The Nightmare Bell

In my last few seconds of falling asleep, the final thing that my senses register is the distant sound of a lone church bell striking out its melancholy tone. My wearied brain briefly entertains the mental image of a large bell, dark with rust, swinging to reveal a pointed clapper striking hard against its interior. However, I am asleep before the mental image can have much of an impression on me, and it falls away, like the light being blacked out of a room by the window blind. The curious World of the Dream claims me instead.

I'm lying on a hard, dusty floor. It seems to be the only definite thing that I can feel and touch, for I can't get up from my supine position. The floor has me in a deadly embrace, a dusty grasp, and I'm completely stuck. I can only move my eyes around and stare at my surroundings in horror.

Outside the glass-less windows, the sky is dark. The never-ceasing blackness is not even relieved by the cold stare of the mysterious moon. The ceiling is high and appears to be supported by dark stone beams forming an octagon between the glass-less windows, and I realise I'm inside a cold, dark bell tower. The thought enters my mind like a cold, clammy, deathly-white hand stroking the flesh of my face unpleasantly. I try to swallow, but my throat is too tight and a wet trail of saliva dribbles down my immobile chin.

Movement catches my eye directly above me. It is so dark I hadn't noticed it before, but my poor vision finally manages to register a large, dark, gruff-looking bell high above me swinging backwards and forwards on a network of beams and flywheels. As I continue to look up at it, small details are taken in by my overcharged brain. I notice its dark colour, its large size, a tiny inscription on its exterior and the long, heavy, pointed clapper. The recognition of the clapper sends a shock of panic vibrating through me. I recognise each little distinct feature of the bell as the same one that briefly entered across the blank canvas of my brain before I went to sleep. It has now resurfaced in my unconsciousness.

It is only now that I realise there is something not quite right. The bell is swinging violently and the clapper is crashing inside the dark interior, but I can't hear anything. It's as though my ears have been deliberately blocked with wax or water. The fact that such a large bell can move so vigourously and make no sound at all inspires further fear, although I'm already saturated with the emotion, to say nothing of cold sweat.

Suddenly, the mechanisms halt and the bell is stationery. I can see right into the interior of the bell now, it's much blacker on the inside and a constellation of pock-marks are scattered close to the rim where the clapper has struck it. This clapper is suspended in the perfect centre of the mouth of the bell like a slender inverted spire.

I still can't move, but I dither.

Then, without any indication beforehand, the mechanism supporting the bell breaks and the thing plunges toward me, sharp clapper and all! I'm still paralysed and in no way can I avoid the bell. I'll be trapped underneath it and pinned to the floor by the clapper!

For a few agonising seconds, clapper level with my heart, the bell hovers over me, ready to swallow me like a hungry beast. However, it never does catch its human prey, for a small but distinct beacon of consciousness ejects me from the torture chamber of the bell tower to the hard, uncomfortable chair on which I fell asleep in my student kitchen.

Outside the window, morning light creeps reluctantly in, like a half-awake student who knows that they cannot lie in bed any longer. The morning church bells clang sonorously, clear and loud in the cold air, reverbarating loudly in the ears of every citizen like a hysterical screamer.

The cold breath of rusted brass still plays over my tender flesh. I shiver.

Ode to my Fountain Pen.

Sharp nib
stabbing blue
into the
whiteness
of the
paper.
My three
bony fingers
caress you,
manouvre you
across the
page.
You carve
large knots
between
my fingers.
Making your
mark on
me as well
as the paper.
What pours
through my
brain, you
make it
real. You
record
it. There
would be no
Welford Soar
without
your
intricate
patterns
of ink.
What would
my brain
be if not
for you?
Nothing.
But then,
you'd be nothing
without
my hand
to guide
your exploits
across
the page.
We work
together.
We are
a great pair,
you are
my ideal
partner.
I treat
you with respect.
My work
is yours,
your work
is mine.

The World of the Dream.

