Tuppence for My Thoughts

by Eric

I just finished reading The Secret Adversary and The Mysterious Mr Quin so I figured I might write something about their author, Agatha Christie. Unfortunately, whereas Mary has read pretty much all of Christie's works, I've read only a fair number. Then too, it's difficult to write about mysteries intelligently without giving too much away. Don't you hate it when the blurb on the back cover of a book recounts half the plot?

Nevertheless, I'm going to make a few random observations, the first of which is that I have never read a Christie I didn't like. For example, I've seen some bad reviews of The Third Girl but I found Poirot's excursion into the sixties counterculture rather entertaining. Some people seemed unhappy that Christie had abandoned the country estates and quaint English villages where she "belonged" but I've always been more attracted to her exquisite mystery puzzles and the interplay of her characters than her settings.

So not surprisingly I also enjoyed Death Comes as the End, the mystery set in decidedly not English ancient Egypt. No picturesque gardens, only sand. No stately mansions. Pyramids aren't really stately, are they?

This book highlights another characteristic of my Christie experience. Never once have I guessed the killer. You'd think I'd have done so simply by chance but Christie inevitably manages to point me towards the wrong suspect. I don't suppose I'm giving much away if I reveal that in Death Comes as the End the suspects are knocked off, one by one until the suspect list has dwindled to two. And even then I got it wrong!

You might gather from the above that I am not averse to less typical Christie mysteries. It's true. I even prefer the books that do not feature Miss Marple or Poirot. Indeed, reading about Hercule can be quite laborious.

It always annoys me when Christie's books are described as cozies. Her settings may not be gritty and she doesn't go in for graphic descriptions of violence but the motives and actions of her characters can be very black. I simply do not see much similarity between what she wrote and the sort of books marketed as cozies today. There was often a hard edge to Christie. A Crooked House, for instance, strikes me as downright noir. Christie listed it as one of her personal favorites.

In keeping with my taste for the atypical Christie I finally got around to reading The Secret Adversary. Childhood friends Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley go into business as The Young Adventurers and are hired to find a British agent who vanished while trying to deliver a secret treaty. A secretive criminal mastermind, bent on fomenting labor unrest in the interest of Bolshevism, is also after the agent and the treaty. Tommy and Tuppence end up chasing and being chased all over England. There's plenty of humor and snappy dialogue. And though it's more a spy/thriller than a mystery Christie keeps the identity of the arch-criminal well concealed until the surprising (to me at least) conclusion.

The stories in The Mysterious Mr Quin are odder still. In each tale Harley Quin (not the comic book character) appears as if by magic and through conversation acts as a kind of catalyst, allowing the narrator, the mild mannered socialite Mr Satterthwaite, to solve a mystery. The Mr Quin character is based on Harlequin, as the stories make clear through clever descriptions. For example: "Mr Quin smiled, and a stained glass panel behind him invested him for just a moment in a motley garment of coloured light..." There's a definite aura of the supernatural. There are no physical clues in many of the stories. Rather, as Mr Satterthwaite gradually discovers the histories and relationships of the characters the solution becomes apparent. These reminded me a bit of Georges Simenon's books where Maigret figures out whodunnit by uncovering the secrets of the people involved.

So much for my reading of uncharacteristic Christie. I'm not familiar with the mainstream novels she wrote as Mary Westmacott. Maybe one of those should be next.

An Inspector Calls -- Finally

by Mary

Why yes, since you ask, I am indeed a fan of Alistair Sim and the film in which he plays Inspector Poole is a particular favourite. But what has my header to do with happenings at Maywrite Towers you may well ask.

Well, early one morning in late October, hearing a racket we got up, looked out our back window, and discovered an industrial-sized excavator was parked close to the wall just a few yards from our buggy, a scene presenting the appearance of, to lift a phrase from Dickens' American Notes, a light-house walking among lamp-posts.

The excavator was scooping up huge buckets of soil, swinging back and forth with a rumbling roar. Thus we began our journey to the world of modern plumbing some weeks after a grinder pump had been installed in a pit near the window. It was finally our turn to be hooked into an up-to-date sewer system.

An electrician was at work by 8 am, an early riser indeed given he mentioned ours was his second job of the day. A jolly fellow constantly cracking jokes, he wired in the grinder's dedicated line even as his cell phone constantly jingled with warnings about bomb threats phoned in to local schools.

