Contineo

The conversations were about the really BIG issues in the world that needed to be addressed. The participants in the conversation were a group of young people. On a piece of scrap paper they had listed a number of issues that they believed to be important. They spent the next ten minutes defending their selection to others in the group. The intention was not just to see who was the most passionate of speakers and could persuade others to see that their issue was the BIG issue.  People tend to wear blinkers when it comes to BIG issues. They don’t always demonstrate 360 degrees of vision. They know all the details of animal experiments but know nothing about modern day slavery, or know the benefits of fairtrade but know little about the near extinction of rare butterflies. An important part of the discussion was simply to help them to take off their blinkers and see a wider spectrum of BIG issues.

My own top-of-the-list issue, had I been asked, is probably ISOLATION.

A couple of weeks ago the BBC aired a series of programmes in the morning hosted by the celebrity chef James Martin. He wasn’t wearing his chef’s hat and showing us interesting things to do with butternut squash. He had recruited a number of other celebrities, sporting personalities, TV presenters and the like, to visit the streets where they grew up and see what things had changed. While they knocked on doors and hugged people that knew them as children, James talked to people who were lonely. The loss of a wife or a husband seemed to be a common denominator. Grown up children lived the other side of the country. Next door neighbours moved out and strangers moved in and “outside” became a frightening place to be. The end of each programme was a neighbourly get together - a street party or tea at the local community centre. Under the watchful eye of the camera people connected with each other and representatives from different charities were there to point people in the right direction.

I am not sure whether it was the first or the second programme when I recognised my potential future self.  She was an old lady in her eighties or nineties. She had become isolated. She lived by herself and she rarely had visitors. She didn’t have “Meals on Wheels” because it would seem like the ultimate surrender to become dependent on someone. Asking for assistance was not the way she did things. Seeing my potential future self was so scary that I didn’t watch any more of the programmes for a week or so.

Warning bells rang! I am not in my eighties or nineties and I have time to lay down a different “old lady” path. I am not a very good joiner-in. I value my privacy. I am not gregarious. I am not the life and soul of any party – although that might not always be true. I think that sometimes I am not comfortable in my own skin and would like to crawl into someone else’s, someone with a bit of the exhibitionist in them. There are no children or grandchildren to bring new leases of life, or to live the other side of the country and not visit.
 

“Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.” (2 Cor 9:6) Paul might have been talking about giving and the next verse talks about God loving a cheerful giver, but giving and sowing encompasses a whole range of actions. If I rarely engage in conversations with people I have just met I am never going to reap a wider set of friends.  If I am too busy to meet someone for coffee there will come a time when they stop asking.  If all I ever do is complain about the state of the world, or the government or the weather, what kind of fruit can I expect to reap?

I am not planning a list of New Year’s resolutions. I don’t think I am even going to hunt down the Bible verse that will see me through the year, although 2 Cor 9:6 looks to be a good one.  

A Facebook picture suggested seeking out a single word for the year ahead. I downloaded a book onto my Kindle – “My One Word” by Mike Ashcraft and Rachel Olsen. There is a DVD out there somewhere and course notes to run a church programme based on the one word. You're not supposed to get yourself stressed out wondering if the word you have chosen for the year is God’s word for you, or thinking there’s a better word on your list that maybe you missed. 

My one word is CONNECT. I love the Latin version of it -  Contineo is defined as: to hold together, to keep together, to connect or to join. That’s my word for the year. Not a list of things – just a single word. It’s not really about the number of connections like collecting Facebook friends.  It’s about quality of them, connecting not just to other people, but to God, to nature and to the unexplored parts of me.
 

Contineo.

The adventure begins…

My Real Life

I am dragging words around the dance floor of the page trying to choreograph a poem. The end result is interesting. The straitjacket rules made it a challenge to write. I liked the concept of an "endangered virtue" and someone's life story written in verbs - the things that they do.

The prompt on page...no page numbers apparently - the nightmare of control freaks:-

"Write a 12 line poem whose lines begin with words that start with the letters R, V, H, O, K and E.  Use each letter twice."

My Real Life

Real life is this, I tell myself, as I

visit the corners of my soul

Here my heart beats strong but

out of sync with a world where

kindness is an endangered virtue

expressed so rarely by so few

Read my story written in active

verbs like love and sacrifice

His life before it was mine.  I am

opened petals unfolded before the Son

Known, not merely by surface and skin but with

every layer understood

There is a second part to the challenge:-

"Try it again, but this time make it rhyme."

