LS Lowry, Manchester's favourite record producer Tony Wilson, and Manchester's favourite football manager Sir Matt Busby. Basically, anyone who Manchester claims as their own tends to end up in Southern Cemetery and, to be fair, its not a bad place to wait out one's deathly eternity. It is also an excellent spot for an autumnal stroll given the abundance of trees, so we met a friend there yesterday and crunched our way through the carpet of leaves. Hannah and I have a bit of thing for cemeteries. We often include a visit to interesting ones on trips abroad and my desktop background is still ...

Frozen, shoulders pressed together, they stared, watching the spot of hillside across the brook where the grass moved, watching something unseen move slowly across the bright green hill, chilling the sunlight and the dancing little brook. "What is it?" Eleanor said in a breath, and Theodora put a strong hand on her wrist. "It's gone," Theodora said clearly, and the sun came back and it was warm again. "It was a rabbit," Theodora said. ~ The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, p. 54 This is, perhaps, the first apparition in The Haunting of Hill House ; a rabbit, according to the rash and bohemian Theodora, although we don't see the creature, just its wake as it moves the grass. The two women shake it off, but the moment lingers, their first taste of the weird thrill-fear that this lopsided house will continue to bring down upon them. I read page 54, and most of the other pages of the novel, in breathless thrill yesterday, while my own rabbit Fi...

I mentioned a few posts ago about the re-discovery of local green spaces during the first lockdown. Remember those heady days in late March? When the cold was leaving us and the rolling ticker of infection numbers was driving ever-upwards in dizzying amounts? When masks were a novelty and we all had to relearn how to wash our hands? It seems and feels like centuries ago. There was a strange luminescence to those days, even amongst all the horror of an encroaching pandemic. Our houses seemed to strain with the burden of being excessively lived-in, we became suddenly more attentive about the dullest of things: the shopping experience, the new possibilities of home-based workdays and homeschooling. And then there was this curious reconnecting with nature, our one and only constant friend. The one-hour-of-exercise-a-day mandate came echoing down the pipes as if offered by the coronavirus itself as a sort of partial ceasefire. Among the gloom, we caught glimpses of silver linings in the sh...

It feels like we’re on the cusp of another lock-down, and like many sequels to must-see originals, it feels rushed, unstructured and full of tired and under-developed characters. Autumn is pulling us slowing into it with its usual blend of beauty and doom, and winter has never been so collectively forbidding. And while there is much tragedy and griping to come, not least towards the incompetents who supposedly lead us, I still have belief in our collectivity and our community fortitude. We’re good at winters, we handle them every year of our lives, and we’ll find excellent ways to adapt. We may even discover surprising new methods to do ancient rituals: let us brace ourselves now for an unusual yuletide and use it to try on some different costumes. Yesterday, I managed to snatch some quality time in the actual physical presence of a dear friend and we took to the rural edges of the suburbs to while away the afternoon in catch-up chat and giggles. The long stroll took us from Didsbury (...

Plastic Dinosaurs What must they think of us? Making little effigies of long dead reptiles out of toxic materials and then putting them on our doorsteps among potted plants like we think this is somehow cute? It is quite cute though. We found the T-rex, the Triceratops and the Parasaurolophus in a box marked ‘Free - Please Take’ outside a local house, so we took them to decorate our entryway and they’re a pleasing bunch of rogues, peeking out from behind pansies. But what must our fauna think of a display like this? If dinosaurs were to come back, Jurassic Park-style, would they pause a moment and recognise themselves in the moulded plastics and think; what in the prehistoric ages? What did we do to deserve this? We leave the house, all perked up for a run, and the dinos see us on our way, the T-Rex’s mouth permanently roaring in what looks more like a yawn than menace.  Cackling Magpies The cackling magpies swoop among the trees of the street, flashing their monochrome wings with ...