As my modest but loyal list of people who read my blog know, for some time now I have regularly taken part in the weekly ‘Six Sentence Challenge’ run by the wonderfully generous and very talented Denise Farley. I used to enjoy being part of a group of writers of talent, wit, and skill.

However I have gradually become more and more concerned about the agendas of some of my fellow travelers.

I now find myself amidst:

– people beating the drum for climate change denial and the continued exploitation of dangerous forms of non-renewable energy

– a contributor’s home page that promotes an anti-abortion agenda

– fatuous Bible quotations popping up in the comments, with one seemingly for every occasion

– people who want to move to Mars to get away from the mess they’ve created on this planet

– ‘contributors’ that seem to think SSC is a Facebook page and that ‘I saw a bird in a tree yesterday’ constitutes creative writing.

The older I get, the less I want to be around people who make me grind what’s left of my teeth, so I’m moving on from the Six Sentence Challenge.

Those whose work I have appreciated and encouraged know who they are and I wish them every success in their ongoing writing endeavors. As for the rest, keep pleasuring yourselves; you’re good at it.

This piece as written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt of ‘vault’. Trigger warning: Silliness lurks here.

Vault     1. German pronunciation of Walt

                2. Cryptic definition of catacomb (or the smaller version, the kittycomb)

(see also megavault – humungous vault and microvault – mother’s handbag)

                3. Be promoted beyond your level of competence e.g. appointed to management

                4. Watt happens between two points at one’s ohm

Pole vault – Uprising in Warsaw

Re-vault – To vault again

Summervault – 360 degree acrobatic revolution only performed when sunny

Killervault – Lethal electric shock (see also gigavault – danger to guitarist performing in rain)

Cranial vault – Cavity in head whose walls are used as a measure of intelligence, varying from permeable to thick as a brick.

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘range’.

Home, home on the range (if you can call a block in a rural village a ‘range’), where the rabbits try to play merry hell with my attempts to grow vegetables (for us) and my wife’s planting of trees and shrubs for the birds to sit in and for us to look at, we sit on our roofed deck (yeah, I know, men and their decks), and solve most of the world’s problems (you’re welcome).

Most of our discussions begin with an aorta; not the one in your heart but the short form of ‘they ought to’ (where ‘they’ is some vague entity that has the power to change troublesome things), as in ‘Aorta do something about stupid drivers, the internet, the health system, petty politics and the burgeoning industry of creating new things to be offended about, (insert your own range of pet peeves here).’

During these discussions we reminisce about the magical times when a range was a slow combustion device that you cooked on, after having fed it with wood that you’d chopped yourself, and which also provided your sole source of heating and hot water for the bath that the whole family shared on Saturday night, whether you needed one or not.

Moving right along, we venture onto the infinite range of character-building activities which, were they still in place today, would ensure no juvenile delinquency, murders, lewd dancing or television, and these include having to bury the contents of the can that sat under the seat in your outdoor toilet, re-using the paper bag that carried your school lunch in for at least a week, tolerating without complaint having your face cleaned with a handkerchief that your mother had just spat on, and having you mouth washed out with soap for swearing.

Unlike the famous Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch we, of course, do not exaggerate about the halcyon days of our youth when we walked ten miles through the snow to school and were thrashed within an inch of our lives by teachers wielding a range of corporal punishment techniques, including the cat o’ nine tails or a mace on a chain if our handwriting was not immaculate copperplate and between the lines.

And no, unlike some grandparents we could name (and they know who they are), we do not chastise our grandchildren about their screen fixation, addiction to junk food and appalling tastes in music, preferring instead to lock them in our walk-in freezer for a while and invite them to make friends with the range of rabbits and annoying neighbours hanging in there.

This piece of nonsense was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘meter’, which recalcitrant Americans persist in believing is a measure of distance, proving that if you give them an inch they’ll take 1.6 kilometres.

Cassandra, the Greek patron saint of meterology, was blessed with the ability to take the measure of anything or anyone down to the last scintilla but was then cursed to never be believed, which is why she’d given up warning about perfidious politicians, bridge collapses and cryptocurrencies.

Feminists argue that it allowed her to stay a virgin all her life because she could spot a bounder and a cad a mile (or 1609.344 metres) off but she still had innocent dalliances with handsome young men, especially the local butcher, who was always glad to meat ‘er.

Thousands of poems were written for her, all in the strict meter of the time (with iambic pentameter being the most common, being Greek and all that), in vain attempts to sweep her off her feet.

She predicted that, in later times, particularly verbose individuals would be known as gasometers and, when the Victorians borrowed the name for giant gas tanks, the irony of their resemblance to politicians was not lost on the English.

And Cassandra foresaw the tyranny of parking meters, leading Bob Dylan advising ‘don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters’ and Cool Hand Luke descending to beheading parking meters and then dying through a failure to communicate, because it simply wasn’t his metier.

In Terror Australis, in which Melbourne is the third largest Greek city in the world and Adelaide is known as The Athens of the South, due to massive migration in the 50’s and 60’s, the legend of Cassandra lives on in our addiction to her invention for laying curses on the truly evil, the hexameter.

