Got another job application rejected. It was just for a fucking weekend job in a shop. This whole thing gets seriously depressing sometimes.
I find out tomorrow whether or not I'm going to have to leave my job. I'm totally expecting the latter. I'm in serious panic mode. No job means no money, no money means no savings, no savings means no PhD, no PhD means no ambition, no career plans, no exciting future.
Plus, if I can't even get a weekend job in H&M, chances are I'm not going to get hired as a fucking lecturer.
My self esteem has taken a massive nosedive and I'm just..
lost.
x
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Saturday, 11 September 2010
don't blame the sweet and tender hooligan
I love lazy Saturdays - Sky Sports news, checking up on the fantasy football team, playing on the Sims, being climbed by the cat, cooking pizza and staying in my pajamas.
X factor without the bff though? No fun at all.
xxx
X factor without the bff though? No fun at all.
xxx
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Devil of the Vault
This is, without doubt, my favourite piece of writing. I apologise for the sheer length of it but my HTML knowledge doesn't extend to doing cut posts beyond live journal. I love this piece because it's the only one I've actually stuck with and kept working at for a period of more than a few weeks. So I give you the result of 8 months of obsessive cliché removing and meticulous editing.
Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
Swear in both the scales against either scale;
Who committed treason enough for God's sake,
Yet could not equivocate to heaven
– Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3.
They told you that we dug through bricks and mortar using nothing but spoons. You swallowed; you probably chuckled at the image. Heretics armed with cutlery.
They told you that we intended to murder Protestants and Catholics alike; that the House of Lords was swarming with both. You probably swallowed that, too, condemning us with a curt shake of the head.
They told you I scrawled my signature at the bottom of my confession after hours, days, weeks of torture, the words sprawling across the page like a child’s. The wrong name, my old name. Was that detail too insignificant, too easy to overlook?
They told you I was incarcerated, tortured, tormented. They executed me in front of your very eyes; my entrails painting the scaffold scarlet, my feet dancing inches above the wood, desperate to be reunited with the ground. They reduced me to charred flesh, a helix of intestine, a half-dressed body without a head or a heart.
Did you swallow that, too? Had your concept of justice, however distorted, been served?
The only thing butchered and burnt that day was my reputation.
I remain: enduring like a Catherine wheel in the sky, an inferno against the night. Once the firework has spent, the smoke lingers: whispers of grey interrupting the opaque sky, an impression burnt on your retinas.
History is made by those who refuse; those who rebel, those whose heads adorn the palace walls like withered pumpkins left out from Halloween.
Does your judgement label us heroes or villains?
Just a man, maybe just a pawn. A tangle of veins, arterial ribbons, tensed over bone like guitar strings. A jigsaw of blood and consciousness; pieces missing, pieces gnarled by time. Hands that could start a revolution; soldier’s hands; calloused, supple, skin like wet bark. Pores that leaked sweat.
A pawn. With no legal moves left.
London slept, and I was skulking around its underbelly; three hundred years ago, this was the palace kitchen. Seventy seven feet long. Ten feet high. It would have been vibrant with movement and a pleasant purr of noise; scraps of gossip, morsels of laughter.
Now I was crouching amongst the rats, my body pressed against the mottled stone. Moss climbed the walls, clutching to the nooks amongst the mosaic of brick. I could hear movement on the Thames; the whisper of a passing boat, the coarse shout of the crew as they manoeuvred along the still, black water – a river of spilt ink.
I was directly beneath the first-floor House of Lords, with twenty barrels of gunpowder in tow; ripe fruit ready to burst.
The undercroft was full of memories; these walls had seen centuries of life, and had observed it with soundless scrutiny. Now they watched over hoards of firewood thrown into piles, hurling a chaotic shadow across the naked soil beneath my boots.
I piled the barrels into a pyramid, handling the wooden husks with care, aware of the precarious bounty within.
The catalyst of revolution.
I pulled my hat far down over my eyes, and shielded my neck with the collar of my black coat, disguising myself with darkness.
Just as Eve had surveyed the apple for one final time, caught between obedience and defiance, I glanced over the barrels once more.
