You catch me in a state of flux in my last week at this address running a mobile connection because Tiscali went out in a puff of smoke in last week’s power cut.

I’m working on a couple of pieces that I started a few years ago as 1500 word stories. Through a series of rejections these are now flashers, flash fiction, which seems to be my only way into publication at the moment. Each time I take a slice out of my story, these slices fall on the floor and spring back as new tiny stories.

The latest flash fiction to hit the multiplexors in a howl of silence (the best form of flattery) is Roman Holiday Blues, a glorious mixture of spoof rom-com and Ballardian moment. Read it at the fabulous Ink, Sweat and Tears.

I know this blog looks nearly but not quite the same as it did when I hosted it myself at Powweb until last week. WordPress.com doesn’t have Atahualpa style. I requested it and was assured developers look at requests for new styles regularly. That was nine months ago. Anyway, the three column thingy looks okay. After a lot of button pushing in Facebook, I trust you will be reading this through Facebook Networked Blogs.  Oh and they know where you are.

Dr Alice Robert’s show Digging For Britain got up my nose in a brief startling section the formerly red-headed one did to camera in ep3 The Anglo-Saxons. She said the “written records” of the so-called Dark Ages were written “hundreds of years after” and “smacked of Christian propaganda”. She dismissed the Venerable Bede with “a not unbiased account strongly motivated by his Christian faith”. Would this be the same Venerable Bede whose “focus on the history of the organisation of the English church, and on heresies and the efforts made to root them out, led him to exclude the secular history of kings and kingdoms except where a moral lesson could be drawn or where they illuminated events in the church”? (Wikipedia) Moral lessons yes, but saying “Christian propaganda” doesn’t acknowledge his “grammar, chronology, and biblical studies [which were] as important as his historical and hagiographical works” (Wikipedia). The good work of early Christians wasn’t shown in context with the Anglo-Saxon invaders.

Very poor I thought, but then a revisionist secular history of Britain can never do more than show skeletons cleaved in two by jewel-encrusted swords.  No wonder they called it the Dark Ages, and what would heretics say if Doc R had said the Westray Wifey was a crude pagan icon, or that the Beaker people spread cranky superstitious propaganda throughout Britain. Trite loam-infested Gortex-clad clifftop fodder for the masses. Cue Enya.