The Christmas Card (Lawyer's) Regulations 2014

1. These regulations are The Christmas Card (Lawyer’s) Regulations 2014 and may be referred to as the ‘card’.

2. The ‘card’ is deemed to take effect from the issue date which is taken as the date of delivery to the recipient. In the event of dispute the issue date may be taken to be the date that follows the posting date, by the a period equivalent to the seasonal average delivery time. 

3. (a) The recipient of this card may at times be referred to as ‘you’, and the sender of this card may at times be referred to as ‘I’.

(b) The recipient of this card is instructed that they must, have an enjoyable and relaxing Christmas, and;

(c) that they may have a prosperous and healthy year commencing on the first of January, on the calendar year following the issue of this card.

4. Regulation 3(c) is subject to force majeure and no liability is imposed upon the sender of the card. 

5. Where the card has not been received by the recipient it is deemed to have no effect, further:

(a) the recipient must be an natural person,

(b) the recipient must not be:

(i)  a limited company;

(ii) partnership, or;

(ii) other non natural legal entity.

(c) the recipient must be as specified on the enclosing envelope and detailed on the card. 

(d) where either or both 5(a) and 5(c) are not met, then the card is deemed to have not effect. 

6. These regulations are to be automatically revoked on 1 January 2016, this regulation takes precedence over regulation 3.

 

Ligeti Spit

 

If ever one were tempted to compare a city to a clock, or some other finely wrought old machine, then one cannot have in mind this city. It is now called Ligeti Spit, although the original settlers, on first arrival, had called it Breughelland. It lies at the far extreme of a spur of land, within a muddy estuary. The spur of land is but one among many, and was apparently chosen at some haste. It is not markedly any more suitable for the purpose than any other of the rather similar such marshy promontories that jut out into the cold waters.
There is a certain ragged grace to the place, great concrete towers punctuate the skyline, and a huge area of parkland lies at its centre, as if the growing city had decided to just get all of its green space out of the way, curtly in one single hasty move.

The city bristles with towers, some squat, some elegant, in so much as a collection of needles can ever aspire to such things. As with the buildings, so with the people. They vary from those who are painfully squat, perched awkwardly on high stools, drinking endless beverages boiling hot and strong with various stimulants. Their talk and observations are pithy and viciously opinionated brooking no scope for discussion or argument. Other residents are as needle thin, as their buildings. Angular in their grey clothing, ironed in creases only accentuating their spikiness. The needle thin residents apparently have no time to stop and talk, and are no less fierce in their views than their more sedentary compatriots.

At all times, at all places, all is struggle. The people are constantly travelling, but seldom do they journey together, they always have slightly different destinations, they are always jockeying for position, edging closer to the front of any queue, whenever any chance presents itself, their elbows are sharp, their eyes will never meet yours.

To the visitor it is never clear what the city does or what the people do. It is forever as if, when something is to all intents and purposes finished, the residents have found some new cunning way to wrestle out some further money by performing some further function on it. So they might be criticise things that others have made, or extract a fee from selling options to do things, or to refrain from doing things, but such options are so opaquely split up and bundled together, so that it is never quite clear what you actually be paying for.

There are sayings around the theme that whenever you are making a deal there, you are always on the wrong side of the deal, any profits you might have been promised turn to huge liabilities. It is a city of lawyers, endlessly tangling up the unwary in contracts and unwanted obligations, offering silky words and pie in the sky, until you end up a virtual slave, paying their usurious fees and rates until the day you die.

It is the busiest, the noisiest, the fastest of places, nothing is still, nothing is settled, there is neither good nor bad, in all that is there. The only merit is in the new, novelty is always valued, always praised for as long as the glossiness and factory fresh smell lasts, and then it too is condemned to, at best, the same impatient indifference as most else, or even the particular vituperation reserved for that which has recently fallen from favour.

Voisin

 

It was a lively day in the city, the air rich with the smell of spices, and the constant bustle of hawkers and stallholders all around us. My friend was up ahead, and I pushed through the crowd to catch up with her. Momentarily I lost sight of her, and I pushed on through the crowd, placing my hand on a back here, nudging between some shoulders there. I saw a door that I had never noticed before closing and caught it before it had fully shut.

In truth the other side of the door was nothing remarkable, little different from the bustling market space that I had left. There was another open market space, with the usual stalls, and up ahead a narrowing in the pillars to create a seeming corridor that shaded into darkness. I could see her mane of bright red hair for a moment but then she vanished into the darkness. I resolved to take my time, I had not noticed these stalls before and it was still early in the day.

The first stall was surrounded by a frantic crowd but when I got through I found that it held only a strange array of broken clock parts. Similarly the next stall was thronged but merely displayed a selection of broken glass, that had seemingly been dug up, the dirt still sticking to it. The further I ventured from the door, that I had passed without thinking, the more I noticed that which was at odds with all that I was familiar with. It seemed that everyone was wearing clothes that they had made themselves, they carried jute sacking or canvas, with which to wrap anything they might buy. A hurdy gurdy played a tune I did not recognise, the hot foods were with dipped in a sauce that glittered and glowed, when I looked at the seller, I noticed that his buttons were improvised pieces, sewn onto his coat, each a different size and shape, pottery punched with holes, stubby twigs.

Beyond a row of pillars was an expanse of round tables, the crowds were less dense, and despite the intensity of those sitting round the tables, it seemed more relaxed than the market space. I sat at one table, slowly realising that those round the table were gambling, I could not recognise the game, it involved strange tokens and playing cards that I could not recognise, their heads were down, as they studied the cards and tokens intently. One head was raised momentarily, and I recognised Simon an attorney from an office near where I worked. His eyes flashed brightly, he nodded in recognition and signalled me to come over. As I knelt down beside him, he welcomed me to the city of Voisin. Although his smile was bright and friendly and his tone welcoming, I could tell from his eyes that he was anxious for me. In a whispered voice he told me that in Voisin it is not done to wear a hat or scarf, and I should discard them as soon as possible. I could tell from his tone and seriousness that it was important not to react to any of this, to treat our conversation as mere friendly words, some chit chat, or commonplace remarks. I nodded that I understood, when it was clear that I did not. I made to stand up, and he beckoned to me one last time, I bent my head closer to him, he mouthed some words to me. The deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets.

I nodded to let him know that I understood, when, in truth, I did not. I left the table and wandered on, with the rough idea that the unexpected door that I had come through lay somewhere behind me. Without looking at anyone I slipped off my scarf and hat, and a few paces later dropped them in the gap beneath an empty table which was draped with a pale cloth.

