About Elder Shredder

master procrastinator, atheist, bipolar, skateboarder, dad, labrador owner, bassist, ale drinker, ncfc, film buff, book worm, comic reader, punk music listener, occasional scribbler





big calc










It was a ludicrous request but one that drew his attention

“You want us to do what?” he said.

He had quite happily been sitting there, minding his own business, lost in his own little world of procrastination, typing random words into Wikipedia, instead of getting on with the mundane work that he should have been doing, when he heard the request. Well, he didn’t hear it as such, as he never listened and due to deafness in one ear, rarely heard anything unless he concentrated on listening and tilted his head and pointed his good ear in the right direction.

It was a ludicrous request but one that drew his attention, and it penetrated his deafness and general aloofness due to the absolute absurdness of it, which is why he piped up and asked for it to be repeated. Well, he had heard correctly, despite his dodgy right ear and general lack of concentration, and it was indeed a very daft thing to ask anybody to do, let alone a whole department, especially as each one of them was as lazy and lackadaisical as the other.

Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at each other in disbelief, heads turning this way and that, as they searched each other’s blank expressions hoping to make some sense of the preposterous request by scanning the faces of those nearest to them, each waiting for someone else to make the first move, either too scared or too selfish to take the lead.

Well, someone had to go first, and as he was the only one to open his mouth and say something, all eyes eventually turned to him. He could feel his ears turning red under the scrutiny of twenty co-workers, one goldfish, and a poster of Shawaddywaddy that had been glued to the wall by an unknown prankster the Christmas before last (nobody really cared who had done it), staring at him.

Slowly, he rose from his chair and stepped away from his desk, looked nervously around him, then with growing confidence headed towards the open space in middle of the office, one by one, the rest of them stood up and started to follow him.

Just then the fire alarm went off and they all calmly made their way outside to stand in the pouring rain and watch the building burn instead.

Prompted by this page


No one knew where they came from, they just appeared. They looked and felt like regular pebbles. All different colours, shapes and sizes, but all with the rounded edges and irregular shapes that pebbles have. No one even seemed to notice them arriving, presumably because of the remoteness of their initial appearance. For, you see, they simply appeared in deserts, windswept deserts, with scattered cacti here and there, and along mountain ranges where the hardiest of plants grew. Some even washed up on the shore, picked up by giggling children and thrown back in the sea, just like regular pebbles. These, however, were not regular pebbles. In fact, these were not pebbles at all.

By the time anybody realised, it was too late. The great pebble invasion had begun.

It started in Mexico, the first cactus to be devoured was a classic western cactus with the appearance of a drunk person waving and saying “Yoo Hoo!” The innocuous looking pebble, nestled in the sand at the base of the green spiky plant, just ate it, very quickly, with razor sharp teeth in powerful jaws.

Then, halfway up a particularly pretty hillside in the Dolomites it happened again. This time a grey pebble with white spots chopped down on a clump of sempervivums and sedums.

And it happened again, and again, and again. The world over, anywhere and everywhere that these hardiest of plants grew. The pebbles devoured the succulents, one tasty morsel at a time. And when the succulents where gone, they ate everything else, all the plants, exotic and common, sweet perfumed and smelly, they did not appear in the least bit fussy, across all the continents, throughout all the seas.

Everything that lived and grew was chopped and chewed and swallowed.

Except for sprouts, for some reason, they left all the sprouts.

Prompted by this page


Well, would you look at that! There’s a fork in the road. Not a fork in the road in the traditional sense of a which way now, left or right, oh I really don’t know which way to go, why are there no signposts, kind of fork. An actual fork, a garden fork to be precise, a rather expensive looking, brand new, steel fork with a beautiful dark wood shaft and well-crafted handle, one of those handles with bumpy bits on the underside to make your fingers more comfortable when you are digging.

