The Box

The box under my bed has wooden sides banded with metal and a curved lid secured with an old-fashioned lock, like a pirate chest. The kind that would open with a creak to release a cascade of coins onto the sand of a faraway beach. Except this chest wouldn’t hold anything larger than an orange, so the coins probably wouldn’t pay for the week’s supermarket shop. A thick coating of dust has turned it grey and dull, and makes me cough as I bring it out of its hiding place.

I haven’t known what to do with it for a decade. A wiser head would throw it away. I’ve just tried to forget about it, until now. It took me a week to find the key lost in the detritus of a life lived without quite enough time to do anything properly. Then another week wondering whether I should open it when life has so many other priorities. I locked the box for a reason. But I’m desperate.

The sound of the key in the lock is small and ordinary. A tiny snick of tiny tumblers turning in a tiny lock in a tiny chest.

There are no coins inside. Just a dark grey stone with uneven ridges and folds and a roughened texture that hints at scales. It takes up most of the chest, crammed into a space barely large enough for it to fit. I poke it gently and it’s cold and hard. Just a funny shaped stone. I poke it again and whisper, “I need help.”

If it’s possible for a stone to look even stonier, the box’s occupant achieves it.

“But I remember what it was like and I need it. Just a bit.”

I’m begging a rock. So pathetic.

“Please? Just a little bit. They’re making me write a marketing article for LinkedIn and I don’t know where to start and I need it. Please.”

The stone twitches and shifts, becomes something else without changing shape because somehow what it was had always been there. Then it stills and it’s a stone once more.

“Please?”

A never-ending minute stretches out before it shifts again. One delicate scaly leg appears, followed by another, then two more. Slowly the stone lifts and a fold becomes a head which had been curled into the body. Another fold becomes a tail which had been tucked in tight beneath it. It uncurls and pushes itself up out of the box to perch unsteadily on the edge. Two obsidian chip eyes open and the stony scales gradually suffuse with copper tints as it stretches out one leg at a time and yawns with a mouth full of tiny sharp teeth.

It sinks tiny claws into the timbers of the box and, still wobbling, unfurls bright, iridescent wings. It’s impossible that they ever fitted into a box big enough to hold an orange. It gives them an experimental flap and they cast light into every corner of the room.

And in that light, stories play out. Explorers pass under trees hung with bird skulls and carved masks, while extraterrestrial mothers escort their eight-legged babies across a plain covered with sulphurous yellow bushes. Nixies peek from darkened lakes and sirens practice their song on passing pelicans, and hedges pulse with sullen red flowers and thorns which crave flesh, and paper cats battle with monsters made of smoke and ash. Herds of tiny unicorns the size of a finger nail dance along kitchen counters and leave hoofprints in the butter, and banshee children prepare for their end of school scream test, and tearstained marionettes waltz in a darkened storeroom to save themselves from curious goblins peeking out from behind the boxes all around them. I remember them all and I remember my pencil filling notebook after notebook.

The box’s occupant hops onto my shoulder and wraps a scaly tail around my throat, and new thoughts trail feathery kisses along my neurons. Every one carries an echo of laughter because it doesn’t care about marketing or LinkedIn and it has no intention of ever going back in the box again. It is mine, and I am its, and we left a baby with snakes for hair alone in an unfinished world waiting for its father to find it. It’s time for us to find a pencil.

Waterway life

Beauty and sadness in one day on the waterways. Three juvenile swans having a flying lesson and a goose with angel wing who will never fly because its mama was fed too much bread, 

Bye bye, Rosie

It's ring in the changes time. The Bump became Tiny Boy, who promptly killed off any plans to finish off the book and send it out. I've decided to kill off the whole thing and kick the book under the bed, at least until I start getting at least eight straight hours of sleep a night again.

The pen name is no more as well. My first few writing conferences made me realise quite how ridiculous it was to have one at this stage and how I preferred to use my own name with people I was meeting face to face. I'm taking the opportunity to jettison it and continue this blog with something which is more obviously a screen name rather than the strange dual personality Rosie Lane was becoming.

Right now I feel wonderfully free.

