Bruin Fisher

Hi all, I'm looking for help. When reading US-set stories, I occasionally come across the term 'hard cider'. It's not a term in use in the UK, and since I'm based in Somerset, which is locally considered the home of cider, I'm wondering if any of you settlers from the colonies (!) could tell me what you mean by 'hard cider' - and is there also a 'soft cider'? Here in the UK, cider (occasionally spelled cyder) is a very popular drink made by fermenting apples. It is roughly as alcoholic as beer, but usually a bit sweeter. There are lots of variations, dry cider, sweet cider, cloudy, clear, and the local 'scrumpy', 'rough cider' or 'farmhouse cider' which is sold in half-gallon flagons, and tastes of cat's piss, and is capable of stripping paint. Traditionally it's always made from apples, although pear cider has recently become popular, and also ciders flavoured with other fruits such as strawberries, but those are still based on fermented apples, I believe. Any info will be much appreciated! Bruin

Love this, and Willie Nelson is a hero!

Cole here's a hug in thanks!

Love is Blind is the title of one of my stories too... I suspect Nick Brady's is the better though.

from the BBC Radio 4 comedy 'The News Quiz' I'm not sure how well some of these will travel across the big pond. If any need clarification, do feel free to ask!

Hear, hear, Merkin! In the days when I taught people how to use their computers for common office tasks, I always took care to make sure my students were reassured that in my view, if the function they were trying to learn was less than obvious to them, the fault was not theirs but the designers of the hardware or software. As I've always held, the best tools are intuitive. You don't need much training to learn how to use a hammer, or a knife....

I just came across this on the web: After my prostate exam, the doctor left the room and a nurse came in, shut the door and said three words that shocked me to my core... "Who was that?"

Hilarious. Most of these would very well spoken out loud in an Irish accent. And with a pint glass of beer in one hand, a microphone in the other, on a stage in front of about fifty people each with their own glass of beer. Or so I imagine...

Lovely wistful poem. Man is wolf to man. Sometimes a man acts like a wolf to another man. So much could be made of that short statement! Could it not be the basis of a story, Camy?!?

You have been? Writing? Oh frabjous day! (Does Snoopy dance)

And I 'third' it....

I want to thank our wonderful Dude for highlighting my short story Xenophobia on the home page in the Dude's Picks - Short Stories section. It is humbling, and a great honour, to be listed in company with those truly great writers Elecivil, Mihangel, Solsticeman, Graeme, Bi Janus and Chris James. Most months the Dude's Picks section prompts me to re-read the listed stories and I'm already half-way through this month's collection. Xenophobia is a little piece, a plea for tolerance and inclusivity I guess, and it's not one that often comes back to my mind. I wrote it ten years ago (can it be that long ago?) which reminds me how much I wrote in those days and how little I write nowadays, which is frustrating. I must try harder...

A moving tale, beautifully told. Thank you Ivor!

Very clever! Sparkling, to suit the season!

Aw... what a delightful story. All too often we don't know ourselves nearly as well as we should. Not that it's relevant to Grant's lovely short story, but I think unhappiness and/or trauma in childhood can often lead to a disconnect so that you can grow up without really knowing yourself. Then you can end up making life decisions that have long term consequences and in later life you might come to realise that you've been living the 'wrong' life! I'm hoping that doesn't happen now nearly as much as it used to, if only because in many parts of the world young people can contemplate the possibility that they might not be straight, without worrying so much that they might be ostracized.

Excellent analysis from Camy and the Guardian, nicknamed the Grauniad, after its reputation for poor proofreading. Personally I don't think the Guardian is proofread any worse than any other text-based media outlet these days. And they certainly do 'speak truth unto power' which is refreshing.

Indeed. On this side of the big pond. Also on the other side of the big pond. And, come to think of it, Russia. And the Middle East. And much of Africa. And.... Have we now arrived at the point where the only rational response to world events is to go back to bed and hope it all goes away?

Stephen Fry for Prime Minister...

This news item from the BBC: British ex-solder tells his story I found it very moving.

I found this clip: BBC Science Programme 'Tomorrow's World' from 1965 Raymond Baxter, presenting, says 'in the future' a girl's ear-rings will be 'not just ear-rings but tiny radio receivers. Light programme in one ear, Third programme in the other, every taste catered for.' Well, he wasn't all that far off, except that the BBC radio channels 'Light programme' and 'Third programme' are long gone, and our wireless earbuds can stream any audio content from the vast resources of Spotify or whatever. At the time, however, it must have sounded far-fetched!

It might work for me if the young male nurse was standing, with his groin at the level of the table....

I attended an LGBT+ writers' group on Monday evening. There were six of us, gathered around the kitchen table of our host, and we were given a theme and asked to write something and then read it for critique by the others. The theme was 'a haunted house' and despite my usual aversion to anything halloween (bah, humbug, it isn't a tradition in Britain) I wrote. We were only given an hour but the story flowed fairly steadily onto my screen and afterwards I finished it off, tidied it up and decided to post it. It's only just over a thousand words long, so I've just posted it in Flash Fiction. I hope that's okay. B x

