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 - Oh my God, my corned beef has just had an out-of-body experience.
A David Sands Writing Competition entry: Faith & Begorrah by Elaine Leet
Jodi’s book recommendation: Katabasis by RF Kuang💙📚
This Week in History: The Birth of a Legend: Sherlock Holmes in Print
The St Mary’s Short Stories Christmas Reading Challenge - Story Four in the Read all the St Mary’s Christmas Short Stories before Christmas Day Challenge is My Name Is Markham
October - Book of the Month: Out of Time
There’s plenty to read this week and you can see everything new on the blog too. CLICK HERE for the blog.
Oh my God – my corned beef has just had an out of body experience.
And before you start – yes, I’m not very well and yes, I may have slightly overdone the Lemsip – it’s really good stuff, you know – but you would not believe the day I’m having here.
I’m suffering from Millie’s toxic snot again. Seriously, I have only to clap eyes on my granddaughter – or, more likely, vice versa – and I go down with something awful. Medusa had her snakes; the basilisk has its stare – Millie has her toxic snot. I woke up feeling grim and that was the high spot of my day.
Around lunchtime I thought I might be hungry. I wasn’t but you have to feed a cold, don’t you? I couldn’t be bothered with anything technical so I chopped a roll in half and pulled out a pack of corned beef from the fridge. Unopened. Remember that. Again, I couldn’t be bothered with the whole butter thing so I just ripped open the pack and was somewhat disappointed to discover there were only two slices instead of the normal four. On the other hand, I wasn’t going to live long enough to enjoy the missing slices tomorrow, so I clapped what I had got between the two halves of roll and went to watch Anaconda. Because I’m fascinated by giant snakes. So sue me. Or better still, go and read Bad Moon.
The roll was fine – as was the entire bar of chocolate that followed it down – thank you, Karin – and I wandered back into the kitchen – the anaconda having met a suitably grisly fate – and put the plate in the sink. As I did so there was a kind of splat sound behind me and when I looked there were two slices of corned beef lying on the kitchen floor.
I looked down at them on the floor where they definitely hadn’t been a moment ago. I looked up at the ceiling. I looked down at the floor again. I picked them up and popped them in one of those plastic box things and shoved them back in the fridge. I offer no explanation.
I rather thought I fancied a good dose of Pacific Rim after that so I turned to go back into the lounge and as I did so the most enormous spider crawled out of the container in which I’d been defrosting the chicken. It was one of those huge black ones that appear in autumn and run across your mother’s carpet and there’s screaming and telephone calls and I have to go down and deal with it.
Bearing in mind that the last time this happened I’d lectured her for twenty minutes on not killing harmless creatures just because you’re scared of them and they have eight legs – or six – let’s go with seven – I gritted my teeth, ignored it’s antler-waving, or tentacle waving, or feeler waving, or whatever spiders call their appendages, clapped it into yet another plastic container – I only have three so that was all of them in use – and rushed to the window to release it back into the wild.
Fly, my pretty one – fly!
Unfortunately, in my excitement, I dropped the plastic thingy. I’m three storeys up and just grateful I didn’t kill anyone. Thirty feet per second per second, you know. Terminal velocity.
Obviously, I had to get it back – thirty-three and a third percent of my plastic thingies now lay in the street below. I shot out of the front door and down the stairs only to collide with a neighbour who wanted to know what the rush was. I told her my corned beef had dropped from the ceiling and there was a spider and I’d thrown a plastic thingy out of the window in my panic and had to get it back before it killed someone. On reflection, it wasn’t clear whether I was referring to the corned beef, the spider or the plastic thingy.
Such is my reputation in our block, however, that she simply said, ‘Oh dear, you’d better get it back,’ and continued with her day.
This has not been my best day ever. I’ve ditched Pacific Rim in favour of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare because I can’t help feeling this is now a Henry Cavill day.
I’m not, in general, kindly disposed towards those who say women shouldn’t live alone because they don’t have the mental capacity to cope with everyday life but I’m beginning to wonder if they haven’t got something there.