I left, and did not look back again.
...at one instant and blast to have ruin'd the whole State and Kingdom of England...
Sir Edward Hoby
I had returned, transformed, to the cold, cobbled streets of London in 1604. The spirits of my past torments still lingered around the corners of buildings and behind coaches. The memory of Maria, loitering in the shadows. The buoyant eyes of Thomas, framed by a mane of copper hair – so like his father’s - peeked out from underneath wide brimmed hats. The past is always present; thirteen years in the Spanish army had changed my name, broadened my shoulders, but hadn’t released me. Limbs splayed beneath the pomegranate trees, feeling the amber sun against my back, I had been at liberty to practise my religion, and flourish as a mercenary. The sandy banks had brought me freedom. But the indifferent streets of London shackled me to my past once more. It knew too much of me.
I couldn’t believe that this world was still turning. Catholics were still being hunted and slaughtered like rabbits, crushed under the boot of a Protestant king. How many had hung from the rafters of their own church, in the name of justice? London had become distorted; a fragmented city, an incomplete jigsaw. I blended, melting in with the fog and torment that haunted these streets. Prices were too high. Harvests were failing. London was on its knees, submitting to a monarchy of insatiable appetite.
He told me the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy, and asked me if I would give my consent. I told him Yes, I would venture my life
Confession of Thomas Wintour
Thomas Percy once asked us: ‘Gentlemen, shall we always talk, and never do anything?’ They were words which demanded action, words which seized the attention of men like myself, luring us back to these terrible, entrancing streets. Thirteen men, greedy for justice; Jesus and his disciples, ready to be martyred.
We were the revolution London needed.
Percy and his brother-in-law, John Wright, were admirable, respectable men, if one overlooked the blemish of their choice of religion. Both were devout Catholics: many of London’s figureheads abandoned their guise of decorum and took Mass at ludicrous times of night.
The Duck and Drake was a dull building just off the Strand, not without its modest charm. The streets around here were bleak and often desolate, seemingly out of parliament’s eye-line. Thomas Wintour lived here when he stayed in London, and he found himself spending more and more time amongst the gamblers and conspirators that occupied the inn. Robert Catesby and I glided in, inhaling the stench of cheap ale and smoke. Although it was May, the air was crisp and the inn provided relief from the endless drizzle of the street. This was not a prosperous place. Many of its occupants were farmers and labourers, being leisurely suffocated under James I. Most of them sat on empty barrels and lost themselves in pints of watered-down ale and gambling. They were decaying; their energy for life was mouldering along with their crops.
‘Fawkes? Catesby?’ The barkeeper caught my eye. He was a coarse man, exhausted by taxes and long hours, but Wintour had assured us he was good at keeping his mouth shut. I nodded, removing my wide-brimmed hat as I approached the bar, unleashing a curtain of hair that lay dormant against my shoulders.
‘Wintour’s in the basement. Percy and Wright are already here,’ he told me, inviting me to go downstairs with a half-hearted sweep of his hands. He was almost spectral: drained from watching his business diminish from a dependable stream to a feeble trickle.
‘Thank you, Sir,’ I replied, leaving a small tip on the bar as I led Catesby down the treacherous, stone stairs to the basement. It was much colder down here, and I was grateful of my black cape and long coat to shield me from the bitter basement air. Percy, Wright and Wintour looked up as we made our entrance.
‘For God’s sake gentlemen, it’s a good job no one else comes down here. You look guilty as sin,’ Catesby teased, winking at Wintour. No one laughed. The silence, punctuated by chattering teeth and the rustle of Catesby removing his hat and cape, grew thick.
‘Do we have a plan yet?’ I asked, wishing to evade any attempts at small talk. The countdown had begun – London needed action.
‘We’ve arranged to purchase the lease to an undercroft. The owner, John Whynniard, has agreed to sell the lodgings for a particularly agreeable price.’
‘Does he know?’ I was becoming concerned at just how liberally these men were sharing the news of our intention. My voice was unexpectedly sharp, and a plume of breath escaped from my mouth as I spoke, as if my words had tumbled out in flames.