The curious world of the dream. a strange place which we all slip into every night whether we remember it or not. Sometimes, the indelible inks of my brain brand such a picture into my mind that I can never shake it off, not even years later. Other times, I know a dream has indeed crept across my subconsciousness, but I sit there, with my head in my hands, trying to pluck the dream out of my memories and come up with nothing.

The World of the Dream is fluid and intangible, you can don another identity, gender or even race like a coat. Then, when it is time for you to wake up, you unfasten the buttons, breaking through the bondage of sleep and hang it up in the dream wardrobe for next time.

The World of Dreams has allowed me to travel to Nineteen-Hundred-and-Two, and tell A.J Balfour, the contemporary Prime Minister, that he was talking out of his arse. It has allowed me to ride through Sainsbury's on a bicycle, aiding the cake section, it has even allowed me to jump over a high balcony and land safely on the floor below like an anthropomorphic cat.

However, I have no control over where the World of Dreams drags me to. As such, the bondage of sleep has held me hostage in some of the most frightening and distressing of places. I have fallen into blackness and had to twitch myself awake. I have raced frantically around corridors in schools and colleges, trying to find my way to a non-existent exam. A real ruler in waking life fell on my neck and caused me to dream of being guillotined, but I thankfully managed to snap awake before the blade fell.

However, I hope the dream world will never again transport me to the Third Reich. Racing around the grey streets of Berlin, confronted by black Swastikas, clutching the arm of a non-Aryan and trying to find our way out of the dystopia. When I awoke, I was bathed in the cold clamminess of sweat.

At times like that, I never want to succumb to slumber again and re-enter he dream world. But I'll go there again tonight, and again every night of my life.

Invisible Cities - "Lesyeux"

As viewed from above, the city of Lesyeux is modelled on the impression of a human eye. A perfect circle of black office buildings jostle in the centre, forming a pupil as depthless and two dimensional as patent-leather. Surrounding the circle is a ring of water, dyed a deep blue, representing an azure iris. A bridge, painted in corresponding blue connects the island of the pupil to the mainland, forming a point of access over the swimming swirling iris.

On the mainland of Lesyeux, the pavements and buildings are constructed of white gleaming tiles. The porcelain coloured houses here are considered to be the most desirable because of their clean looking exteriors. The citizens of the Upper-Classes have claimed these as their own. The black, dirty, sooty streaks of the lashes form the colonies and workplaces of the Working-Classes. The jaundiced, filmed eyes are forced to live here, right on the edge of the city.

Vision is terribly important in the city of Lesyeux, everyone is a pair of eyes, floating up over the pavement. No citizen of Lesyeux is a perfect, tangible being. They're reduced to mere eyeballs, all they have is the power of sight, they can only move around and see.

Observation of the Station (rhyming couplet unintended)

The jagged bulk of the trains jerked to a standstill with a screech over the railway lines. They were black with accumulated filth and puffed, wheezed and squealed like an asthmatic, hysterical woman.

Above this terrible noise, the announcements droned over everyones heads, obviously read out by people with a permanent cold. They informed every passenger present that the trains were ready and waiting to take them ton any destination on the British Mainland; from Perth to Plymouth. The announcers threw their cries into the filthy air, telling that the next train to arrive at Platform three would be the 21:30 to Birmingham New Street.

Whilst trains arrived and announcers struggled to be heard, people of every race, gender and social class were spewed out onto the platform, just as an equal number tried to pile through the very same doors they were exiting from. Each one had the regulation orange and yellow ticket clutched in their right hand. Grubby from so much handling. They elbowed each other out of the way, shouted to be heard above the row and some even tripped each other up in their frantic scramble to get to their destination before everyone else.