The thing in the attic by Bruin Fisher It should have been okay. It was only one night, Jamie would be back the next day and I had my mobile phone in case of emergency. I heated a pizza and ate it in front of the TV, an old horror called The Exorcist, which grossed me out and left me a bit shaky, but it’s only a story, and I did the night-time routine, closing the windows downstairs, checking that the doors were both locked, then turned off all the lights except the stairwell and went up to bed, much earlier than usual, but without Jamie there wasn’t anyone to talk to and I thought I could read in bed for a bit if I couldn’t sleep. Upstairs I changed my plan a little, decided to take a leisurely bath rather than my usual quick shower. I also lit some scented candles in the bathroom to help me enjoy a long soak, and took my book in to read in the bath. Georgette Heyer isn’t perhaps the obvious choice for a gay man, but I’ve always enjoyed her Regency romps, and I can swoon over the handsome heroes just as well as her target audience does. I was well into the story, the headstrong runaway debutante throwing herself on the mercies of the notorious rake with the irresistible lantern jaw and flashing dark eyes. What are flashing eyes? And can he still see through them? The sound I heard wasn’t anything special, just like somebody moving a rug across a floor, but the problem was that I was alone in the house, and it’s detached, I shouldn’t be able to hear anything the neighbours were doing. So I took notice, and when the sound didn’t stop and I couldn’t identify it, I got out of the bath and opened the bathroom door, and listened to try to work out where the sound was coming from. Upstairs, perhaps, which meant the attic. Jamie’s house is one of the big old stone piles that got built when the Victorians discovered seaside holidays and the wealthy ones built holiday homes for themselves in Weston-super-Mare, because the railway reached there before anywhere else on the West coast. Most of them have since been converted into flats, ruined, Jamie says, a lot of them with great concrete staircases built up the outside. Jamie owns one of the few remaining intact buildings in the area, on the hillside with a commanding view of the bay and the sprawl that is twenty first century Weston. It’s built on four floors, a basement, the ground floor with the big reception rooms, high-ceilinged and with enormous bay windows looking out over the valley, then the first floor with the family bedrooms built on almost as grand a scale as the floor below, and then, up a further narrow staircase, the servants’ quarters, in the roof space with dormer windows and low ceilings. Jamie doesn’t use those rooms, except for storage, and I was beginning to think maybe birds had got in, or, heaven forbid, rats. I crept up the staircase, already regretting not putting a dressing gown on, or anything on my feet, and I didn’t know where the light switch might be, or even if there was electric lighting up there at all. Looking back down the stairwell I could see damp footprints marking my progress, but looking upwards I was peering into gloom. I stood stock-still for a moment and listened. The sound was still there, clearer now, something was being dragged across the floor up there. There was a door at the top of the staircase, I’d never been up there before so I had no idea what was behind it. Now I regretted not getting Jamie to show me around up there when I’d moved in, or exploring up there at any time in the three weeks since. Now I had to open the door in almost pitch darkness. I reached out, began to turn the brass doorknob. The next moment I was squashed between the wall and the explosively-opened door. I had only the vaguest impression of the whatever it was that had burst out of the room and – knocked me over? - or did I just fall backwards? It was dusty and covered in cobwebs, but it was definitely human-shaped, but with heavy iron cuffs around its ankles and lengths of chain attached to them, which it was dragging behind it as it went. Maybe one length of chain, linking the ankle cuffs together. I screamed. And kept screaming, and it sort of helped. Nobody came to my rescue, it would have taken more than my lungs are capable of to make any of the neighbours hear me, but after I’d emptied my lungs I began to feel less terrified. I pushed the door away and it swung closed. Then I checked that I could move everything and established my nose and bum were sore and the back of my head was already developing an impressive bump but otherwise I seemed to be intact. I stood up. It wasn’t until then that I took stock and cursed myself for my imbecility. Why did I go to investigate an unexplained noise in a supposedly empty house, without a stitch of clothing, any weapon, or even a light? I’d behaved exactly like so many gormless characters in so many dreadful horror movies. I remember laughing with Jamie at the antics of one such, both of us shouting at the TV screen ‘don’t go in there alone!’ as another blonde with an improbable figure and a distinct shortage, we surmised, of brain cells, headed for her inevitable demise at the hands (and chainsaw) of the mass murderer who was terrorising the neighbourhood and had already claimed multiple victims. And now I had acted just the same. Perhaps those movies are not so ludicrous after all. My next move had to be to get back to the bedroom and phone Jamie. My legs were shaking but I made it into our bedroom, turned the ceiling light on to supplement the bedside light that was already on, and reached for my phone from the bedside table on my side. Something drew my attention to the mirror above the dressing table and I glanced at it, and dropped the phone. There, framed by the old black oak frame of the mirror on candytwist supports, I could see behind the bedroom door where we keep our dressing gowns, on hooks behind the door. But what I could see was not dressing gowns, at least not our nice clean paisley pattern silk gowns that we bought each other for Christmas last year. Far too much cobweb and dust for that. We stared at each other. It seemed like hours, I couldn’t have moved to save my life and it really looked as though the inability to move might just be a fatal hindrance. To my shame I became aware that I was wetting myself, which broke the spell and I stood up, wanting to avoid damage to Jamie’s bedding. It seemed that my movement triggered a response from the thing behind the bedroom door. It stepped forwards, twice, dragging the chain behind it. Its arms waved, its mouth opened, I cringed, it spoke. “For fuck’s sake, Dave, you’ve wee’d on my carpet!” - and the ghoul fell to its knees, giggling uncontrollably. For a moment my mind clouded, unable to process this. Then I remembered the date – October 31st – and I ran at Jamie in that awful disguise, and pushed him over. I’m not at all sure this relationship is going to last… (c) Bruin Fisher 10/2018

Thank you Colin. I checked out the piece on the Symantec site, thanks for the link. Am at least slightly less confused now... ?