Wintour struggled for a moment: he opened his mouth to speak, and then reconsidered.
Percy eventually intervened, and spoke gently but with unmistakable certainty: ‘Nothing was said, not explicitly. He knows we’re up to something and he has his own vendetta against James. An unspoken agreement.’
‘As lodgings, it’s fairly useless. It’s filthy and hasn’t been used for decades. Whynniard reckons it used to be the palace’s kitchen.’
Catesby thought for a minute, composing his argument: ‘So why do we want it then?’
Wintour smiled. ‘Because it’s directly beneath the first-floor House of Lords. It’s accessible from the River Thames through Parliament Place and down the stairs. It’s also a perfectly adequate place to store gun powder.’
‘Gun powder?’ Catesby and I had clearly arrived too late. Serious plans had already been arranged. We had begun our descent into oblivion; free-falling, utterly seduced by the promise of change.
‘Yes, gentlemen. We’re going to blow up Parliament.’
The world has no instrument or means so pernicious as gunpowder, and capable of effecting such mischief
Thomas Barlowe
Our meeting continued for several more hours: our plans developed relentless momentum, half in love with martyrdom. Once we had agreed to meet again, we went back upstairs, and I realised how comical we must look: a sombre parade of guilty gentlemen advancing the stairs like convicts to the gallows. We retreated to a small, sparse room by Wintour’s lodging, where we met Father John Gerard. We humbly knelt on the harsh, cold stone floor and took Mass: our pledge of secrecy. It felt appropriate.
Parliament had adjourned, leaving us to return to our lives, to our less heroic alter egos. It gave me the terrible luxury of time. I returned to my lodgings at the top of the Strand, and I spent long hours treading the floor boards: patrolling my territory and indulging my past as I peered out upon the apathetic London streets. I was ambushed, the smells and sounds of my former life: Maria’s perfume: never quite there, but never quite escaping memory. Thomas’s howl as I plucked him from his crib to hold him: the tickle of his hair as it caressed my lips and nose. Returning to my slice of domesticity after working as a footman for the Viscount Mantagu: the heat from the coal fire, Maria’s smile, Thomas’s playful squirming as he evaded bedtime. The unforgettable clash of my knees against the pavement as I knelt over her body: blood trickling across the cobbles in ribbons, running across the stones in threads. Blood; such a resolute stench. Thomas’s fragile body left mangled in his crib: a broken doll. Skull cracked like porcelain.
James’s men had marched through our village with simple orders: don’t let the Catholics survive. They had left with the blood of generations embellishing their uniforms.
Our plans were stalled. We didn’t give it much thought; such is the nature of treason. Unpredictable.
The plague was charging through the streets of London like fire; indiscriminate, consuming the young and old in the same smouldering breath. Parliament had adjourned once more; the fear of the plague overwhelmed anyone’s desire to talk politics. When the country needed them most, the figureheads of London hibernated far from the suffering, but nevertheless watched their people burn at a distance.
I spend most of my life remembering the fifth of November.
I had walked away from my own execution; I watched my intestines embellish the scaffold, my voice lost in the roar of the crowd. I had watched myself become martyred. I had predicted it: James being too proud to admit the mouse had eluded the cat’s claw. He had thrown the crowd a scapegoat, and yelled: ‘A penny for the guy!’ I believe he was just plucked off the streets and he had taken my burden; carried it to the scaffold across his shoulders like a cross. What did it matter, the murder of a faceless pauper, when the reputation of our king was at stake?
London’s children nodded and smiled and agreed that justice had been served
The smallest victories are still victories.
Our downfall came from within. A comrade turned traitor.
I still, to this day, do not know who it was. These were men I had burdened with my trust, my respect. We had drunk together, we were bound by faith, we had spoken the unspeakable in hushed tones in basements. Who was I to distrust a heretic?
Someone had written a letter. This letter saved the seven feet deep walls from being reduced to crumbs, stopped the windows of Westminster Abbey from becoming a shower of stained glass: tumbling from the sky like fragments of a rainbow. I dream of an encompassing cloud of crimson swallowing the building from below: an irrevocable bonfire. Plans and dreams scrapped by the power of the written word.
