It's not coincidence, it's existential satire

So I have posted a couple of times these last days about my sudden urgent need to write about a good old-fashioned barber, yes?

Yesterday, working on a ghost story in the Lit & Phil, I wrote the line:

The hands of time hold razors, every little tick catching at your skin, cutting you newly.

I can’t help it, okay? It’s just the kind of line I write. And likely that whole razors thing has been lurking in the back of my head anyway; it’s no surprise if the substance of one story becomes an image in another.

Only then - because I’m in the Lit and Phil, in a bay in the Silence Room where the old histories are stored, and because I’m easily distracted, and just because I can - I reached out an arm and plucked a book off the shelves: “When William IV Was King” by John Ashton (Chapman & Hall, 1896).

And it fell open - I swear! - to a page about his ruthless regulations regarding the appearance of the Cavalry, and featuring this verse by T Haynes Bayly:

Adieu, my moustachios! farewell to my tip!
Lost, lost is the pride of my chin and my lip!
When Laura last saw me she said that the world
Contain’d no moustachios so charmingly curl’d!
But razors are ruthless, my honours they nip,
Adieu, my moustachios! farewell to my tip!

Sometimes I think the world is laughing at me...

Another of those beginnings

Okay, as this is partly your fault for encouraging me, or else it's All Thanks to You, I thought it only fair to share:

I have surprised myself today, by writing the opening opening to I SHAVED HALF-EMPEROR CYRRHENIUS. It's nowhere near ready to write as a story, of course, but this is just setting up the board, bringing pieces into play, all of that stuff. Clearing my throat, perhaps. It's all vulnerable; nothing is safe.

( Such as it is, though, here it is. )