Real life, not always calm and still, is

Visited by light and shade

Here daily beats the steadfast heart

Off centre in sin’s world unmade

Kindness breathes its healing air

Exhaled by those who ache to care

Read my story written now in

Verbs like love and sacrifice

His words so sweet I make them mine.

Oh never can the world entice

Known am I beneath my skin and

Every thought that dwells within

The Mind Provoked to Dance

“712 More Things to Write About” by the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto provides 712 creative writing prompts to “provoke the mind to dance”.  It was on my Christmas List to Santa and he was kind enough to leave it under the Christmas tree.

 Unlike the Bible it's acceptable to just turn to any page to see what the prompt is.

My first entry:-

“People Who Mispronounce My Name”

Two people come to mind when it comes to mispronouncing my name. The first person was Kay Grant, or Kay Carver, if we are going by married names, although she was Kay Grant when she did it.  She used to call me Menanlie instead of Melanie.

My best friend and I, in our school days, went through a phase of speaking backwards.  She was Thiduj and I was Einalem for a while.

There are a lot of people that pronounce “Mel” correctly but wrongly assume that it is short for “Melissa”, but that technically doesn’t count as mispronouncing it.

You know of course, as I keep telling people, that it means “dark and mysterious.”  The dark bit is related to the Greek word for “ink”.  The mysterious bit I just add for dramatic effect.  It is a real battle not to live up to my name.  It is hard to be an open book.

The second person to mispronounce my name was me.  Not my first name, obviously.  There were no cute baby-getting-it-wrong moments when it came to me saying my name or the names of brothers and sisters, of which I had more than a few.

It is my married surname that I stumble over. Too often I say “Kerr” to rhyme with “fur” or “spur” or “occur” when it should be “Kerr” to rhyme with “share” and “spare” and “don’t-you-dare”.

I suppose those times when I am giving myself a firm telling off by using my full married name – Melanie Kerr (rhyming it with fur, spur and occur) I could ignore myself on principle.

The Last Straw and the Camel’s Back

I am looking at straw.  Not the real stuff, the yellow, prickly stuff that cows eat and guinea pigs sleep in, but the metaphorical stuff.  I look not upon a pile of it but just one single strand.  Yes, I am faced with the piece of straw that breaks the camel’s back. 

So what do I do? Surrender to it and comfort myself that I held it together for a good long time? Mop up my tears with a bath towel?

I confess a pity party appealed.  I entertained the notion for a while.  I thought about robbing the Peter resources in me to pay the Paul problems I was encountering only to discover I’d already done that weeks ago. Peter was empty and Paul was demanding to be paid.

So what did I do?

I’d written a poem earlier on in the day – before Paul appeared.  If the truth in the poem was genuine truth and not just pretty words that rhymed, there was only one response.

I let Jesus see my struggle.  I let Him know my pain.  I listened with my heart and my spirit…and I heard His victory song in my ear.

God is no use to me if I keep Him locked up in words in the book – even if that book is the world’s best seller.  Faith opens the book and releases the words inside.  Faith invites me to take God at His word and grab hold of His promises.

Paul makes his threats.  Peter cannot help.  But God?  He has given me everything I need for life and godliness – in abundance.

The last straw that would seek break the camel’s back – I pick it up and toss it harmlessly away.

Incarnation

The Ageless and Eternal One

Beyond all time and space

He folds away divinity

To mortal flesh embrace

He comes to keep a promise

An ugly curse to break

He steps into our darkness, calls

This sleeping world to wake

He sees us in our struggles

And knows us in our pain

And sings o’er us a victory song

A powerful refrain

The sin that binds and bites and burns

He comes to wash away

And opens wide a brighter path

A new and living way

Not Looking Sideways

It was a snatch of a dream, not a whole story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It was just a brief scene of me sitting somewhere in a hotel lobby perhaps. A friend passed by and touched me on the shoulder.  She commented about my hair.

In real life a couple of weeks ago I had visited her salon.  My hair was getting too long and chopping at the fringe was doing nothing to make me feel better.  The man that does my hair was on holiday and I just needed a cut.  It wasn’t all about the fringe or the hair getting too long.  It was about the pampering – the being at the centre of someone’s attention for an hour or two – and coming out of the experience feeling better.