On looking around me, it was increasingly obvious to me that this was not the city that I had come from, although on first glance it looked the same. Things were made of painted cardboard, like the scenery at the theatre, canvas was stretched over straw, and crumpled paper filled gaps.

I resolved to …

Quipu

 

 

I have heard tell, from explorers and other travellers of the city of Quipu. It lies deep in the jungle, a thousand miles from civilisation. The jungle there is wet with constant rain, the trees are loud with colourful frogs calling, and tiny bright fish swim in the puddles caught perpetually in the folds of the trees. It is even said that the great river that flows down to Mahogany has its source in that region, though I do not know whether that is true.

The region is so endlessly moist, that no paper could possibly survive. There are no books in that place, nor so much as a single piece of paper. Explorers tell how their normal clothes rotted on their backs, any metal rusted and stained, their buttons reduced to green smudges on their shirts.

Any books and notes that travellers had carried with them rotted in the hot humid atmosphere, turning to mush, like a wasps’ nest that you find in late summer in some neglected spot. But the people of Quipu are undeterred by such things and do not recognise them as an inconvenience, instead of paper, or even impressions on clay, as I have seen employed elsewhere, they rely solely on knots tied in the string they make. There are numberless varieties of knots, and the distance between knots is equally telling, in conveying meaning and nuance. Their entire civilisation is recorded on these knotted twines, they organise their accounts in this manner. Their rulers convey orders to distant subjects, lovers share fond memories.

While their civilisation appears unconventional to our eyes, it is successful by all the usual metrics, excelling in such arts and trades as we might recognise, with one great lacuna. Without the lens of the blank paper, without the rectangle of an empty page before them, they have no architecture that we could recognise as such. They have no understanding of right angles, the perpendicular or the level. They do not recognise a straight line, or the angles that it can describe.

For the people of Quipu, all is curves and possibility, there is space or there is not space. Their whole city is heaped opportunistically where there is space to put it. When the mood, or the need takes them, they will make a rough wall, piling clay woven with threads, letting the wall fall where it will enclosing what it can. The overall effect is of something natural, like bird nests clustered close together in a tree, or coral slowly tumbling across the ocean floor.

Having never seen a straight line, they think that their way of life is perfectly natural, and for the people of Quipu they truly believe that they are lacking for nothing at all in their strange city in the jungle moistness.

Lux

 

The strangest thing that I ever saw, was when I was a child in the desert. We passed a camel, carrying a great curved slab of water. This was not cold like ice, but crystalline water. There was no container, merely ropes to fix it in place, I was told that some light wires were submerged in the mass, and there was a battery to provide a modest trickle charge forcing the water to retain its crystalline form. A few metres in height and breadth, it was curved coming to a peak, heavier at the base. The water seemed cloudy, translucent rather than particularly dark or clear. I was told that at the flick of a switch it would resume its natural form, a sudden deluge of warm water. In this way, the nomads would carry great chunks of water across the desert to their dwellings or for trade.

Once the camel had crossed our path, carrying the huge slab of water, it headed on, I know not where. I was a child and full of questions, and there were only a few answers available, the camel had come from the city of Lux, a desert city crafted entirely in this crystalline water. The natural shapes of water in this form had dictated the layout and architecture of the city, great stocky walls, coming to distant peaks. The city shone out in the harsh desert light, a welcome landmark for travellers.

Now I am much much older and no one can remember the city of Lux, the technology of crystalline water has been lost, like those of flexible glass or Greek fire. I asked myself what would be left of a city in the desert made of crystalline water?

I was curious so I spent years in the desert, following the desert ways, until at last I found a high place in the desert, a sea of broken rocks amidst the desert sands, a place too barren to linger. There was a tangle of crude copper wires and primitive old batteries. The materials looked so very old, as if they had been there for decades and had been rotten with age even a century ago. In dismay I looked at the wires and pottery batteries, crude mineral anodes and cathodes, nothing at all remarkable. There was nothing there to convince anyone of the story of crystalline water. I was ready to leave, when I caught a glimpse of the sun reflecting off something. In a cleft in the rock there was a single slab of crystalline water, I went to it and reached out to touch it, it was warm, as a rock in the desert and smooth too. The surface was worn and pitted, like the outcropping stones around us, I could glimpse the wires beneath the surface.

I was alone, I had walked for hundreds of miles in the deserts, but at last I had seen what I needed to see, it was real, it must have been the last piece of crystalline water in the world. A technology that was once a commonplace was now on the very brink of extinction. I could see it, I could handle it, but I could no more discern its secret than I could touch the moon. I went back into the desert, heading towards the coast. It was enough, simply, that I knew.

The Connected Cities - Chaintry and Agate

 

 

 

Perhaps the world’s greatest engineering achievement is the railway line between Chaintry and Agate. These cities lie hundreds of miles apart across a vast near empty desert. Though, of course, the only people who actually think that deserts are empty are those who have never visited them. All the deserts I ever saw were packed, children herding goats, botanists climbing joshua trees, lost pilgrims and festival goers.

Building a railway line is a combination of brute force and precision. There is brute force in arranging all the aggregate and hardcore, digging the cuttings, building up the embankments. There is precision in surveying, it is no easy thing to layout a railway line, you have to survey vast swathes of land, measuring spot height after spot height, plotting contours across the sway and ebb of the landscape. Once the surveyor has walked the land, the geologist comes with his hammer, and a navvy with a spade. They work out where there is heavy soil, like clay and where is light soil, like sand, they work out how close to the surface the bedrock lies and what it consists of.

With the surveyor’s theodolite and geologist’s hammer laid aside, it is the turn of the draughtsman to translate all those endless notebooks filled with columns of figures into charts, stretching out across the table, put flat into plan chest, or curled into tubes. And even then, someone else comes by, with a slide rule and tables of figures, working out whether it would cost more to curve around or to just cut through, whether to bridge a gap or skirt a lake.

But for the line between Chaintry and Agate there was little to consider. The desert offered few features, the route was as straight and as flat as the surveyors could hope for. And the straighter the route, the faster the trains could go. Engineers from across the known world worked on the project, there had never been a straighter or a flatter route. Trains were designed specifically for the route, long trains, that would shoot like pencils along the slot in a schoolchild’s desk. These were the sleekest, most beautiful trains that you ever saw, polished metal in a silvery yellow, trains that shone like a fresh star.

