The Rushford Times - A weekly newsletter from Jodi Taylor
Sent on Wednesdays to paid subscribers and Fridays to free subscribers
This week we have:
Jodi Taylor writes about The Great Poinsettia Experience
A David Sands Writing Competition entry: The Trouble with Tuesdays by Alison Jones
Controversy Corner – ‘Penny for the Guy, sir?’ by Jodi Taylor
The St Mary’s Short Stories Christmas Reading Challenge - Story Six in the Read all the St Mary’s Christmas Short Stories before Christmas Day Challenge is And Now For Something Completely Different
News of an exclusive new Chronicles of St Mary’s short story - The Flux Capacitor
November - Book of the Month: The Nothing Girl and Little Donkey
There’s plenty to read this week and you can see everything new on the blog too. CLICK HERE for the blog.
Pay attention – this is science.
Last December, we all enjoyed a family expedition to the garden centre. There was mass buying – Christmas decorations, lights, chocolate, reindeer antlers, supposed pine-smelling room sprays, more fairy lights, sausage rolls, tasteless Christmas sweaters, a garland for the front door, bottles of mulled wine, a Deadpool and Wolverine DVD, and, remembering where we were, some plants. To whit – two very pretty poinsettias.
The garden centre had a great choice. Poinsettias with the traditional scarlet leaves, cream leaves, pink leaves, and a combination I hadn’t seen before – red leaves splashed with cream. Very attractive and unusual. I bought one, and my brother bought one.
We both placed ours on our respective kitchen window sills. His flourished, throwing out ever more spectacular leaves on an almost daily basis. Mine slumped into a stupor. It didn’t die as such because presumably that would have been too much effort. It just did nothing. No new growth. No dead leaves. It just… froze.
By now, of course, my brother’s poinsettia had achieved near beanstalk-like stature. I, however, had an eight-leaved inanimate object ostensibly in suspended animation
Anyway, Christmas came and went, as it tends to do and miserably depressing January and February turned up. I hate those months. My digestive system has lost the will to live, I’m broke, I’ve piled on the pounds in areas which should always remain poundless, and the weather’s always awful.
Surviving the curse of January and February – just – and the year picked up as warmer weather approached. I emerged from near-hibernation and time ticked on.
And then right out of the blue, the brother announced his poinsettia was still alive. Don’t ask what happened to mine. If you are of a sentimental nature, just tell yourself it’s in poinsettia heaven.
He and his wife had googled not only How to keep your poinsettia alive but also How to get it to produce more red leaves. Yes, by now it was the size of a small bush, but it was green all over. Not a red leaf insight.
Approaching the science bit now, but with trepidation… The secret of persuading the plant to produce lots of lovely red and cream leaves is to place it in bright but not direct daylight for eight hours and then shove it into complete darkness for sixteen hours more. And it has to be complete darkness to simulate the Mexican desert night, so no street lights, no moonlight, just utter Stygian gloom – or, in other words – my bathroom. My bathroom has no windows, so I’m definitely not short of a spot of Stygian gloom.
I’ve been religiously depositing the poinsettia in the (empty) bath at 4:00 PM every afternoon and hoiking it back out again at 8:00 AM the next morning so I can perform my daily ablutions.
And is it red? I hear you ask.
Well – in a word – no.
The stems have turned red along with some of the veins but the leaves themselves remain defiantly green.
Nil desperandum however, there are still nearly two months to Christmas. Still time for it to perform. And proper scarlet poinsettias will start appearing in the shops any day now. I shall buy a few to act as mentors and role models to my little green friend. And I will be building my usual kitchen window Christmas display, in which a small, stubbornly green but ultimately heroic poinsettia will be the centrepiece.
UPDATE: We have red! It worked! The new bracts coming through are crimson and scarlet. Massive family rejoicing. Off to the pub to celebrate. Yay us!