Hallucination

I watched the train as it pulled into the filthy station, adding its own dirt to the foul collection. The station was so old it had not been cleaned in at least twenty years and dirty filthy pools of rainwater were everywhere. The dirt seemed to grab me and grapple with me, it clogged my senses so that I couldn't think. Breathing was becoming difficult and my throat was tight. The devilish dirt held me in its grip, dragging me down into a hallucination

Down, down, down. Down into the deepest dungeons of my mind. Past the mundane streams of consciousness. Past my strange unconscious desires. The hallucination was dragging me down further into the torture chamber of my mind which held my obscure phobias.

The chamber opened onto a slaughterhouse. A butcher, with arms stained scarlet from his fingernails to his elbows, stared me down. In his hand he held a meat clever and I could see several slaughtered cows littering the floor. HE had skined their hides and here I was. A human victim.

Writing Implements.

It seems that the flexible fingers of my right hand have disowned most writing implements in favour of a fountain pen. I love being enswathed in the protective blanket of the satisfying scratch of the nib. I marvel at the way the fountain pen enables me to slant my glyphs toward the right. This phenomenon has yet to be acheived with a ballpoint. The fountain pen seems, however to put my very ink in awe of me. The characters I pen seem to be executing a graceful bow.

The one drawback to the faithful fountain pen, is the re-loading of the ink cartridge and cleaning of the nib. The ink can, at this time, lose it's awe of me and leap playfully out of the cartridge to shower my clothes and fingers with blue stains. Although I grumble, completely outraged at the errant liquid's impudence, I really don't mind being coated in the substance of my trade. Those things are only to be expected and taken in your stride when you're a writer.

The writing implements that I hate having to grace my grip with include the 'push-click' variety, the propeller pencil and the revolting, filthy, ill-mannered creature of all writing implements - the biro. Like most inventions that incorporate flimsy plastic, it breaks easily, showing a network of conspicuous cracks that meander around it's clear casing. Inside, the slender, black cylinder stores the ink like blood in a vein. The ridiculous nib is topped by the black, bulbous steeple of a plastic cap. The biro just has to be the physical embdoiment of a disorganised writer's brain. Oh disgusting!

What is worse is that many of these disorganised writers absent-mindedly place the wrong end into their mouths. There are few sights more pathetic than a biro with great chunks of hewn out of the end by chewing teeth, the ink vein protruding from the bitten off end and flattened by a curious molar.

For a writer, your pen is the tool of your trade, don't forget that. Of course there are laptops, memory sticks and pocket books, but these cannot be carried and operated all of the time. Pen and paper most record whatever your mind has to say before it can be ultimately typed. For the simple reason that the pen is so important to the writer, it is surely a sensible convention for the pen to be treated with respect.

Poem for Baby P

If you were my little boy,
You’d go to sleep every night in a cradle of wishes.
If you were my little boy,
I’d banish nightmare monsters with White Magick.
If you were my little boy,
I’d keep you safe from harm in a playpen of love.
If you were my little boy,
Together we’d build coloured cities of LEGO.
If you were my little boy,
Your lips would never contort with tortured cries.
If you were my little boy,
My words would weave a bonnet for your little cherub’s head.
If you were my little boy,
Your brain would be brimful of ideas and education.
If you were my little boy,
You’d know what a mother’s love really was.
If only Baby Peter were my little boy.

Welford Soar.

Tears

I've shed so many on recent occasions, that they have become a source of wonder to me. The imagery that nowadays describes tears has become so commonplace, so cliched, that I may as well give up. The only way I feel I can describe tears is as they really are. Tears don't trickle like liquid moonstones down pale cheeks. The Romantic poets wrote about crying in that way, but they never managed to get it right.

When I cry, the whites of my eyes take on a pink hue, my tears leave tracks down my cheeks resembling slug trails and my anaemic cheek puff up and redden unbecomingly. The rivers and tributaries of of my face also carry the silt of my mascara downstream. The picture I present here is already undignified, but I have still not mentioned the snot. Nasal mucous - much worse than the fattest of tears - obstructs my respiration, then gushes over my lips where it dangles in mid-air. Suspended from my nasal cavaties, there it hangs, a bolbous pocket-watch of slime. The tears and mucous together varnish my reddened face giving it an appearance of pink patent leather.