For a while the beautiful trains were packed with visitors, their huge hats wrapped in silk scarves, laughing porters carrying on crates of exotic fruits, children crammed around the windows, watching the distant mountains shift imperceptibly and the nearby goatherds shoot by like rockets. Each station was decorated with colourful blimps hung with huge long silken banners in primary colours. Orchestras would greet each arriving train, photographers would crowd round each leaving one.

But after the engineering conference papers had been presented, after the councillors had all congratulated themselves, it no longer seemed quite so novel, or quite so amazing. It soon began to seem commonplace to zip across the salt flats and mesas, past cacti as the lizards flicked their tongues and watched. In truth there was very little reason for anyone to travel between the cities of Agate and Chaintry, they were much of a muchness, they had nothing to trade, there was nothing to see in the one, that was not in the other. The grocers of Agate might visit a solicitor in Chaintry, or a young bride in Chaintry might buy a wedding dress in Agate, but then again they might not.

And now, the train still runs, but not everyday, and not quite so fast, to run at super speeds you needed engineers checking the line each morning for any deviation or impediment, sweeping the line with a hair brush, pressing a head to the rail and with one eye closed, checking for miles of straightness.

I suppose that the people of Agate and Chaintry are a little embarrassed, they never asked for this marvel of engineering, they were happy enough without it, truth be told. And now the world looks askance at them. Engineers and politicians looks upon the citizens as unworthy of this great marvel, the miracle bestowed upon them. But the people of Agate and Chaintry never asked to live hundreds of years in the future, like all sensible people they were content enough to live in the present.

in an age of mechanical reproduction

We always just sort of assume that art forms are fixed in the forms that we now understand them to be, so a film is around an hour and a half of narrative entertainment, with a handful of main characters. A song is just over three minutes, in the verse chorus format. A piece of classical music is played on traditional instruments and often adopts a symphonic narrative or applies variations to an original theme. 

But much of this is just an accident of redundant technology, a vinyl single could hold around three minutes of music, an hour and a half was a reasonable period to sit in a cinema when people shifted to seeing just the one film, rather than a double bill. Many of the ‘fixed properties' are just repetition of what we are familiar with, there is no inherent ‘rightness’ to them. 

It is now possible to listen to music all the time, when Beethoven was composing you could only expect to hear a symphony a few times in your lifetime, unless you were a member of the orchestra. We are now totally smothered in art forms that were only ever envisaged to be available in a very limited context. Classical music is applied as a bland background or mood music, pop music is chopped down into tiny fragments to play in the background of tv programmes, so they can evoke a period,or even just their title in a knowing reference to the action. Pretty Flamingo plays while a flock of flamingos take flight. 

Art forms are resilient, we are not likely to stop listening to music any time soon, though we are listening to shorter pieces. If you listen to film music it is strong on mood and atmosphere, but it does not develop a musical theme across an hour of music. We are reading plenty of books, but it is probably no longer possible to write the great book that marks an era, would Catch 22, or Catcher in the Rye be possible now?

However my main concern when I started to write this blog posting, was with film. There is something naturally resilient about the format of an hour and a bit of narrative entertainment that just seems to stick. As with all these art forms, the format has become more, rather than less, fixed with time. Early film ranged from shorts to some very long films, Napoleon by Abel Gance or Greed by Erich von Stroheim are massive. Before television, the studios were rattling out films, some classics like Casablanca, and plenty more that are forgotten now. Today too, they seem to be making films like never before, every comic strip apart from Oor Wullie seems to have been the subject of at least one film. But as with tv, there is a real tendency to make films to fill a genre format.

Often it is the constraints that make for great art, at school I always preferred the challenge of writing a story under some onerous constraint, to writing about anything, it is the limitations that make for great architecture, not unlimited budgets. CGI has allowed people to put anything on screen, and once you can film anything, there is no spectacle, with no constraints, there is no challenge. 

Although film is far from dead as an art form, it is now like a adjunct of video games, it lacks the widespread social currency and meaning it once had. Everyone would see ET or Jaws, we knew what they were about, but now? We are losing that element of challenge and stretch for the viewer, seeing something they had not seem before, thinking something they had not thought before, not just novelty for the sake of novelty, but something compelling and memorable.

Personally, I don’t tend to seek out many conventional films to watch, I like documentaries, or art house films. A lot of conventional cinema is no less predictable than the sort of generic action thrillers churned out Steven Seagal, once you understand the conventions of the genre you have a good idea of what you will get. If there are only so many plots, then is it time to abandon the convention of a narrative, to just create a film as a long musical video or a compilation of clips, or reform it completely into something / anything that we are not so familiar with. Will the best selling films eventually become straight footage of rail journeys, or busy city streets, or wordless tours of baroque gardens, or will we all just end up gazing endlessly at webcam footage of other. 

Nipple / Award / Room

/ Nipple /

 

The house was large and untidy, battered in the way that a growing family will batter a house.

 

She was large and untidy, battered in the way that a growing family will batter you. She was sitting in a large fabric armchair, the seams had stopped fraying and were now parting ways. There was a thick plastic ring of long ago spilt coffee on the right arm of the chair. She was typing away, her face puckered and scowled as she typed, as if each word was a pulled tooth. She paused, “Darling, darling.”

 

An open copy of the Times stood vertical, commendably so, eight fingers visible, four at each side. “Mmmm,” emanated from the newspaper.

 

“Darling, darling, another way of describing an erect nipple, quickly, now,”

 

The Times offered. “Another erect nipple.”

 

“No no that won’t do, I’ve already said that, something else,”

 

The Times counter-offered. “What about one half of a matching pair of two erect nipples, you haven’t said that.”

 

“I haven’t said that because it is shit, come on,”

 

The Times made its final offer. “His nipple stood to attention like the bearskin hat on a guardsman’s head, like the well chewed end of an old biro, like a pleasure missile aimed at her cardiac muscle, like…”

 

“I’m not Fay Weldon, I’ll just stick in a load of ‘x’s and come back to it later. I’ve still got seven hundred words to do today so I would appreciate a little bit of help.”

 

The Times quivered slightly and asked. “What is this one, Lucky Lucy and the Dolphin who can’t say No?”

 

“I only wrote that one book about dolphin sex, and it hardly sold any copies at all. This is still the sequel. The first one was three hundred thousand words long, and sold by the shedload, so the agent says that the sequel has to be bloody enormous.”

