The Birth Of Domestic Bliss

Posted on June 30, 2025 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

Ignatius Plotsky was a poet in waiting, a painter in search of a canvas and writer of some obscurity whose insights were sited somewhere beyond the land of meaning. 

Following a few drinks at the bar, and spotting a young lady who, as Shakespeare might have said, “Ticked all the boxes” he wandered up to her and, pushing his fringe aside in a gesture of world weariness said, “Faze in to the far out” while looking as deeply into her eyes as good manners would allow.

Her mind was filled more with the image of Maserati’s than poetry so we can forgive her, or anyone else to be fair, for failing to understand what he meant. Indeed he didn’t know himself but it had a certain cadence don’t you think? It flowed with obscure confidence, a silent volume possibly, or am I allowing myself to fall into the trap of meaningless profundities set by our sub-illustrious hero. 

Whatever his failings or mine, his interest in the fair maiden was sincere, and seeing that her eyes did not fill with wonder he quickly added, “Perhaps we can discuss life and the apparel of the dilettanti over a meal at “La Gala,” which was an expensive restaurant of note in central London. 

Here was her problem. He clearly had the conversational magic of a route guidance system, but La Scala was a seriously expensive eaterie available mainly to the “More money than taste” clique, of which young Ignatius was a proud member. Brief images of a sun drenched Maserati speeding across the Alps toward Monte Carlo, with her in the passenger seat and music playing just loud enough to drown out his voice, moved through her imagination as she replied, “That would be lovely darling.”

She called everyone “Darling” in truth, but he was not to know that, and so felt flattered by this obvious sign of interest. “Let us move on with languid haste towards the chariots of yore” he said quoting a line from the poem he had been “slaving” over the previous evening. Her mind, filled with expensive cars and drawing room trinkets, hardly noticed he was talking nonsense and gave him one of her deeper smiles which looked straight past his soul and towards his bank account.

Curiously, after both had exhausted all attempts to impress the other, somewhere before the dessert course arrived, they discovered a mutual love of dogs and potted plants. Successful marriages, as Ignatius might have said, “Are often based on a lesser hue.” 

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Loved And Not Loved

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

In these last days and hours before my final breath may I, Gordon Richard Carlson, lay my guilt and thoughts before you as a matter of conscience, if not regret, so that I might meet my maker free of worldly deceit, if nothing else.
I was, and largely remained, a man of detail: head of the Office Of Statistical Analysis in the county where I live. My wife also worked because I was, by her own admission, incapable of sustaining a household of any standing by myself.
She was punctilious in all matters of social standing and appearance,insuring maintenance of the marital home in everything but intimacy: no carpet was uncleaned or dish unwashed, no book undusted, though not read, and everything maintained to standards of unfeeling excellence I always thought. Does that sound too bitter or too harsh?
To me she was correct in everything which did not involve mess or unleashed joy and I lived by those dictates while quietly shrinking inside myself, unaware of my own circumstance till events conspired to provide me with an alternative.
As the demands on my department grew, staffed only by me, I was offered an assistant who would help me with my work. Clarice Brown, ordinary to the casual glance, that was her view, was beautiful to my shy and awkward gaze. She grew to love me, as I did her: being together gave purpose to our days. Our feelings grew silently over time as duties conspired to entwine our lives and then our hearts.
She was a younger person than me by eighteen years and the product of a strict and controlling family, still living with her mother and father, and I was a man just past his fortieth birthday, sited somewhere beyond hope, but gentle I like to think, and caring of the unregarded in a way which gradually gained her attention and then her love. We formed a conspiracy of private and diffident urgencies unnoticed by the world.
One Friday, and recklessly, I pinned her up against the filing cabinet and told her I loved her. She knew all about the barren pieties which were my home but, faced with this commitment and sincerity, I felt her pious resolve melt and then we kissed. We kissed more each day, two souls who found purpose in each other’s lives. Our hearts bonded in secret desperation until, over the coming months, as intimacies grew beyond anything I had previously known we became lovers in every physical sense.
I loved her then and now. We discovered what life and urgency might bring to those who think that “Ordinary” is not a world they seek. Finally I decided, regardless of the cost, that I would leave my wife and marry her, and walk the path of knowledge without guilt.
I bought a ring, premature I recognise, to pledge my love, and prepared to place my life in her palm and tell my wife that all we had was gone but Clarice did not come to work that day, or any day again: an accident had robbed me of her life and longed for destiny.
By some bewildering chance, our love and intimacy had grown without it being public knowledge so when I was told that Clarice Brown had been involved in an accident and killed I merely nodded and said, “How sad” because privacy of emotion is the last sanctuary of the disenfranchised.
I attended her funeral, together with my wife, and passed on our commiserations to her family, giving my own feelings the weight they deserved, which is no weight at all.
Now thirty-six years later I slide away from life, breathless and without strength. My wife, punctilious to the last and ignorant of my feelings, visits me in hospital every day, noting the cost of my daily treatment. We have, and had, no pets, because pets can make a mess, and no children because that requires intimacy, unsettling at best, but we have a house, paid for now, and paintings of value I believe, which she will possess when I am gone.
But if there is a hope in life’s eternities, Clarice will greet me at the gates, kiss me with that warmth she always did, and walk with me across Infinity. If there is hope.
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|She Was My Home

