Round the Herne

A short story belated finished to mark the summer solstice. For readers unfamiliar with the area, Dunwich is a coastal village in Suffolk (once a thriving medieval town). This is the second story it has inspired for me - I'll post the other one at some stage. About the Buoy Charles, never Charlie even when he was young, stood on the shore and listened to the mournful dolling of the bell on the buoy. The early morning sea mist hid the distant float, but could do nothing to muffle the sound. The longest day would shortly dawn, and old Charles would mark it as he had done since his own grandfather had dragged him from bed at the age of ten. Fifty-eight solstices he has witnessed since then, come rain or dry, come joy or grief. Born and raised in Dunwich, there was a special joy in being the farthest east and so the first to witness the spectacle. The solitary buoy marks the tides both lugubrious and tumultuous as surely as it marks Charles’s solitude, whether contente...

Last night I, like so many other people, saw the horrific news coming out of Orlando about the massacre of over 50 people dancing the night away in a gay club. Just as disturbing, though thankfully with a bloodless resolution, police elsewhere in America stopped a heavily armed man on his way to slaughter people at a Gay Pride march in Lo Angeles. I don't know if these two murderous lunatics were in contact and had coordinated their attacks, or if it was just some bizarrely improbably coincidence. My partner and I instantly recalled the bombing of a London gay pub n 1999. Numerous incidents of violence against LGBT people hit the mass media, such as Daesh hurling people off high buildings in accord with their reading of the Koran. There are plenty more incidents around the world that never reach the headlines, and even more that are never reported to start with because people don't see the point, are too afraid of further reprisals (or losing their jobs etc. as a result of the...