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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh @[email protected] · 2022-10-29 · 23:56 UTC

The thread about David Allan’s watercolours of Edinburgh workers in the 18th century; what they looked like and what their jobs entailed

This thread was originally written and published in October 2020.

Show me a fireman that’s as dashing and dapper as an 18th century Edinburgh fireman.

Edinburgh Fireman, David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

The firemark on the bucket and helmet identify him as being in the employ of the “Sun Fire Office”, founded in 1710 in London and one of the first such organisations. His helmet is probably painted leather, and over his shoulder he carries a length of water pipe. The municipal Edinburgh Fire Establishment was not formed until 1824. Owners of buildings could subscribe to a Fire Insurance Office, and in return for payment would receive a plaque to put on the wall of their property. If it were to catch fire, they could call on the firefighters of their insurance to deal with the blaze. In Edinburgh, the Sun Fire Office was at “The Exchange”, the building which would later become the City Chambers.

This beautiful watercolour sketch is by David Allan, and fortunately there’s more where it came from. Allan hailed from Alloa, born in 1744. The young David was expelled from school when only 10 years old for drawing a caricature of his teacher. Attending the Academy of Art in Glasgow he honed his craft in Rome, where he lived and studied for 10 years. He established himself in Edinburgh after a spell in London that had left him ill and unrecognised, finding success as a painter of family portraits and as a book illustrator (clients included Alan Ramsay). More importantly as far as I am concerned, he also producing a large and interesting body of his own work, of documentary sketches of characters and workers around the town. In this respect he seems to be heavily influenced by Paul Sandby, the “Father of English Watercolour“, who started his artistic professional life as a military draughtsman and cartographer in Edinburgh in the 1750s, and shared an interest in illustrating the everyday scenes of the town.

The man below is a caddie (a porter). He wears his licence as a badge on his coat, the lowland garb of knee length breeches, stockings, a hodden overcoat and on his head the ubiquitous blue bonnet. His carrying basket rests on the wall behind him. Caddies were of special importance in the town, and were regulated by the council, hence the badge. They were expected to know everything, everyone and everywhere. If a visitor to the town was important enough, they would be allocated a caddy of their own as a porter, message runner and local guide. The term is from the French cadet, and has been applied to the game of golf, where the caddy is the player’s porter and guide.

An Edinburgh Porter or Caddie, David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Coalmen at work. The lad on the cart wears a hodden jacket, breeches and the blue bonnet. He loads large lumps of coal onto the back of the other, who wears a short military redcoat. Note the load is taken around the forehead by a leather strap, the same would be the case for the caddie’s basket. Coal was an essential but expensive item; although it was plentiful in the Lothians, the cost of transporting it even a few miles was high due to a combination of poor roads and it being at the mercy of carters. Colliers and coal haulers were at this time still bonded labourer, living an existence very close to slavery, however something about this pair suggest to me they were possibly working as coal merchants, perhaps they were a father and son team? If you read down tro the Salt Seller you can find out more about the sorry existence of the bonded labourers in Scotland before 1799.

Coalman. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Chimney sweeps. Their attire is perhaps more genteel looking than you might imagine, but then again this was a very important trade in a crowded and flammable city with labyrinthine chimney flues. Again they are in the ubiquitous breeches and stockings, hodden overcoats and blue bonnets. The iron ball on the rope would be lowered down the lum to dislodge stoor, and they worked in pairs; one up top and the other down at the hearth, calling to eachother up and down the lum. Things aren’t that much different these days for sweeps, although hey may have refinements like overalls and nylon ropes.

Two Edinburgh Chimney Sweeps. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Two chairmen and their sedan, one of the earliest forms of “public” transport (if you could afford it) in the Old Town; its streets were too narrow and precipitous to make even small horse traps much use. These men are quite smartly turned out, as they would be serving a certain class of clientèle. Long coats with coloured facings, breeches, and at least one blue bonnet. The man with the brimmed hat has has highland-style stockings woven on the bias in a chequered pattern – many if not most chairmen were of the Gàidhealtachd. The two appear to be sharing snuff. The poles of the chair carry a lantern. There was an alternative occupation called a “link man”, who was usually a boy and whose job it was to carry that lantern ahead of the chair (for a fee).

An Edinburgh Sedan Chair with Two Porters. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Sedan chairs first appeared in Edinburgh in the 17th century; there were six public chairs in 1687. A century later in 1779, not that long before Allan painted this sketch, there were 180. The wealthy who had need of frequent transportation around town might keep their own private chairs. Most chairs plied their trade from the Tron Kirk, but a servant would usually be sent to fetch it to the exact location where it was required. The trade and its fares was subject to regulation, as “Hackney Chairs”; in 1768 the basic fee within the city was 6d, rising to 1/6d for up to half a mile outside the city, up to 4/- to hire the chair for the day. There were a number of storage sheds for them around the town, one of which survives, off Tweeddale Court.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/davids_leicas/44751274650

A water carrier. Although the supply in Edinburgh by this time was relatively good, it was drawn from a limited number of public wells. Daughters were often sent to fetch water, but if you could afford it you paid a water carrier to bring it to you, very useful considering in the Old Town the wealthy usually lived a couple of floors up, removed from a bit of the noise and stench of the street. This image clearly an ex-military man, he retains his redcoat and his Kilmarnock-style bonnet is of the sort worn by Highland regiments at this time. Based on the basic blue bonnet at one time it would have been decorated with feathers, but these have long since expired. He has a padded leather apron and harness.

