I still don’t know if this is going to work but when I was about 10 I wanted to write a story about a lamppost, the cover I designed then and the ‘blurb’ as well as the first page still exist in my writers file!
Time has changed a lot since then so I am updating it a bit but I am working on it and hoping it will be something good at the end of it, but I feel I owe it to my younger self to explore the story in the lamppost, so far I have written a few chapters, this is the first couple of pages;
‘Mum it’s happening again!’ I can tell she’s rolling her eyes, checking her watch and stomping over to the window.
It’s ok for her with her bedroom looking out over the mesh of road and railway leading down to town. My view is obstructed by a large green Victorian lamp-post and the harbour. My sleep is no longer disrupted by the various fog horns and warning blares from passing ferries. It really is amazing how far sound can travel on a summer night.
‘You sure it’s still going?’
I look out of the window and there it goes again.
‘Extra sure’ I confirm.
I can hear her harrumph even though she’s downstairs, it’s not my fault I think throwing myself on the bed. She’s muttering now and banging pots and pans about from the dinner we ate earlier. But as the light outside my room flickers on and off over and over again for the next two hours I think I have more right to feel annoyed than her.
It’s not like it’s the first time it’s happened. At first she thought I was making it up and sneaking my phone upstairs and blaming the erratic light flashes on the lamppost to avoid getting myself into trouble.
I even agreed to surrender my phone for a whole week once I was home from school to convince her. She’d burst into my room at random intervals to check if the lamppost was flashing or not, so much for privacy. She caught me doing all sorts of terrible things; homework at my desk that is far too messy to be completely productive, building my latest Lego model that takes us most of the space in my room or on rare occasions reading. Of course if I had been able to use my phone I would probably have been curled up in my den playing one of the hundreds of games on there or texting my friends to arrange our next weekend meet up. I only get to go every other weekend as each fortnight and about half the school holidays I make the train journey into London to stay with Dad. It’s kind of cool that he lives in London as there are loads of great places to go and they are all easy to get to from his flat which is super swish and looks across the Thames.
Mum moved us out to Kellerton when they split, she’s a reporter for our local paper so I thought she’d be more interested in the lamppost flickering constantly. Surely the ‘Local boys gets no sleep due to faulty lamppost’ story would be full of local colour and be what her readers would like to know about. To be fair she did call the council and they did come and have a poke about and they even when up one of those cherry pickers and checked the bulb. They may be old Victorian style lampposts but modernity caught up with them when someone decided that gas was too dangerous and too expensive to maintain. The change of bulb made no difference.
You probably think I’m making a fuss about nothing, Mum does that’s for sure! She says that with a blackout blind and thick curtains there’s no way the lamppost should be able to disturb me but somehow it does! All I know is that I am awoken by strange flashes, they aren’t even regular which is why I didn’t actually think there was anything wrong with the bulb. It doesn’t happen all the time, more every couple of weeks, sometimes more often and sometimes not, the problem is I can’t tell when it’s going to happen. I think maybe that’s the most frustrating thing, you see I’m a teenager now and everyone knows teenager need to sleep, a lot! If I can’t sleep when I’m meant to be sleeping, then when I am meant to catch up. Not in class or I’ll be in detention, not in the evenings as that’s when I have to eat dinner and complete homework and at the weekend my time is split between my Dad and my friends.
I have decided that the best thing to do is to investigate it myself. So for the next few weeks I am going to keep a diary, when the things flashes, how many times and the times it flashes between. It seems to almost always be in the early hours of the morning or in the early evening just as it’s getting dark. Our house is at the end of the small row of 5, so I think maybe I am the only one who ever notices anything, opposite us is a wall that forms the boundary of the cliffs, they are crumbling so they walled them off just after we moved in as someone had a nasty accident! Mum overlooks the harbour office and the lighthouse, and no it isn’t that disturbing me, to be honest the lighthouse is one of those things I got used to like the noise of the ferries and the railway. I think ours must be one of the noisiest houses in Kellerton but it was all my Mum could afford. She has the railway to contend with as well!
(everything crossed that someone likes it)
