Nothing’s gone to plan tonight. My son wanted to join a party of kids Trick or Treating around Cancajos without an adult in sight. Now Cancajos is full of bars, and now and then you get some dodgy people around. Sin City it ain’t, you understand, but nor is it somewhere we could leave our son unsupervised. So I was going to supervise a party of two. Then the other…
The green threads wrapped around this parsley are dodder (Cuscuta). It’s a parasitic plant without any leaves or roots of it’s own. It finds a living plant, wraps around it, and digs sharp spikes into the victim plant to suck the juice. Other names include devil’s guts, devil’s hair, devil’s ringlet, goldthread, hailweed, hairweed, hellbine, love vine, pull-down, strangleweed, and witch’s hair. Essentially it’s a vampire, and the dang thing’s…
I saw this boat from my balcony. I think it was trying to get to the harbour before the rain started.
I just finished reading “The Inferior” by Peadar Ó Guilín. I loved it. This is Peadar’s first novel, but I’ve admired his short stories for a long time. They stick in my memory them for years. Although the novel’s SF, it begins like standard fantasy dystopia, with the protagonist, Stopmouth running for his life, chased by intelligent animals who want to eat him. Then he turns back to help his…
I met Helen and Theresa in town this morning, to see if there was any progress on sorting out their Spanish driving licences. Nope. The man at the gestoría (paperwork agency) explained that the first thing they do is to contact the UK and see if it’s a real UK driving licence, and he thought they did them in batches. Anyway, they hadn’t done it yet. Sigh. But I went…
My story “Scream Quietly” is available in Escape Velocity Magazine – issue one. You can buy it at Lulu It’s 156 pages of A4, or a download (which is cheaper). And the editor said: “By the way, your story is the BEST one this issue, without a doubt. It is listed on the front cover. Unanimous vote by the staff. “ Of course now I’m grinning like a maniac.