Liner Notes for Neighbourhood Watch
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Back before this was Strandbridge Tales I invented Hubert Benson, the good-hearted very conventional retired civil servant, as the foil for an occult investigator. (See The Red Cap Of Old Hobb Mill, forthcoming in Kaleidotrope Magazine). He was slightly pompous, old fashioned, and not fully understanding that he was seeing uncanny events occurring. The bowler hatted solid Watson of the black and white films.
But of course John Watson is no mean detective in his own right, a doctor and war hero. And though I wanted Benson to be a figure of fun, a comedic sidekick, I didn’t want him to be just a clown. So I wrote this solo adventure to figure out who he was when he wasn’t misunderstanding things to have the plot and lore explained to him (and the reader). It turns out he’s a bit funnier and on the ball than I originally thought, which fed back into other stories with him in.
This is good, as it explains why people would want to spend time with him, both people having weird Strandbridge adventures and people just generally living their lives.
When an old town is being developed you’ll often find odd bits of land that have been left. Sometimes they belong to someone else, have some sort of prohibition or limitation on them or fall outside the boundary where they have permission. Sometimes they’ve been left for a purpose that never occurred or even for drainage or wildlife reasons. Or maybe fairies live there, that could probably happen. After all it does in Iceland so they could easily object to planning permission here. I guess.
And so the riddle game. I don’t know if there’s a fresh twist left but I tried. I tried. I combined it with what I think is a fun idea, of trying to outwit someone who can read your mind. I’ve got three strategies for this, and this is one; thinking of things that annoy the mind-reader. So there’s a fun solution.
(What are the other two? I’m not putting them down on paper. What if some telepath came by and read it? I’m not going to tell you, I’m burying them deep in my brain.)
(Maybe that’s not the smartest way to keep that particular secret.)
Why are they French? Actually they’re not, it’s just that Benson has somehow got it into his head. And once addressed like that, the Ghiblaine family take on the protective coloration, appearing as those they meet expect them to be.
I mean you don’t actually expect to meet anyone called “Goblin” do you? Or maybe you do.
Tinsel is a very sensible name for a cat, especially a cat in a house with a child.
There are two good ways to introduce yourself to your neighbours I’ve discovered. The first involves baking a cake or something and going round and saying hi. That’s a bit awkward but gets the job done. More interesting is spotting something bad, like the binmen making a mess or lorries blocking the road, or a pot hole up the street and talking to them about it. People love to complain, and you instantly have someone in common. Very rarely is someone pro-pothole.
(Wait a moment, adding ‘loves potholes’ to the Strandbridge story idea notes.)
If there’s a point to this, and I don’t insist that there is, this might just be a fun adventure, some people finding the door to fairyland and coming out unscathed. If there’s a point to this and why should there be, parsing points and meaning is an interesting way to respond to some writing but not the only one. If there’s a point though, then maybe it’s that you could find out more about your neightbours, you might have more in common than you think, or you might have greater differences than you imagined.
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