Vegas is Vegas, BabY - my latest TOME coming SOON; Exclusive story: Bakin' Bread All Winter; Poem: The Couch; Thesaurus - what a book; Tales From The UniversE 51 - newsletter from A Pair Of Pantaloons
An arcadia of imagination
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1. Vegas is Vegas, BabY
My latest book is coming on Saturday 2 March to my substack - in four parts:::
Manchester United's summer 2023 tour of New York, New Jersey, San Diego, Houston, San Diego, Las Vegas penned the way only I can pen.
The first part is FREE; the rest for the £4.99 a-month subscription fee for which you receive everything else paid for on here.
2. Short Story
Bakin’ Bread All Winter
Through the lanes and over the hills she hiked to her favoured meadow where the sheep did not yet know her visage and she walked the gentle incline to the top where it was green and the winterflowers of whiteheaded pansies and creamcoloured galanthus and violet-streaked hellebroes with their rocket-streaked slashes grew wild and fervent.
From the backpack purchased only two yesterdays ago from MATES in the village she pulled a campstove, a small frying pan, a pack of six fat Caldwell’s The Butcher pork sausages with spices in brown greaseproof paper, a flask of tea, a black and oblong bluetooth speaker, salted Devon butter, a fresh wholemeal loaf she baked this morning.
She lit the stove - instant heat in the cool and winter February air. She switched the speaker on and hooked it up to her iPhone via bluetooth. She opened the Classic FM app and dialled in to an opera station.
An aria filled the grassland where it rolled and ran along the meadow. She placed the pan on the stove and dropped in all six sausages and turned the heat lower for the fat in the meat to render.
A sizzle of sausage and spices and the Italian woman’s voiced aria and the vista that showed Manchester miles away on the horizon like a city in the blue and orange streaked clouds where the sun was a light show.
Why was she here? Why was Geraldine Louise MacStone on a hill in a meadow in Higher Poynton on a regulation Wednesday in February?
It was simple and it was not. She was 44. She was married. She had two grown children away at university. She did not work. Her husband, Pete ‘the Meat’ was away each and every week working on the continent. She had copious time and money.
And she was this: regretful.
At what?
Being closed off. Being what she called to herself as ‘anti-open’.
She couldn’t remember when precisely the realisation came but it was sometime in the past few weeks since, maybe, mid-January, making her a month or so into the new person she had to become.
Then came the wish to do what she did today. Forget going to Costa for her daily coffee and cake or to the Farmers Arms for her favoured gin and flowers-cented tonic.
Head for the hills and the meadows she remembered from being a girl of 9 or 10. Adventuring to them to lay among the bluebells and lilac coneflowers and blush-red zinnias and doing nothing else but being there among the aromas and heat of summer days.
What happened between those times and who she grew up to be?
Geraldine Louise MacStone had scant clue.
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