Despite its size, the movements of the massive excavator's toothed bucket, guided by delicate manipulation of control sticks reminiscent of those used in video games, were precise enough to avoid damaging the grinder pit almost touching the septic tank next to it as the latter was exposed along with the house drain, daintily setting aside basketball sized and even bigger rocks.

With the septic tank disconnected and the house drain connected to the grinder, the next job would be pumping out the tank and filling it with gravel. However, the contractor was late and arrived after everyone else had left, leaving the excavator guarding the back lawn for the weekend. Once the tank was emptied the job would be inspected, after which the tank and the two large holes in the lawn would be filled in. As it turned out the inspector was working elsewhere in the state and his colleague would not return from holiday until the following Monday. However, he'd be here on Tuesday.

On Saturday a recorded message from the electricity company announced an 8 am to 3 pm power outage needed to carry out scheduled maintenance -- on the same Tuesday. Oh dear, thought I, talk about playing the cat and banjo with the contractor's plans. Then I remembered the remaining work would be done outside so it, at least, could proceed as planned.

Tuesday morning dawned bright and bitterly cold and over several hours the house temperature fell ten degrees while outside the well-muffled crew worked on cheerfully enough. As Julius Caesar almost said, the inspector came, saw, and considered. Not much later, the first load of gravel for the septic tank arrived. On its second run the lorry got stuck in boggy ground caused by torrential rain the previous week. The excavator had no trouble as it trundled about on tracks and so was able to help push the lorry back to the road. (A few days later the propane tanker became immobilised in the same way. It took an hour and a half to get it back to the road, even with the assistance of a tow truck.) While the excavator leveled the ground the lorry returned to deliver a large load of top soil, followed by layers of grass seed and fertiliser, the whole topped off with straw.

So now we not only have updated drainage but also a large area of back lawn starting to grow on the best soil in the place. Can't beat that with a big stick!

The Pickle Jar Hearse

by Mary

The first thing the horrified technician said was "You were lucky not to have had an explosion."

Since last we darkened subscribers' in-boxes, some days at Maywrite Towers have been less dances of delight than Fortuna deciding to play the cat and banjo with our plans.*

A couple of examples. The ongoing Rebellion of Household Machinery struck last month when an out of season cold night triggered the heating. The boiler leapt into life, hummed through its cycle, and shut down.

Unfortunately there was no heat.

Soon afterwards, the water heater attempted to balance out our lack of warmth by producing hot water that was far too hot, diagnosed as caused by our water's high mineral content reaching the point when it blocked the relief valve, leading to the technician's remark mentioned above. All this, mark you, despite annual inspections of both appliances. And what, you ask, about the problem with the boiler? Well, it turned out its thermocouple had conked out only a couple of years after its last replacement.

We are of course grateful the boiler didn't wait to work its ticket in the frigid months soon to advance down the pike, as it did one memorable night a few years back when the thermostat failed during the dark hours and we woke up to a house temperature in the forties.

Speaking of cold weather reminds me country folk say when mice migrate into a house during autumn it's a certain sign of a harsh winter ahead.

Living as we do on the very edge of woodland, occasional visits from wildlife are inevitable. As a result animals paying a call have included deer dining on our day lilies and a flock of wild turkeys tearing up our back lawn -- though to be fair they left the front one alone. Smaller fry of various descriptions have also occasionally found their way indoors. A while back a creature about as long as my thumb was caught stealing the cat's dry chow if you please. We had already deduced something was afoot because a small cache of said comestibles was found in one of Eric's sneakers. Given this particular visitor's fur was dark, it appeared to be eyeless, and moved so smoothly it might as well have been on roller skates, my guess would be it was a pygmy shrew but I can't be certain, because I observed it as it was moving fast away from me and in poor light to boot. Whatever it was, it was never seen again.

Then there was the unfortunate mouse with a broken leg, likely caused by our then resident feline Sabrina. However, there are doubts as to her guilt because when the mouse appeared he and she crouched a few feet apart, staring at each other. Sabrina took no interest whatsoever. If only we had a camera...that mouse was a fine example of what we might call a Disney mouse. Despite lack of white gloves, red shorts, or large yellow paw-wear, he was a neatly turned-out little fellow with grey fur and a white pinny undercarriage. But he also possessed exceedingly long teeth as sharp as needles, as we saw when he was escorted from the premises to be released into the woods out back.