An Edinburgh Water Carrier. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Women worked too of course. A Newhaven fishwife in her distinctive uniform which was directly inspired by the Dutch and Flemish tradition; a bright and voluminous set of striped skirts, a cape tied below the beck and a fancy linen cap. The ankles were reputedly always on show. With a heavy creel of fish on her back, supported by a leather strap, and a basket of oysters under her arm, the fishwives would each day make the 2.5 mile, 250ft climb up the hill from Newhaven to the City to sell their wares on the streets or door to door. For the Fisherrow women, who had their own garb, it was a 5 mile walk! Their Scots refrain of Wha’ll o my caller oo? and Wha’ll o my caller herrin? translates as “who’s for fresh oysters?” (or herring). The island of Inchkeith is clearly visible in the background, so she is standing somewhere on the foreshore between Newhaven and Leith.

An Edinburgh Fishwife. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

The pioneering photographers of every day life, Hill & Adamson, made a number of studies of Newhaven fishwives 60 years after Allan’s painting. You can see almost nothing had changed in that time.

Two Newhaven Fishwives, perhaps Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall on the right. 1843. Hill & Adamson. Cc-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Indeed little more changed in the following 100 years. Up until the 1950s, a dwindling number of Newhaven fishwives, some of the older ones still dressed in this manner, still took their wares into the city to sell door to door, although by this time they allowed themselves the luxury of travelling by tram.

Fishwives travelling by tram, c. 1920s-30s. From NLS Mackinnon Collection

A lacemaker. An older woman carrying a “distaff” – a pole from which the strands could be spun. She has an apron over at least 2 layers of plaid, a shawl around her shoulders and a cowled bonnet on her head.

Lacemaker with a Distaff. David Allan, 1784. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

And one of Allan’s most unusual and intriguing portraits, not because it shows a servant girl or a milkmaid, but because she is a black woman. This is one of the earliest images of a black woman in Scotland and is clear and compelling evidence that she was part of the town community. This picture was only secured by the National Gallery of Scotland in 2021, at which time the press release said “Looking directly at the viewer, she is shown in working dress, going about her daily duties and set against the backdrop of an elegant Edinburgh street. Her name and life story is unknown, but it is likely that she was a servant, a milkmaid, as suggested by the large vessel or butter churn shown beside her.” Unlike Allan’s other workers sketches, which are always in a fly-on-the-wall style, this one is clearly posed.

Milkmaid with Butter Churn. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

An officer of the town, perhaps a bailie, reads a proclamation (“God save the King!”), accompanied by two town guardsmen with drums. The officer has a luxurious blue velvet coat, the guardsmen are in simpler red coats with blue facings and tricorne military hats. We can see the spire of St. Giles in the background. Allan has at least four different sketches of town officers in this uniform; the badge on the chest of the coat is clearly the civic arms of the city.

Town Officer and Drummers. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

A member of the town guard, a red military uniform with blue facings and with red breeches. He wears a tricorne hat and carries a “Lochaber axe”, a long-handled pole weapon. The hook on the end was reputed to be for dismounting horsemen but just as likely was to hang the weapon up in the guard room when not in use. The “town rats” or “black banditti” were another class of citizens largely drawn from the Highlands and their nickname gives you an idea of how popular and respected they were by the general public.

A town guardsman. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Not just any old beggar, this unfortunate man’s blue cloak and the prominent tin badge on his breast identify him as a Jockie. The Jockies were King’s Bedesmen, or Blue Gowns; they were a class of beggars by Royal appointment, first licensed by King James VI. Every birthday of the reigning monarch, each Bluegown received a new cloak, their tin badge with the motto “pass and repass“, a Scots shilling for every year of the monarch’s age and their dinner. “Pass and repass” referred to the holder being allowed to pass freely through the land, not being subject to local begging laws or charges of vagrancy. They had a lodge house outside the city; the Jockies Lodge – this is where the neighbourhood of Jock’s Lodge takes its name from.

“Charity”. A beggar with donkey and children. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

A salt seller. Again the load is carried in a basket held with a leather strap around the forehead. A cloth in the basket prevents the salt escaping and could be closed to protect it from rain. Salt was produced along the Forth coast wherever there was good access to coal to evaporate seawater; at Joppa pans, Pinkie pans, Prestonpans etc. Salt was vitally important for everyday life as one of the few preservatives available for meat and fish. After the Act of Union in 1707, a favourable tax regime meant boom times for Scottish producers; this favour definitely did not trickle down to the work force however. The trades of coal miners, coal carriers and salters were of vital importance to the national economy, and although the work was highly skilled it was excruciating labour; in recognition the Scottish government forced them into being permanently bondaged labour in 1606. New workers were not subject to this after 1775, but it was not until an Act of 1799 that the last were freed from their obligations. In 1785, a worker of the age shown in the sketch could well have been a bondaged labourer. Changes to the salt taxation regime and imports of cheap European and later English mined rock salt largely killed off the Scottish sea salt industry in the first half of the 19th century.

A salter. David Allan, 1785. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

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SummerSimo Travel Troubles Notes and The Purring Page @[email protected] · 2026-09-03 · 11:49 UTC

The Gray Suit and the Year of Reckoning

The man in the gray linen suit did not look like an angel, a demon, or a scientist. He looked like an insurance assessor who had spent thirty years eating egg-salad sandwiches in windowless basements. He sat across the laminate table, folded his hands over a blank manila folder, and pushed a cheap ceramic mug of lukewarm tap water toward me.

“If you could relive one single year of your life,” he said, his voice as flat as unironed cotton, “which one would it be?”