In my dream I think I might have growled at her. What the stylist had done in her salon with all of her years of cutting hair and her access to the best of shampoos and stuff – I couldn’t recreate at home.  It was, I told myself, her fault that my hair was awful. The new style had looked sexy and sassy when I left the salon. A week later it was an impossible mess of sticking-out-in-all-directions-disorder.  I should have listened to my gut and not been talked into a new style.

In real life it was nothing to do with her.  I was the one who put the picture in front of the hairdresser – not my usual bob.  I asked if I had enough hair to make it happen.  I wasn’t that niave to think I would look like the girl in the picture.  She had neat eyebrows and a heart shaped face.

So the stylist chopped away and my usual bob was transformed into something other than my usual bob. It was nice.  I wasn’t raving about it.  Give it a few weeks to settle let grow a bit and I would begin to like it more.  The ladies at the salon agreed between themselves that it was a transformation.

I cannot recreate the style at home.  I have “first day hair” – freshly washed and dried and just a shy short of how it looked in the salon.  Then I have “second day hair” which is an unwashed impossible mess.  Nothing works except a wet brush that flattens everything down to one step away from a paper bag. I don’t want to wash my hair every day.

Of course, these dream things are never about the dream in it literal state.  There is always a layer or two underneath.  My friend looks amazing all the time.  She brims over with confidence. She owns her own business, has a lovely home and a family.  She is flourishing. 

I on the other hand have “second day hair” sticking out in all directions. I rarely brim with confidence.  To say that I am struggling with myself is an understatement.  My home will never grace the pages of an Ideal Home magazine. The garden is looking nice thanks to J Fields and Sons Landscaping.  But, apart from a neat garden, flourishing is not the word that describes my life at the moment.

“Mel-World” isn’t an ordered place at the best of times.  There are bits of Mel-World that I love – my relationship with Jesus, my prayer life and a clean bathroom.  There are lots of bits that I simply put up with because I am too lazy to do anything about it – the messy corners, the ironing pile and the paper confetti next to the paper shredder. 

Sometimes I look at “Marion-World” or “Angela-World” and line them up along “Mel-World” and theirs look so much nicer than mine.  Most of the time I don’t do this but just sometimes I do. In the horse racing world my world has fallen at the first hurdle as they gloriously cross the finish line.

I was reading John 21 this morning.  Peter was just licking his fingers after the fish breakfast as Jesus struck up a conversation.  Peter takes out another contract with Jesus to look after the flock under the difficult years of the coming persecution.  His long term future in the club looks bleak with the possibility of crucifixion.

Peter looked over at John and asked about his future.  Was John going to get the better deal?  Did Jesus have a soft spot for John and was giving him an easier ride?

I look over at Marion’s world or at Angela’s and ask the same kind of questions.  From where I am standing it looks like they have the better deal.  They don’t seem to struggle like I do.  I know Jesus doesn’t have favourites but from where I am standing…it looks like He does.

Jesus basically told Peter that what happened to John was none of his business.  Peter had his own Jesus-appointed destiny just as John had his own story to live. Looking sideways at John meant that Peter was not looking forwards at his own challenges.  Looking sideways at John meant that he was not looking at Jesus.

Jesus is telling me, too, to stop living my life looking sideways at other people.  I have my own Jesus-appointed destiny.  It’s not a vague mystery to me.  If I need to look anyway other than on the road ahead I should be looking, not at Marion or Angela, but at Jesus.

Leper

I am the filthy leper

I stumble and I kneel

Before the man of power and

Ask for words that heal

Too long have I have inhabited

This damaged, broken shell

The locust years eroding

All hope that I’d be well

His touch so unexpected

I yield to His embrace

I'm lifted from my mire

To gaze upon His face

My shroud of sickness loosens

And from my shoulder slips

The heart once dead within me

It stirs, it leaps, it skips

Gone are the red raw blisters

And gone the weeping sores

He speaks and heaven answers

My fractured frame restores

I’ve never known such wholeness

A new life has begun

And I will ever sing my praise

For all this man has done

My sin I wore as leprosy with

Wounds upon my skin

Yours perhaps not visible but

Hidden deep within

It’s time to stop your stumbling

And at His feet to fall

The wholeness He bestowed on me -

His touch is there for all

In Good Hands

In Good Hands

Whenever night falls

The earth is always

There to catch it

(by Roger McGough)

In Good Hands

Whenever I fall

The Father is always

There to catch me

(by Melanie Kerr)

Anonymous From Scotland

My husband, in the passenger seat of the car, on the way to work this morning, turned his head to look at me.
 
