A FEAST IN A FIELD (CHAPTER 4)

Janie Cobweb first saw the light of day in December 2007, when i was writing a blog for another well known blogging site called MYSPACE, due to popular demand i found myself writing a whole series of related blogs, almost 30 in number and since then i have reworked them and issued them as a paper back book available to purchase on lulu.com.


What follows here are faithful renditions of the original blogs and not those published.





A FEAST IN A FIELD.

Artie Archer ran like the wind once it crossed his mind that he was safe from burning. "It's all right whistling a merry little tune and trying to look anonymous, but the best thing to do is to get away from Billy of the Big Belly as quickly as I can," he'd told himself – and had started running like he'd never run before.

While he was running, forcing one leg to lope in front of the other, he got to thinking. After all, he was the village writer and in that noble position had been called on to do a great deal of really hard thinking, especially when it came to complex plot lines in which a really good person needed to be extricated from this or that unbelievably dangerous situation.

"This is a strange village," he huffed and puffed to himself as he ran along. "To think that in the age of Playstations and crotchless knickers people still think it's appropriate to burn other people alive, and actually delight in it! It reminds me of tales of cultural revolutions when the spirit of intelligence was being cleansed from weird and wonderful societies in the past, and how these days we look back on then as being primitive and heartless!"

"What on Earth are you rambling on about?" asked a voice at his elbow, and when he glanced round in shock it was to see that a rotund individual with whiskers and wearing a bright red coat was running along by his side, matching him step for step, one who had he himself been in the possession of a big round stomach would have been also matching him wobble for wobble.

Artie pulled up to a screeching standstill and fluttering clouds of dust sprung into the air as if propelled by tiny bursts from minute explosives.

"I thought they were going to burn you!" he gasped. "I thought they had it in for you good and proper! I thought that they wouldn't give up until they had a jolly good fire a-blazing and you were a pile of sweating ash!"

The fat man stopped running just as suddenly, and created an equally exciting cloud of dust. He pulled a jolly face and bellowed "Ho Ho Ho!" several times as he contrived to get his breath back.

"Nice of you to be so concerned as to try and rescue me," he panted with a great deal of irony laced in his voice.

"I would have, but it was either me or you and I like to be free from fire," said Artie, trying to sound sympathetic and understanding, but failing miserably.

"It would take more than Billy of the Big Belly to burn me!" exclaimed the red man. "I'm magical, I am! I can do things that mere mortals only dream of doing! For starters, I can ride my sleigh round the world in a single night, and not only ride it but can stop at every house and drop presents of this or that at the foot of little children's beds while they're sleeping, and munch mince pies left out for me, and slurp sherry without getting the timniest bit – hic – pissed!"

"Where is your sleigh?" asked Artie, impressed. "I love tales of that Rudolf of yours! He's my favourite! Lovely red nose and a heart of gold!"

"Sod it, I left the whole kit and caboodle on the burning field!" exclaimed Father Christmas. "I really should learn to be less forgetful! Why, only last year I forgot to leave presents at the British Prime Minister's home, so he's had to live since then without his usual parcel of common sense, which might have proved pretty nasty for the rest of the world if he had anything remotely resembling intelligence between his ears!"

That's the trouble with Prime Ministers," agreed Artie, "but what are you going to do about your sleigh? Hasn't it got all the presents for all the children in the whole wide world in its capacious sack, and won't the villagers pinch them all?"

"Oh, that's no problem," grinned the fat red man, "This is my last call and I've only got one left. It's for Janie Cobweb, and that's why I was landing on that field where they were about to burn you."

"That little bitch doesn't deserve anything at all!" growled Artie. "I spend all my life writing stories for innocent little children, and all she wants to see is me going up like a roman candle! But we'd better do something about getting your reindeer back. I know my neighbours in this here village and they're a light-fingered lot! They steal so much off each other that it's become a tradition for the women, when they go shopping, to secretly take things back to the shop so they've got something to buy when they get there! And the men are no better! They're after each others' stuff all the time. It's like an obsession with them. They're not happy unless they've got their hands in each others' pockets!"

"Sounds like a rough place, then," observed Father Christmas.

"Oh, it is that. I hate living here, but where else can I go? There are mountains all round the place and they'd have to be climbed by anyone wanting to get away, and we've all got the same genetic defect which means we're all totally terrified of heights! But you haven't said how you're going to get your reindeer back!"