I did not ask who he worked for. When people wake up strapped to a vinyl chair in a concrete bunker beneath an abandoned rail depot, they usually waste twenty minutes shouting about the law or their rights. I had worked three years in industrial repossessions; I knew that when men in linen suits ask you a question in an airless room, the law has already packed its bags and caught the midnight bus out of town.

“Two thousand and fourteen,” I said immediately.

The man’s pen hovered over the card. His gray eyebrows twitched. “Most people choose eighteen. Or the year they got married. Or the year before the accident took their legs.”

“I don’t want my youth,” I told him. “And I never married. In 2014, I was thirty-one years old, driving an eight-ton flatbed truck across western New South Wales for an old lunatic named Silas Vance. On November twelfth, Silas took a four-digit brass padlock, snapped it onto a green steel army surplus chest, and stuffed it beneath the floorboards of an underground dugout in White Cliffs. Six hours later, he had a massive coronary over a plate of mutton chops at the local pub. He died before his chin hit the gravy.”

The man in the suit tilted his head. “And what was inside the green chest?”

“Rough-cut pine-tree opals,” I said. “Three sacks of them. Pulled out of an illegal shaft seventy feet below the red clay before the mining inspectors sealed the lease. Worth roughly two point four million on the private market in Antwerp. Vance was the only man who knew the combination to that lock. He told me he’d write it in his field diary the morning before he died, but he burned the notebook during a bout of alcoholic paranoia at three in the morning. I spent ten years digging post holes and hauling drywall for sixty dollars a day, wondering what four numbers were on that dial.”

“You want to go back for money,” the man said. It was not a question.

“I want to go back because I want thirty seconds alone with Silas’s notebook before he throws it into the kerosene stove,” I replied. “Give me 2014. From January first to December thirty-first. I’ll do the sweaty work. I’ll haul his survey gear through the dust, I’ll smile at his crazy stories, and when November comes, I’ll pocket the slip of paper, leave the dugout before the mutton chops arrive, and catch the train to Sydney.”

The assessor unscrewed the cap of a black fountain pen. He pressed the nib to the cardboard folder, drew a single vertical stroke, and blew on the ink.

“A year is a long time, Julian,” he whispered. “You don’t just visit. You occupy the meat. And memory is not a video recording. It’s an open wound that tries to heal while you’re picking at the scab.”

“Just push the button,” I said.

The assessor didn’t push a button. He reached across the table, grabbed my thumb, and bent it backward until the joint made the sound of a dry branch snapping under a boot.

The pain didn’t radiate up my arm. It exploded into a blinding flash of yellow light that smelled of burning rubber and cheap diesel fuel.

My lungs seized. I sucked in air, but it wasn’t the dead, conditioned chill of the bunker; it was hot, dry, and thick with the stench of red clay, river silt, and stale tobacco. My ears popped with a violent rush of wind.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of an ancient, rattling Toyota Land Cruiser. The dashboard was split down the center, its foam padding cooked into hard black toast by decades of ruthless sun. Through the bug-splattered windshield, the Cobb Highway stretched dead-straight into an undulating sea of saltbush and dry grass, trembling under a midday heat mirage that turned the horizon into liquid silver.

My hand was gripping the door handle. My thumb didn’t hurt. I looked down at my hands. The skin was tan, taut, scarred at the knuckles from steel fencing wire, free of the liver spots and stiffness that had settled into my fingers over the past decade.

I was back.

To my right, behind the wheel, sat Silas Vance.

He was wearing the same grease-stained khaki shirt I remembered, his gray beard trimmed with blunt scissors, his thick forearms covered in pale freckles and white hairs. A rolled cigarette hung unlit from the corner of his cracked lips. He looked eighty, but he was sixty-two—a man pickled in cask wine, diesel fumes, and outback sun.

“Stop daydreaming, boy,” Silas barked, his voice like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. “Look at the map. Did we pass the Booroorban turnoff or are we still south of the Black Swamp?”

A cold prickle of adrenaline washed down my neck. It was March. We were hauling a load of cast-iron drill heads up from Echuca, heading toward the Darling River. I knew this day. I had lived this day. We were supposed to stop at the Royal Mail Hotel in Booroorban, drink two schooners of heavy draft beer, look at the giant iron sculpture of the Headless Horseman by the swamp, and sleep in the back of the ute.

“We haven’t hit Booroorban yet,” I said. My voice sounded higher, younger, less frayed by ten years of cheap cigarettes. “Another four miles. You’ll see the pub on the left.”

Silas didn’t answer. He reached down, grabbed a dirty rag, and wiped the inside of the windshield. His hand was shaking.

I frowned. Silas Vance never shook. In my memory, the man was an iron post sunk six feet into the earth. When a road train had clipped our side mirror outside Hay, he hadn’t even blinked—just spat out the window and cursed the driver’s mother. But now, his knuckles on the steering wheel were bone-white. His eyes kept flicking up to the rearview mirror every four seconds.

“Silas?” I said. “You alright?”

“Keep your eyes on the road,” he muttered. “Watch the tree line. Don’t look at me.”

“What tree line? There’s nothing out here but saltbush and sheep skulls.”

“Just watch the road, Julian.”

I turned toward the side window. The landscape rolled past in a monotonous blur of ochre dirt and pale green scrub. Everything was exactly as I had left it twelve years ago. The heat radiating off the door panel pressed against my left shoulder like a hot iron. I reached into my jeans pocket. My fingers touched a paper receipt, a brass pocket knife, and three silver coins. No smartphone. No plastic cards with microchips. Just the raw, heavy tang of 2014.

