A Novel beginning

[John G]

(Please feel free to totally ignore this as it irrelevant and written this evening during 10 very dull moments at work)

Edward Zackley was digging in the garden the other day, his shovel went through the ground and he heard a CLANG, a loud CLANG that echoed through the air. The CLANG sounded metallic. It was like the shovel had hit something that was made of metal. Upon further investigation Edward Zackley concluded his shovel had hit metal and he decided to look further.

There was no wind in the air.

The trees stood still, like they had been there for years and in truth they had. Most trees tend to stand rooted to the spot for a considerable amount of time. The Sequoia tree for instance can live for up to 2,000 years, imagine that ,2,000 years standing in the same spot, dogs pissing on you and bird shitting and fucking all over you? Not the best way to live eh? Bet Stephen Hawkings is happy he’s not a tree.

Tress by their nature will stand there until old age withers them or a storm snaps their spine and they fall like a pensioner on slippery ice. However some trees will be felled by bearded men with chainsaws. These men are called lumberjacks and they can be found in forests and jungles and in places called Canada and Brazil and their job is to cut down trees so companies can make tables and doors and wooden legs for pirates and table tennis bats and beds. Trees give us oxygen and ensure our longevity on earth. In essence, and as a bad analogy, chopping down a tree is like cutting out one of your lungs. Maybe we need to find other material they can make table tennis bats out of. I mean, if you tried to make a table tennis bat out of a lung it would be a pretty feeble bat. It would probably be hard to stick the black and red rubber bits on each side of the lung, and beside lungs are to floppy to be able to get proper purchase on spinning plastic ball smacked at you with pace by a sprightly Oriental. . (I think, I mean I’m not a Doctor, if I was a Doctor I wouldn’t have time to write this, I would be be in the middle of a 100 hour shift or drunk in a cupboard. Possibly)


(are they called bats or rackets?)


Edward Zackely also wandered why the Chinese were so good at table tennis. What was in there DNA that made them so skilled at batting a tiny plastic ball over a small net? He thought maybe it had something t o do with Communism but he couldn’t think of great Russian or Cuban table tennis player. He did however know that the Cubans produced consistently world class boxers. Again he wandered why? Was it communism or was just an angry nation that produced men that liked hitting each other? He couldn’t be the later he thought because they also produced excellent dancers. Maybe the choice was to dance or fight your way out of communist induced poverty, but as there was no professional sports, boxers wouldn’t get paid a lot so Edward Zackely concluded that Cubans just like hitting people.


As well as producing world class cigars and rum.

Edward Zackary didn’t smoke so he could only surmise about the apparent quality of a Cuban foot long.


Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of table tennis, Edward Zackely only knew the name of one table tennis player. He was black and British and he was called Desmond Douglas and in Edward Zackely;s eyes he looked like Wayne Williams who was the main suspect in the Atlanta child murders in America in the 1970’s. He sometimes got these two confused, but as not many conversations revolved around child murderers or table tennis he never really felt the need to clarify or investigate his confusion.

He often found himself wandering what became of Desmond Douglas? Other then John Barnes and Daley Thompson, Desomd Douglas was probably the most famous black sportsmen on the 80’s. This was Edward Zackelys opinion.

He used to play table tennis when he worked as a porter in a mental home (Edward Zackely not Desmond Douglas) but he was always got put off by the grunts and screams and random babblings that emanated from the red mouths of the patients who, even though they sat in the games room, they were actually floating on a different planet, subdued by a liberal prescription of drugs. Those that heard voices screaming inside their head now only heard soft, faint whispers,

These people either suffered because the chemicals they were born with made them do or say odd things or they had taken to many drugs which made the chemicals they were born with act in an odd way.

Edward Zackelys time in the hospital will be covered at a later point. The point here is Edward Zackely didn’t now much about table tennis, (or ping-pong as it’s also called)

This is what Edward Zackley thought on this windless day as he dug deeper to locate what he CLANGING metal was. The ground was soft and the digging was easy. Edward Zackley felt he was in one of those old maths problems,:


“If take 3 men, on a rainy day, 4hours to dig a hole 56squared by 16foot deep how long would it take 2 men to dig the same hole on a sunny day?”

Edward Zackely was never any good at maths at school and would have got the above question wrong. He could never understand the abstract nature of maths or why someone would want to know why it would take x amount of men to dig a hole. If you owned a company that specialised in digging holes then maybe this aspect of maths would be beneficial but Edward Zackely was sure there was computer that could tell you this information now and in this day and age there probably was machine that could dig a hole just as quick as two or three men, regardless of the weather.


But Edward Zackely couldn’t have been one of the men in the old maths conundrum because he was on his own and the weather was neither sunny nor rainy. A weather forecaster had described today’s weather as, “over shadowed, but normal for this time of year”. This reassured Edward Zackely as he like things to be “normal”, he liked everything in it’s right place.


Edward Zackely never knew where he got his shovel from. It was just something he accumulated. He had never bought a shovel in his life. Also, he had never bought a carpet, a pair of curtains or a pair of scissors,


But the shovel was in his hand and the metal blade was in the ground and scratching against some hidden, unearthed piece of metal.

I know all this about Edward Zackely because I invented him

[Richard WH]

Firstly, what a blurb that is - "ignore" "irrelevant" and "very dull"
I very nearly did ignore after that
Anyway, the first part tempted me (even though the word metal or metallic was repeated too much and it was much longer than necessary - ie one short sentence would have been enough) so I carried on.
I stopped halfway through - thought what sort of inane rambling is this? The author was right.
Then for some reason I went back to the start and read it all in one go.
What have we got then? (in my opinion)
I dont know anything about any previous writing you may have done but if time and effort were put into this (and some pruning in places) then I think you have a very interesting and lifelike character. Its a good start too, if you trimmed it.
And I think you could write a piece (whether that be a short piece of prose, short story or novel I have no idea) that reads exceptionally well.
Application (if you can be arsed)

[Ilex]

Much like the other person who commented on your work I got irritated several times but despite this I found myself going back and carrying on reading. There are several bits that are really staggeringly original. Like the idea of cutting down trees to make pirates legs...and the line,

"Bet Stephen Hawkins is happy he's not a tree." is just classic.

I feel in a strange way a bit like I did when I first tryed reading Ulysses at college when I read this, to be frank I find it a bit annoying buts there's something interesting and irresistable about it at the same time.

Is would love to read more of your work.