Jeff Ellis

I agree with Chris. Most of the problems of the last twenty years should have been Arab and Muslim problems. It's taken twenty years and a dead pilot for Jordan to notice that they have a stake in restraining the fundamentalists. Turkey has been so taken up with keeping a lid on their Kurdish minority that they have only just noticed the inconvenience of extremists on their doorstep. As for Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan! Nato, the USA and the EU have been too quick to step up to the plate to sort things out when it was actually the Arab League's job. If the Monroe Doctrine worked in reverse outside the West's sphere of influence and we could say "Saddam's a nasty man... what are the Arabs going to do about it?", then we wouldn't have muddled mess after muddled mess. We would have had some nasty wars but they wouldnt have been ours. Isnt there a saying about the unwisdom of getting between two dogs that are fighting?

Oh, brilliantly done... to say more would be a spoiler. Well done Rick for drawing our attention back to this 2010 posting... there must be lots of people who have missed out on it since... go look for it... this elderly atheist lapsed anglican says its brilliant... well done James. Find it here... http://awesomedude.com/jamessavik/the-barlow-boy/the-barlow-boy.htm

R and Chris are right, its a beautifully crafted story.

Nigel has created a future that is both a logical development from our present and radically different. It's fascinating to see him make a change to the way people live and then follow through with logical consequences. Regarding the reference to the rabbit book and its view on the role of the homosexual in society, you may be interested to return to Rabbi Simchah Roth's responsum on the subject to see how much the rabbits agree with mdoern Jewish thinking... http://www.bmv.org.il/ab/dd.asp I enjoyed this story immensely, it is both well written and totally credible. Nigel has packed into a short story what others might have been inclined to stretch into a novel. Well done him. It's the ideas he creates and the way the reader responds that are important here, not the length of the work.

I really like where its going... it has depth

Todays posting was so gentle and so captured the essence of early adolescence. I absolutely revelled in the moment, well done Cole.

Thank you guys. Once again I was sitting here wondering how close to acceptable I have sailed. I think I agree with both of you regarding those songs. As I understand it Horst Wessel is illegal to print or sing. Ich Hatt Einen Kameraden is I suspect not strictly illegal, but jolly bad taste, unless you are a New Zealander WW2 battle re-enactor :-)

I don't normally read American Football stories (I don't understand the rules and have never seen a game), but I do like love stories, so I gave this a go... and I'm so glad that I did. It's set a century in the future when both the Catholic Church and acceptance of homosexuality have taken a few drastic turns. Technology has come a long way too. So when it all comes together on a football field, well the result is a strikingly different science fiction teen romance. Give it a go... I'm glad I did. There is a lot more to this story than I have let on, everything I've said you will find in the intro... above the title line. Read it here... http://awesomedude.com/altimexis/short_stories/WishfulLinking.html

This a great short story, delightfully told, it's just as gay teen stories ought to be... well that's my take on it anyway. Read it here... http://awesomedude.com/rick/outed.htm

Graeme, Good thinking. The one I'm working on now... 97k and getting shorter. Had its ending from the beginning. I knew where it would end, but then I found that to tell the end properly it had to end twice. I was so shot in the foot! That was until I realised that I could move one of the endings to the beginning and that it could then hold the rest together as memories rather than a linear tale.

I'm with Bruin et al on this one... methinks its wishful thinking on Waitrose part... Though, the powers of darkness foisted Halloween on us... at lease until parents were too scared to let their kids out in the dark. I have never come across Thanksgiving over here. Perhaps Waitrose feel sympathy for the Indians who gave away their turkeys... If they had insisted on selling them their lives might have worked out differently. While we are discussing curry and rice, a taste that came to us from Africa rather than the sub-continent when Uganda decided it could do without its Indian traders... A word of warning... if you have a surplus of rice do not keep it for next day, nor should you freeze it. Cooked rice can breed a very vicious virus, and there are very strict regulations for places like takeaways that keep it for any length of time.

Oh dear, I recognised the Wordstar page!

Just two replies... Philotimo deserves better Just saying

Des is right, a near surfeit of good stories in progress. What is appealing to me in Indigo is the fully rounded characters, it makes such a difference... it's what separates AD from the herd. Thanks Chris.

Good one Cole. I've no idea where you are taking us but I'm on for the ride, I know its going to be good

Well, it seems to me that however you look at it he is much better off without the family that he had, the new one seems a better basis for his future.

This ought to raise a smile or an eyebrow. These mailings would need a real idiot to respond to such a poorly constructed letter... right? And... thats apparently the whole point. A scam takes a lot of work once the mark is hooked, and it gets less and less plausible as it progresses. To take the scam all the way to the end requires a mark who is really dim. If he isnt dime enough then a lot of wasted time results, and that is to be avoided. So... the initial letter is deliberately written so that only a really dim person will respond, thereby avoiding all the ones who will bale out before any money is made. Neat, huh?

I too am getting a great read from it. So very gentle.

This is a truly brilliant piece of writing. A magnificent achievement

I agree with Mihangel, all those expressions, except "up the duck" are in very common use. I suspect that up the duck is a miss-hearing of another very common expression "up the duff" meaning pregnant. As "plum duff" is a pudding I suspect that up the duff is of the same origin as "in the pudding-club" which also means pregnant.

what Lug said! I was delighted to see Gee had a new story up, and I wasn't disappointed. Powerful stuff.

Well done Kevin, and welcome indeed. I come from a part of industry where some touch of autism was relatively common. If you can get across to people how difficult it is for autistic people to appear "normal" , how hard they have to work at it and how fragile their world is then you will have achieved much more than simply written a beautiful and skillfully crafted story... As I said, welcome and well done. Jeff (one of the A-team)

As always from Cole, a gentle and greatly enjoyable read. Thank you Cole.

Two to add confusion: fags = cigarettes in English presently = later on in English There have been a number of "street trader" languages in London, rhyming slang is just one. Another is back-slang where key words in a sentence are spoken backwards. Polari now famously a gay affectation was originally a way for street traders to discuss a mark in front of them. Many Polari words were acronyms. My favourite is "naff" meaning worthless or lacking style it was originally NAFF meaning "not available for f***ing" My mother (a Londoner) moved to Wales with my Welsh father during WW2 and it took her 16 weeks to learn enough Welsh to avoid being bilked by local shopkeepers.

Jolly well done that boy. A ripping good yarn, awfully well told.