“It’s you, isn’t it?  You have re-mortgaged the house, haven’t you?”

We were listening to Chris Evans on Radio 2.  It was the final ten minutes of the “Children in Need” auction “8 Go Mad in Monaco”.  The top spot was “Anonymous From Scotland” pledging some obscene amount of money that I am never likely to see in my lifetime.  His or her place seemed secure.  It was the ones at the bottom of the list that were losing their grip and falling off the auction cliff as other, richer pledgees scrambled over them.

Four lucky couples will head to next year’s famous Monaco Grand Prix as very special guests. A private jet will fly them to the Cote D’ Azur. A Sunseeker motor yacht will sail them around the bay. Then there will be ‘Access All Areas’ passes for the Grand Prix weekend and brunch with one of the racing teams.  There will even be a personal invitation to Prince Albert’s palace for his exclusive Saturday night cocktail party.

Just what part of that deal sounds like anything I would want to do? Besides, the dates, Thurs 23rd to Sun 26th May 2013, are not good for me.

I could do the private jet thing and the motor yacht things but the racing car thing is not my cup of tea. I would feel incredibly out of place in Prince Albert’s Palace and I don’t possess anything that would pass as a cocktail dress.

I’m not sure whether part of the treat involves driving any of the race cars but it reminds me that I almost came third in the Snowman Rally.

The Snowman’s Rally

A bright and sunny February day

We pack up the car and drive away

Heading out to see Loch Ness

Away from all the week day stress

The roads seem empty to my eye

One cannot help but wonder why

Vroom! A race car overtakes

A loud and roaring sound it makes

It swings the corner out of sight

And gives us both a massive fright

Another race car roars behind

We hear its engine loudly grind

And then it slowly dawns on us

The local paper – all the fuss

The Snowman’s Rally is on today

And us in our mini are in the way

The race begins on normal roads

Then into forest trails explodes

A sober thought has just occurred

With two gone by, that makes us third!

A café on the road ahead

We park and drink some tea instead

Eating Rudolph

The first date my husband and I went on was a very posh meal.  I have not had many first dates so this one was special, not just because it was the first step in a romance that has lasted twenty three years, but also because it was a rare event for me.  I have never regarded myself as being pretty and I suppose I had settled into what I saw as a permanent place on "the shelf".

The restaurant was expensive.  When faced with the menu I chose the most expensive thing – not because I thought I better make it worth my while since it might be the only date, or that Joseph looked like he possessed a bulging wallet.  The venison dish was the only thing on the menu that I could eat.  Everything else had a fish connection and I was never big on fish. I am glad to say that I have since lifted the ban on fish. 

The other thing that sticks in my memory about the date is the coffee.  For a very expensive restaurant one might have expected a jug of milk but resting beside the cup, on the edge of the saucer was a plastic portion of milk. I spent quite a while trying to pull the foil lid off.  I was listening to what Joe was saying with less than my full attention.  I eventually worked out that that if I snapped the little triangle of plastic on the edge of wee pot I could get to the milk.  The trouble was the little triangle of plastic broke and fell into my coffee.  There might have been a spoon, but I was loath to try to retrieve the little plastic triangle.  I didn’t want to draw attention to what had happened. I assumed that if I sipped very slowly and left an inch or two of coffee at the bottom of the cup I would be fine.  I forgot about leaving the inch or two of coffee. The cup was drained and the little plastic triangle was not there.  I had swallowed it.

Joseph confessed much later that the plan had never been to go to a posh restaurant at all.  It was only when I turned up on his doorstep dressed up that he felt obligated to take me somewhere posh.

Giving the girls the lowdown on the date afterwards one of my friends wailed, “You ate Bambi!”

It was our twenty second anniversary not so long ago.  The posh restaurant was intentional this time. Yet again I was faced with a fish menu with venison buried in the middle of it.  Braised venison and pheasant sausage, something apparently associated with Winston Churchill.

It wasn’t a comfortable meal for me.

The venue was the Atholl Arms Hotel in Blair Atholl.  There was the usual mixture of all things Scottish - tartan carpets, roaring log fires and around the room, mounted on the walls, the skulls of a couple of dozen or more deer heads complete with antlers.