Monteagle broke the seal, and liberated the slip of paper within.
...for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time [...] I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament...
Extract From The Monteagle Letter
Suspicion breeds like fire. The flame gathers momentum, consumes and devours, swells with movement. It unfolds from the slightest of touches and the smallest whispers, corrupting, smouldering, spreading from floor to floor. It permeates the walls, leaving its mark on the stone. The envelope was passed from servants to Lords: met with nervous laughter and the letter was in transit again, manoeuvring up the hierarchy until James glanced down, the edges of the paper smudged and frayed.
Chaos, the friend of the heretic.
The undercroft was searched, my hoard of gunpowder was released from its hiding place. They told you they found me there, hunched over my bounty, encompassed in shadow, intoxicated by madness. The true theatrical villain: face contorted into a smirk of lunacy, teeth bared, matches in hand, poised to light the fuse. I’ve seen the paintings. They’ve really failed to capture my likeness. It did me no end of favours: allowing me to lurk the streets undetected after my incarceration. No one knew the true face of their villain. I saw myself apprehended by a hoard of courageous soldiers in a painting: a captured moment of an invented past. They’d given me a moustache, a hat that hadn’t been worn in years, a hooked nose, eyes that would turn you to stone. A demon that fashion left behind.
After my execution, I stayed to watch my conspirators ascend towards the gallows. They were shackled: a tangle of chains and ropes, their movements punctuated by the clatter of manacles. They stood opposite the building we had tried to obliterate. Wintour was staring at my corpse: unzipped, a mess of crimson. Their crimes were read out. They climbed onto the wooden structure, movements made clumsy by metal. Wintour was first. His eyes scrutinised the crowd: searching for salvation, or avoiding the eye of the executioner. As the noose was placed around his neck like a dormant snake, his gaze tumbled into mine.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he barked, his voice discordant as the noose pulled.
I acknowledged him with a small nod, and turned my back, melting into the crowd, holding my hat over my heart.
The noose creaked like old bones.
I moved to Whitechapel. I watched the world resume. I ventured to the banks of the Thames and stared at the new fruit that had blossomed on top of the palace walls, blooming from spikes. I watched the crows descend from the unknown and peck and peck and peck until there were no faces left: only shapes, silhouetted against grey. Percy’s words govern my dreams: ‘Gentlemen, shall we always talk, and never do anything?’ I wake up and I am in the company of ghosts: ghosts with necklaces of rope, ghosts gutted like fish.
I tell the walls: ‘Percy, we did all we could.’
I shall leave you with my legacy.
Guido Fawkes: the only man to enter parliament with honest intentions.
Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
Swear in both the scales against either scale;
Who committed treason enough for God's sake,
Yet could not equivocate to heaven
– Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3.
They told you that we dug through bricks and mortar using nothing but spoons. You swallowed; you probably chuckled at the image. Heretics armed with cutlery.
They told you that we intended to murder Protestants and Catholics alike; that the House of Lords was swarming with both. You probably swallowed that, too, condemning us with a curt shake of the head.
They told you I scrawled my signature at the bottom of my confession after hours, days, weeks of torture, the words sprawling across the page like a child’s. The wrong name, my old name. Was that detail too insignificant, too easy to overlook?
They told you I was incarcerated, tortured, tormented. They executed me in front of your very eyes; my entrails painting the scaffold scarlet, my feet dancing inches above the wood, desperate to be reunited with the ground. They reduced me to charred flesh, a helix of intestine, a half-dressed body without a head or a heart.
Did you swallow that, too? Had your concept of justice, however distorted, been served?
The only thing butchered and burnt that day was my reputation.
I remain: enduring like a Catherine wheel in the sky, an inferno against the night. Once the firework has spent, the smoke lingers: whispers of grey interrupting the opaque sky, an impression burnt on your retinas.
History is made by those who refuse; those who rebel, those whose heads adorn the palace walls like withered pumpkins left out from Halloween.