 

The Times responded. “Didn’t you say we earned a million pounds on the first one last week, why bother with the sequel, do what you like. I thought the dolphin sex book was good, what about tuna sex.”

 

“You never read it. Anyway tuna sex would be stupid, dolphins are intelligent mammals, who would want to read about having sex with a tuna.”

 

Not unreasonably the Times responded. “Who would want to read about having sex with a dolphin?”

 

“That creature porn is selling by the shed load, and you can get away with knocking out a word count of fifty kay, stick it on Amazon and the money comes rolling in. Anyway, this is real writing, this is hard work.”

 

The Times displayed its literary aspirations. “It is hardly Dombey and Son.”

 

“It pays the mortgage, better than your teaching ever did.”

 

Silence descended once again in the house of that week’s Times best selling author.

 

/ Award /

 

The mighty face of the newspaper glowered across the well worn kitchen table, had you not known that the paper was flimsy and insubstantial it would have seemed like a mountainous region beset by very neat graffiti. Like the diaphanous robes painted by Poussin it had a monumentality totally out of keeping with its reality.

 

That week’s Times best selling author was trying on dresses.

 

“Is it those awards tonight?” boomed out from behind the newspaper.

 

“Yes darling, I told you yesterday, and the day before,”

 

“Do I have to go?” echoed from the Thunderer.

 

“Yes darling you have to go.”

 

Silence, from the Thunderer.

 

“I am sure that your favourite author will be there, that one that you like, Beachum, Stovepipe Beachum.”

 

“Oh,” the Thunderer had regained interest.

 

The Thunderer continued “I like him, that one where the hero has a biscuit and all the memories of his childhood come flooding back, or the one with the one sided coin, or the one with the man and his last cigarette, just incredible.”

 

“Hmmm, just how does he come up with all those ideas?” his wife replied. “So, we have managed to agree on one thing, you are coming then.”

 

“I suppose so, what about you, what are you going to fit your pert little breasts into, fresh like dewy apples newly picked from the tree.”

 

“Hmmm, I was thinking about this, the outfit I have been trying to show you for the past ten minutes.”

 

The Thunderer offered its fashion advice. “Oh that, it makes you look like Darth Vader, you can’t wear that.”

 

“What about the floral one,”

 

The Thunderer offered a supplement of fashion advice. “You do know that I love you dearly but that one just makes you look like someone from the Laura Ashley Regiment of Long Range Snipers.”

 

“What does that even mean?”

 

The Thunderer continued. “Okay then. Wear that one you always wear, I like that.”

 

“I am a best selling author, I cannot wear a dress you bought in Primark to everything. People will think that I am mad.”

 

The Thunderer had exhausted its interest in fashion. “I suppose you have to wear something, wear that Laura Ashley thing then, I quite like that.”

 

A moody silence descended once again on the home of the Times best selling author.

 

Some time later the Thunderer piped up again “Darling, have you done something to your hair, it looks like that character from Harry Potter, you know.”

 

His wife sighed wearily, “I don’t know if you don’t tell me.”

 

“I haven’t really seen all the films, you know, you know, that one.”

 

His wife loved the Harry Potter films, she started to wax eloquent on her favourite topic “You mean like Hermione Grainger, she has the most lovely thick hair, or Bellatrix Lestrange she has hair like something out of a dark moody Pre-Raphaelite painting?”

 

“No, I’ve got it now, I remember, it was Hagrid.”

 

/ Room /

 

Lucy pulled her woollen hat down, it seemed colder here than it had at university. She looked round nervously, but her over stuffed case was still sitting there, there was no one else about, no thieves loitering waiting to swoop. There was a small taxi office, the door was open and she could hear the local radio station playing. The same old disk jockeys that she had grown up with, still making the same old jokes.

 

Her father would be coming soon, she pulled out her mobile phone and started browsing through text messages and Twitter and Pinterest, and the whole great time sink of insubstantial distractions. In seconds she was immersed, deep down the rabbit hole that is any teenager with a mobile device and a live connection to the internet. A car horn woke her from her reveries.

 

Her father shouted across “Hi sweetheart, you been waiting long?”

 

She shouted back “No just got here, thanks for coming to pick me up.” Now that she was no longer at home, and she normally had to pay for taxi fares, or bus fares, or indeed everything, these small kindnesses were marginally more noticed and marginally more appreciated.

 

He grabbed the suitcase by the handle, wincing as he lifted it. “Oh, no worries, we really miss doing your laundry, jump in.”

 

She replied, bubbling with the undefined excitement of at last being a grown up, in a grown up world. “You’ll never guess who I was speaking to on the train?”

 

He looked at her, considering whether to guess that it was Jesus Christ or something similarly ridiculous, but could think of nothing that would have made her laugh. He just nodded and said “Go on then, who was it?”

 

She carried on, “That composer, the really famous one.”

 

He replied, “You mean Beethoven?”

 

She was getting exasperated. “No, the one at our university, what’s his name, the Scottish one.”

 

He replied. “Oh, the Scottish one, the famous one, that is really impressive.”

 

He continued “I should probably say, there have been a few changes at home,”

 

She shouted back over the car roof as they got in. “You mean in addition to mum earning about a million pounds a week with THAT book.’

 

He did his best to sound indignant. “That is no way to speak about what your mum does, anyway, seeing as you don't live at home anymore, we thought it might be time to make some changes.”

 

It was her turn to sound indignant. “But I do live at home, that is still my room.”

 

He attempted to adopt a reasonable tone, as if speaking to a child. “We are paying a small fortune for you to stay at university, so no you don't still live at home, anyway you are never there.”

 

She was getting annoyed. “I am so too, I will be back during the summer, and Christmas.”

 

He was still patiently trying to explain. “Well maybe, but you hardly live there anymore, so we thought that we would make a few changes to your room.”

 

She was getting worried. “What sort of changes?”

 

He was really trying to sound reasonable. “Well now that we have the house to ourselves, your mother and I, we thought a few changes were in order, you have read the book haven't you?”

 

She was getting exasperated. “No I have not read the book, and what sort of changes?”

 

He replied. “Well, your mother always rather wanted some space, just for us.”

 

She was clutching at straws. “What like crafting and sewing?”

 

He was Mr Reasonable. “Not exactly.”

 

She sought to clutch at some more straws. “An exercise bike, that sort of thing?”

 

He was driving smoothly, along a road that he had driven along a thousand times. “Closer.”