Then the Land Cruiser hit a cattle grid.

The steel bars clattered under the tires—clack-clack-clack-clack.

My gaze drifted down to the odometer on the instrument cluster. The little mechanical numbers were rolling over.

241,892.

As the back wheels cleared the iron grid, the third digit didn’t roll forward. It clicked backward with a sharp mechanical ping.

241,891.

I blinked, rubbing my eyes. The dust out here played tricks on your vision; everyone knew that. The glare from the hood could burn a hole through your retinas if you didn’t wear dark glasses. I looked again. The numbers were stationary.

“Silas,” I said slowly. “How many miles on this rig?”

“Too many,” he snapped. He reached out and snapped the radio on.

Static hissed through the dashboard speaker, followed by the dry, warbling drawl of an AM cricket broadcast from Melbourne. The commentator was talking about Michael Clarke and the English tour. The sound should have anchored me, should have confirmed that the machine in the concrete bunker had worked.

Instead, the commentator’s voice suddenly dipped down an octave, dragging out like an old cassette tape being pulled through a dirty playback head.

…and the ball goes through to the keeper… keeper… keep-her…

Then the radio clicked off. The knob hadn’t moved.

Silas hadn’t touched it. He was still staring straight ahead, his chest heaving under the sweat-stained khaki shirt.

“We aren’t stopping in Booroorban,” Silas whispered.

“What?” I turned to him. “We have to stop. The radiator’s weeping from the bottom hose. You said it yourself back in Deniliquin—if we don’t take on water at the pub, the head gasket will blow before we reach the Murrumbidgee.”

“We aren’t stopping,” he repeated, his knuckles whitening further. “They’re at the pub.”

“Who’s at the pub? The shearers?”

Silas turned his head toward me. For the first time all afternoon, his eyes met mine. They were bloodshot, the pupils dilated until the blue rings of his irises were almost invisible.

“You are,” he said.

A laugh caught in my throat, dry and hollow. “What the hell kind of bush joke is that? I’m sitting right here.”

“I know where you’re sitting,” Silas hissed. He didn’t slow down. Up ahead, on the flat horizon, the tin roof of the Royal Mail Hotel rose out of the saltbush like an abandoned barge stranded in an inland sea. Beside it, the silhouette of the Headless Horseman sculpture stood black and jagged against the brassy sky. “And that’s why we’re not touching the brake.”

“Silas, you’ve been drinking metho out of the camp stove again. Slow down. The temp gauge is in the red.”

“Shut your mouth!” he roared. He slammed his right foot down. The old diesel engine screamed, the transmission whining like a circular saw hitting a rusted bolt. The needle of the temperature gauge bounced against the brass stopper at the far right of the dial. Steam began to hiss from the edges of the hood, curling against the glass in greasy white ribbons.

We flew past the Black Swamp. In the stagnant, tea-colored water, half-submerged river red gums thrust their dead branches into the air like drowned skeletons.

Then we reached the pub.

The Royal Mail Hotel was a low, weather-beaten weatherboard box with a wide corrugated veranda supported by rough-hewn posts. Parked in the dirt yard in front of the saloon doors was a vehicle.

A flatbed Toyota Land Cruiser.

It was painted the same faded mustard-yellow as ours. The passenger door was dented where an emu had struck it two winters back. A blue canvas tarp was strapped across the cargo bed, covering three heavy cast-iron drill heads.

And standing on the veranda, leaning his forearms against the wooden railing with a cold glass of dark beer in his hand, was a young man in an olive singlet and grease-smeared work shorts.

He had my broad jaw. He had the crooked scar through his left eyebrow where a snapped winch cable had caught him at seventeen. He was laughing at something the publican was saying through the open service hatch.

I pressed my face against the passenger glass, my stomach dropping into a bottomless, icy pit. My breath fogged the window.

“Silas…” my voice was barely a croak. “Who is that?”

“I told you,” Silas spat, tears of pure terror leaking into the white bristles of his beard. He didn’t look at the veranda. He kept the pedal pinned to the floorboards. “Don’t look at him! If he looks over here and sees us, the whole bloody thing snaps!”

As we roared past the pub, the engine howling and throwing clouds of sulfurous white smoke, the young man on the veranda paused.

He lowered his beer glass.

Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head toward the highway.

His eyes swept across our windshield.

For a fraction of a second, across fifty feet of shimmering outback dust, my own eyes met mine.

The world went violently silent. The roar of the engine vanished. The rattle of the suspension cut out. The heat in the cabin turned so cold my teeth clattered together with the sound of dice in a plastic cup. The boy on the veranda didn’t look shocked or frightened. He looked through me, through the glass, through the metal, as if he were staring at a smudge of soot on an empty road.

Then we were past.

The sound slammed back in like an artillery shell. BOOM. The radiator hose gave way with a wet shriek, and a geyser of boiling green coolant erupted over the windshield, completely blinding us.

Silas fought the steering wheel as the truck fishtailed wildly in the soft sand shoulder. The tires screamed, throwing plumes of red grit thirty feet into the air. We spun through a full circle, the horizon whirling like a carousel in hell, before the front bumper plowed into a dry irrigation embankment and brought us to an agonizing, bone-jarring halt.

Silence fell over the cabin, broken only by the hiss of boiled water splashing against the exhaust manifold and the heavy, rhythmic gasping of our breath.

I sat there, my shoulder bruised where the seatbelt had dug in, my brain refusing to process the geometry of what I had seen.