Things I learned at Loch Melfort

1. Small boys exert a strange magnetic field . If you took one to the north pole, he would find another small boy to play with.

2. It's kind of cute when your restaurant waiter tells you that the other small boy is his brother and asks if yours will be out to play again later.

3. The sight of children running down a path to the beach can render adults in the dining room misty eyed.

4. Highland cattle are rather appealing.

5. Comfy hotel beds render your child's chances of sleeping in his own bed again minimal to say the least.

6. Local produce also renders your chances of feeding your child supermarket sausages without complaint even more minimal.

7. A tidal rock pool can be the source of hours of fascination.

8. Southern small boys find the thought of a land without KFC bizarre and horrifying.

9. When planning for hours of exploration, allow for the fact that the Highlands are steep, and that sheep need fences.

10. When planning a trip to a fish farm for book research purposes, just look out of the window. One may be closer than you think.

11. It is an unwritten law of the universe that if you are in a hotel somewhere with no light pollution and there is a telescope in the living room, the nights will be cloudy.

12. When you pack to go home, expect to find every pair of clean underpants your son brought, unworn.

Loch Melfort: lovely place and friendly people who were completely charming to writers with galloping morning sickness and small sons in tow. The Boy is desperate to go back again.

Things I learned at Eastercon

Crawling out of my pit of morning sickness to post, pretty much just to let the world know that I'm still alive. Morning sickness: Best. Diet. Ever.

Coming up to Eastercon I was just mildly nauseous, so I thought, let's do this. It's all booked and paid for, you've been looking forward to it for months, and there's no way you can stiff your room mate, Mhairie Simpson, for the whole hotel bill, so pack a big bag of tummy-settling snacks and let's go.

It worked until day 3, when everything went up a gear and I became intimately acquainted with the lovely bathroom in my hotel room and spent much of the last two days in bed. This was disappointing, since I missed my chance of a ringside seat to the big kerfuffle.

Still, after two weeks of wishing for death, the words finally seem to be stringing together okay and this morning's Rice Krispies are staying put, so hopefully I'm on the downward slope now.

So, things I learned at Eastercon (which aren't to do with pregnancy and vomiting, because these things are only of interest to the poor fool suffering them):

1.  Remember who the guests of honour are. People are friendly and may ask you questions. It isn't meant as a test, but...

2.  You are possibly the only person in the hotel not to have seen Game of Thrones. When this means that you assume the giant replica Iron Throne in pride of place is a random piece of hotel sculpture, it might look like you just arrived from Mars. Resist the urge to produce your battered copy of Fevre Dream by GRR Martin. The damage is already done.

3.  There is nothing jumpier than a person on a budget staying in an expensive hotel for the first time on a special cheap convention rate, where straying from the path could bankrupt you.

4.  Just because the room service menu is in your room, does not mean you are going to be charged £17.50 for breakfast each day. Breathe.

5.  Fancy hotels may prearrange a credit limit on your bill in case you want to put extras on it. This does not mean that you are going to be charged an extra £200, only that you can put an extra £200 of services on your room bill if you want. Breathe.

6.  The minibar is one of those optional services, not a ravening beast which will creep out of the cupboard and maul your credit card while you sleep.

7.  It doesn't matter how much your husband irritates you. In a hotel room on your own, you will miss him.

8.  Ditto your children, although you're still happy that they aren't in the room with the minibar beast. It makes it easier to close your eyes in the dark. Except you think you just heard it whisper something in there.

9.  You realise that if you were a stick of rock, it would say 'daylight consultant' all the way through, because you wish you had your laser tape and computer with you so that you could calculate the Average Daylight Factor of your hotel room.

10. At a science fiction convention, you will not be alone in your stick of rockness. There will be other stick of rock people with scientific disciplines running all the way through.

11.  It's hard to stay cool when a Klingon walks in the bar.

12.  You are never short of a t-shirt to read.

13.  Attending a sci-fi panel on getting to Mars can give you at least three dystopian book scenarios in the first fifteen minutes.