I know that the Romantic poets must have shed floods of tears, yet I find it difficult to imagine Romantic Keats reddened in the face, cheeks glossy from weeping and a trail of mucous leaking from his nose. No, it just can't have been. I'm afraid I must still cling to the image, unlikely as it seems to me, of Keats sitting at a table with his head on his hand, perfectly white face totally unspoilt by the liquid gemstones that slide down his cheeks. You never had snot, did you John? No, of course you didn't.

Birdsong.

To listen to the sweet symphony of birds singing in the early morning and early evening is one of life's greatest pleasures. When I see the brightly coloured plumage of a bird and listen to its specially composed, conducted and performed music, I find it incredible to think that I once ate other species of the feathered musicians. They are my friends, and I would rather die than eat one.

The beautiful, sweet serenade of the evening bird symphony takes place with each bird sitting in their specific tree, dressed in their smart, feathered suit of clothes playing their piece. The gilded beaks pour forth a fountain of trilling notes sounding as wonderfully delicate as the tiny droplets of rain suspended from the railings of the park.

In the Midlands, there are very few of the coarser, duller sounding birds. There are hardly any crows to caw out their death-like dirge and cast the black shadow of their feathers across your window pane to depress you. There are very few ravens, the larger relative of the crow, to swoop down low over your head emitting its shrill scream as it goes, startling your heart almost to a stop.

There are, however, innumerable pigeons, sparrows and song thrushes. There are even quite a few swans and mallards, pedalling furiously up and down the River Soar like the traffic down Western Boulevard. Although these bird cannot sing awfully well, their course up and down the river is certainly a treat to the eye of the enraptures spectator.

Authors and essayists write about pleasures all the time. Cigars, chocolate, sex, food, sleep and even newspapers. All are common topics of pleasurable essays. Why then not birds and their symphonies? Every evening, they arrange themselves into orchestras, only to be overlooked. Surely, though, their voice is infinitely better than any sound a human being might make.

Darkness

When the light is switched off and the candle is snuffed, blackness pours itself around you like melancholic bile. You feel depressed, as if the dark is a blank canvas on which all your worry and inadequacy makes itself known. The dark is awful and unclean, even if you are not a nychtophobe.

While you sit in solitary silence, totally devoid of light, the dark sets its malevolent hands upon you. Black velvet gloves that reach reach out to your throat. Velvet gloved fingers disturb your hair and snatch at your clothes. What makes it worse is the knowledge that these gloves do not exist. They are simply illusions vomited by your frightened imagination. Therefore, they cannot be faught against.

When the gloved hands of darkness compress your throat further, you know you cannot stand the ordeal any longer. You snatch up your lighter and, with trembling hands, flick the switch to light the candle. A tiny, indistinct blue orb glows firstly, emitting very little light. The flame soon, however, expands into a yellow steeple of light streaked with red and blue, supported by the scaffold of the wick.

You take the tiny light and sit with it before a mirror. The yellow steeple gives off heat that makes your chin and upper lip perspire. Its limited light is insufficient for you to make out the colour of your own hair and eyes. However, it easily picks out every line and blemish in your face, a blackened tooth, the silvery hairs sprouting between your eyebrows, the tiny craters of open pores and the glittering white flakes of dead skin on your chapped lips.

You again lift the tiny bell of the snuffer and extinguish the flame. A tendril of grey smoke billows from the wick carrying the special scent of molten wax to your nose. Sitting there, the black velvet gloves now stroking your face tenderly, smoothing out your wrinkles and hiding your blemishes away from judgemental eyes, you reason that no light at all is better than partial light. It's all or nothing.

Why I'm called Welford Soar.

I very much like the pseudonym that I have chosen for myself. My own name, although I have no objections to it, I fear is too 'personal.' Also, I doubt very much if NMH would be taken seriously as a historical novelist. Another reason is that my pieces seem better written by someone totally anonymous. A person with a name and an ability for writing, that is all.