The Trouble with Tuesdays by Alison Jones
Raine had long suspected Tuesdays were a conspiracy. It wasn’t paranoia, at least not in the bad sense of the word. She considered it more of a personal philosophy. Mondays were universally disliked, Wednesdays had camel memes, Thursdays were the anticipation of Friday, and Friday itself was a carnival of pub trips and paydays. Saturdays and Sundays were sanctified.
But Tuesday?
Tuesday lingered. Tuesday loitered. Tuesday was suspicious.
Raine had tried to explain this once to her flatmate Leonie as they sat in their kitchen, which was roughly the size of a shoebox designed by someone who hated feet.
“Think about it,” Raine said, waving her fork at Leonie as though it were a sceptre of universal truth. “Tuesday is the day nothing happens. No one talks about it. No songs about Tuesday, no movies about Tuesday. It’s hiding something.”
Leonie, half-asleep over her cereal, muttered something about cornflakes being eternal and went back to staring at the wall.
So when, on a Tuesday morning, a man in a lime-green suit materialised in their kitchen, Raine felt vindicated.
The man was tall, thin, and had a hairstyle that looked as though it had been designed by a committee of frightened pigeons. He carried a briefcase that wheezed every time he moved it, as though carrying the existential exhaustion of countless forms.
“Good morning!” he announced. “Terribly sorry for the intrusion, but you’ve both been time-travelling illegally.”
Leonie blinked. “We’ve both been what?”
“Time travelling illegally,” the man repeated. “Dreadfully sorry, paperwork nightmare, really. I’d rather be at home polishing my gorgonzola collection, but alas, duty calls. The Department is quite firm on these matters.”
Raine set her toast down. “We’ve never time-travelled.”
“Of course you haven’t. Not yet. But you will. Which means you already have. Temporal enforcement, you see. Cause and effect are just dreadfully bureaucratic suggestions.” He smiled in a way that suggested he did this sort of thing far too often.
Controversy Corner – ‘Penny for the Guy, sir?’
Yes, I know I’ve missed Bonfire Night, but I saw the news item about burning effigies of certain parliamentary leaders, and it made me pause over my second mug of tea.
This is what might have happened had the plot succeeded and forgive me, but I’ve used the notes I made for A Catalogue of Catastrophe if any of it seems familiar.
OK – Guy Fawkes rowed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder across the River Thames (not all at the same time), and stored them in the undercroft or cellar beneath the House of Lords at Westminster. A lot would depend on the size of those barrels, but thirty-six barrels of any size almost certainly equals a tonne of gunpowder and probably much more.
Had Guy Fawkes actually succeeded, the explosion would have been absolutely massive. The undercroft, with its nine-foot-thick walls, would have channelled the force of the blast upwards, and the House of Lords would have been utterly destroyed. No one would have survived. In fact, the House of Lords and its surroundings would probably have been vaporised.
But things get worse.
The St Mary’s Short Stories Christmas Reading Challenge
Story Five in the Read all the St Mary’s Christmas Short Stories before Christmas Day Challenge
Who’s up for joining in the St Mary’s Christmas Reading Challenge? You simply need to read the 11 St Mary’s Christmas stories and leave a comment below each story as you finish them. We will feature one story a week up to Christmas.
This week’s book is And Now For Something Completely Different
Yes, Jodi is treating you to another free St. Mary’s short story, exclusive to Substack. Available to paid SUBSTACK subscribers on 8th November and free SUBSTACK subscribers on 30th November.
October - Book of the Month: The Nothing Girl and Little Donkey
It look gorgeous! I love the color.
I live in South Texas 10 miles north of Mexico and have an in-ground poinsettia that grows to 6 ft+ and I have to cut it back from around February to September to keep it from taking over the patio. By December I’ve always had a gorgeous display but last year it was really puny. I realized (too late) that hubby had installed solar walkway lights that shine most of the night. Starting in a few weeks, those are going offline.
Well done you. That's a new challenge for all us. Xxx