Posted on April 29, 2025 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

Away from the world of career strategy, while working in a Care Home, I found the doorway to a place of gentle resignation and understanding. I am drawn to explore and the lady I met there made that voyage kindly possible. She was eighty-seven years old: trapped in an old people’s home, living without destination, unvisited by relatives: immobile and past the age of where others aspire to know her.

 Her father was killed in the second world war with others, serving on a submarine. Her mother, as was the custom at that time, hardly remarked on his passing; her solace being the church and memories parked within her private thoughts. She did not engage in emotional conversations but lived inside herself, leaving her only daughter to scrounge around her home for food and  emotional reassurance. 

Now that daughter, elderly in her turn, had no one to talk to of those alienating experiences until I, searching for purpose, volunteered at the care home where she now  lived.  I asked her if she was married and she replied, “I tried to be but none of the men I grew to love would have me.”  “They’ll understand their loss in time” I said, and for some mysterious reason  a tear started its journey down her cheeks, dabbed away in silent dignity.

It appeared, in times gone by, she had loved a man “a lot like you” but, because he seemed impractical, she felt she could not risk a life by his side after a childhood lived at the mercy of her mother’s grief. She said of him, “He understood life like no one else I’ve ever met but he had no regard for his own circumstances: I don’t know what happened to him.”

 Sometimes people, adrift in life, happen upon each other and, regardless of age, recognise they are both voyaging without compass but on the same vessel: that is what happened with us

In my presence she grew lighter and with her I found a companionship I thought impossible. “The only lesson I’ve learnt in life “ she said  ”Is not to give advice.” ” Mine is not to heed any advice I’m given,” I said, which made her smile.  We took to holding hands and sometimes hugging and a sense of coming home was apparent to both of us. You will never know who you might meet but occasionally you cross paths with someone who understands you like no one ever has: I think we gave each other that gift. We were never intimate but we became connected in a way valued in eternity.

Now she has moved beyond mortal measurement, brought to peace by advancing years but the memory of her will always live within my soul. Only too well I understand the phrase,  “Alone in a crowd” but she offered me a sense of connection and for that I will always treasure the lady  who brought me to  a sense of home

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The Cost Of Our Choices

Posted on January 13, 2025 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

You lived creatively letting art define your life, fearless in your every day, walking the path I should have walked if I had courage in my veins; but I was a percentage man, careful always not to fail. I talked of art but lived by common sense and progressed cautiously, toward an unmarked death.

At first you welcomed me, and drowned me with your kisses, opening yourself to me in pagan celebration sure that I, like you, was of the chosen few, who recognised the secret of life will only be discovered creatively. How we loved to swap observations, and nestle with each other by the fire and talk of love. I touched your skin and felt each brush of it to be a prayer. Your lips, for that short time, were mine to kiss and face to hold: wonder was our chemistry, and gold the colour which framed our life, for we had found eternity.