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘verge’.

Explanatory note: In Australia, a suburban garden verge is the strip of land between the footpath (sidewalk, pavement) and the street. Technically this land is owned by the relevant local government authority and some maintain them (e.g. mow the grass) but many require that residents maintain the section in front of their house, which has in turn led to the street verge gardening movement.

Never a keen gardener in the past, Geoffrey in retirement had become obsessed with growing useful things, with an emphasis on orderliness and strict boundaries for his raised beds of vegetables and fruit trees in large pots.

Of course he could not eat even a small proportion of the seasonal harvests, so he gave most of it away to initially grateful (and then later inwardly groaning and discreetly binning) neighbours.

Having used every square inch of arable land he owned, he took advantage of the street gardening movement to colonise the verge in front of his home, growing mostly herbs that he imagined passers-by would gratefully snip off (with the scissors he had thoughtfully provided, hanging on a string) to add to their evening meal, having failed to observe that most of his neighbours still worked, rarely cooked and never walked anywhere.

One morning, as he was doing his rounds, inspecting his crops, he stood gazing in horror at the carnage in his herb bed on the verge, clearly created by vehicles owned by social miscreants, and then walked briskly back inside and began to coldly map out his dish of revenge, followed by world domination (or at least that part of the world that comprised the street on which he lived).

Over the next few years, Geoffrey leveraged his savings to buy up his less desirable neighbours one by one, including Cactus Man (his front garden resembled the Mojave Desert) and, shortly afterwards, the home of the young people next door, who believed the perfect garden involved red tanbark and gravel and a ‘classic car’ parked on it while it awaited restoration that never seemed to commence.

With each acquisition, he transformed its garden into the orderly and productive space it should always have been, engaged agents to let the properties to people screened for their green fingers and, a decade on, he had created a miniature green solar system, with highly desirable moons orbiting around his virtuous Sun.

PS – Shameless self-promotion of my ridiculously cheap books (including one with ‘Verge’ in the title) to use as stocking stuffers for the festive season.

On The Verge Of Extinction https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B7L4JYJY

Raving and Wryting – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NXMXB3W

And now for something completely different this week; an historical anecdote. This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘eternal’.

Arthur Malcolm Stace was born in 1885, brought up by alcoholic parents in poverty that led to stealing bread and milk and searching for scraps of food in bins, and as a teenager became an alcoholic, was sent to jail at 15 and, in his twenties, he was a scout for his sisters’ brothels.

But, after hearing a sermon on eternity in 1930, he suddenly gave up alcohol at the age of 45 and went on to achieve world-wide fame as ‘Mr. Eternity’, before his death in 1967 at the age of 83.

For 35 years he inscribed the word ‘Eternity’, in copperplate writing (despite the fact that he was illiterate and could hardly write his own name legibly), with yellow chalk (and later crayons) on footpaths and doorsteps in and around Sydney and it’s estimated he did this half a million times.

Only one original still exists, inside the bell of the Sydney General Post Office clock tower, which was brought out of storage in the 1960’s and no-one knows how Stace had been able to get to the bell, which had been sealed up for 20 years.

He inspired many artists (including Banksy) and writers, spawned an opera and even a film by Julien Temple, the video chronicler of the Sex Pistols and The Kinks.

In 2000, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up with the word “Eternity” as part of the celebrations for the beginning of the year 2000, as well as being part of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, in celebration of a man who became eternal though the use of one word.

You can learn more about Arthur in this brief video. https://youtu.be/bF7X9aiRH7s

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘play’. It’s basically true, allowing for some poetic license and what time does to memories, and I only publish it as a very poor confession for a thoughtless act.

In my callow and thoughtless youth, I was a budding and ambitious thespian who grabbed at the offer to be stage manager in a touring production of a play, with the bonus of also having a very small part, as a black English sailor.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I am not now, nor was I then, black but a ginger-haired Anglo-Saxon who, with the aid of a crew cut and voluminous amounts of make-up was up for the challenge,  rationalising my decision on the basis that persons of colour were rare in the theatre in 1960’s Australia.

One night after the show, a smartly dressed woman waited around afterwards and, after introducing herself as the wife of the Colonel at the local Army base, insisted we come to their home for supper and wouldn’t hear of me waiting to remove my make-up.

When the cast arrived at the grand house and trooped into a living room that would have served well as the setting of the final scene in an Agatha Christie mystery, a maid was despatched to prepare tea and supper and to fetch the Colonel.

Soon the Colonel made an appearance and, without batting an eyelid, marched over to me, shook my black make-up caked hand and said ‘Welcome, you look like you could do with a scotch’ and then chatted to me amiably, as if fake black men were regular visitors to his home and that they always left black stains on his expensive scotch glasses.

When we finally grasped the chance to say our farewells, the Colonel once again gripped my hand and intimated in a low voice that I was the least convincing black man he’d ever seen and that perhaps other roles might suit me better.