"I'll go and demand them," announced Father Christmas. "I'm not afraid of any old burning! And I'll take the opportunity of giving that little girl, what was her name, Janie Cobweb, her present. It's a special one, that it is! Then I can go back home and get a good three hundred and sixty-four day's sleep."

"That's a long time," observed Artie, "to be asleep, I mean."

"I prefer leap years when I get the extra day in bed," yawned the good Father Christmas. "Now come on with you and we'll go back to the burning field and I'll get my reindeer back quick as winking, and be off home to my good lady who will have prepared a good bowl of steak and kidney stew with dumplings for me to eat and be wearing her best negligee for me to marvel at!"

"Sounds nice," observed Artie.

"Delicious on both counts," agreed Father Christmas. "Now come on and we'll sort things out, no messing."

"This reminds me of a story I wrote," mused Artie as they walked along. "It concerned a boy who was born without a head."

"What's anything that's happened today got to do with boys without heads?" demanded Father Christmas, puzzled. "I don't get it! You're not making any kind of sense to me!"

"It's just that if you haven't got a head you can't think because you haven't got any brains, and what the folks tonight have tried to do is totally brainless," observed Artie.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!" roared his companion. "Yes, I get it! And you are, of course, quite right!"

"Now, hush," suggested Artie, "We're just about back at the burning field, and I've already got away from them once: I don't want to risk getting ensnared again and this time get burned for real."

"Okay! Mum's the word!" agreed his jolly companion. "I'll see Rudolf the moment we get in sight of the field: his big red nose gives him away! Can be seen for miles, it can!"

The two of them tip-toed back to the field.

"Shouild be able to see Rudolf by now," muttered Father Christmas.

Instead of an angry crowd they found that just about the entire population of the village was sitting on the grass in cosy little groups and chewing on great steaks of fragrant meat.

"Is that you, Artie?" called a voice. "Come and join us! This is delicious!"

"Is that you, Millicent?" he ventured, amazed at the obvious change in a woman who not so long ago had been quite happy to see him burned at the stake until he was definitely dead.

"Of course, you sweet man!" she cooed. "Now come on and sit by me, and bring your friend! This venison is so good!"

"Venison? Venison? Venison?"

The man from the skies (chapter 3)

Janie Cobweb first saw the light of day in December 2007, when i was writing a blog for another well known blogging site called MYSPACE, due to popular demand i found myself writing a whole series of related blogs, almost 30 in number and since then i have reworked them and issued them as a paper back book available to purchase on lulu.com.


What follows here are faithful renditions of the original blogs and not those published.






THE MAN FROM THE SKIES

"If you set light to me nothing good will come of it," muttered Artie Archer, looking directly into Billy of the Big Belly's eyes.

"If you don't set him alight right now I'll kick you where it hurts, just you see if I don't," squawked the shrill voice of young Janie Cobweb. "My mummy always said I wouldn't be a proper woman until I'd seen my first really good burning, and I want to be a proper woman so I want it now!" she added, her eyes locked onto Billy's like two desperate cat's-eyes.

"If he does set light to me there'll be no more sweet little stories for lovely little girls," hissed Artie at her through clenched teeth.

"Put a bag over his head and get on with it!" called somebody with a gravely voice from the crowd, which was beginning to display the first stirrings of impatience.

"No bag!" shrieked Janie. "I want to see his eyes burst and the juices turn to steam as they evaporate on his crumbling cheeks!"

"You're not a very nice child," grumbled Artie. "A nice little girl would beg for my life! I nice little girl would tell everyone here they should be ashamed of themselves for demanding that an innocent little man like me was burnt to death just because he wrote the kind of stories that melt ice-maidens and cause ancient cats to drop down dead!"

"I'll burn him!" announced Billy, aware of the growing impatience of the crowd. "Now if you don't mind, little girl," he added to Janie, "if you don't mind I'll ask you to take a couple of steps back or the juices from his snozzle when they explode from him might fly onto your precious skin and burn you, and consequently scar you for the rest of your life, and I dared say you wouldn't like that!"

"I want to stay exactly where I am!" snorted Janie in a very loud, very shrill and very imperious voice.