I lost my nerve at last, and talked of safe professions, a refuge from the fear that those who live to dream will pay a cost until, one day, that love I drank of so freely from your eyes shrank to a trickle of regret. 

You painted like a girl possessed while I trained for my bar exams and we drifted on complicitly, avoiding the unspoken truth, that you were fearless and I was not. An agent came to see your work, sent there by a man of note, and the rest we know is history. You have created these forty years and I have not, but I read of you in magazines, and sometimes when silence fills my life, I take the portrait you made of me, a young man with a dream to chase, staring out courageously, for that was how you saw me then.

Life becomes your memories and in that place I love you still. I never speak your name out loud, and make no reference to your work but in that garden where we sat, innocent of encroaching truth, I sit, as so I often did, and feel your hand move through my hair.

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Notes From The Wilderness

Posted on September 18, 2023 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

I have been loved but not totally, married, but not happily, qualified for professions I barely understood but in other ways I’ve drunk at life like a madman: walking the streets, connecting with strangers openly and reacting to the music of the time, often filled with a joy in the moment which can be difficult to comprehend given my circumstances. I  struggle by every measurable standard but somehow being part of this world elevates me daily.

What did you do in your life? some man asked and I replied, “ I enjoyed the view but without any sense of strategy!”

Hitchhiking across Europe aged eighteen, sleeping under hedges and living on carrots and milk, playing chess with some oddly competitive man in a cafe on the Croatian coast, and later walking into the sea to wash my clothes, launderettes being beyond my budget, were the memories I treasured.

I’ve always been among the dispossessed, oddly distracted from the day’s urgencies by passing events. Isn’t life wonderful, especially when we wander in a landscape untarnished by man and admire those species which dwell in it. 

Somehow, in this drifting chaos I connected with another being over a number of years whose steady kindness, understanding and beauty centred me like nothing has before: Caroline, a fellow volunteer at the shop where I worked became close to me over shifts and months until on the morning of the day she left she said, even though we’d never spent time alone, “If I wasn’t married I would love you till I died” and I’d replied, “It would be returned:” It was all I had to offer and the truth.

When she touched my arm I melted into her soul but, of course, she left me forever after that shift because she was a civilised lady and life with chaos in an unironed shirt had never been her dream. 

Whatever the different circumstances, we connected in that profound way outsiders can sometimes do, but life is not always about understanding:  the truth is her empowered albeit unimaginative husband, a thoroughly decent man, offered her security in a way I never could: I might be her dream but I was never a reality. We never kissed because some boundaries cannot be crossed, but she was as near Eden as I will ever reach: she left my side but she will always be my home !

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Silence Was Her Enemy

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

Solitude was her enemy, filled with fear of consequence. However much she teased at life, shredding the dreams of fragile men, fatigue would come and take her to the empty void, wherein she had lived as a child, without love and free of toys.

You can laugh at life it seems, and those dull folk who turn it’s wheels, but some hours after dusk, when partied out and lying alone, you may feel the advancing years seeping through your tired dreams.

She had found no answer on her voyage, as many people fail to do, but somehow on her anxious walk she introduced herself to me, and sitting under some ancient oak, with nothing to see apart from life, for reasons she did not disclose, she threaded her arm through mine, and said, “I could love you if you choose.”

I am as lost as man can be, I can not say it otherwise, but in her gaze, so drenched with doubt I somehow rediscovered hope, finding a purpose in my life, that she discover tranquillity.

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The Final Word

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

You hear it on the radio: some transmission made decades before, a fragment of a conversation, picked up as your ship travels it’s now uncharted path. “I’ll see you soon, put the kettle on,”  then  laughter and a silence which is eternal. “What was this life, and who were they?” you ask yourself, now on some mission and in a distant galaxy, sent out to explore the universe decades ago, before the Earth was hit by meteorites.

“Life on other planets. I hope so” was all you could think of at the time, as you turned to look at Greg, the captain on this now unrecorded voyage. “Shall I make a note of it” you ask, but he just shakes his head: the answer is in his lack of interest.