Does your judgement label us heroes or villains?
Just a man, maybe just a pawn. A tangle of veins, arterial ribbons, tensed over bone like guitar strings. A jigsaw of blood and consciousness; pieces missing, pieces gnarled by time. Hands that could start a revolution; soldier’s hands; calloused, supple, skin like wet bark. Pores that leaked sweat.
A pawn. With no legal moves left.
London slept, and I was skulking around its underbelly; three hundred years ago, this was the palace kitchen. Seventy seven feet long. Ten feet high. It would have been vibrant with movement and a pleasant purr of noise; scraps of gossip, morsels of laughter.
Now I was crouching amongst the rats, my body pressed against the mottled stone. Moss climbed the walls, clutching to the nooks amongst the mosaic of brick. I could hear movement on the Thames; the whisper of a passing boat, the coarse shout of the crew as they manoeuvred along the still, black water – a river of spilt ink.
I was directly beneath the first-floor House of Lords, with twenty barrels of gunpowder in tow; ripe fruit ready to burst.
The undercroft was full of memories; these walls had seen centuries of life, and had observed it with soundless scrutiny. Now they watched over hoards of firewood thrown into piles, hurling a chaotic shadow across the naked soil beneath my boots.
I piled the barrels into a pyramid, handling the wooden husks with care, aware of the precarious bounty within.
The catalyst of revolution.
I pulled my hat far down over my eyes, and shielded my neck with the collar of my black coat, disguising myself with darkness.
Just as Eve had surveyed the apple for one final time, caught between obedience and defiance, I glanced over the barrels once more.
I left, and did not look back again.
...at one instant and blast to have ruin'd the whole State and Kingdom of England...
Sir Edward Hoby
I had returned, transformed, to the cold, cobbled streets of London in 1604. The spirits of my past torments still lingered around the corners of buildings and behind coaches. The memory of Maria, loitering in the shadows. The buoyant eyes of Thomas, framed by a mane of copper hair – so like his father’s - peeked out from underneath wide brimmed hats. The past is always present; thirteen years in the Spanish army had changed my name, broadened my shoulders, but hadn’t released me. Limbs splayed beneath the pomegranate trees, feeling the amber sun against my back, I had been at liberty to practise my religion, and flourish as a mercenary. The sandy banks had brought me freedom. But the indifferent streets of London shackled me to my past once more. It knew too much of me.
I couldn’t believe that this world was still turning. Catholics were still being hunted and slaughtered like rabbits, crushed under the boot of a Protestant king. How many had hung from the rafters of their own church, in the name of justice? London had become distorted; a fragmented city, an incomplete jigsaw. I blended, melting in with the fog and torment that haunted these streets. Prices were too high. Harvests were failing. London was on its knees, submitting to a monarchy of insatiable appetite.
He told me the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy, and asked me if I would give my consent. I told him Yes, I would venture my life
Confession of Thomas Wintour
Thomas Percy once asked us: ‘Gentlemen, shall we always talk, and never do anything?’ They were words which demanded action, words which seized the attention of men like myself, luring us back to these terrible, entrancing streets. Thirteen men, greedy for justice; Jesus and his disciples, ready to be martyred.
We were the revolution London needed.
Percy and his brother-in-law, John Wright, were admirable, respectable men, if one overlooked the blemish of their choice of religion. Both were devout Catholics: many of London’s figureheads abandoned their guise of decorum and took Mass at ludicrous times of night.
The Duck and Drake was a dull building just off the Strand, not without its modest charm. The streets around here were bleak and often desolate, seemingly out of parliament’s eye-line. Thomas Wintour lived here when he stayed in London, and he found himself spending more and more time amongst the gamblers and conspirators that occupied the inn. Robert Catesby and I glided in, inhaling the stench of cheap ale and smoke. Although it was May, the air was crisp and the inn provided relief from the endless drizzle of the street. This was not a prosperous place. Many of its occupants were farmers and labourers, being leisurely suffocated under James I. Most of them sat on empty barrels and lost themselves in pints of watered-down ale and gambling. They were decaying; their energy for life was mouldering along with their crops.
