Bruin Fisher

Ha! yes, England similarly has some doozies. Six Mile Bottom always made me giggle. Also Nempnett Thrubwell obscurely. Nether Wallop, Wetwang, Piddle Trenthide, Fingeringhoe, the place is awash with rudery.

Naked man who walks through doorway sideways going to Bangkok.

Lido A lovely, if fanciful, glimpse from 2015 into a near future that has since happened, though not, sadly, quite as the author proposes. I just loved re-reading this one, Pedro cleverly fictionalises several statesmen and gives them a back story that explains, perhaps, a lot. Quite wonderful.

King of Shreds and Patches A touching account of the bond between an old man and his dog. Tragic Rabbit's excellent writing skills very much in evidence.

Popularity I just re-read this lovely short story by Graeme. Very well-written, a sweet story that shows us how difficult it can be for popular kids in the school environment, to come out to their peers.

I'm feeling a little emotional just now, impressed by your comments, guys. Perhaps we've all been adversely affected by war, even when we've escaped direct involvement. Many of us were brought up by emotionally crippled men and frustrated women. At one point in the book In Memoriam, a girls' school mistress addresses her students, telling them that only one in ten of them can hope ever to marry. Apparently there was a generation of 'surplus women', not enough surviving men to go around. One effect of the book for me has been the image in my head of a whole generation of privileged enthusiastic patriotic public schoolboys and their more plebeian equivalents in lower ranks, volunteering to fight for their country, signing up at 17 or 18 although the age limit was 19. And months later going 'over the top' in France or Belgium and being mown down by enemy machine gun fire. In just one day's battle, apparently, 60,000 soldiers on the Allied side died. These were children, just on the cusp of adulthood with what should have been a whole life stretching decades ahead of them, just snuffed out. It's enough even at this remove to make you cry. With our 21st century sensibilities we can argue that war is futile, of course. But even with the attitudes that prevailed at the time it should have been obvious that having thousands and thousands of men march into a hail of machine gun fire scything them down, and then replacing them with the next wave and the next, day after day, was futile. Lions led by donkeys. There were so many corpses that there was nowhere left to bury them. The craters made by exploding shells revealed decomposing human remains everywhere. Dead bodies got left where they were, an obstacle to be clambered over by the next advancing wave of cannon fodder. Thank you John for the link to your excellent Powerpoint presentation. The photos look like a film set - surely the countryside couldn't have been laid so comprehensively waste? Surely the destruction couldn't have been so complete? But the photos are there as evidence. Truly awful. Big hugs all round.

Thanks for this! I checked out The Sleepwalkers, it looks very good, an authoritative explanation of the complex causes of World War 1. What I failed to mention, perhaps unforgivably, in my first post in this thread, is that In Memoriam is a touching gay love story, that just happens to be set in WW1. Its meticulous research and harrowing account of the horrors of war are what affected me so powerfully. That and the love story.

A hundred years and more have passed since the Great War, the 1914-1918 war that was ‘the war to end all wars’. It was a dreadful war, marking the end of wars being fought between heroic, chivalrous foes with a strict code of honour. It was the war that introduced mechanised killing, with machine guns mowing down lines of soldiers marching stolidly into fire. It was also the war that killed with gas, which burned its victims from the inside out. Part of the reason why that war inspired such powerful writing by such as Rupert Brooke, Siegried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Erich Maria Remarque, is that children were still being taught that war is glorious and the young men, children really, who signed up were expecting to win glory for themselves, in victory or in death. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. The war to end all wars didn’t work. Only twenty years later it all happened again, on an even greater scale and with even more powerful weaponry. That second one required that world wars be numbered, World War 2 - and its predecessor became World War 1. There hasn’t been a World War 3, yet, so did these wars end all wars? Sadly, no – there are always wars going on somewhere, just not on a worldwide scale. My father was just too young to be called up to fight in the Second World War. He did National Service in peacetime just after the war ended. I have lived my life without experiencing war. I have had the luxury of considering my life valuable, but human life is not valuable, really. Nations still fling themselves into conflict with their neighbours without regard to the vast numbers of their citizens who will die. Like the columns of soldiers who marched in line into machine gun fire in World War 1, and like the Light Brigade sixty years before that in the Crimean War, who rode similarly into fire, and died pointlessly, soldiers are still being sent to their deaths so that their masters can claim to have captured a town which will be retaken by the enemy the following week. Military leaders still factor expected casualties as ‘collateral damage’, and they must consider a certain level of such ‘damage’ as acceptable in the pursuit of their aims, or no battles would ever be fought. Human life is still expendable, and I, having lived a life insulated from this harsh reality, struggle to think of my own life in those terms. I have just read In Memoriam by Alice Winn. I was powerfully affected by it. It has changed me. I highly recommend it – if you get a chance to read it, do.