Every empty eye socket was turned in my direction.  The antlers took on a menacing air. Not only was I eating Bambi, but I had an audience of his long gone relatives watching me do so. And the pheasant sausage was disgusting.

I read last week in one of the newspapers about David Cameron in some Scandinavian country sealing an agreement of some kind with a meal of braised reindeer.

“You ate Rudolph!” I wailed to no one at all since the front room was empty. I am not sure who committed the greatest crime – me eating Bambi or him eating Rudolph. 

The Cowardly Wuss in Me

Yesterday my husband and I had a three and a hour journey from Glasgow to Inverness.  The previous day we had waded our way through puddles and been drenched by relentless rain.  The day had begun bright and sunny and we saw no need to pick up the brolly. It seemed somewhat unfair that the train journey happened under blue skies and sun blazing through the train windows.

We had an array of books and newspapers to keep us occupied.  My husband had been at a training course for work and lectured me for a while on how to run a good business and how to spot a bad one! He also insisted that I complete the questionnaire he had done – “What makes me tick?” It is entirely possible that if I did the same questionnaire today I might have chosen different answers.  All these things are supposed to be about the first gut reaction, not carefully considered or dissected.  I wasn’t supposed to think too much about my answers.

Did I set myself reasonable challenges and meet them? Reasonable challenges? Yes!  Meeting them? Not always.  I have a lazy gene that pops up every so often.

Did I enjoy starting conversations with strangers? Seriously?  I find it challenging to start conversations with people I know well!  I also have a shy gene that I constantly battle with.

Was I a risk taker? I am reminded of the verse in the book of Proverbs about the man who won’t leave his house because there might be a bear or a lion walking down the road.  I am not that bad but I cannot condemn the man.

Do I avoid confrontation and conflict? I would like to avoid it, yes.  Most times it is not avoidable.  I would say that I wind myself up to deal with these things.  The conversation in my head as I approach the situation sounds very reasonable and balanced but like all the conversations I have with myself I forget that I’m not dealing with me.  The other person doesn’t follow my script. Emotions get whipped up to hurricane force and, reason, like age-old trees in a tropical storm, gets knocked over.  Carefully-rehearsed words trip out of the mouth in the wrong order.

Do I fear silence? No. I don’t feel the need to fill a silence with words.  I recognise and appreciate silence. 

Do I handle criticism well? Does anyone? In my early years of writing I was devastated when someone picked fault in things I had written.  It was as if they had pulled a limb from my baby and quite callously too.

After I had finished the list of questions with agree or disagree – no maybes on offer – my husband did the adding up.  It turns out that yesterday, on a train from Inverness to Glasgow, after a very wet and squelchy day in the city centre and after a passing passenger, with a large rucksack on their back, had knocked a plastic cup of orange juice over my kindle, and the sun was cooking me slowly through the train window – I rated really high on security and affiliation and very poorly on achievement and influence! I need to feel safe AND that someone liked me.

As I was answering the questions I was aware that the end result didn’t look good.  I was turning out to be a cowardly wuss.  I felt like a train heading for a cliff and despite pulling on the brakes it was still relentlessly steaming ahead.

I am convinced that on another day the answers would have been different.  The questionnaire caught me at the wrong time and wrong place!

I am equally convinced that regardless of wrong times and wrong places there is always a better response open to me.

I was wondering how the apostle Paul might have answered the questionnaire faced with prison bars and chains.  On a Wednesday perhaps when the stink of the place was overwhelming and his feet or hands chaffed from the heavy cuffs he might have given one set of answers. On a Friday perhaps after seeing Luke or John Mark the previous day or holding a letter in his hand from one of the churches he might have given a different set of answers.  I can’t believe Paul didn’t have his own cowardly wuss moments. 

But that’s it – they were just moments, perhaps even whole days or weeks, maybe a month of two of cowardly wuss – but they were passing and they did not define who he was or how he behaved. And they were far outweighed by the courageous warrior moments.

Sitting with God this morning I confessed I was a cowardly wuss.  He didn’t disagree but reminded me that I didn’t have to always be a cowardly wuss.  My need to feel safe? – He would always meet that.  My need to know that someone liked me? – He loves me unconditionally!

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I shouldn’t be surprised when God answers prayer.  I almost didn’t recognise it when I was reading the paper yesterday – but there it was in black and white – “British jihadis want to come home”.