What’s the point? There’s no one left who we can talk to, and nothing but these fragments of conversation bouncing round in space and prodding at our spent emotions: brief relics of a vanished world, heard on this voyaging craft which travels now without reference points or purpose.

“Can’t beat the view” you say, trying to keep it light, but routine sapped magic from the flight some years before and silence has become the known companion. Now galaxies pass by unremarked  by two souls lost in travelling , robbed of home and context by that catastrophe which destroyed their home in mid-evolution.

“What does it mean” you ask yourself, but mute indifference has no answer. At some unspecified hour, you accept, if you don’t die before the event, some black hole or other matter will swallow this last evidence of man and his ambitions, and suns will rise and planets form without comment or exclamation from a lost life-form now become particle in space

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Awkward Hello’s

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

Here I was, or there, or even here and there.  Well, OK. On a towpath, walking back quite early in the morning after sampling the local brand of fresh air, lightly seasoned with diesel fumes and a sprinkling of cement dust from some roadworks when I spot a lone lady walking towards me at a current range of approximately two-hundred yards,

I do not like this happening: in the country life is simple, as you pass her by you would say, “Vegetables failing again Doris” or “Hi there, how’s your Mum” and with complete strangers a simple, “Bit chilly eh?”  and onwards you would go with, in my case, my mind firmly fixed on a plate of scrambled eggs and some decent conversation with my much loved goldfish, Jacinta: in London things are more complex.

A claxon sounds on the bridge and all senses and instincts go to action stations. “Keep it light, Keeeeep it Light, no panicking among the nerve-endings paleeeese” says our noble leader, who speaks from somewhere in the centre of the brain. Now the range is only 150 yards and you can see she is wearing a nice blue dress, tucked in at the waist with a matching belt. Some reckless molecules from the waist region suggests you say, “Lovely dress if I many say so, and worth discussing over breakfast,”  while remaining out of slapping distance in case your invitation is declined.

Ninety yards and time for sensible suggestions only if we may. Heart rate rising slightly, and a sense of unease evident in thickening neck symptoms.  “Eye contact and a brisk but courteous nod” suggests someone from the earlobes, while other canny folk say, notice something interesting on the other side of  the river and walk past without comment.

Almost too late for strategy meeting now as we approach the twenty-five yard mark. No more suggestions seem forthcoming and a glassy grin, rich in unease and discomfort floods across your face and you open and close your mouth weakly in the manner learned from Jacinta,  who has no wardrobe to speak of, the shameless hussy.

The lady looks at you and is clearly alarmed by evidence of palpitations and mouth flapping, together with some head-nodding to show that, strangers we may be, but we are all companions in the world village apart from some rough-necks on the Ukraine border, a number of folk in the middle east, and other places where head nodding may result in execution.

Still for better or worse, apart from her moving as near to the fence as possible to maximise distance, the moment is over, and a pleasing absence of humans is evident between you and the gate you are seeking. Now all that matters are the eggs and the prayer that you hope to never meet her again.Botched first meetings are always made worse by the clumsy efforts to explain them on re- meeting.

For example, you meet her three days later, and she is getting as near the fence as possible, and quickening the pace. You serve towards her and raise your arm to demonstrate there is nothing to worry about. “I say” you gush, “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you the other day, I was………” Sliding sideways she just manages to get past you and scuttles on at speed. You have managed to create an “incident” from poor planning and your clumsy efforts to put her at ease: there is no manual for what to do on the third meeting.

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Bottled Emotions

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

Things could have been worse for “Threadbare” Jo, and how often is that true:  his morale was protected by his poor understanding of his situation, but even he knew he lived in an affection free zone. Thus it was that our Jo, walked into “The Shop of Love” to see if, emotionally at least,  he could re-equip his circumstances and experience a moment of living in the promised land.

This was no sleazy joint where women leaving the gentle slopes of youth might squeeze one last ingénue pose out for the camera, or men with more desire than aura were old enough to cause unsettled comments when they entered a nightclub. No, this was a shop offering the ultimate in  emotional experience, if only for a while or possibly just a moment , captured in a corked bottle which could be opened and enjoyed within the privacy of your own home or space. Every hue and shade of feeling, from joy through to despair, ( a surprisingly good seller),  was on offer.