"Your mother ought to give you a slapped bottom, then," suggested Artie, mildly. "You remind me of a little girl I know of who always wanted her own way. She would create all kinds of havoc if she didn't get exactly what she wanted until one day she insisted that she wanted an old Friesian cow as a friend. Her mother said there was no way she was going to have an old Friesian cow in her house, especially one with an incontinence problem, but the little girl shrilled and shrieked and declared that she wouldn't stop until she got her old cow. So she cried and moaned loud as sin both day and night, and first her mother got a headache and then her father got a migraine, and still she moaned and wailed and filled the whole neighbourhood with horrible sounds. In the end, in total despair, her parents got divorced and went their own ways and it turned out that neither of them wanted their daughter with them. So she was taken into care by the local Beadle, and put in a children's home where she was beaten every second day whether she deserved it or not, and had nothing to eat except bread and water and her Christmas presents were bars of soap, which she ate because they tasted far better than any of the food she was offered."

"That's all lies!" screeched Janie.

"Is it the truth?" asked Billy of the big Belly, fumbling for a third match in the box of matches that had cost him an English Pound.

"Of course it is," observed Artie. "It's the kind of things that happens to little girls who think it's perfectly reasonable to behave like spoiled brats and get their own way over everything, including the burning of the local village story teller."

"I'm going to burn you anyway," muttered Billy, striking the third match.

"What's that?" asked a slimy thin man with whiskers who happened to be in the crowd, pointing into the skies above his head.

Every neck craned to see what he was pointing at.

Every head was twisted until every head was pointing to the stars.

And high above their heads, higher than a man can see properly, there was the outline of a row of what were almost clearly horses. And that row of what you might have thought were horses was pulling something behind it. And that something that they were pulling had the oddest character imaginable sitting on it.

"What on Earth's that?" asked Billy of the Big Belly, still holding a match that was slowly burning down until it singed his fingers, and he had to drop it with a petulant "Ouch!"

"It's a fat man in a cart!" exclaimed Janie Cobweb. "Why, he's even fatter than you are, Billy of the Big Belly! And he's got a sack," she added. "Do you think he's going to come down here and put us in that old sack of his and cart us away to some strange land where we'll be slaves to princes? Do you suppose he's an evil sorcerer who's going to trap each and every one of us and march us to another planet where we'll be roasted on spits and toasted over an eternal fire?"

"You'd make a good story teller, Janie," muttered Artie. "You've got the kind of imagination it takes to make a really good story teller!"

But nobody else could find a single word to say because everyone else had his or her mouth open and everyone else was staring so intently at the strange apparition in the skies that a passing sparrow pooed in one person's mouth, and he didn't even notice.

And the thing, whatever it is, drew closer so that the crowd of people gathered for the Burning could see it more closely.

"They're not horses!" shouted a boy out loud. "They've got trees on their heads!"

"They're antlers," called a girl in a gym-slip.

"The fat man's wearing red and he's got a white beard!" called out another. "And his sack isn't empty and waiting to be filled, but it's full and waiting to be emptied!"

"I've heard of that character before!" announced Billy of the Big Belly. "He goes around the world giving presents to all the children in every land, and when he's done the idle sod sleeps for a whole year before he has to do it all again!"

"You mean…?" asked the crowd as if the hundreds there were one person.

"It's Father Christmas!" shouted Billy. "Quick! He's sure to land here! I'll let this writer idiot go and we'll have a bigger burning tonight! We'll tie Father Christmas up and he can burn! He's big and fat and full of grease, and he should blaze really well!

Without waiting for the advice of anyone, not even of Janie Cobweb, he untied Artie Archer and hissed into his ears, "You'd better get off, squire! This is a reprieve, but if I were you I'd not come back to this village, not even if you live to be a million!"

"You can't burn Father Christmas!" shouted Artie. "He's a really wonderful man and does all the good in the world! Without him the world will become a sad place and little children will go without Playstations and misery will reign supreme!

"Sod off!" ordered Billy, "If you know what's good for you," he added. "And if I were you I'd change my pants before the stink gives you away."

Artie shrugged. There wasn't much else he could do, just shrug and wander off. He whistled a jolly little tune to himself when he thought he was out of earshot of the terrible Billy and his matches. Somehow, he needed cheering up

Meanwhile, the fat man in his sleigh landed on the field, right next to the wooden stake that was still driven menacingly into the ground. Billy of the Big Belly slouched up to him.

"What have we here, squire?" he asked, clenching and unclenching his fists.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!" came the joyous reply.