Lugubrious British comedian Les Dawson once claimed he knew when his mother-in-law was coming to stay because their mice threw themselves on the traps. We have never seen one of the newfangled "rodent exterminators" (otherwise known as electric mousetraps) though we understand they do exist, nor are we keen on spring-loaded or sticky traps. Yet you cannot entertain mice in your living space -- think of them as house fleas. At least they were not as destructive as Beatrix Potter's Two Bad Mice. On the other hand, I'd say it's acceptable to give a pass to sugar mice, Cinderella's mice-horses, and the somnolent dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea party, who were all better behaved.

What puzzles us is why they insist on intruding because we always make certain food is stored in covered containers or in the fridge overnight. Now Sabrina has crossed over the rainbow bridge there's not so much as a bowl of cat chow to raid.

Despite all precautions, however, last month we received several visits from field mice. It was as if a murine entrepreneur was running a charabanc to save them having to walk to our house. The Pied Piper of Hamlin being elsewhere engaged, we dealt with their invasion by reluctantly laying down poison and then transporting the departed into the woods for disposal, with a pickle jar retrieved from the bag of recyclables serving as their hearse.

Apparently it isn't just us: the technician who restored our heating boiler to working order mentioned his house was under siege as well.

* Tips of the hat to Phil Ochs and Rudyard Kipling respectively.

A Famous Burning Colander

by Eric

Here in the northeast leaves are starting to fall. I simply grind them into lawn fertilizer with the mower. But when I was growing up in the suburbs homeowners raked the leaves up, hauled them to the curb, and burned them. A wall of smoke and swirling sparks rose from bonfires lining the street. It was a spectacle second only to the colored Christmas lights strung between the utility poles after Thanksgiving. And second only because the fires didn't foretell the coming of a bearded man bearing gifts.

Children are elementals. They love to play with water and dirt and fire. A street in flames was irresistible.

One of my childhood friends used his father's Aqua Velva aftershave to make fire. He poured it into the palm of his hand and lit it to our great amusement. One can't help but think of sixties rock star Arthur Brown of "Fire" fame who used to wear a burning colander on his head during concerts. (The sixties really were a wonderful era.) Wikipedia informs me that when Arthur accidentally set his head on fire a fan saved him from serious injury by dousing the flames with beer. My friend somehow managed to never set his hand on fire. Just as well since we never had any beer handy.

The closest I came to handling fire was around the Fourth of July. It was great fun waving sparklers around and drawing patterns in the air. (I did collect fireflies in jars which is a kind of cold fire.)

My friend also made small conflagrations with shredded newspaper in the upstairs playroom at his house. Flames provided more entertainment than the building blocks, board games with missing pieces, and broken plastic trucks littered around the floor. Better yet, in the loft in the barn behind the house, someone had squirreled away and forgotten enough toilet tissue to last through several pandemics had there been any pandemics around at the time. Brittle and brown with age the paper was delightfully flammable. We'd cart rolls to the field behind the barn and create long winding trails leading to an enormous pile. We'd light the end of the trail and watch the flames race towards the explosion at the end, like the fuse on a cartoon bomb. It was better than fireworks.

That wasn't the end of our fiery creativity. Inspired by Ray Harryhausen classics like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, we made stop action movies with my Super Eight movie camera. Needless to say our directoral aesthetic demanded flames. However, this presented technical problems. We constructed a castle out of cardboard. Our Plasticine protagonists were supposed to flee down some stairs. After positioning the figures we set fire to the cardboard, shot a couple frames, and blew out the fire. Then we repositioned the figures and set the castle ablaze again in order to take a few more frames.

This animation procedure led to two problems. For one thing the castle started to deteriorate too quickly. Worse, the Plasticine figures started to melt. We did our best to restore their shapes between shots. The resulting film showed them weirdly transforming as they fled, their proportions changing as they devolved into nearly unrecognizable blobs. Fencing skeletons they were not.

I would like to say that I gave up playing with fire as an adult but that would not be strictly true. Greek Fire figured prominently in our second John the Lord Chamberlain novel. The composition of this ancient super weapon remains a mystery. Some historians have suggested it was based on naphtha and quicklime. The compound apparently ignited on contact with water. The Byzantines sprayed this flammable substance at enemy ships to devastating effect and in Two for Joy we arranged to set the waters of the Golden Horn ablaze which surely would have thrilled my younger self and my fire loving buddy.

