Prologue

The storm had been raging for weeks rampaging like a screaming drunk beast ripping up thoughts with both fists from their secured rational threads and throwing them into paces they shouldn't rightly be. What a mess. I don't know where to start. Back to the core....

All clear now - the sun is shining through a few small grey clouds that still hover: the lingering gate crashers deciding between a way home or the can of warm ash infused beer and another petty bout of vandalism. The serious leather jacketed weather just visible departing over the horizon, bitch in toe content with their carnage.

By the shore a fisherman weeps over the body of his dead wife not noticing the few fragments of his boat and house that lie around him or me staring scared and scarred. Slow waves caressing occasionally shifting debris back and forth across the shore but never going anywhere.

So where now? I am still here. I think about helping the fisherman - he turns and we chance each others eye and hold it for a second. We both know there is nothing I can do.

So I turn my back and start walking away. Away from here. Anywhere but here. Anyone but her.

Folkicious

So I go to the Green Man festival with Helga and Copacub and gang.

One night after a day’s eclectic set of entertainment from an electric one-man banjo band to black and white slap-stick celluloid played to pianoed Mozart to painfully exquisite songs of forgotten wars, past down from soul to soul over the reaches of time; we go back our camp and Helga picks up her guitar and starts to sing.

After a while, when I’d dosed into a satisfied slumber listening to her melodious strumming, a face emerged from the gloom, lit up from underneath by the candles we were sat around.

“What time are you thinking of playing to?” it said.

“I am not planning to stop at all!” Helga replied, her ember eyes still burning red with rage and passion of the evening and the song she had been singing just moments before.

“Can you just keep it down?”

“Yeah… we will keep it down!” The crowd said hoping to douse the situation.

“No! I want her to say it – her playing the music - her singing!!” the face said getting uglier by the word.

“No! I will not!” Helga muttered under her breath.

“Say it – your music is shit and I don’t want to hear it anymore!”

Suddenly the touch-paper was lit.

“Who do you think, the fuck, you are, telling me you don’t like my music? I don’t like your shit haircut; I don’t like your ugly face. I think they are offensive. Why don’t you shut them up!”

“Yeah – man – this is a folk festival – what are you doing, complaining about acoustic music being played around a camp in a traditional folk style, re-introducing codes of intercourse and our own personal emotional responsive adjustments to life in some way?” the crowd said in unison.

As the demon saw her attempted tyranny fade she disappeared into the night.

It is always good to have Helga around.

Nana Jizel

I met them, Dr Syntax and Dr Johnson, when I was there last week.

My travailing companion had decided to take a fly around, swooping and swirling with the birds, twirling over the white peaked waves, nearly losing control as she took the full face of a blustery gust around the edge of a lighthouse.

As I watched her tumble away slightly out of control, crying with delight as the rain and sea spray streamed down her face, I felt slightly alone and left out having never learnt to fly myself.

I wanted to find the Nana Jizel.

Nana Jizel is a sagely purple dragon who lives near by.

She has reached a certain age and black spines are starting to break through her wrinkled purple skin, sore and flapping against the painful intrusions or rather their antonyms.

Dragons start out green, big and boisterous, flaming terrified villagers or flying low over herds of cows, cooking them with big bursts of fire. As they grow older they shrink and turn red becoming strong and powerful, generally acquiring unimaginable wealth of gold and jewels they mostly just sleep on. When the glitter fades they become wise and purple, magically knowledgeable of their inner power as their outer frame and fame reduces further. Eventually they blacken into concentrated intelligence and wisdom getting smaller and smaller until they finally disappear in a sublime puff of divine smoke.

Nana Jizel is still young enough to get annoyed and grumpy with her two wizard neighbours but only intervenes when their arguments get completely out of control. This is rare because Dr Johnson and Dr Syntax normally have a completely different perception of what they are actually talking about.

For example Dr Syntax might say in passing:

“Split infinitives are frequently poor style, but they are not strictly bad grammar. To avoid the split infinitive could result either in weakness or over-formality: either might ruin rhythmic force and rhetorical pattern.”