“That was me,” I whispered. “That was… I was on that veranda in March of 2014. I remember that beer. It was an Old, too cold, tasted like iron pipes. I remember watching a yellow ute drive past through the steam…”

My voice trailed off. A cold sweat soaked through my shirt.

“I remember,” I said again, slower this time. “I was standing there. And an old Land Cruiser tore down the highway with its radiator blowing. I asked the publican who the crazy bastard in the truck was. And he told me it was just two drifters running from their own shadows.”

I turned my head. Silas was leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. His hands were dangling limp between his knees.

“How long have you been here, Silas?” I asked.

The old man didn’t move. He let out a wet, rattling sigh that shook his thin ribs.

“Three times,” he whispered into the vinyl of the horn pad.

“What?”

Silas lifted his head. His skin wasn’t just weathered; it looked degraded, like parchment that had been left out in the rain and dried over a kerosene heater. The skin under his eyes was black, and the fingernails on his left hand were split down the quick.

“I died in White Cliffs,” Silas said, staring through the fogged, coolant-streaked glass. “Heart blew out like a rotten tire. One minute I’m chewing on cold mutton, the next I’m in a room with a little bastard wearing a gray suit, asking me what year I’d like to do over.”

A cold wire tightened around my heart. “You?”

“I wanted to fix the lease,” he muttered, his lips trembling. “I cheated old man Miller out of the claim in ’13. I knew if I went back to ’14, I could file the paperwork in Broken Hill before his boys showed up with the rifles. But every time I pick this year, I wake up in this bloody ute outside Echuca with you sitting next to me, looking younger, looking stupid, talking about drill heads and beer.”

“Wait,” I said, my chest aching. “If you relived it… and I relived it…”

“The road doesn’t have room for two ghosts,” Silas said. He reached down beside his seat and pulled out a heavy, double-barreled shotgun with the stock wrapped in electrical tape. “Every time you cross your own tracks, the world gets stiffer. The paint peels off the signs. The towns empty out. Didn’t you notice the birds when we left Deniliquin?”

I froze. I thought back to the river red gums along the Edward River. In 2014, the wetlands were deafening with the sound of cockatoos, superb parrots, and corellas.

There hadn’t been a single feather. The branches had been completely bare, silent as telephone poles.

“The machine doesn’t send you back,” Silas said, checking the brass heads of the cartridges in the breech. Click-clack. “It dumps your mind into the garbage heap of a year that already happened. A copy of a copy. And when the copy gets too crowded, the ink runs.”

“What about the opals?” I demanded, my voice rising in panic. “The green chest in the dugout! Did you hide them or not?”

Silas turned his head and gave me a smile that was missing four bottom teeth. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.

“There weren’t ever any opals, Julian.”

“You’re lying! You bragged about them for eight months! You drew the map on the back of the survey charts!”

“I bragged about them because if I didn’t have a treasure, you would have left me to die in a dry ditch outside Hay,” Silas said softly. “I was an old drunk with bad lungs and twenty thousand dollars of gambling debts to men who use bolt-cutters on fingers. I needed a mule to haul the fuel drums and pull the winch. You were greedy, Julian. You were young, stupid, and so hungry for easy money you could smell gold in a sheep trough.”

I sat back against the split vinyl seat. The world seemed to wobble on its axis. The entire foundation of my life—the ten years of bitter regret, the late nights staring at the ceiling wishing I had grabbed the combination from his coat pocket—it was a ghost story. A confidence trick invented by a dying drunk to buy himself a free laborer for nine months of outback heat.

“Then why did you come back to 2014?” I screamed at him. “If there was no money, why this year?”

Silas looked down at the shotgun resting across his lap.

“Because this was the year before you killed me,” he said.

The word hung in the boiling cabin of the truck like carbon monoxide.

“What?” I choked out. “I didn’t kill you. You died of a heart attack! Over dinner! In the pub!”

“That’s what you told the constable in Wilcannia,” Silas said, his voice dropping into a register that didn’t sound human. It sounded like the grinding of millstones. “You told him my ticker gave out. But I remember the taste of the mutton, Julian. It didn’t taste like sheep. It tasted like bitter almonds and the white powder you scraped out of the old rabbit-bait tins in the tool shed.”

“No,” I stammered, backing against the passenger door, my fingers scrambling behind my back for the handle. “No, that’s insane. I wouldn’t… I didn’t do that!”

“You didn’t do it yet,” Silas whispered. “In your memory, you’re the innocent boy who missed out on a fortune. In my memory, you’re the greedy rat who got tired of waiting for an old man to fall over. That’s the joke of this place, Julian. The man in the suit doesn’t give you the year you remember. He gives you the year you earned.”

Outside the truck, the outback was changing.

The bright, brassy sunlight of western New South Wales was curdling into a dull, leaden violet. The red sand didn’t look like earth anymore; it looked like powdered brick, flat and textureless. The scrub had frozen mid-sway, the wind dying instantly as if someone had thrown a master switch in the sky.

Down the highway, half a mile back, the yellow Land Cruiser that had been parked at the Royal Mail Hotel was moving.

It was driving toward us.

It wasn’t speeding. It was rolling along at an even thirty miles an hour, kicking up no dust behind its wheels. The engine made no sound. Through the heat mirage, its front bumper seemed to stretch and shudder like warm wax.

“They’re coming,” Silas said, cocking both hammers of the shotgun with two crisp, oily clicks.

“Who?”