The Puzzling Case of My Favorite Mysteries

by Eric

Who are your favorite mystery authors? What are your favorite genres? For me, the first answer is easy. There are authors whose work I've enjoyed for decades. The second question is much harder because my favorite authors' books are oddly divergent. For instance, both Agatha Christie and John D. MacDonald are among my favorites. But how can I like both the elderly spinster Miss Marple and rugged beach bum Travis McGee?

I've always been attracted to the intellectual nature of classic mysteries even though I rarely, if ever, solve the puzzles presented. In Death Comes as the End, Christie kills off her ancient Egyptian suspects one by one until there are only two left and even then I guessed wrong! I suppose I like being surprised and seeing how the author fit everything together and fooled me. Years ago Mary and I went to a fair where a strolling magician stood six inches from us and performed sleight of hand making coins appear and vanish. Even though I knew it had something to do with diverting our attention and sheer dexterity I couldn't spot the trick and Christie performs similar magic of a literary sort.

Then too as a kid I loved Golden Age science fiction from the thirties, forties, and early fifties where intellectual content (even if mostly pseudo science) far outweighed characterization, psychology, or any literary pretense. What would happen if you could travel back in time and meet yourself? What would life be like on a planet where gravity would crush humans? Later I discovered mystery novels where whodunnit was figured out logically in convoluted detail just as puzzles involving time and gravity were in science fiction.

Do I even have to say I love the locked room mysteries of John Dickson Carr and Ed Hoch? These are even more purely "scientific" than Agatha Christie.

However, I've also read all of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books more than once. The houseboat he lives on in Florida is wildly different from the English estates and manor houses which provide the settings for many Christie novels. And neither Miss Marple nor Poirot are likely to engage in fist fights with the bad guys. And talk about really "bad" bad guys. MacDonald depicted some of the most realistic nasty villains -- as opposed to cartoonish villains -- I've ever read about.

However, a Florida houseboat is to me as exotic a setting as an English estate. Christie's villains can be pretty diabolical in their own ways. And although Travis will use his fists when necessary the books mostly revolve around some elaborate con game he and his economist friend Meyer set up to retrieve whatever the villains have stolen from their victims. These schemes can be every bit as clever and surprising as the solution to a Christie murder mystery.

Certainly my liking for noir novels of the sort Gold Medal published in the fifties matches my liking for the Travis McGee stories, which can be quite black and bleak. But, when you think about it, Christie wrote some very noir stuff featuring greedy, evil sociopaths who kill innocents. Also, her mysteries can end as unhappily as any noir, I don't want to give anything away but if you are familiar with Christie you know what I mean. It irks me when I hear her work described as cozy because, settings aside, most of her books are not anything like those marketed as cozies today.

I haven't mentioned another of my all-time favorites, Georges Simenon's Maigret. The gloomy underbelly of Paris where Maigret usually operates is about as noir as it gets and though he may not be as physical as Travis he is not adverse to throwing his considerable weight around. But unlike the classic whodunnit with its elaborate maze of clues, Maigret focuses almost exclusively on the psychology of the murderers and victims. Or so we are told. To me, this isn't all that much different than a locked room mystery because what room is more tightly locked than the human mind? The tangle of intellect and emotion that might motivate a person to commit a crime is every bit as complicated and puzzling as a method for knifing someone in the back through a locked door. Once Maigret solves the characters he encounters he has solved the murder.

I'm sure I've left out some favorites and similarities between them all. But thinking about it, maybe different genres of mystery aren't as dissimilar as they might seem.

Black Sand and Bleezers

by Mary

We were among those affected by smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Considering it carried particulates of whatever materials they burnt and thus presented serious health affects, we at Maywrite Towers consider ourselves fortunate to have got away with scratchy throats, runny noses, and a touch of hoarseness.