Samual Sackly, who liked to weep while others smiled,  and could be found walking inconsolably through the gardens of historic homes  crying, as he held a tender flower in his hand saying,  “You will die. All  of them will die” which was true, but not for several months, given that it was early Spring, used to purchase a deliciously soul-bleaching bottle of Melacholia to heighten the experience before he set off on his adventure.

Joseph Leek just wanted “Love.” The nice old fashioned sort which we enjoyed before sensibility barged into the frame and made strong men weep just by looking at a cloud-tipped view while music soaked them with a sense of loss. “I’m after Love” said “Threadbare” and the attendant nodded sympathetically. He saw every kind of ill-fitting decision, or no decision at all, walk through the door. Here, as I said, they did not offer the physical experience of being loved, but just the essence of it, in every shade and strength of expression, so you could return home, make an egg sandwich and, quite literally, take the cork out of the bottle.

Now at last, as the yolk spilled down his cheek in the splendid isolation afforded by the lack of a phone in his rented room, his emotion of choice flooded the space around him, bathing him in sweet recognition until, sated by the brief sense of acceptance and celebration, he  slumped down on his bed and recalled those days when people cared and loved without recourse to manuals or instructions. That lost era  before  works like,  “How To Live The Natural Way,”  were to be found in the homes of aesthetes everywhere.

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Testing the Boundaries

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Peter Wells aka Countingducks

Malcolm Vexley, or, as he liked to remind those careless of rank, Sir Malcolm Vexley, was a business tycoon of standing who enjoyed what he modestly described as “A position of note in the city.”

I had no immediate knowledge of the man, I was an office junior in the department which existed for no other purpose than to organise his diary, and mediate between those competing for his time. “The modest exercise of power is more telling than a crude demonstration of strength” he used to say and I can vouch for that. He was one of those people who could make an entire district shake merely by moving his little finger so when his eyes fell on me in passing and he said I needed to go to his tailor and obtain a replacement tie, something to do with accidents and coffee, I just nodded and walked off as if I knew where his tailor was.

Once he was out of sight, I asked my department senior for the address and set out to obtain the required item; presenting it to him about forty five minutes after his request. That marked the beginning of a relationship where I became his errand runner of choice, and thus to the occasion when I was told to “Obtain some truffle chocolates “and take them to his wife: apparently it was her birthday.

His wife was about twenty-five years younger than him and had enjoyed a successful career in modelling, some of it involving clothing, until Sir Malcolm rescued her from a life of pitiless self-promotion and settled her in his town house sited in the better half of Mayfair.

An hour later I was at her door, chocolates in hand and a card carefully written by myself, wishing her the very best of days. She answered the door nearly dressed in some silk robe styled with a Chinese print, and a glass of something inspiring in her hand. “Come in, come in” she said, and her look invited no disagreement. I was young and inexperienced so a woman of her background, age and connections was difficult to argue with. Another hour later there I was, but now slightly tiddly, lost in her admiring gaze and with a departing sense of life’s imperatives.

“I am so bored Alfie. Boooored I tell you. Entertain me please” she said and I endeavoured to do so, sure that diverting his wife for an hour would only gain me credit with my employer.

Two glasses later and suddenly she moved over and settled on my lap saying, “Do you know what love is Alfie” and, if I did not, she seemed determined to demonstrate the subtleties of emotion by moving her lips to mine in a telling display of physical generosity. Panic filled me, only partly dimmed by the fact that her gown now opened to reveal a body which had been the subject of a million daydreams, albeit some years ago, and after a short period of kissing she led me without pity up the stairs and into the marital bed.

“Please me” she whimpered in a tone of menacing surrender, and I considered it reckless to refuse. I moved to kiss her once again: struggling with the awkwardness of foreplay with a lady now clearly uncoupled from sanity and unaware of a disturbance until a familiar voice said, “What is the meaning of this?” As I turned round I saw Sir Malcolm looking notably unsettled and in danger, I thought, of moving more than his little finger. “She loved the chocolates” I said, hoping to curry late favour with this man of note, but something in his manner suggested he had other things in mind.

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