Faith & Begorrah by Elaine Leet
Year: 2175
In a communications room on an outpost on Earth’s moon, a young sergeant reported, “Lieutenant Tring, something weird is going on with one of the habitat satellites orbiting Mars.”
Tring responded with a grunt, “Which one?”
“Hotel Faith and Begorrah.”
“That space camp for the mad scientists? They’re always tilting, twirling and adjusting. Tell me something new, Sergeant.”
“Sir, all shuttles have docked and they’re firing up, and it looks like the whole damn thing is leaving orbit.”
“Leaving orbit? Have we heard from Mars Base?” Tring came to stand behind the sergeant to study the holographic representation of the satellites orbiting Mars.
“Sir, Mars Base says they don’t know what’s going on.”
“They never do. Get me a com link to the hotel.”
A pleasant, slightly mechanical voice answered Tring’s call. “Thank you for calling Hotel Faith and Begorrah. Your call is important to us. Stay on the line and someone will be with you shortly.” The automated answering service then played soothing strains of the popular song Luna Lullaby. A minute later, the message repeated.
Tring blustered, watching the hologram, “Sergeant, get a Mars Guardian Patrol to do a flyby.”
At last, a human voice responded to Tring’s call, “Concierge Desk. Mandi speaking. How may I help you?”
Katabasis by RF Kuang💙📚
Alice, an ambitious post–grad student in the field of analytic magick, desperately needs the support of her tutor, Professor Grimes, to achieve the academic excellence she so desperately craves.
Unfortunately, he’s dead.
Even more unfortunately – it’s Alice’s fault.
Now she has no choice but to journey to Hell and bring him back.
I loved this book. It really touched a chord with me. At one point in the story, one of the characters, in an attempt to explain her academic imperative, rationalises her emotions by saying – Never mind the day-to-day distractions of everyday life. All she ever wanted was the unhampered time and resources to be able to think.
I’ve had many jobs and enjoyed all of them but one, but no matter how interesting or engrossing the task in hand, there was always a slight resentment that the paying job got in the way of what I considered to be proper thinking. Paying jobs stood between me and the ability to think the thoughts I wanted. They also stood between me and homelessness and starvation, of course, but to have the time to imagine, to dream, to create whole new worlds full of strange new people and places seemed, to me, a never-to-be-achieved luxury. I could only imagine having the time, one day, to take any number of these random elements and weave them into a story of my devising.
This Week in History: The Birth of a Legend: Sherlock Holmes in Print
On 31st October 1892, George Newnes Ltd published a collection of twelve short stories that would forever shape the detective genre: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. Bound in pale cloth with an illustration by Sidney Paget, the volume gathered tales that had already captured the imagination of thousands of readers in The Strand Magazine. In book form, they confirmed Sherlock Holmes’s place as the most famous fictional detective in the world.
Arthur Conan Doyle was trained as a physician, and it was in the quiet hours between patients that he began writing. His first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), introduced readers to the consulting detective and his loyal companion, Dr John Watson. A second novel, The Sign of Four (1890), followed. Yet it was not until Holmes appeared in short story form that his popularity truly soared.
The St Mary’s Short Stories Christmas Reading Challenge
Story Four in the Read all the St Mary’s Christmas Short Stories before Christmas Day Challenge My Name Is Markham
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 My Name Is Markham
Raising the Dead is a new St. Mary’s Halloween short story - it’s now live for paid subscribers and will be free for everyone on Halloween.
October - Book of the Month: Out of Time
I used to live above a bookies, and despite being repeatedly told not to, their staff would stand outside the front door to smoke, so the smoke went into my living room. Anyway.
I clapped a plastic box over one of those huge arachnids one evening, and asked the convenient visitor (not phobic, unlike me) to remove it. Usually we tipped them out of the bathroom window but before I could explain he'd opened the (creaky) sash window and tipped it out of the living room window.. straight onto the head of the smoker below. There was an amazing scream - she could be in Hammer Horror revivals.
They all stopped smoking there.
Ah, but the good thing about living alone is that there are no witnesses.