What was intriguing was the sky turned dirty yellow but caused an eerie pinkish twilight all day, followed by spectacular tomato-coloured sunsets. Having grown up in an industrial city permanently swathed in smoke from satanic mills of all descriptions situated amid rows of terraced housing, I'd expected the same type of murky grey-black veil that hung above those long-ago streets, black stained brick rows much as depicted in a number of Lowry paintings, of which my favourite is https://www.lowry.co.uk/lowry-original-industriallandscape.html

Such brooding skies could not be laid solely at the feet of commercial enterprises, given homes were heated by coal and so many people and their coughing brothers smoked what locals call tabs indoors and out. Some started young. Classmates pinched a cigarette from home and smoked it behind the bike shed in elementary school. It was almost a rite of passage for boys in particular.

This was a time when homes might use a bleezer, a square piece of metal held against the kitchen fireplace to help the coals "catch" by improving the draught. Some, like my lot, used an opened newspaper page for the same purpose. A dangerous custom, given this sort of makeshift bleezer sometimes caught fire and had to be quickly thrown into the grate. Since anything that could be burnt was put in the kitchen fire, tainted smoke added to the dark cloud hanging over the city. No wonder peoples' lungs have been compared to kippers. Older films offer noticeable and to modern eyes shocking evidence of just how polluted the air had become, to the extent sheets hung out to dry were routinely taken in speckled with soot.

Speaking of which, a story often retold at family gatherings involves my niece and nephew. At a young age they were visiting with their mother and went out to play, investigating a long untenanted stable at the top of our back lane. On their return they announced they had been playing with black sand, a fact obvious at a glance given a local sweep stored bags of soot in it.

In England seeing a sweep or shaking their hand has long been considered lucky, as Dick Van Dyke points in Chim Chim Cher-ee. Couples have been known to engage a sweep to attend their wedding in full fig (top hat and neckerchief included), bringing along his brush and rods. He also brings good luck to the nuptial pair by kissing the bride and shaking the groom's hand.

While on the topic of romance, we're all familiar with cinematic interludes of that type involving cigarettes and soulful gazes. Tobacco has long assisted couples to meet. Smoking provides a chance to those -- particularly shy teens -- who wish to strike up a conversation with a stranger. He (or less commonly she) strikes a match and offers to light the other person's gasper, thus effecting the desired introduction in a socially acceptable fashion.

Though I observed such interactions numerous times while still in school I did not experience it directly because I had only a brief fling with Lady Nicotine. I tried a ciggy or two during those painfully awkward years we call the teens, scandalising my younger sister when she saw me puffing away trying to master the fine art of blowing smoke out through my nostrils. I never could master it but since I didn't care for the taste of tobacco and the way the smell of smoke clung to my hair and clothes, I soon abandoned tabs forever. Yet even at that age several girls in my class were already fully paid-up members of the Sisterhood Of The Saffron-Stained Digits. In fact, one already smoked so heavily her fingers felt cold and her fingertips were stained almost to the point of turning brown.

I recently learnt from an impeccable source (which is to say Mr Maywrite) that in grade school he made and painted a clay ashtray he described as being of "a strange shape", putting me in mind of Lovecraftian rooms with walls of singularly peculiar angles of a disturbing nature. There being far fewer smokers than there used to be, it seems fair to deduce making ashtrays would be an unlikely art project for youngsters to undertake nowadays.

Memories of Memories

by Eric

Have I written about my earliest memories already? I can't remember so why not give it a try?

Not that my first memories are very exciting. I'm not one of those people who claim to recollect the obstetrician slapping his bottom. And just as well since an initial memory so traumatic might warp a person's whole view of life. In fact I don't retain much prior to my school days. A few jumbled up snapshots taken with a mental Brownie camera, colors leached away by time, out-of-focus, heads cut off, undated.

There's a picture of a dark room illuminated only by a tiny black and white television screen showing Willie the Worm, a local kid's program. Am I sitting in a high chair looking out over a plate? Surely I must have been older than that. I'd hate to think my first memory in life is Willie the Worm. Talk about warping one's viewpoint!

Instead, maybe it was of my dad coming in through the apartment doorway on a rainy day, wearing his overcoat, presumably just home from teaching. No story, no particular significance. Why did that scene stick in my mind?

Or was it the view from our apartment window, looking down into an alley where a fellow sporting a Mohawk is walking by. I guess the exotic haircut amazed me. The big world outside contained things I had never dreamt of.

Although my preschool memories aren't time stamped these have always struck me as the most ancient.