 

Her mind was starting to spin. “Well what then?”

 

He was not reassuring her. “Are you sure you haven't read the book?”

 

Her mind was spinning out of control. “Ewww. No I have not.”

 

His driving was entirely controlled. “Well now we have the house to ourselves, and the privacy and all that, your mother thought it would be nice to have a sex dungeon.”

 

She did not think that her life could get any worse. “You what!”

 

“It is very tasteful, that lube is so much cheaper if you can buy in bulk, and then there are all the chains and sex toys and things.”

 

After that it was a long silent drive home. On arrival, she ran from the car, ran to the door, ran to the foot of the stairs.

 

She almost shouted at her mother. “Mum, what have you done to my room, that room is my whole life, you can't go changing it, my posters, my books, my whole childhood is in that room.”

 

Her mother replied calmly. “We only made a small change or two, I really did not think you would mind.”

 

The student Lucy ran up the stairs, her mother puffing gently trying to keep up with her.

 

Lucy was close to hysterics, frantically looking round her room, the One Direction posters, the Snoopy bedspread, it was all almost exactly as she remembered it. “Mum, you have changed the curtains!”

 

Her mother replied. “Sorry don't you like them, I thought the gymkhana pony curtains were a bit age inappropriate but they are still about if you want them back.”

 

Lucy muttered quietly. “But, but, dad said, …..”

 

Downstairs, her father was smiling as he dragged the heavy suitcase into the hall way, and hung up the car keys.

The New Pearl of Great Price - a John de _____ story

 

My name is John de _____ and this is my story. Although this story is scarcely credible, even to myself, I swear that it is all true. As a younger man, I was the faithful servant of Henry, to become the greatest king in all Christendom. He was a strong virile man, full of wisdom beyond his years and with the strength of many men. 

 

I am a soldier, a soldier in the service of God and in the service of his due representative on this earth, King Henry. A soldier pledges his life, and when he pledges his life, he knows that his life on this earth is but a short thing. Like the flowers in the field, there for a day and gone. To live is something, to die is a nothing. It comes to all, and it is better to die well, than to live badly. 

 

I feel I must explain myself, lest I be thought a liar. Those papists with their Spondent quas non exhibent sought to outlaw all such things as transmutation, transubstantiation, alchemy and the multiplying of base metals. And there never was such a parcel of rogues and charlatans as the alchemists, all mad with their quicksilver and poisonous roots. But the Summa Perfectionis by Psuedo-Gerber and the Margarita preciosa novella by Petrus Bonus, held within their coded texts a truth that was only even suspected of by the most perceptive of adepts. The terms, Azoth, the balance of the four elements, the philosopher’s stone even. It was not about the conversion of base metal into gold, though I myself have seen aqua regia turn gold into nothing. No the adepts were not breaking that unseen fixed balance of the four basic qualities that make one metal as it is, and forcing it to become another. They were breaking that unseen fixed balance that chains us all like a cart behind the plodding horse that we call time. 

 

They say that Petrus Bonus died a century ago, but I met him. He wore velvet gloves that stretched from his fingers to his elbows. His hands were fixed stiff by his side, like a stone effigy over a great man’s tomb. His skin was discoloured like I have never seen, save in plague victims. He told me to mix for him his alchemical compounds to make his Azoth, the universal medicine, and then I need never fear battle again. I did as he instructed. I kept one hand upon my dagger and my eyes upon him always. I did not trust him any more than all those other rogues with their mystical texts and dusty cells full of powders and roots. They are all too full of the heathen arab and the papist.

 

He drank a measure of the potion, and I drank the rest. He exclaimed that I had made it better than he could have himself, and I paid him well. 

 

I am a knight of the greatest king in Christendom. There is gold aplenty to be found in soldiering and I know full well that I will never end my days in slumber with my dogs around me, in my own great hall. The money was ever nothing to me, but it would be an amusing story to tell when we were all in our ales, and merry with tall stories and bawdy rhymes. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X 

 

We fought long and hard that day, I fought on my armoured horse until it was felled by halberd after halberd. And as my pierced horse slumped to ground, I fought on. They were poorly armed and scrawny. It was easy enough to hack away at them until even my mighty arms were tired. The day went on and on, and I had slain very many, and there was no shame to it. I fought on back to back with my liege, until my liege too was felled, and then I fought on. 

 

I hacked and stepped forward, pushing them back, and weakening their strokes. They were poor fighters, easily forced into the weaker position. Leave a man hungry for long enough and he will never amount to a real soldier. For soldiery is a hard living, and a soldier must be fed well. 

 

There was no shame to it. I have killed many men, as many as the starlings in the sky when there is a great murmuration of them. 

 

My foes surrounded me, my leg was wounded and I fought on killing many, but they still came. The battle was ending, and it seemed we had not won. The field was filled with the sounds of the dying, and of the wounded being put to the sword. 

 

A man, large as I was myself, came through the melee. He smote me with an axe near as long as a man. I stumbled and fell to my knees. On my breath was the name of my lord and king. I pledged allegiance to him with my dying breath, and staggering forward my numbed hands shifted on my broadsword. I held it now like a knife to stab down upon something loathsome, and stabbed it down into the ground. My sword fixed in the ground, like the cross upon which our Lord Jesus was crucified. With my king’s name upon my bloodied lips I fell back, and I was dead. 

 

X X X X X X X X X X 

 

But Petrus Bonus had tricked me with his half truths and ways, that potion had done something else to me, so that I was no longer as other men. When that axe went though my breastplate, I fell upon my knees. As the life left my body, likewise that anchor which fixed me to that time was loosed. Like a vessel caught in a strong tide, my body was swept by strange currents beyond its control. 

 

I woke from my death and found myself here. My armour broken and rusted, my broadsword still before me, like the cross of our Lord Redeemer. I was scarce more alive than I had been, not far from death. But I was no longer on that field of dying peasants where the crows tugged at the carrion that we had made of each other. I was here where no birds flew and no flowers bloomed. And my numbed hand was made of stone.

The Floating Cities - a very short story in the manner of Italo Calvino

There are two floating cities that I know of.

One Mahogany lies in the mouth of a river so vast that the shore is scarcely visible on either side, and yet the water that bathes it is still fresh and suitable for drinking.

