Category: Music

This is my response to this week’s Flashback Track Friday prompt, where they asked us to:

Share a piece inspired by witches, real or imagined.

My story is 100% real. There’s no way I can do it justice by anything other than a straight journalistic account. Even then, there’s no way I can write this so it has the same effect on you, but I hope I have come close to describing the effect it had on me.

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Can I state, right up front, that I’m a scientist? Seriously. I studied physics to a high level. That’s how I trained. My first job was in the Atomic Energy Authority. Experiment, observe, draw conclusions, and try to build empirical laws. That’s how my world works.

There is an explanation for everything, that everything is understandable. If we don’t understand why something happens, it just means that we haven’t discovered the reason yet.

There are many examples to cite. We go out, and the sky above us is blue. For millennia, it just “was”. But now, we understand why. It gets dark, and we see specks of light in the curtain of night. And we understand, now, that they are stars. And we know how stars work, the method they use to create the light we see. And we know how they orbit, and can predict their paths hundreds of years in advance.

Or, in the field of medicine. I had my COVID booster yesterday, and, think about the miracle of it. That we understand how vaccines work, that giving ourselves a small dose of something, we trigger our bodies to protect themselves against it.

My point is, that humans learn. We start off without a clue, and we find things out. There is a reason for everything, even if we don’t know what it is yet. The sky is blue because other wavelengths are scattered by the atmosphere, not because God happened to have some paint left over.

I want to get that out of the way, because there is no way I can convey the absolute terror that I felt after I met someone who claimed to be a witch, and I couldn’t process it. All I can really do is recount how I felt, what I saw, how shook up I was afterwards.

I was at university – the height of my science training.

This woman was my then-girlfriend’s best friend. She was great company and, to tell the truth, I had the wrong girlfriend. But we were all young once.

We were talking one night, just the pair of us. No booze, no drugs. The subject turned to my grandfather, who had died four years before, and who this woman could not have met. She told me various things about him that I don’t think she could have known otherwise. And in the process of the evening, she disclosed to me that she was a witch. Really, no shit! That’s what she told me.

I know, I know. That’s exactly what I thought, at first. That she must have found out these things somehow. I just didn’t know how.

All these years later, following deliberate attempts to put it out of my mind, I can remember few specifics of the conversation. I can, however, remember my emotion.

The most uncomfortable part was when she talked about my smoking habit. “He doesn’t like you doing it, you know.” Like as though he was sitting there, in the corner of the room. Maybe, to her, he was. In fact, my grandad smoked like a proverbial chimney and this was likely what caused the heart attack which killed him.

But, at that part, I was merely uncomfortable. Lots of people smoked, but the health risks were becoming increasingly clear. Lucky guess?

She told me that the “powers” were stronger in me than in most people. I know. Total flannel. I’m replaying Star Wars in my head. She spins everyone this line, right?

There was one other specific that I remember. This woman was into her crystals. Magical powers and whatnot. Hocus Pocus bollocks. But she had a crystal pendant. It fell nine or ten inches when you dangled it.

And, do you know what happens when you dangle a pendant? It does little figures of eight, almost, gradually losing its energy. Ever decreasing circles, kind of thing.

Well, I held this pendant – let’s be clear there was no physical contact with this woman – and this pendant swung around in small circles as any momentum dissipated because of the friction in the chain.

Then the woman warned me what she was about to do. She just looked at the crystal on the end of the pendant. And it stopped dead. Did not move a millimetre.

No touching, remember?

Like I said, I can’t possibly do this story justice. For one, many of the details of this night, over thirty years ago, are gone. I can’t expect you to feel any of what I felt, so I’m not even going to try. But I can at least tell you how freaked out I was. A diehard sceptic, I hate not understanding things. I racked my brains for explanations but found none.

And my only conclusion was simply that some things, we just don’t understand – call them supernatural if you wish. And how, even if we are 99% certain that something is bullshit, there is still that 1%.

This account is totally honest. I have lost details over the years, and I’m not making any attempt to conceal this. But I remember that sinking feeling, as my neat scientific world dissolved around me – like it was yesterday.  I bet you’re all better at remembering moods than details, too.

This woman’s name was Noreen, and this took place in the Halls of Residence during my first year at university in Cardiff, UK. I was nineteen and she was no more than a couple of years older.

This is my response to this week’s Flashback Track Friday prompt, where they asked us to:

Tell us about your favourite music video.

I just fancied writing some flash for this one, and I’ll post one of my favourite videos at the end.

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Vito was relieved. Just this one fare before the night shift finished. Not a run-of-the-mill pickup, but these jobs happened from time to time. After a busy shift, Vito simply wanted his bed. Just this one last fare.