Lovely, Cole. So true! I've heard a similar story, but about the elevator - which of course is correctly called a Lift.

ROFLMAO!!!😅🤣😂

I just re-read the collaborative series we did here, posted in the Flash Fiction forum as Uni. Lovely to be reminded of it, it's rather wonderful, with its prequel and epilogue too. Well over ten years ago now, but fresh as a daisy. I doubt it's ever featured in Readers Rule, it was, after all, a bit of a one-off. I've read a few other collaborative stories, and participated too, and sometimes it works better than others. But I've never come across anything so serendipitous and perfect as this. We didn't plan it at all, it just happened. Truly delightful.

Brilliant. Thanks for cheering my day.

Yes, do tell, Jason! By skimpy, are you thinking bikini briefs? Jockstrap?

Super idea. Thanks, Mike! Glad you're in a better place, too.

Cole? Nothing? Are you not feeling well?

Short shorts, yes... (sinks into reverie...)

I grew up in the post-war years, things were different then. Little boys wore shorts, never long trousers, until their mid-teens – I guess when they began to acquire hairy legs – at which point they switched to long trousers and from then on never wore shorts. Adult males wore shorts perhaps on the beach or on the tennis court but never otherwise. My teachers wore shorts on the school playing fields when coaching rugby or hockey. I remember being fascinated by the blond fur that covered the tanned legs of our hockey coach. As a teenager, when I had switched to long trousers, I visited my father who was working in Germany and I remember being shocked and fascinated to see men at the railway station wearing lederhosen, leather shorts, and displaying their more-or-less hairy knees – and that passers-by appeared not to notice anything untoward about this. There was, at the time, a Member of Parliament with the odd name of Airey Neave, but I do not remember whether I knew of him or the humour to be drawn from his name. Half a century and more later, the world has changed out of all recognition – and I have changed with it. On a recent trip to the local supermarket half the men I saw were wearing shorts. I enjoyed the sight of these bare legs; I was neither shocked nor particularly fascinated – I was, after all, myself wearing shorts. In my youth supermarkets did not exist in my town, and the shopping was done by housewives who were, as the name implies, female. To encounter men you had to visit a workplace or the commuter routes – and there would have been no hairy knees on display. I grew up with the impression that men’s legs were in some manner shameful, not to be revealed in public. I remember even my own father’s long lean legs, displayed on the beach, struck me as icky. I have only relatively recently overcome this childhood prejudice sufficiently to venture out in shorts, and I rather regret that it took me so long. My legs, never exactly long and shapely, are now those of an old man and not appendages that might be found pleasing to the eye by strangers. So why do I now wear shorts? Perhaps it’s in wistful regret, mourning a life not lived. And I think it’s good to get a bit of daylight to my legs, turn them a more healthy colour than their usual pallid grey-white, absorb some vitamin D.

Fantastic. Can't think of anything recent that's comparable.

TV comedy from the golden age.

While speeding, on weed, this mad guy Films himself parting his fly. The cops flag him down, Yell "Stop that, you clown!" But he can't and comes hard, fast and high.

I like Johnny...

This lovely story is one of Dude's Picks from the Past, appropriately since it's February. And what a delightful short story it is. Much to my surprise I don't seem to have commented on it before, although I have certainly read it, with much pleasure, before now. How very remiss of me. Very much in Cole's inimitable style, a First person POV story of youthful naivety (naivete?) and self-discovery. Heart-warming and cosy, just the thing to relieve the misery of the cold, damp, dark February that is the UK at this time of year. Thanks so much Cole!

Shall we start a support group: Seniors Against Baby food? I don't think I like it but I'm certainly not going to try it, just in case. At least we AD denizens have each other!

You're very kind, guys, thanks for these comments. It's a story I forgot I'd written, until I re-read it and remembered. It's better than I thought it was...

If she did, she never told.