The other, Cuilper (or Culyper), where every building sits within its own quarried out hole, and is fixed to the bare rock with a strong anchor like chain. At times the dykes fail and the sea pours in, and the buildings of Cuilper, rise, bobbing and floating in the floodwaters of an encroaching sea. As the dykes are restored, the floating buildings are reeled back in and sit back down in their housings until the next flood. 

The city of Mahogany is ramshackle, logs are added to it, and the city sprawls with opportunistic concentrations of multi story buildings congregating, until the underlying logs become waterlogged and start to sink down. Each log is fixed with a rope, and in general the ropes will rot away in time for the waterlogged logs to drop down into the current. At times, logs are cut loose. In this way, segments of the city become redundant and unusable until fresh log foundations are floated into place. But this all takes place over a great period of time, and seems no more unusual than the changing fashions, or gentrification in another city. 

In Cuilper the layout of the city is literally fixed in stone, the holes quarried out for housing each building remain in place, they form streets and quarters. Everything is organisation, it is the neatest city you ever saw. The chains are neatly painted, the houses are neatly arranged, the people are methodical and ordered, save the one great uncertainty, when the dykes will break and their city will float up on its chains. 

In my experience the people match their cities, the people of Mahogany sprawl expansively, they are moody and gregarious, prone to exaggeration and argument. At heart though they are warm and kind, every ready to share and offer assistance. The people of Cuilper are fastidious and organised. They dress neatly in blacks and greys, even their flamboyance, the odd laced collar or brass buckle, is restrained and almost mathematical. The people of Cuilper would watch cooly as a neighbours house flounders in the tide, drawing a wry moral from their neighbours failure to prepare adequately, or to appropriately ensure that their household possessions are evenly distributed within their domicile. 

And at times I wonder, did the people of Mahogany and Cuilper make their cities, or, in truth, did their cities make them?

Italo - a very short story in the style of Italo Calvino

 

Hard up against the Northern Frontier lies the abandoned city of Italo. No one knows who occupied it, if indeed it ever was so used. It is, in general, a city that defies, or at least deters and frustrates understanding. There is a rough geometric grid, of sorts, to which the buildings are obliged to conform, streets running one way, avenues another. However there is an irregularity to both the angles and the offset distances between roads that adheres to no discernible pattern.

Likewise, the buildings show a semblance of order, elements are consistent between different buildings, a pillar here, a lintel there. But such familiar elements are seldom seen to be arranged twice in the same manner. A lintel that goes over a window, is elsewhere a hearth for a fire. The exteriors of the buildings bear little relation to their interiors. Windows arranged randomly surround a regular commonplace interior arrangement, and likewise the contrary.

At this distance in time it is impossible to determine the function of the buildings that remain. Likewise no quarters are discernible by likely function in that city. In whole and in part, it defies categorisation. There is no style, no commonality, no repetition. It is a maddening city, it defies logic and intuition. It is impossible to place the buildings within any typology, to conjecture any order to their construction. Devoid of the sun or the stars, as with a cloudy firmament, you quickly lose your bearings.

Scholars are, in general, frustrated, by Italo, and it is little studied as there is so little that one can usefully say about it. The lack of interest in the city is doubly manifested in those who lived there or chose to build it. No image can form of the creators of such a frustrating place. There is nothing to be said for or of them.
The young turks of urban historiography put forward a theory, a half hearted and playful notion. Their conjecture is that Italo was never occupied, it was the physical manifestation of some lost architectural manifesto, some set of forgotten tenets, part intellectual, part religious. An auto-da-fé for some past sins. A festival of possibilities, endless permutations, built and rebuilt, formed and reformed, seeking some final form that bore the self evident stamp of authenticity and rightness that its timid builders could not find it in themselves to arrive at by more rational means.

Misericord - a John de _____ story

 

[A misericord or mercy seat, is a wooden shelf fitted beneath a folding seat in a church. They can be ornately carved.]

 

The scholar adjusted the angle-poise lamp. There was far too little space left on his oak desk. He picked up the pile of books on medieval alabaster work and stained glass, moving them aside to place them on a windsor chair, already well laden with books. 

 

At last, there was nearly enough space. He pushed back the paperwork and artefacts out further towards the edge of the desk. A few toppled precariously, but nothing fell off. The circle of bright legible light fell on the middle of his desk. He unpacked the manuscript, the edge was tattered. Shreds were about to detach forever, now part of the manuscript, the merest touch and they were on their way to the oblivion of being dust. 

 

The manuscript conformed to the broad description offered by the antiquarian bookseller. It was a handwritten manuscript probably of the medieval period. Very late, but possibly medieval. It smelt musty and old, foxed and splatted with spots and damage. At first he focussed on the damage, the random pattern that age had inflicted on it. Then he tried to switch his focus to what remained. Looking back in time to see what had been written on this yellowed parchment. The antiquarian bookseller had merely described it as possibly medieval parchment, he had made no further attempt to describe it. With no illustrations or illuminated characters it was not the most prepossessing of items. He looked around his room, in the partial gloom he could see the same reassuring collection of artefacts that he always liked to look at. Like a miser admiring his hoard, his eye flicked between the items. A variety of misericords, the heavily decorated underside of fold away church seats, designed to offer temporary respite during a long church service. They were decorated with mermen, centaurs, green-men, courting couples. They were roughly rectangular, that was the beauty of the medieval, nothing was ever quite square or quite straight. It was always contorted in some cartoonish manner. There was a huge ceiling boss, a screaming green man sheaved in leaves. The boss would have covered the part of the ceiling where the stone reinforcing ribs crossed. In use it would have been visible, but not legible, yet the detail was incredible. The leaves sprouted forth from his eyes and mouth. There were fragments of rood screen or jube, the wooden tracery that separated the medieval church chancel and nave. Figures being swallowed by reptilian mouths and swathed in looping oak leaves. The medieval wood carvers continued a tradition of working and venerating the living oak that stretched back to at least the druids that the Romans had encountered when they invaded. Back when an older faith pervaded these islands keeping and maintaining the people in their happy state of fear and awe. 

 

These wooden carvings were rare, rarer than just their antiquity would suggest. Under the Tudor Reformation the state had destroyed the vast bulk of religious carvings, tearing them from their churches and burning them in great bonfires. 

 

He heard the faint rustling of leaves. He had probably paid too much for this piece of tattered parchment, he usually did. 

 

He scrunched up the brown wrapping paper and board, throwing them aside. He pulled across a medieval dictionary and started to work through the text methodically. If the text were actually of more than just the usual very parochial interest then it might be of some real value. 