Dr Johnson would retort angrily:

“You can't use unicylcing fish to badly lubricate priest's collars because his name was Tim and making book knees without of umbrella tears or Mariah Carey, you fool!”

To which Dr Syntax would say:

“Your reply is irrelevant and not a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition. It contains the fallacy of Non Causa Pro Causa: you have identified a cause of an event, but not actually shown it to be the cause. The non sequitur is only worthy of note but not comment.”

Dr Johnson would then start choking, gagging as if something was stuck in his throat until an orange popped out of his mouth and rolled along the floor to Dr Syntax’s feet. A door would then creakily open in the orange’s side and out would jump a tiny monkey carrying an equally tiny jack. The monkey would then put the orange on the jack and start jacking it up, pausing occasionally to pant for comic and dramatic effect. When it reached Dr Syntax face a hoping mad Hara Kristina would rise up on a platform through its top, shouting incoherent obscenities – something about stealing a trampoline and frantically waving his tambourine.

At which point Dr Syntax would storm off in a huff, sweeping his cape around him brooding deconstructivism.

Nina Jizel would then close her watchful minds eye and go back to sleep.

She knows they never agree or disagree but they are both very powerful wizards so she wants to be careful.

She was a red dragon back the days of Merlyn and doesn’t want those mistakes to be made again.

Land's End

If you start walking west and don’t stop, leaving behind the dealings of man, the tarmaced roads and clipped hedge fences of stripped dreams,

If you keep going and reach the coast, taking the windy path by the turquoise sea, both seductive and dangerous, looking down on waves exploding against ragged rocks and soft sands, sometimes traveling high along towering cliffs topped with spiky heather and sharp brambles flowering a shower of colour all around you, other times low through thick rich green over-hung paths escorted by brown and white butterflies to fields of ferns draped down the steep sides of beachy coves,

When your weary feet throb for rest, carrying on past the frowning crowds of cliff edge cows slowly masticating on their non-existent doom,

Down fragrant clean steamed valleys gurgling under tiny moss ridden stone bridges by white witches’ cottages, gardens filled with medicinal herbs, giant rhubarb and tiger dragonflies.

Pausing briefly to hear a blue capped curly haired weather worn fisherman’s tales of a widow’s woe at the hands of a cruel sea and the shocking cost of house prices these days as his white teeth and blue eyes sparkle in the sun.

Past the castles of long dead kings and the ghostly remains of tin mines marking deep holes.

Sometimes walking like giants, striding over trees like weeds; sometimes like mice, scrambling over peddles like boulders,

Resting occasionally on the sleeping heads of stone trolls embedded in the soil, maybe taking a lock of their mossy hair for luck,

Through the wispy mist seeping out the black broken windowed eyes of abandoned farms covered with stinging nettles and doc leaves,

Eventually you will run out of land.

A head, where, blue nothing stretches away forever across endless waves, whales and basking sharks eating fish spunk and stinking sea weed for thousands of miles until a new world.

There, just beyond souvenirs shops, the laughing seagulls screaming their cream tea crumpet scavenging delight and signs that say “Danger CLIFF”, right on the edge, at the very end, two wizards live.

Who, what with the enlightenment and all, are called Dr Syntax and Dr Johnson.

Dr Syntax makes perfectly formed sentences, in granite, then lets the elements erode them until they tumble away crumbling into the sea.

He is rather highbrow and has eye brows floating a few inches above his particular head.

Dr Johnson has a big top hat that falls over his eyes, in it a cuckoo lays eggs on his head made of cheese that tick and tock and could explode at any moment into parachuting ponchoed parrots but never tell the time.

Dr Syntax finds Dr Johnson’s work trivial and neither laudable nor commendable for any let alone an exemplary modern Wizard.

Dr Johnson finds bananas in his pajamas… plotting… exponential cardboard cutout fanaticism.

They never agree.