He’d been hired by a law firm, Imbroglion, Frode e Truffa. Vito had heard of them. From the TV News, mostly. Their name seemed to crop up with every high-profile hoodlum who was ever arrested. But to Vito, their money was as good as anybody else’s.

Shortly before six o’clock, he pulled his spotless black Mercedes into the prison’s car park. He was to take his ride, a man called Barucci, back into the city, and then, Vito’s long shift was done. At this time of the morning, he thought, he should be back in twenty minutes. In forty, hopefully, he’d finally be snoring. He glanced at his watch, before pulling a marker pen from the glovebox, taking a sniff, then writing the name on a piece of white Perspex. The car park opposite the drab, grey building was empty, and Vito probably did not need the sign, but just in case… He adjusted his sweat-stained Hawaiian shirt, as he settled in to wait, and from the corner of his eye saw a guard emerge from the Reception Block and set about raising a flag. At this time of the morning, the prison was quiet, except for dogs barking in the distance. Even before the day had begun, they sounded angry. Soon, the officer returned into the building, leaving the flag blowing gently in the summer breeze.

Inside the prison, two more guards walked along the otherwise-empty balcony. They passed cell after cell, until they reached their goal.

A tall, mean-looking guard hammered on the door, as if to rouse its occupants, an act which might have been convincing, were their quarry not already fully dressed. ready and waiting for them. He had been anticipating this day for the last seventeen years. The guard’s shorter, sweating accomplice fumbled with a long chain of silver keys, before making his selection and pushing it smoothly into the lock. Turning the key, he pushed the door open and, in the same movement, stepped backwards. The mean guard read from a clipboard.

“Prisoner KJ4503 Barucci, step out.”

An elderly, greying man emerged from the cell, a plastic carrier bag tucked under his arm. Despite his age, he carried no extra weight, and he stared at the mean guard with malevolent blue eyes.

Undaunted, the officer continued. “Follow me”, he instructed, leaving his partner to relock the cell. The men marched, side by side, toward the Admin block. At the end of the corridor, the shorter guard again selected a key from his chain, and swung open the heavy door. The three advanced along a second balcony, exactly the same as the first. Looking through the floor and ceiling grilles, they could see more identical balconies, above and below. At last, the men passed a manned station which marked the entrance to the block, and they were released into a courtyard.

Outside, even at that hour, it was clear that this would be another sticky day, as the three walked the length of a football pitch towards an identical, concrete building. They passed the kennels; the dogs were quieter now, enjoying their breakfast.

The mean guard referred to his clipboard once again, as the three were admitted into the Admin Block. Instructed to stand behind a line until called forward. The prisoner showed a bewildered expression, as he realised that the block was otherwise empty. An adjutant appeared at a counter, behind another grille.

“Next”, the man commanded. The prisoner glanced around, but just confirmed his solitude. He stepped forward.

“Name”, barked the man once more, and the prisoner, sensing his closeness, complied.

The adjutant, in turn, disappeared, returning minutes later with a shoebox containing items which had been confiscated on arrival. First issuing the prisoner with a khaki-green kitbag, the adjutant navigated an itemised list, returning the items to the prisoner, one by one. In one final act of bureaucracy, the prisoner was instructed to sign a receipt. Placing each item into the kitbag, in a final show of defiance, the prisoner jerked the drawstring to close the bag.

This final stage complete, the three men exited the block. But this time, they turned right, and walked the short distance to the prison’s main gate. One last time, the guard read from his clipboard, and another guard exited a gatehouse. He opened a regular-sized door, set into the larger gate, and beckoned the prisoner to step outside.

Hearing the door click shut behind him, Carlo Barucci set his kitbag down, stretched, then took an enormous breath as he closed his eyes and sniffed the air as he realised that his name had finally been returned. After forever, he exhaled, opened his eyes once again, and began scanning for a limo. Had his associates delivered?

Formative nostalgia again. I was in my first year at college when the movie Running Scared came out. Two Chicago cops, on vacation about as far away in the US as possible, down in Key West, where of course they fall in love with the different lifestyle. There’s a good montage in the movie, set to Sweet Freedom and it truly does look beautiful down there.

The Keys was one of those places I never quite got to. When I first met Mrs Bump, we talked about a holiday down there, and I had just the place in mind. Little Palm Island. But this place was so luxurious, and presumably pricey, it was honeymoon territory. Once in a lifetime stuff.

As it happened, when we did actually get married, we only had three weeks between the decision and the registry office. So a holiday we had already booked, in the Carcasonne area in the deep south of France, became our honeymoon. Everything to do with our wedding was low-key, which was what we both wanted. Only two witnesses knew about it beforehand. Her close friend, and mine.

To be honest, I think I’d have been bored on LittlePalm Island anyway.