Trivial events but ones I judge authentic because of their triviality. I am not likely recalling a story someone told me, or remembering looking at a photograph in a family album as might be the case with a birthday party or a special toy. I'm certain I never ran across a picture of Willie the Worm until I looked him up on the Internet a few years ago. For decades, I wasn't even sure that Willie had existed or was just a figment of my imagination.

Should I include the terrifying memory of the open stairs leading down from the second floor porch at the back of my parents' apartment? Between the gaps, which appeared large enough to allow for the passage of a small child, you could see all the way to the concrete below. However, I recall having nightmares about falling from those stairs and it might be the more vivid dreams I remember rather than the stairs themselves.

How do you separate memories of dreams from real memories, unless the dreams are about the endless skull-littered plain behind the closet door or the alien tripods looming up over the familiar houses on the street? I'm pretty sure those aren't memories of reality even though they are real memories.

Then again, from this distance, does it make much difference? Is the residue of reality any different from the residue of dreams?

Musical Malefactors

by Mary

We both love musicals, those lively productions when anything, even the most unlikely occurrence, may happen and frequently does. However, it recently occurred to me these bright entertainments often feature characters who walk on the darker side of the footlights.

Take for example Les Miz's prize pair of villains, the innkeeping Thenardiers. Master of the House Monsieur T gloats how he cheats, overcharges, and robs his guests, not to mention watering their wine, admitting the beef on the menu is minced organs not sourced from cows and hinting the sausages will not bear close scrutiny. Well, wayside hostelries may not always be of the best but the couple's villainy is further revealed in their brutal treatment of the little girl Cosette, whose now dying mother had been paying them for her keep. Jean Valjean, former prisoner still on the run and now a town mayor -- as I said, anything may happen in a musical -- promises her he will raise Cosette as his own. When he visits the inn to rescue her the Thenardiers pretend they treated her kindly and express doubts about his intentions towards her. But even so, the couple sell Cosette to him.

Then there's Fleet Street barber Sweeney Todd and his companion in crime Mrs Lovett, who openly admits the meat pies she sells are the worst in London. Nobody seems to notice Sweeney's customers are never seen again after visiting his shop for a shave. This is not surprising, since they've been transformed into the main ingredient for Mrs Lovett's new and improved pies. Her creations become extremely popular and as a result her beastly business booms. She tells Sweeney when enough ill-gotten gains have been saved she'd like them to retire somewhere By The Sea and live in a house where they'd provide suitable accommodations for occasional paying guests, who'd be murdered by Sweeney. I wonder if it occurred to Mrs Lovett that running a B&B would be even more lucrative when breakfast is never needed, although no doubt part of the profits would be lost due to necessary laundry bills.

Oklahoma is on the eve of statehood and farm girl Laurey Williams is loved by two men: hired hand Jud Fry and cowboy Curly McLain. Jud attempts to murder his rival by persuading him to look through a Little Wonder. This intriguing gadget is, so far as I can deduce, some sort of picture viewer. It's not so innocent as it seems and Jud knows this particular artifact conceals a blade that can be triggered as someone looks into it. But is Curly any better for trying to persuade Jud to commit suicide, telling him when Pore Jud Is Daid others will think better of him. Fired, Jud returns to gatecrash Laurey and Curly's wedding, fights with Curly, and dies by falling on his own knife. Fortunately Curly is found not guilty after an informal trial held on the spot. Certainly nuptials to remember!

In this weary and battered world many musicals see justice meted out to those guilty of malice manifested by malevolent machinations. Most of the time at least.

Berry Good Eating

by Eric

Even before the spring melt was finished we could see the traditional green spikes of day lilies sticking up through the remains of the snow by our door. We don't try to garden here in the shade, rocks, and tree roots. We only observe. And maybe put names to the vegetation growing naturally in the backyard.

Finding out the name of a hitherto anonymous plant feels akin to putting a stick through the seed packet and placing it at the end of the row in the flower bed, but without the digging, fertilizing, watering, or sowing. For example, I finally identified the Mock (or Indian) Strawberries that will be decorating the grass soon and last right into the fall. At first I mistook the plants for wild strawberries. From a distance they look the same. Closer examination, though, revealed that while the leaves and vines are very similar, the red berries are bristly, seedier, and lacking in the familiar strawberry smell.