‘Fawkes? Catesby?’ The barkeeper caught my eye. He was a coarse man, exhausted by taxes and long hours, but Wintour had assured us he was good at keeping his mouth shut. I nodded, removing my wide-brimmed hat as I approached the bar, unleashing a curtain of hair that lay dormant against my shoulders.
‘Wintour’s in the basement. Percy and Wright are already here,’ he told me, inviting me to go downstairs with a half-hearted sweep of his hands. He was almost spectral: drained from watching his business diminish from a dependable stream to a feeble trickle.
‘Thank you, Sir,’ I replied, leaving a small tip on the bar as I led Catesby down the treacherous, stone stairs to the basement. It was much colder down here, and I was grateful of my black cape and long coat to shield me from the bitter basement air. Percy, Wright and Wintour looked up as we made our entrance.
‘For God’s sake gentlemen, it’s a good job no one else comes down here. You look guilty as sin,’ Catesby teased, winking at Wintour. No one laughed. The silence, punctuated by chattering teeth and the rustle of Catesby removing his hat and cape, grew thick.
‘Do we have a plan yet?’ I asked, wishing to evade any attempts at small talk. The countdown had begun – London needed action.
‘We’ve arranged to purchase the lease to an undercroft. The owner, John Whynniard, has agreed to sell the lodgings for a particularly agreeable price.’
‘Does he know?’ I was becoming concerned at just how liberally these men were sharing the news of our intention. My voice was unexpectedly sharp, and a plume of breath escaped from my mouth as I spoke, as if my words had tumbled out in flames.
Wintour struggled for a moment: he opened his mouth to speak, and then reconsidered.
Percy eventually intervened, and spoke gently but with unmistakable certainty: ‘Nothing was said, not explicitly. He knows we’re up to something and he has his own vendetta against James. An unspoken agreement.’
‘As lodgings, it’s fairly useless. It’s filthy and hasn’t been used for decades. Whynniard reckons it used to be the palace’s kitchen.’
Catesby thought for a minute, composing his argument: ‘So why do we want it then?’
Wintour smiled. ‘Because it’s directly beneath the first-floor House of Lords. It’s accessible from the River Thames through Parliament Place and down the stairs. It’s also a perfectly adequate place to store gun powder.’
‘Gun powder?’ Catesby and I had clearly arrived too late. Serious plans had already been arranged. We had begun our descent into oblivion; free-falling, utterly seduced by the promise of change.
‘Yes, gentlemen. We’re going to blow up Parliament.’
The world has no instrument or means so pernicious as gunpowder, and capable of effecting such mischief
Thomas Barlowe
Our meeting continued for several more hours: our plans developed relentless momentum, half in love with martyrdom. Once we had agreed to meet again, we went back upstairs, and I realised how comical we must look: a sombre parade of guilty gentlemen advancing the stairs like convicts to the gallows. We retreated to a small, sparse room by Wintour’s lodging, where we met Father John Gerard. We humbly knelt on the harsh, cold stone floor and took Mass: our pledge of secrecy. It felt appropriate.
Parliament had adjourned, leaving us to return to our lives, to our less heroic alter egos. It gave me the terrible luxury of time. I returned to my lodgings at the top of the Strand, and I spent long hours treading the floor boards: patrolling my territory and indulging my past as I peered out upon the apathetic London streets. I was ambushed, the smells and sounds of my former life: Maria’s perfume: never quite there, but never quite escaping memory. Thomas’s howl as I plucked him from his crib to hold him: the tickle of his hair as it caressed my lips and nose. Returning to my slice of domesticity after working as a footman for the Viscount Mantagu: the heat from the coal fire, Maria’s smile, Thomas’s playful squirming as he evaded bedtime. The unforgettable clash of my knees against the pavement as I knelt over her body: blood trickling across the cobbles in ribbons, running across the stones in threads. Blood; such a resolute stench. Thomas’s fragile body left mangled in his crib: a broken doll. Skull cracked like porcelain.
