Tag Archives: meese

Island News

Festive preparations

2 Comments

There are a number of things you might be trying to celebrate in the coming weeks, so we bring you advice about how best to survive the festive season on Hopeless, Maine.

Those of you who like getting into the water need to keep in mind both the murderously low temperatures and the murderously hungry waterlife. We will undertake to believe that you’re just very keen on cold water and not that you have been driven to madness if you persist in this peculiar activity. Although I’m increasingly suspicious that some of you flapping about in lakes are so undead as to not feel the cold, which is rather indecorous of you.

Say no to night potato vodka. It is not magically better or safer right now, it will hurt you. Just don’t. Please.

After last year we are fairly sure that the dustcats know about Yule cats. They won’t actually kill you if you don’t have new clothes, but anyone looking especially shabby is at serious risk of being pounced on in unusually humiliating ways.

It isn’t Father Christmas, he doesn’t come here. The noise on the roof is almost certainly a donkey. Sometimes they poop down the chimneys. Whether you consider that a gift is very much at your discretion.

If anything has hatched out of your meese stocking, burn it at the first available opportunity.

For those of you who are more recently arrived, please be aware that there is an island tradition of knocking on doors after dark and asking for food and drink. If you don’t comply, there will be singing. You have been warned. Other things also knock on doors after dark looking for food, and the ones that do not do the singing are arguably much worse.

Please leave out at least one candle during the coming weeks. We have good traditions of keeping the departed well supplied. Angry ghosts are so unseasonal.

If you find yourself feeling that you are having fun, check your pantry supplies for signs of mould and fungus, and ascertain whether you are also feverish. In case of jollity, remember that the black eyed meese in your stocking are here to help you and that breathing in their peculiar aroma will put you back to normal in no time.

News Item

Life without the lens

Leave a comment

and still, there are tentacles

Since last week, Reverend Davies has exorcised my camera. Annamarie Nightshade has charmed it. Doc Willoughby took the lens off and cleaned it with alcohol, and Arthur Gibbous, glasses maker and inventor, took the whole thing apart and put it back together again.

 Currently, photographs, once developed, all look like the image I have published alongside this article. Consequently I cannot tell you if this is the picture I took of Parables Chevins’ remarkable meese (they’re emerging early this year!) or my attempt to capture an image of the sea creature that appeared off our shores on Tuesday. It might, equally, have been the outrageous street scene that followed a fire in a house of ill repute on Wednesday, or the frankly improbable wedding dress worn by Chastity Jones for her marriage to Exodus Chevins on Friday last. I didn’t know we had that many rodents on the island, and the patience required to skin and stitch them must have been tremendous.

News Item

Spade Up Sunday

1 Comment
who knows how your meese will grow?

 Yes folks, this Sunday is the day to get your spade out, before the ground freezes. The first frosts will have softened up the black eyed meese, and there’s no shortage of them under the hedges and in dank corners this year.

I find it works best to gather them into on old pot, cup or other lidless container, for ease of lifting in the spring, and to bury them at a depth of about a foot. A thick layer of kitchen scraps will help them grow. However, from experience it is best to give them only vegetable matter. Meese who are given meat scraps frequently turn out aggressive.