The Bronte sisters chose pseudonyms that were neither male nor female names, as we all know. I love the idea of a non-gender specific name. Especially as I have a very masculine writing style. NMH could be accused of all sorts of crimes, but Welford Soar is simply a name.

I live in New Wharf Hall on the banks of the River Soar. George Orwell chose his surname from the name of a river, in which case, so shall I. What about a first name? In the great city of Leicester, there is a great road. An artery pumping the citizens and their motors in and out of the city's generous heart. The name of this raod is Welford Road. 'Welford' goes well with 'Soar.' Welford Soar it is then! Welford Soar, I like.

Welford Soar is not a man, Welford Soar is not a woman. Welford Soar is not a feminist, Welford Soar is not a misogynist. Welford Soar is not a Communist, Welford Soar is not a Facist. Welford Soar is not black, Welford Soar is not white. Welford Soar is not gay, straight or bisexual. Welford Soar has no political opinions. Welford Soar has no spouse. Welford Soar has no children. Welford Soar is a contradiction in terms, just a name, a veil, a screen. Welford Soar is simply Welford Soar.

Solitude

Leave me. I want to be alone.
When I need somewhere to be alone, but I am not quite ready to face the four gloomy walls of my room, I meander through the streets. I know from experience that there is no peace to be had in Leicester. The only place I can go is the Cathedral courtyard. Even there, passers-by come and go every few minutes.
I stand by the buttresses, or sit on a piece of masonry - a mourning statue of an angel clad in black - and try to wear an expression of deep melancholy. The same expression on the face of John Keats when he composed his Ode to the bird of infinite melancholy.
Inside the quaint, hipped spire (as Hardy would have put it) the great bells of Leicester chime the hour, the quarter hour, the half hour, three quarters and the next hour. I sit below them, but perceive them as clearly as if they were inside my temples.
I feel a true Leicesterian under the great Cathedral spire. I serpentine between the benches and headstones, gazing up at architecture chiseled by very curious hands. Hands that had to be strong enough to drive a chisel into the depths of the stone block, yet delicate enough to fashion the intricacies of Simon De Montfort's nose and Gabriel Newton's curls. Two pairs of hands metamorphosed into one. A physical paradox.
Many a reverie is ardently pursued under the proud bosom of the spire. Even if my own Pagan religion rejects such organisation, such architecture, such materialism. When I am alone, however, it hardly matters if I am in awe of an architectural tribute to Christianity. The statues were, after all, fashioned by the hands of man, not by the hands of God.

The Writing Question

I am always being asked to consider the question: "Why do we write?"
It is a conjecture I do not find easy to solve although I know I love to write. It is almost impossible to explain my love for writing. Ideas simply enter my head, one after the other and jostle in my mind like people in a crowd. The side effects of this are nausea, insomnia and a mind that will not let go of painful memories.
I find the insomnia part of it terribly irritating. It is far from uncommon for me to be writing at four am while my flatmates have just arrived back from a night out. Many writers I admire have suffered insomnia: Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov were all raging insomniacs to name but a few. Dickens often walked late at night, which he described in his essay "Night Walks," and Kipling often wrote late into the night, in the same fashion as I sometimes do.
However, despite the trouble it gives me, despite the insomnia, the painful memories and the infuriating sensation I experience when I am inspired and do not have a notebook to hand, I love writing. I am a true Paramour of Prose. I love the physical sensation of the blood throbbing through my writing hand. I love the sheer freedom of writing. When I write, I do not feel I have to follow the conventions of speech. If I had to say the words I write, I would choke on them, but it's so easy to put those very same words down on a page. I also love the fact that writing acts as an outlet for all the ideas that enter my head and scream in my ears until I want to cry "Enough!"
I cannot give up my writing. Without my poems, short stories and my novelettes, I am nothing. They are me and I am them. Without them I do not exist.