James’s men had marched through our village with simple orders: don’t let the Catholics survive. They had left with the blood of generations embellishing their uniforms.
Our plans were stalled. We didn’t give it much thought; such is the nature of treason. Unpredictable.
The plague was charging through the streets of London like fire; indiscriminate, consuming the young and old in the same smouldering breath. Parliament had adjourned once more; the fear of the plague overwhelmed anyone’s desire to talk politics. When the country needed them most, the figureheads of London hibernated far from the suffering, but nevertheless watched their people burn at a distance.
I spend most of my life remembering the fifth of November.
I had walked away from my own execution; I watched my intestines embellish the scaffold, my voice lost in the roar of the crowd. I had watched myself become martyred. I had predicted it: James being too proud to admit the mouse had eluded the cat’s claw. He had thrown the crowd a scapegoat, and yelled: ‘A penny for the guy!’ I believe he was just plucked off the streets and he had taken my burden; carried it to the scaffold across his shoulders like a cross. What did it matter, the murder of a faceless pauper, when the reputation of our king was at stake?
London’s children nodded and smiled and agreed that justice had been served
The smallest victories are still victories.
Our downfall came from within. A comrade turned traitor.
I still, to this day, do not know who it was. These were men I had burdened with my trust, my respect. We had drunk together, we were bound by faith, we had spoken the unspeakable in hushed tones in basements. Who was I to distrust a heretic?
Someone had written a letter. This letter saved the seven feet deep walls from being reduced to crumbs, stopped the windows of Westminster Abbey from becoming a shower of stained glass: tumbling from the sky like fragments of a rainbow. I dream of an encompassing cloud of crimson swallowing the building from below: an irrevocable bonfire. Plans and dreams scrapped by the power of the written word.
Monteagle broke the seal, and liberated the slip of paper within.
...for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time [...] I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament...
Extract From The Monteagle Letter
Suspicion breeds like fire. The flame gathers momentum, consumes and devours, swells with movement. It unfolds from the slightest of touches and the smallest whispers, corrupting, smouldering, spreading from floor to floor. It permeates the walls, leaving its mark on the stone. The envelope was passed from servants to Lords: met with nervous laughter and the letter was in transit again, manoeuvring up the hierarchy until James glanced down, the edges of the paper smudged and frayed.
Chaos, the friend of the heretic.
The undercroft was searched, my hoard of gunpowder was released from its hiding place. They told you they found me there, hunched over my bounty, encompassed in shadow, intoxicated by madness. The true theatrical villain: face contorted into a smirk of lunacy, teeth bared, matches in hand, poised to light the fuse. I’ve seen the paintings. They’ve really failed to capture my likeness. It did me no end of favours: allowing me to lurk the streets undetected after my incarceration. No one knew the true face of their villain. I saw myself apprehended by a hoard of courageous soldiers in a painting: a captured moment of an invented past. They’d given me a moustache, a hat that hadn’t been worn in years, a hooked nose, eyes that would turn you to stone. A demon that fashion left behind.
After my execution, I stayed to watch my conspirators ascend towards the gallows. They were shackled: a tangle of chains and ropes, their movements punctuated by the clatter of manacles. They stood opposite the building we had tried to obliterate. Wintour was staring at my corpse: unzipped, a mess of crimson. Their crimes were read out. They climbed onto the wooden structure, movements made clumsy by metal. Wintour was first. His eyes scrutinised the crowd: searching for salvation, or avoiding the eye of the executioner. As the noose was placed around his neck like a dormant snake, his gaze tumbled into mine.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he barked, his voice discordant as the noose pulled.
I acknowledged him with a small nod, and turned my back, melting into the crowd, holding my hat over my heart.
The noose creaked like old bones.
I moved to Whitechapel. I watched the world resume. I ventured to the banks of the Thames and stared at the new fruit that had blossomed on top of the palace walls, blooming from spikes. I watched the crows descend from the unknown and peck and peck and peck until there were no faces left: only shapes, silhouetted against grey. Percy’s words govern my dreams: ‘Gentlemen, shall we always talk, and never do anything?’ I wake up and I am in the company of ghosts: ghosts with necklaces of rope, ghosts gutted like fish.