Although too dry and tasteless to appeal to humans, they're apparently tasty to animals. I've seen crows and woodchucks harvesting them. I watched a squirrel making a leisurely feast, repeatedly nosing around in the grass to find a berry, then sitting on its haunches to nibble at the treat held in its paws.

For my own part, I was disappointed they weren't wild strawberries. Coming upon anything uncultivated and edible outside is a bit of a thrill. Does it remind us of our foraging past?

When I was a kid I knew where to find the untended berry bushes in nearby fields and patches of woods. I preferred the small blackcaps and raspberries to the larger blackberries with the seeds that stuck between your teeth.

One year, when Mary and I lived in Rochester, the raspberries along the abandoned railroad tracks a couple blocks from our house went wild. We carried away several grocery bags full. We never again saw the berries in such profusion.

Years before that, in a corner of the tiny yard of a house I rented, a gnarled gooseberry bush clung to life. It looked like it had been there since colonial times, or longer, the gooseberry equivalent of the Glastonbury Thorn. Each year the sparsely leafed skeletal branches managed to bring forth a handful of round, translucent berries.

Even more exotic were the berries I discovered while accompanying my dad on trips to haul garbage to the local dump when I was a kid. Beyond the smoking landfill, just inside the woods, in the light shade of saplings and birch trees, wintergreen covered the ground, red berries bright against dark evergreen leaves. I was amazed. To me wintergreen meant chewing gum or Life Savers. It was strange to encounter it in a natural state. There's a berry I've never identified. I only remember seeing it in one place, in the straggling weeds near the edge of a scrubby patch of woods a few yards away

The mysterious berries were the size, shape, and texture of blackcaps but light orange in color and with a mild taste defined mostly by their unfamiliar, perfumy fragrance. I haven't turned up a photo or description on the Internet that quite matches my memory. Perhaps they were golden raspberries and I'm not recalling them exactly. It's been a long time since I've seen them.

The Burying Berry

by Mary

Word on the country street warns us not to eat, pick, or have anything to do with blackberries after Michaelmas, the feast day of St Michael (29th September, 10th October old style). Ignore this advice at your peril, lest misery, disaster, and an IRS audit follow. There are even those who go so far as to predict whoever disregards the warning will be dead by the end of the year, the risk also extending to members of their family.

I first heard we should not eat blackberries after Michaelmas when I lived in Oxfordshire in the long ago, but it was not until we began writing The Guardian Stones that the belief's dark presence showed up in our fiction. When talking about Isobel, who has gone missing from the village of Noddweir, local wise woman Martha Roper declares "She's been carried off by the devil because she ate blackberries last October. The devil, no doubt about it.." To her way of thinking, wilful Isobel did not listen to those who warned her of the danger and thus went over the fatal date, well into the dangerous period to be dining on the berries.

Recently it occurred to me to ponder why the blackberry came to be regarded in this way. A bit of poking about revealed it was considered to have been cursed by Lucifer because he landed on a blackberry bush after his fall from heaven following defeat by the Archangel Michael. The fallen angel vented his fury by lashing out with a fearful malediction that would cause terrible suffering to those who had post-Michaelmas truck with the fruit.

Depending on location, other traditions have it Lucifer was so enraged at the hitherto innocent blackberry he also burnt, trampled, spat, and/or relieved himself on the bush. Margaret Ann Courtney succinctly warned in Cornish Feasts and Folk-lore (1890) "This fruit, by old people, was said not to be good after Michaelmas, kept by them 10th October (old style); after that date they told you the devil spat on them, and birds fouled them."

Similarly, Charlotte Latham's Some West Sussex Superstitions Lingering in 1868 records the tale of a farmer's wife said to be living near Arundel. Finding herself without the necessary amount of berries needed to make a large batch of blackberry jam, she instructed her charwoman to send a couple of children to pick more for the purpose. The other woman pointed out it was 11th October, adding "I thought every one knew that the devil went round on the 10th October, and spat on all the blackberries, and that if any person were to eat on the 11th, he or some one belonging to him would either die or fall into great trouble before the year was out."

Had Isobel come to grief because she disregarded the awful warning? Well....

Monkey Business at the Flicks

by Mary

Valentine's Day hoves into view as I write and the thought brings back memory of a matter I shall boldly declare we all have in common: our first romantic kiss and/or date.