14.  People might want to check for pregnant women before they ask hypothetical questions of the room, such as whether they would be willing to offer their children for body modification to allow them to colonise Mars. Specifically, they might want to check for pregnant women with sharp, pointy objects within reach. Seriously, it's like a doctor tapping below your knee with a little hammer; your hands will slam over your belly and you will start scanning the room for people who might have been brave enough to put their hands up. (I know I promised, but come on, one preggy point out of fourteen isn't bad.)

This was my second convention, and despite having to stay teetotal and a few chats with the big white telephone, it was a ton of fun. I now have to decide whether to try to get to Fantasycon in September despite the fact that I'll be dodging harpoons by then, or to cancel it on the basis that a woman going into labour in one of the panels might be more excitement than anybody wants.

A Boy's visit to the Harry Potter Studio Tour

The Boy was incredibly lucky last week; his school had the opportunity to go to a preview of the Harry Potter Experience at the Leavesden Studios. Our (very) small claim to fame is living within walking distance of the studios. Sadly, they are excellent neighbours and I have never seen or heard anything interesting from the outside.

When The Boy told me about his day, pretty much every other word he used was 'awesome'. So, over to you, Boy:

• We saw  the trolley from the train, and you could eat the sweets, They had snakes to eat that moved in my mouth!
• There were chocolate cauldrons with caramel goo inside them that you could drink, and wands that dropped bits of licorish out of the end. They tasted delicious.
• We went into Fred and George's shop. There were actually fireworks! We saw Peruvian instant darkness powder that makes black smoke go everywhere. My friend went home covered in it. 
• The electric shock hand worked! 
• We met the actors that played Fred and George and they were really funny. They were jokers just like in the films.
• There was a cinema and we thought it was going to be boring but then the wall turned out to be the screen. After the film the screen went up and there were two huge doors. Everybody gasped and didn't move. Behind the doors was the great hall, with no roof. Apparently they only used candles in the first film because they kept falling on the children's food!
• In the tunnel I swear there was magic going on there, because there were lights on the walls and they moved around. You felt like you were walking upside down!
• We went into a huge room with 15 golden snitches to find. Finding the snitches was a lot of fun. They were... Stop! You can't tell people where to find the golden snitches!
• We saw Hagrid's Hut, Professor Dumbledore's office, the night bus, the Griffindor common room, the Slytherin common room, the dormitories for all the houses, the floor network and the Ministry for Magic.
• We got to drink butterbeer! It was really nice.
• There were wands that shot a bright light out of the end. I really, really wanted one to take home.
• There was lots of other stuff but the absolute best thing of all was wearing the quidditch robes and riding the broomsticks! You got to see yourself  on a screen. It was awesome! 
• I still wish our head teacher had let us get autographs from Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Ralph Fiennes. She had a load of paper and she wouldn't give it to us.

So, overall, good day out?

One of the best days of my entire life. I would recommend it to every single person in the world, and that includes people on Mars.

Thank you, Boy. The Harry Potter studio tour officially gets the nine-year-old's seal of approval. In fact, he wants me to take him again when it opens so that he can show it all to me. I think I might have to. I want to ride on a broomstick too.

An exercise in the procurement of a child passport:

1. Take child to be photographed. Obtain passport renewal form. Fill in form and append previous passport and two photographs. Give it to husband to take to friend who is deemed official enough to countersign form and photographs declaring that child exists and is not part of terrorist plot. Countersignatory makes mistake in her part of the form. Application rejected.

2. Get new form. Fill in new form, including countersignatory's part so this time all she has to do is sign it. Give it to husband to take to countersignatory. On return, notice that passport and photographs are now missing from envelope and part of her signature is outside the box. Form now invalid as it refers to enclosed passport.

3. Get new form, plus form to declare a lost passport. Fill in both forms. Append two more photographs. Give them to husband to take to countersignatory. On return, notice that form is signed but photographs aren't.

4. Send husband back with photographs to get them signed. Signature is in blue ink. Application rejected.

5. Head explodes.



Duration of exercise: 2 months.


Outcomes:

1. Brain matter everywhere

2. No significant progress in long term goal of reduction in pathological need to maintain excessive levels of control in all things.

3. Still no child passport.