 

 

“My name is John de _____ and this is my story. Although this story is scarcely credible, even to myself, I swear that it is true. As a young man, I was the faithful servant of Henry, to become the greatest king in all Christendom. He was a strong virile man, full of wisdom beyond his years and with the strength of many men. In the winter of 15__ I was dispatched in his service to the furthest reaches of his kingdom. The kingdom was unruly. Henry had been chosen by God to lead us, but his lords and their serfs were not worthy of him. They were disputatious amongst themselves and unduly troubled by ungodly things. With a troop of my soldiers I was to travel the lands of our King and instruct them in their rightful duties and allegiances. A good king will have obedient people and those that will not be obedient must be fearful, in fear for their very lives. 

 

It was a hard winter, the wet ground solid with frost. We were unwelcome everywhere we went. We struggled our horses up endless tracks through oak woods that had never seen a cart. We fought off cur like wolves, and snarling wild pigs, cold hungry. The woods were full of brigands but they knew better than to attack us in the daylight. At night we heard their oaths and footsteps in the dark of ancient woods. The nighttime woods were always full of their noises around us. 

 

When we found a village we were scarcely more comfortable. The huts were low and mean, crowded round a church or pond, like weary hunters round a fire. Hungry dogs licked round us as we entered each village. Dark eyed children looked on. At each gathering I would say my story. I would tell them of their great king and their place in his kingdom. The lords would shift uneasily. They lived in comfort in service of their king, but had done so little to deserve his favour. 

 

I am pledged to the service of my king. After that I am pledged to the service of my Lord God. The churches were as dark and mean as the people. We were far away from the fashionable papistry and Latin of London. The churches were dark and crowded with their carvings. Dark oak figures of heathen things, mythical figures and conjoined couples, gargoyles pulling at their cheeks, twisting branches and oak leaves. On the Lord’s day we would go to the church. The services were long and stilted. 

 

It was in the darkest month of that year when we came to the village of F_____ after days of riding through the tightest of forests. As we approached our path was bordered by oaks on either side, huge twisted trees that were too broad for a man to put his arms around. Trees that were so ancient as to be near useless for anything but firewood. The houses were set low in the ground, turf walls and roofs of scattered brash. It was Sunday and there was no one to be seen. The village circled it’s church. I led my men to the church, stooped low to enter. The church was dark, but full of people. There was the sweaty warmth of many people together. The place smelt of wood and damp, like the woods that we had been marching through. No one turned to face us. We sat at the back of the church, there was empty space and we genuflected before sitting back on the misericords. I took my right hand off the pommel of my sword and placed it on the side of the pew. It was carved with their usual pagan heathenry. The service was unfamiliar, the dialect here too thick to understand. 

 

The church was a long low building, the row of pillars were like the oak trees that led up to the village. It was entirely covered in carvings. Green men and wild hairy men of the woods, carved oak leaves and carved ivy spread across every surface. 

 

The people of the village stood and knelt, their hands pressed together in prayer. At the front of the church there was an ornate rood screen, atop it a rood, a figure of our Lord Christ, upon the cross. This Christ was entangled in oak and ivy leaves. The people roared as one, their prayer becoming more feverish, in the faltering winter light the endless carvings seemed to fidget and settle, flicking like the tail of a summer lizard. 

 

Their chanting grew louder. The Christ rood grew brighter in the dark. The chanting was like shouting. The rood Christ stepped forward, the leaves started to swallow up the Christ until they consumed him. The figure was now a green man, the screaming green man, walking through the air towards us. My men jumped to their feet, their swords and axes at the ready. The wooden leaves were flicking and twisting, grabbing at my men as they chopped desperately to save themselves. I watched as my men were swallowed up and torn apart by this dark wooden undergrowth, I myself felt the pew twist and grasp at my wrist. 

 

I pray for forgiveness from my king and my Lord. I ran to the horses, climbing atop the strongest of them. The heavy horse galloped as our lives depended on it, the very avenue of oak trees bending and grasping at us. My king is the wisest king in Christendom. He knew my testimony to be true. Together we set out to rid the country of it’s paganism.”

 

 

The scholar rocked back in his chair feeling sick. The light was getting dimmer and the sound of rustling leaves was getting louder and louder, but it was winter and there was not a tree for miles.

 

 

Losing Definition - Stories by Peter Reid

 

As touched on in earlier blog postings, for some time I have been working on a series of short stories that I intend to collect together as Losing Definition for self publishing on Kindle. 

To be honest, I have been busy with other things for a while, but I am now trying to make a concerted effort to pull together the collection. Proofing the stories for final publication is unbelievably tedious, and I am still to decide on exactly what order to publish them in, but things are progressing. I think that I will just publish the stories here on my blog as I finish off the final proof. Having said that, there is no guarantee that everything that appears in the blog will appear in the final book, or that i won’t make further amendments, some stories here might not make the final cut. 

I do hope you enjoy these stories. 

best wishes 

Peter 

 

 

 

 

Chalcedony - a very short story in the style of Italo Calvino

To the north of their territories, nearing the edge of that empty steppe land that they inhabit lies the city of the nomads, Chalcedony. Once it was as other cities, but the nomads were unfamiliar with the ways of cities. They had determined that the city should be built entirely from the stones from one quarry. At first this quarry had seemed infinite, the great slabs of rock that had outcropped, it seemed as if they would stretch on far beneath the thin turf. Believing that they enjoyed a near infinite wealth in their chosen stone, they were wasteful discarding pieces with a poorer figuring or cutting large pieces that necessitated much waste. Their city too, though smaller than it is today, was built with extravagance and architectural abandon. The buildings had many stories, turrets and such other features as amazed the visitors eye.

After a few short centuries, the seams of rock were petering out. They were cutting smaller and smaller pieces for building, and even that was not enough to allow fresh building. Barely enough for an outbuilding could be cut in a year. Being nomads, they did as nomad did. The city was not in where it was, but in what it was. They had resolved at some nameless point in time, that the city was built solely of those rocks from that quarry, internally supported and floored with such wood as they could find. Though in truth, in that empty land, wood was scarce more common, or more accessible than their chosen stone.

As nomads do, their city shifted, the wasteful stone foundations were dug up, and houses and great public buildings were installed on more rocky lands, where weatherworn rock made up the whole of the surface of the land. Gentle slots were cut to fix the base of their walls, and atop those the self same stones of old Chalcedony city were laid in fresh configurations. The old city now is marked by robber trenches, setting out where the streets and walls once lay, the diligent and poor are still prospecting for the odd slab of stone that might have been neglected and left behind, and might once again be reunited with its migrant city.