God and I had prayed together about the situation months ago. We had prayed that there would come a time when the young British Muslim men and women who had left UK to join IS in Syrian would have had enough of blood and executions and want to come home.  They had purchased a one-way ticket to what they believed to be a meaningful life standing up for a righteous cause, but it turned out not to be so.  The grass turned out to be less than green on the other side of the fence.

Wanting to come home and actually being allowed to come home are two very different things.  It’s not just the UK government who don’t want them to come home and are threatening prison sentences, but the IS don’t want them going home either.  Mehdi Hassan, just 19-years-old was killed this week because he 'wanted to come home'.

These young people are truly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The less sympathetic among us will want to say, “You made your bed and now you must lie on it,” I think of some parents of these Muslim children who have talked about betrayal and how they cannot forgive their child’s actions.

When did any of us make the sensible decisions when we were nineteen years old?  Didn’t we, even at nineteen, sometimes feel our lives to be on a meaningless path? Didn’t we long for something a little more exciting?  The older generation had lost its way, got side-tracked by mortgages and bills and keeping up with the Joneses.

God snared me at 18 years old. He nudged me onto a very different path to the one I had planned.  His path wasn't bad for me in any way. Following God does not automatically mean something negative, destructive or divisive. Christians are required by God to serve the community and to love people unconditionally.

I believe the disillusioned jihadis should be allowed to come home. Who better to talk to the next wave of radicalised Muslims? These people had swallowed the same propaganda and let the fire be ignited in their hearts.  They have been out there and they know how the story ends.  Who better to talk sense to the next wave?

They are still young.  Their ways are not set in stone.  They are malleable. They represent the child who stuck his hand in the fire and got burnt and won’t do it again.  Wisdom has come quickly to them.

One day they will not be so young and they will become hard.  Right now they have hearts soft enough to hurt when they see acts of horror meted out on innocent communities.  Leave them there and those hearts will harden and they will hurt less and less as time goes on and horror falls upon horror.

If other countries like Denmark, Sweden and Germany have set up programmes aimed at bringing them home we should be able to follow their example. 

The times when we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place it doesn’t help to be told that we have made our bed and must lie on it.  It’s not about being soft on the offender and letting anyone off.  Very often the way out of our rock and hard place requires effort to change our thinking about things.  We have no “Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free” card that we can slap on the table when times are tough.  We can’t snap our fingers, like Mary Poppins, and the mess of the floor tidies itself up.  

No one expects it to be easy.  A lot of hurt has been caused by the actions of radicalised young people to families and communities but now is not the time for writing them off.  

When one prayer is answered it often leads to another connected prayer.  I pray for a Spirit of repentance and forgiveness and for people to be given a new start.  It is everything the Christian faith is about.

Cotton Parva

The topic for the Faithwriter’s Weekly Challenge is to write a mystery or thriller.  I have seen too many episodes of every crime drama ever aired to think that I could write something that wasn’t plagiarised.  One online story ideas website suggested I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers before attempting my own.  With just a few days left to the deadline, I don’t have time to read a variety, or even just the one book.  I found this site on my online travels.  Fill in the blank spaces and click on the plot generator button and, hey presto, you have your own unique mystery short story.  It’s a hoot!

http://www.plot-generator.org.uk/

Cotton Parva

A Mystery by Elliot Jones

The quiet, old town of Cotton Parva holds a secret.

Clement Overton has the perfect life working as a gardener in the city and rambling with his reliable girlfriend, Sally Perkins.

However, when he finds a heavy cake in his cellar, he begins to realise that things are not quite as they seem in the Overton family.

A flower show leaves Clement with some startling questions about his past, and he sets off to strange Cotton Parva to find some answers.

At first the people of Cotton Parva are determined and honest. He is intrigued by the curiously clever vicar, Gene Hollister. However, after he introduces him to hard betting, Clement slowly finds himself drawn into a web of murder, jealousy and perhaps, even lying.

Can Clement resist the charms of Jilly Hollister and uncover the secret of the heavy cake before it's too late, or will his demise become yet another Cotton Parva legend?

Praise for Cotton Parva

"Who wouldn't give up a life of rambling with their reliable girlfriend to spend a little time with a curiously clever vicar?"

- The Daily Tale

"About as mysterious as finding a poo in a public toilet. However, Cotton Parva does offer a valuable lesson about not getting into hard betting."

- Enid Kibbler

"The only mystery, is why did I keep reading after page one?"

- Hit the Spoof

"I could do better."

- Zob Gloop