“The first draft,” he said. “The ones who don’t know they’re dead. If they catch up to this wreck, they clean the slate. They grind us into the clay and finish the year the way it was written. You poison me in November. I die on the floor. You spend ten years hauling timber, crying about a locked box that had nothing in it but three rusty crescent wrenches and a dead scorpion.”

“Get us out of here,” I yelled, slamming my palm against the dashboard. “Silas! Turn the key!”

“The radiator’s blown, you idiot! The block’s cracked!”

“Then run!”

I kicked the passenger door open.

The heat that hit me wasn’t normal air. It had the weight of water, pressing against my temples until my eyes pulsed with blood. I scrambled out onto the red embankment, my boots sinking four inches into sand that felt as cold as crushed ice.

The physical laws were unraveling. The air smelled of salt and ozone, like the sea had suddenly broken through three hundred miles of desert and flooded the plains beneath our feet.

Silas climbed out the driver’s side, the shotgun clutched in his right fist, his eyes fixed on the approaching yellow truck.

The other Land Cruiser was two hundred yards away now.

I could see the figures in the cab.

The Silas behind that wheel was younger, his beard less gray, his head thrown back in laughter as he talked to the young man beside him. And the young Julian in the passenger seat was leaning his elbow out the window, tapping his thumb against the metal door in time to a song that didn’t exist in the air.

They weren’t looking at the road. They were driving blind through an empty universe, completely unaware that twenty yards in front of them, two shredded versions of their own future were standing in the ditch with their boots in the freezing dirt.

“Shoot the tires!” I screamed at Silas. “Shoot the engine block!”

Silas raised the shotgun to his shoulder. His hands weren’t shaking anymore. His face had set into a mask of pure, suicidal fury—the look of an old dog that had been backed into the corner of a shearing pen for the last time.

“You don’t understand, Julian,” Silas said, his finger tightening on the front trigger.

“Shoot it!”

“Every time I shoot,” Silas said, turning his cold, dead blue eyes toward me, “I miss the truck.”

He swung the barrels ninety degrees to the right.

The two gaping black holes of the twelve-gauge were pointed directly at the center of my chest.

“Silas, wait—”

“I tried three times to fix the mining claim,” he whispered. “I tried twice to dodge the truck. But the only thing that changes the script… is taking the poisoner off the board before we reach the Darling.”

The hammer dropped.

There was no sound. No thunderclap of gunpowder, no spray of lead, no kick against his shoulder.

Instead, the shotgun barrels simply dissolved into black smoke, pouring out of his hands like ink dropped into a bucket of clear water. The smoke didn’t rise into the sky; it drifted down to the red earth, pooling around his boots, bubbling and hissing as it ate through the leather of his soles.

Silas looked down at his empty, smoking hands. His mouth opened in an oval of horror.

“It’s not 2014,” he gasped, his voice thinning into a reed-like whistle. “Look at the sky, Julian. Look at the bloody sky!”

I looked up.

Above us, the violet vault of the outback heavens wasn’t blue, and it wasn’t gray. It was covered in rows of tiny, illuminated gray symbols, microscopic letters and numbers flowing in tight, vertical columns from the zenith down to the flat horizon, flickering like the green phosphor of a radar screen in an air traffic control tower.

The oncoming truck didn’t hit our Land Cruiser.

It reached the edge of the ditch and simply passed through it.

The two yellow vehicles overlapped for three seconds—a double exposure of rusted fenders, spinning fan belts, and cracked glass. The young Julian and the young Silas drove straight through my ribs.

I felt a sudden, sickening sensation of being turned inside out, like a cold hand reaching down my throat and pulling my organs out through my teeth. I smelled river mud, cold beer, and the lavender soap my mother had used thirty years ago. I heard myself laugh—the sound of my own twenty-something laughter ringing inside the hollow chamber of my skull, stupid, loud, and confident that the world was an open road waiting to be paved with gold.

Then they were gone, continuing north up the Cobb Highway toward Hay, their dust hanging stationary in the air like a wall of yellow plaster.

Silas was on his knees.

The black smoke had reached his waist. He wasn’t bleeding; his body was simply unspooling, his skin turning into thin, gray ribbons that fluttered in an unfelt breeze and dissolved into the frozen dirt.

“The room,” Silas choked out, clutching at his throat. “The man with the linen suit… he didn’t have an office… he didn’t have… a machine…”

“Silas!” I dropped to my knees beside him, reaching out to grab his shoulder.

My fingers passed straight through his collarbone. There was no resistance, only the sensation of dipping your hand into dry sand.

“What did you tell him?” Silas wheezed, his eyes rolling back in his head until only the yellowed whites remained. “Julian… what was the answer you gave him… when he asked the question?”

“I told him 2014!” I yelled, my voice cracking under the terror of the dissolving world. “I told him the year of the dugout! The year of the chest!”

Silas let out a sound that might have been a sob or a dying rattle.

“You idiot,” he whispered, his jaw crumbling into gray flakes of dust that blew across my knees. “He didn’t ask you what year you wanted to go to… he asked you what year you wanted to die in…”

The last of him collapsed into the red dirt, leaving nothing behind but an unlit cigarette and a single brass cartridge.

The silence that followed was absolute.

No wind. No engine hum. No crickets. Even the hiss of the cracked radiator had stopped.

I stood up alone on the edge of the Cobb Highway. The road stretched north and south, but it didn’t look like asphalt anymore; it looked like a flat ribbon of gray slate laid across an empty canvas. The trees in the Black Swamp had vanished. The Headless Horseman sculpture was gone. There was only the flat, brick-red line of the plain and the pale violet sky covered in its endless, running columns of code.