The city is never fixed, not as a city, nor as streets, houses or other buildings. Only the stones of Chalcedony are permanent, endlessly rearranging into different forms of building or city. The city was once small and ambitious, but the constant parsimony of their situation has imposed a pessimistic mien to their fresh city. The stones of Chalcedony cannot last forever, facing blocks are worn in the harsh desert winds, sand batters stone, until only sand remains. They seek to use their blocks until the very last, but eventually every stone must be a pebble and useless for building. And so their fine public buildings, with great spans and impressive arches, are becoming more mean and squat. Houses sit low in their landscape, huddling to the ground, the many stories of the old Chalcedony are a distant memory, if indeed they ever did exist. For now all there is is some low buildings, much as any other village, sunk low to the ground. The nomads are out of love with their idea of a city, the robber trenches sometimes reveal a fresh large block of cut stone, or even a fragment of such, exciting much telling of stories and fantasy. I do believe that for all their talk of the splendours of old Chalcedony, those desert people would fain recognise a real city now, one that stretched beyond a huddle of low huts sheltering against the sandy wind.

But in truth their city of Chalcedony has never left them, it is all around them now, as the pebbles and sand that they piss on, on cold winter nights.

organising the wood pile, how I backed up all my photos to Flickr

 

I suppose that like most Apple Mac users with a camera, I have taken photos, and just relied on iPhoto to keep them organised. I don’t take enough photos to have every worried too much about developing an efficient workflow or means of backing up. However my current laptop, despite having a 250gb hard drive is now very full, so it is time to start doing something a bit more systematic. I cannot claim that this is the most wonderful approach, that I have considered, or that I even understand the alternative options, but for what it is worth this is what I have done. 

The basic facts are that I have an iPhoto library of over three thousand photos, stretching back to scans of photos that I took in the pre-digital age. The early digital photos were from a very cheap Vivicam camera that got me started, the later ones from a Canon Ixus. None are terribly high end, but they are what I have. Although I do have Aperture, I find iPhoto does more of what I need so just use that.

I am a long time user of Flickr the photo site, and paid for a subscription shortly before you got unlimited access for free. 

I do back up my laptop, to an external hard drive, and although I have iCloud, Evernote and Dropbox, none seem terribly practical for easily backing up my photos. 

 

What I have decided upon is 

1. create a series of Smart Albums in iPhoto, see the File Menu, one for undated photos, then ones for each year that the photos were taken. Not essential but it helps to break down the mass of undifferentiated photos.
2. create a matching set of Albums on Flickr, although this can be done directly in Flickr I found it easier to do so using Flickr Uploader when I was uploading the photos. 
3. As hinted above, use the Flickr Uploader software to upload all the photos from each year. Flickr Uploader will let you select a Smart Folder on iPhoto to upload. You can set access rights at this point. The bulk of my photos are simply uploaded as only for my access. With hindsight it is best to keep the Smart Albums small, anything over a few hundred and it will be unwieldy. There were times when I left the computer running overnight to upload the photos. 
4. This then created a back up of my entire iPhoto library on Flickr. It is possible to check that the numbers match, that Flickr and iPhoto agree on how many photos there are. They treat videos slightly differently, iPhoto counts them separately. I never got numbers to entirely match up for the very large Albums, but it seemed to go more or less okay.
5. Having created this back up, I then went through my iPhoto library. Unfortunately it is not possible to do this within the Smart Albums, you need to work within the Folder of all photos. However the folder is sorted into date order, so it is easy enough to see what the last photo for a particular year should be. Knowing that it was all backed up, I worked through my photos in chronological order, publishing the best of them to Flickr public albums named, people, places and stuff. Family photos are saved to an invitation only Flickr album. I have invited my family to view that album. 
6. the final step will be to go through the Flickr albums and delete any duplicates. With hindsight it might have been easier to delete everything already on Flickr and just start over, but it would have lost any comments and view stats on the Flickr site. 

A few important points to note, if you want to upload your photos for back up purposes, then it is easiest to use Flickr Uploader. If you upload a photo using iPhoto, when you try and delete it from Flickr, it also want to delete it from Flickr, which rather defeats the point of backing the stuff up to get it off your hard drive.

The whole process is very time-consuming, it might be worth sprucing up your iPhoto library first to get rid of pointless duplicates and the complete rubbish. To be honest it is taking me days to back up and publish my photos, so this is a gold plated option that might not be for everyone.

This should cost nothing, Flickr now offers near unlimited storage for free. Flickr provides a lot added value for storing photos, you can save as public, completely private or restricted to those you have invited to view. Those viewing can comment etc, so there plenty of useful functionality. That said, it is online, I would not have anything hugely private online, just in case. If Flickr do amend their charging model or go bust, then you will lose your photos, so best to retain the really good ones on your hard drive in iPhoto and have a back up strategy in place for that. 

Going forward, this approach seems reasonably sustainable, setting up smart folders for each year or month, on iPhoto and then backing them up when they get to a certain size using Flickr Uploader. I will get better at deleting the surplus variations of photos, if there are six similar photos, just keep the best. Nowadays it is easy to generate a vast volume of digital content, so it is worth developing an approach to deal with it, that is not just wholly reliant on the one hard drive. This is still a work in progress, but it has meant that I am a lot more confident that my photos are safe and my family are able to enjoy them too.

style and content

 

It intrigues me that we accept that styles apply within such limited contexts. For example there are plenty of architectural styles that have no equivalent in literature or art, I am not sure that I could point out any rococo literature, or art deco or art nouveau literature, much less Bauhaus literature. There are exceptions, I think that Modernist and Post Modern both apply within architecture and literature, though I am not sure that they do so with a great deal of rigour. 

 

It would be nice to design relatively functional items in architectural or art history styles, for example the Bauhaus garden of geometric shapes and plain expanses, I suspect that large amounts of topiary would be required. Or the Mannerist pepper grinder, bent double demonstrating the nature of twisting. 

 

There is plenty of topiary in my garden already, but it is mainly box hedging so it certainly does not grow very quickly. I would like to shape it into the shapes of mouldings, bull nosed ogees, egg and darts and ornamental finials. The notion of replicating wooden mouldings in topiary seems to me to be an entirely sensible pursuit.