Let me set the scene in proper fashion. My family lived for several years in Gateshead, the town memorably described by Dr Johnson as a dirty lane leading to Newcastle. Then, as now, a visit to the cinema was a popular outing for a date. There was plenty of choice from numerous cinemas on both sides of the Tyne. Many were second run venues and changed their programmes mid-week.

During our Gateshead residency, we lived equidistant between two picture palaces, the Coatsworth and the Bensham. It was the Coatsworth a boy in my class -- I'll disguise him as Bert -- invited me to a cinematograph entertainment for what would be my first date. He was round-faced and dark haired, and yes, I had a bit of a crush on him.

It was Bert who had given me my first kiss a short while before. He was showing me around the pub his parents ran, including the cellar which featured what I believe is technically termed a beer drop door, i.e. double metal doors set flush in the pavement through which barrels of beer are delivered. In any event, having taken the grand tour we were standing at the door talking when he suddenly leaned forward, planted a kiss on my cheek, shoved me off the step, and slammed the door in my face.

Not exactly romantic, was it?

So here we are, not long afterwards, at the Coatsworth Cinema watching Little Red Monkey, which the Internet informs me is based on a BBC TV series of the same name starring Donald Huston and Honor Blackman. It's a Cold War thriller, wherein someone is assassinating nuclear scientists. Richard Conte arrives and attempts to thwart the villains responsible for these deaths in order to get a Russian defector safely to America.

Back to the Coatsworth Cinema. The only things I remember about Little Red Monkey are, first, its perky organ music and occasional appearances by the titular monkey entering or exiting via a window. Also a comment having nothing to do with the film. It transpired Bert kept his cash in a black purse whose shape was near enough to a heart for me to observe wittily -- or at least I thought so at the time -- if it had been red it should have had an arrow through it.

Since enquiring minds may want to know but are too shy to ask, no, there was no kiss at the end of our date.

Alas, it was not to be. Fortuna intervened in that a few weeks later my family moved back to Newcastle and after that Bert and I never met again.

So there you have it. Meantime, having dragged subscribers this far down Nostalgia Lane, they might care to glance at a couple of sites relevant to my ancient bit of personal history:

Trailer for Little Red Monkey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb9BBVS4hOw&ab_channel=NetworkDistributing

27 screen shots from Reel Streets, long a favourite port o' call of mine
https://www.reelstreets.com/films/little-red-monkey-aka-the-case-of-the-red-monkey/

The Coatsworth Cinema in all its grimy glory
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/51237/photos/171176

Three Bean or Not Three Bean

by Eric

This time it was the three bean salad.

It's always something.

The awful realization hits me when I'm halfway home, or hauling the bags out of the car, or in the evening, hours after the groceries have been put away.

"Oh no!" I'd forgotten to pick something up.

"Forgetting three bean salad isn't a crime," Mary said.

"Or a snack. Because I didn't bring any home. I could really do with a three bean salad right now."

"Do you think you should be eating three bean salad at ten o'clock at night? You never have it except with meals. Since when do you have three bean salad for a snack?"

"Last winter," I told her. "Or the winter before. I forget. Those were good times. Whenever they were."

"I remember. That was at the end of February. We'd been snowed in for weeks. The shelves were bare. It was either the three bean salad or the tinned okra."

"And the three bean salad was delicious too. Tangy. What else do we have for a snack that's tangy?"

"Never mind," she said. "You can buy two tins of three bean salad next week. Or three tins. This is Liberty Hall."

"There's no point trying to be a Pollyanna about it," I said. "The plain sad fact of the matter is...I forgot."

I might almost have said I was vexed, but I'm not sure if anyone has been truly vexed since the nineteenth century.

"It's easy enough to forget," Mary offered sympathetically.

"Well, yes, there's only one way to remember but endless ways to forget. I mean, I can forget to take the grocery list, or forget to write it in the first place. I might forget to take the list out of my pocket at the store. Or else I put it back in my pocket in order to hold the freezer door open to get at the frozen lasagna, and then forget to take it out again before I get to the tinned vegetable aisle. Oh, I'm a wonder at forgetting!"

"But you did remember the lasagna."

"But I don't want lasagna for a snack. It isn't tangy. I guess I will just have to suffer for my own mistake," I concluded.

"Look on the bright side," Mary told me. "What if you'd forgotten the loo rolls?"

"Oh no!", I said.