I looked down at my hands.

The skin on my left wrist was beginning to fray.

A tiny, paper-thin strip of epidermis was peeling upward, curling toward my elbow, revealing no muscle or blood underneath—only an empty, gray void that smelled faintly of dry paper and ozone.

I looked north.

Far in the distance, where the Cobb Highway intersected the horizon outside Hay, something was walking toward me.

It wasn’t a truck. It wasn’t an emu or a stray bullock.

It was a man walking at a slow, measured, professional pace. He was wearing an unbuttoned gray linen suit, carrying a thick manila folder beneath his left arm, and his right hand was swinging rhythmically at his side, holding a small brass stopwatch that flashed yellow in the frozen light.

I didn’t run. There was nowhere to run. The desert around me was flat for three hundred miles in every direction, and the edges of the world were already turning the color of skim milk.

I waited by the rusted skeleton of the Land Cruiser, my boots rooted in the freezing sand, watching the gray figure grow larger with every second.

When he reached the embankment, thirty feet away, he stopped. He looked at the smoking ditch where Silas Vance had dissolved, then shifted his pale, slate-colored eyes up to mine.

He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look triumphant. He pulled the manila folder from under his arm, opened it with a flick of his wrist, and retrieved a single sheet of heavy yellow paper.

“Julian,” he said, his voice carrying clearly through the dead air without the slightest hint of an echo. “You have three minutes remaining on the standard assessment.”

My hand was half-gone now. The gray unspooling had reached my bicep. I couldn’t feel cold or heat anymore; I could only feel the slow, methodical erasing of everything I had ever remembered.

“What is this?” I asked, my voice flat, stripped of fear by the sheer scale of the nightmare. “Where did you put me?”

“You selected 2014,” the man said, reading from the card. “The terminal file for subject 884-Julian. Cause of death: blunt force trauma following a multi-vehicle collision on the Cobb Highway, four miles south of Booroorban, March 14th, 2014.”

My heart gave a single, violent kick.

“No,” I whispered. “I lived until forty-one. I worked in Sydney. I hauled drywall. I went to the pub in White Cliffs—”

“A classic compensatory loop,” the man interrupted, not looking up from his paper. “The brain produces approximately seven minutes of subjective narrative while the neural pathways depressurize after the windshield shatters. In ninety-two percent of cases, the subject invents an unfulfilled goal—a fortune, a lost lover, a locked chest—to explain why they cannot accept the terminus.”

He closed the folder with a sharp, dry snap.

“You never made it to Hay, Julian. You never saw White Cliffs. You never bought the rabbit bait.”

“And Silas?” I asked, looking at the empty dirt.

“Silas Vance died on impact when the Land Cruiser hit the irrigation culvert,” the man said simply. “His projection terminated forty seconds ago.”

The assessor tucked the file back beneath his linen arm. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the brass stopwatch, and pressed the top button.

Click.

The gray columns of code across the sky suddenly halted their descent. They began to turn red—a deep, burning arterial crimson that dripped toward the horizon like fresh paint running down a hot wall.

“You have one selection remaining,” the assessor said, stepping down into the ditch toward me. His shoes made no sound in the sand. “Under Section 4 of the Reclamation Protocol, when an artificial loop collapses before brain death is fully registered, the subject may choose a secondary year to stabilize the terminal projection.”

He held the fountain pen out toward my remaining hand.

“Choose quickly, Julian. If the ink runs out before you name the date, you do not get to remember who you were when the glass hit your face.”

I stared at the pen. The skin of my fingers was drifting away like dandelion seeds in a gale. Down the highway, the roar of a speeding diesel truck suddenly echoed out of nowhere—the sound of an eight-ton flatbed blowing its horn, the scream of metal tearing through an iron culvert, the blinding glare of two halogen high beams bearing down on my eyes from two feet away.

I opened my mouth to speak.

The assessor watched me, his thumb resting lightly on the brass stem of the watch, waiting for the four numbers that would decide whether I woke up, burned out, or vanished into the red dust forever.

“The year,” he whispered, as the lights filled the universe. “Name it.”

#bloganuary #bookReview #books #curiosity #dailyprompt #dailyprompt2875 #Evernote #everyday #facts #fiction #IFTTT #Pinterest #ShortStory #writing

#bloganuary #bookreview #books #curiosity #dailyprompt #dailyprompt2875

Myriad Misadventures @[email protected] · 2026-08-10 · 01:02 UTC

Last week I posted photos of Angkor Wat and this week I’m going to post photos of me at Angkor Wat, starting with this selfie looking at the entrance over the water when you first arrive. It’s…not a great selfie but Angkor Wat looks nice
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#cambodia #angkorwat #travel #travelphotography #cambodiatravel #shotoniphone #bucketlist #travelbug #selfie

#cambodia #angkorwat #travel #travelphotography #cambodiatravel #shotoniphone

Travelling Worm @[email protected] · 2026-08-06 · 21:43 UTC

Broken Hill in the Living Desert

In this post: The city of Broken Hill, how it got its name, and the living desert that surrounds it. Plus some desserts.

This is the blog of Mark Wordsworm, the travelling worm. I’m a 40-year-old bookmark (give or take a few years) and I proudly boast my own Hallmark serial number, 95 HBM 80-1. You’ll probably want to read all about me and my Travelling Companion (the TC).

Today’s travel notes

Me and the TC recently made a big trek westwards from Sydney, to explore parts of NSW and South Australia. Broken Hill was one of the places on our bucket list.

