Alive

As part of my selfless espionage, I am forced into attending many social outings with the heinous Jonny B.

One such ritual humiliation is the weekly snooker match. As it has been since the dawn of time, we are left cursing our general lack of skill and manliness, as we succumb to a 25-0 beating. Fast forward several hours, (and several pints), and we are travelling at breakneck speed along a small country road in the middle of nowhere. Jonny is driving. He has been drinking again. He's always drinking these days. I beseech him to slow down, but he just stares into the gloom ahead and ignores my cries.

We round a tight corner at high speed, the car tilts, leaves the ground for several minutes, and executes a mid-air triple-salko. The next thing I know I am flying through the air, like a beautiful angel, down from Heaven for the weekend, before thumping face-down into the snow, head ringing and balls aching. The Firm trains you to be calm in these situations, but I am shaking with fury and fear as I struggle to my feet.

The car is laying upside-down in a ditch. It looks like it has been through one of those compactors you get at the breakers. You know, I think they had one in Superman. Or like Luke Skywalker would have looked like if he had actually got crushed in that room that he was stuck in with Princess Leia. I am babbling incoherently, and struggling to think of a half-decent metaphor, but hopefully you get the picture.

I fall to my knees and look inside. John Twonill is out cold and bleeding from a nasty gash to his temple. Len the Fish is conscious, but has a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. I think he might be dead, before he coughs bright red blood all over the back seat. The Chipper Barman is upside down with his head in Len's lap. (I don't know whether he was like that before the crash, I was in the front.) Jonny B is strangely unharmed, and busy crawling out of the driver's door.

"Hit some black ice", he explains. The man's audacity knows no bounds.

We set about pulling the others from the wreckage. John appears to have broken some ribs, and Len has to forcibly extricate a rogue snooker cue which appears to have lodged itself in his arse, but otherwise we are remarkably unharmed.

We assess our situation. The country road we had been travelling down is deathly quiet. The snow is falling heavily now. I can barely see ten yards in front of me.

"We must find some shelter", says Len the Fish, to which there is general assent. We do not know which way to proceed. Jonny B says that he did some orienteering when he was in the third year, and says that you can find north by sticking your tongue out and seeing how many flakes you can catch standing in different directions.

It sounds like bollocks to me, but I’m still reeling from the crunching ball-ache, so I nod and tell him to lead the way.

Hours later we are still making away across snow-covered fields. Visibility has dropped to nothing. John has turned slightly blue and can only walk for short periods before he has to be given a piggyback by Len, who has kept the snooker cue, ostensibly to ward off any bears, wolves, etc. I think he might just be a bit fond of it.

The Chipper Barman wails "I don't want to die out here" from time to time. Chipper no more, the poor man.

We make camp under some old bits of wood that have been put together in a seemingly haphazard fashion. It is not much of a shelter, but it will do until the snow subsides. We swallow our pride and cling to each other for warmth.

I awake during the night to find Jonny B gnawing on my buttocks. Whether this is a sign of affection or hunger I am not quite sure, and I am too tired to make a big issue of it. I tell him to bugger off and roll over, and try and get some sleep.

Morning comes, finally, and we wake to find the world covered in snow. We survey our surroundings, and find that we are in the Chipper Barman's garden. We have been sleeping in the shed we helped move, back in September 2005, if memory serves.

Lucky.

Despair, hope, etc.

The cold northerly wind whistles through the Village, scattering leaves hither and thither, like so many broken dreams.

In the village pub, a lone patron hunches over the remnants of a beer that has long warmed in his hand.

The village shop is closed, as it is closed on every Wednesday at this time of the year. Business is not what is used to be. Up the stairs, the shopkeeper sobs quietly into her Tesco Value porridge, and wonders what will happen to her once the shutters come down, for the final time.

The bowls club is silent, (except for the distant howls of a 75 year-old grandma being tag-teamed by a roaming pair of itinerant fencers, down for the weekend from Glasgow, but that is not the point of this story). The turf is frozen over. Summer is a distant memory, as far away as the bright lights of London are from this dour, terminally ill place. The remnants of a society long cast-adrift from the outside world huddle inside their faux-period cottages, heating one room at a time. This is how the Eskimos feel, looking out from their igloos over miles and miles of cold, unrelenting bleakness.

Here comes the man now, shuffling, hunched-over, up the hill from his house. Face buried inside his coat, against the sub-zero temperatures that have befallen this outcast community. Who is this man? What is he doing, out alone, struggling up the road on this wretched day? He stumbles towards the village pub, almost falls through the door, and shakes off his dreary garb.

It is him.

The bartender wakes from his half-sleep, face brightening like the dawn of a summer's day. Legend has arrived in his pub, and he feels proud.

It is The Author, (from down the hill).

The man who has shown that something good can come from this desolate wilderness. That there is hope! Yes, hope! There is hope for us all. For if one man can become a published author, then perhaps we can all fulfill our dreams, our loves, our deepest longings. A shout goes up from the figure in the corner, a mangled kind of "hooray"! The barman turns on the jukebox, and from across the village they come, to wallow in the pool of brilliance that emanates from this man. In the village shop, the shopkeeper removes the shotgun from her mouth and turns toward the sounds of the gathering. She wipes a tear from her eye, and knows that everything, everything, everything will be OK.

The party will last long into the night. The wine will flow, the people will laugh and when it ends, they will embrace, and they will look into each other's eyes and say, yes, this is a good life, this is worth living, for the small moments, if nothing else. When they wake in the morning, they will smile and go about their business, refreshed, with a spring in their step, and a reserve of joy in their hearts.

The Author returns to his cottage, kisses his family as they lay sleeping, and sits, thinking.

Boom!

The interesting thing about the Terrorist's Handbook is that it's really, really badly named. I mean, if you had called it something crap like "Musings on the etymology of gardening-related terminology, 1912-1915", you'd probably be able to sell it on the high-street without anyone blinking an eye. But call it the Terrorist's Handbook and we here at the MI5 can easily track any nutcase who types the words into Google. And then catch them and give them a good shoeing.

Furthermore, if you were to take the important bits - like how to blow people up - then you could take each letter, put it at the start of each sentence, and have a really clever way of disseminating Jihad information to the sleeper-cell community.

Note to self: keep a keen eye out for Jonny B attempting to release any innocuous-looking publications.