I tell the walls: ‘Percy, we did all we could.’
I shall leave you with my legacy.
Guido Fawkes: the only man to enter parliament with honest intentions.
Unnamed.
A first-draft attempt at articulating myself a few months back when I started getting pretty regular (and horrendous) migraines. I forgot this was on my computer, and I quite like it. It's quirky.
Head full of electricity, ribbons, pulses,
Vibrating under a porcelain skill,
Eyelids twitching beneath the bulb,
Flicker like a moth’s wing.
Jigsaws of dreams, nightmares,
The static of a radio, the purgatory between stations.
Thinking of empty spaces.
The chaos of movement,
The pandemonium of
silence.
Those moments that define you, shape you, mould you:
Cradling your own heart in your palms.
Scrubbing at blood that seeps into the grouting,
that void between the bathroom tiles.
When the crescendo isn’t a purge,
A bottle of vodka, a packet of Marlboro Reds,
My feet won’t leave the ground.
My shoes don’t leave a footprint.
My touch leaves no impression.
But here I am.
Head full of electricity, ribbons, pulses,
Vibrating under a porcelain skill,
Eyelids twitching beneath the bulb,
Flicker like a moth’s wing.
Jigsaws of dreams, nightmares,
The static of a radio, the purgatory between stations.
Thinking of empty spaces.
The chaos of movement,
The pandemonium of
silence.
Those moments that define you, shape you, mould you:
Cradling your own heart in your palms.
Scrubbing at blood that seeps into the grouting,
that void between the bathroom tiles.
When the crescendo isn’t a purge,
A bottle of vodka, a packet of Marlboro Reds,
My feet won’t leave the ground.
My shoes don’t leave a footprint.
My touch leaves no impression.
But here I am.
My standard break from life
First post. These are always a bit awkward really.
I've wanted one of these for a while but have never really gotten round to it. So here we are. It appeals to me to have a place to ramble and write.
I'm 21. I'm nearly 22. I've just finished a degree in English and Creative writing. I'll be starting a Masters in October. I want to do a PhD but, to be honest, I doubt I'm going to get on. I think it's good to be ambitious though.
I got a 2:1. I wanted a 1st, and I think I deserved it. I put my heart and soul into that final year. I'm really pleased with a 2:1, don't get me wrong. But I know I'm capable of a 1st.
I like writing. The last piece of writing I did, I am so stupidly proud of. I might post it on here at some point. It's a bit long though. And that feels quite pretentious.
I'm working full time at the moment to fund my MA. I work on the lingerie department at M&S. I basically measure people's boobs for a living. It's a pretty decent job, and I've met some pretty awesome people there.
Other than that... I like expensive clothes and dancing and sleeping and reading and Heston Blumenthal and icecream and sunshine and smoking and cars and gaming and tattoos and piercings and football.
I might come back to this. I might get bored and forget about it. Who knows?
<3
I've wanted one of these for a while but have never really gotten round to it. So here we are. It appeals to me to have a place to ramble and write.
I'm 21. I'm nearly 22. I've just finished a degree in English and Creative writing. I'll be starting a Masters in October. I want to do a PhD but, to be honest, I doubt I'm going to get on. I think it's good to be ambitious though.
I got a 2:1. I wanted a 1st, and I think I deserved it. I put my heart and soul into that final year. I'm really pleased with a 2:1, don't get me wrong. But I know I'm capable of a 1st.
I like writing. The last piece of writing I did, I am so stupidly proud of. I might post it on here at some point. It's a bit long though. And that feels quite pretentious.
I'm working full time at the moment to fund my MA. I work on the lingerie department at M&S. I basically measure people's boobs for a living. It's a pretty decent job, and I've met some pretty awesome people there.
Other than that... I like expensive clothes and dancing and sleeping and reading and Heston Blumenthal and icecream and sunshine and smoking and cars and gaming and tattoos and piercings and football.
I might come back to this. I might get bored and forget about it. Who knows?
<3
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