The book I’m in

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers. I’m nestled in near the start of this book, getting to know the characters and the situations they manage to get themselves into. So far, it’s a warm and amusing experience.

Travel tips

Take an early morning stroll in the living desert, but make sure you don’t get lost. It’s big country: Large landscapes, rolling hills, and a lot of sameness.

Recommended restaurants and bakeries

The Silly Goat is excellent for brunch. Their sweets looked scrummy, though we didn’t endulge this time.

The Musicians Club provides a good nosh-up for dinner. Their citrus tart is a delicious dessert.

The Deli presented us with delicious, gluten free cakes, a little like muffins.

The photos

Me at the top of the Line of Lode (it’s a mine dump), with the city of Broken Hill spread out below:

Why the name “Broken Hill”? The city is named after a range of ragged rocky outcrops that looked as if it had a break in it. The broken hill itself has since disappeared. It turned out to contain the world’s largest ore seam of silver lead, and zinc. After the resulting mining spree, the hill is now a large flat mine dump, part of which is still being mined.

The mine dump is called the Line of Lode. Let’s put on our wings (this worm is still patiently awaiting the day that I morph into a beautiful winged creature) and zoom some distance away from Broken Hill. This shot shows the Line of Lode and the city:

Due to the wealth of silver, zinc, and lead in its rock, Broken Hill became a bit of a trend setter in mining matters. Mining revenue supported the new nation of Australia in no small way. The mining and minerals technology developed in the city were adopted worldwide, as were many of the financing practices. Some of today’s large mining companies owe their beginnings to the miners at Broken Hill. Take BHP Billiton for example: BHP comes from the company’s former name, “Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited”.

The Line of Lode is part museum, part working mine. Derelict structures greet you as you make your way to the top:

Erected on top of the Line of Lode is a memorial to the miners who contributed so much to the city and the country. More than 800 people have died during mining activities here. The memorial shows names of deceased miners in columns lined with dusky pink roses, along with each person’s date and manner of death. This photo shows but a few of the names. The list stretches for several more panels:

The city of Broken Hill

The Line of Lode looms large from the city too. On Sulphide street, the 30-metre high mullock (an Australian term for a hill of mining waste) lurks behind the Palace Hotel:

The streets in the city are named after the ores mined and the chemicals used in the mining process. Here’s Argent Street:

The Broken Hill Courthouse is also on Argent Street:

Several areas in the city are designated alcohol free zones, in a bid to improve public safety. In these areas, it’s illegal to consume alcohol 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:

A big ant prowls Crystal Lane. This impressive creature is part of the pavement art created for the “Beyond The Dust” festival in 2025:

Above the streets, Corellas lurk. Like this one, which looks like a somewhat jaded reveller with its soiled feathers and splodged eye shadow:

Living Desert State Park

Twenty minutes’ drive from Broken Hill, along Nine Mile Road, is the Living Desert State Park. We were lucky to see the desert even more alive than usual, due to the unusual amount of rain the region has had over the past several months. The desert was covered in green shrubbery, even outside the park.

The park itself is well worth a visit. The entry fee is $10 per person, payable at an automated pay point beyond the gate. The payment system is eccentric. It’s unmanned, just a machine, and accepts card only. When we arrived, there were a few confused people wandering around looking for help. Eventually, by group effort, we all made it through the system and into the park.

Video: It’s mid morning in the Living Desert State Park. Several kangaroos bound across a bowl-shaped valley below us:

https://youtu.be/enYrbjHXKDo

The next video shows more kangaroo action, later in the day. It’s approaching sunset. Two kangaroos tap each other playfully with their paws. Being but a small worm in a large world, I’m not sure what type of kangaroo or wallaby these are. They’re reddish in colour, with rather endearing tufty hairstyles:

https://youtu.be/eXMB2jBakyk

As the sun goes down, sculptures make interesting shapes at the top of a hill in the park:

We left Broken Hill early next morning, driving into the sunrise:

That’s all for today, folks.

#australia #bookmark #bookworm #brokenHill #livingDesert #newSouthWales #travel #travellingWorm #travelog #travelogue

#australia #bookmark #bookworm #brokenhill #livingdesert #newsouthwales

Sci Fi Brickyards 🚀 @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 12:50 UTC

And it was, as always, perfection 😋

#DateNight #ItalianFood #PortugeseFood #CasaNostra #Sutton #SouthLondon #Whitebait #Prawns #Mussels #Beef #Sirloin #Espetada #Meat #Seafood #Food #Scran #Scranodon

#meat #datenight #italianfood #portugesefood #casanostra #sutton

Sci Fi Brickyards 🚀 @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 12:50 UTC

And it was, as always, perfection 😋

#DateNight #ItalianFood #PortugeseFood #CasaNostra #Sutton #SouthLondon #Whitebait #Prawns #Mussels #Beef #Sirloin #Espetada #Meat #Seafood #Food #Scran #Scranodon

#meat #datenight #italianfood #portugesefood #casanostra #sutton

Dining & Cooking @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 09:44 UTC

Beef ribs! https://www.diningandcooking.com/2801219/beef-ribs-79/ #Meat

#meat

Dining & Cooking @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 09:44 UTC

Beef ribs! https://www.diningandcooking.com/2801219/beef-ribs-79/ #Meat

#meat

Dining & Cooking @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 09:44 UTC

Beef ribs! https://www.diningandcooking.com/2801219/beef-ribs-79/ #Meat

#meat