What’s more, it was standing upright, all four prongs thrust into the ground, as if it had been left there while the owner did something else, like pop to the compost heap or make a cup of tea, you know, the sort of thing you do with a fork when you are gardening and think to yourself you must quickly pop to the compost heap or make a nice cup of tea. You thrust it into the ground and wander off to do whatever it is you need to do.

What made it even stranger was the fact it was in the middle of the road, embedded in the asphalt, at a slight angle, and causing just enough of an obstruction to prevent anybody driving around it. It was quiet country lane, no cars to be seen either in front of me or behind me. How did it get there? It’s a mystery! A mysterious garden fork embedded in the asphalt in the middle of the road.

Anyway, I wasn’t about to look a free gift-fork in the mouth and walk away so I got out of the car, wrestled with it for a bit to loosen it, pulled it out, looked around to make sure I wasn’t being secretly observed by the ghost of Jeremy Beadle, put it in the back of the car and drove off. It would come in very handy for all the gardening I never did.

At the next junction I got stuck at some road works. There was a lot of shouting going on, so I wound down the window to better hear.  I was a couple of cars back, but I could just make out that some poor chap was being severely reprimanded for not strapping all the tools down in the back of the truck when they left the depot earlier. Poor fellow, I guess fate took a turn for the worse at the fork in the road for him that day!

Oh well, his loss my fork.

And as she walked away, she took it all with her

The day had started rushed as she had overslept and was a full forty minutes behind her regular morning schedule. Something had to give, so she missed her morning shit. Electing to go when she got to work instead. By skipping her morning shit, she would gain an extra twenty minutes, rather than losing forty, giving her an extra ten minutes luxuriating in the bath and a spare ten minutes for anything else. She would have been wiser to have had a shit and a shower and rushed out of the door, rather than face the embarrassment of what would happen later.

Having accrued an extra ten minutes by not having her morning shit and having a longer bath, she arrived at work in good time. Made her way to her desk, logged on to her computer, checked her email, did some other bits and pieces before deciding she should probably have that shit now. So, off she went. To the toilet. On the 32nd floor. It was a work shit after all, so she figured she might as well make the most of it. She got up from her desk, located on the second floor, and made her way slowly to the stairs and started the long ascent to the 32nd floor. Fifteen minutes later she was nestled on her throne, catching up on world affairs on her phone, while having a shit. A particularly satisfying shit as it happened as it was during work time and she was getting paid to shit and use the firm’s toilet paper!

Twenty-five minutes later, she arose, pulled at the toilet paper, wiped her arse with a few neatly folded sheets, chucked them in the toilet, flushed it, turned around and left the cubicle all in one swift motion (no pun intended), washed her hands at the sink for a full five minutes, then went through the door to the stairs and began her descent.

Ten minutes later, as she walked through the door to her floor, one of her co-workers started to snigger, another co-worker looked up to see what the first one was sniggering about, and began to giggle, another looked up to see what the sniggering and giggling was about and let out a loud guffaw, because of the loud guffaw it wasn’t long before the whole of the floor were either rolling around on the carpet tiles in merriment, or were doubled up in extreme laughter at the site that was in front of them.

For, you see, when she had pulled at the toilet paper to wipe her arse, due to a slight flaw in manufacturing, the sheets hadn’t separated as there were no perforations. When she had chucked the neatly folded sheets into the toilet and turned swiftly to flush it, she hadn’t noticed that a piece of paper was wedged in her bottom, the speed of her turn causing the discarded poo paper not to land in the toilet bowl as intended, but to dangle behind her, out of sight, as she pulled up her knickers and realigned her skirt.

After she had washed her hands, she had exited the loo and as she walked away, she took it all with her, one long trail of industrial style toilet paper trailing from the 32nd floor all the way to the 2nd. And to make it more embarrassing, the folded sheets she had used to wipe herself with had become unfolded, leaving a long brown stain imprinted on them shaped just like an arrow pointing back the way she had come.

Prompted by this page

The storm raged on without any hope of being saved

How to save a storm.

How do you save a storm? Can a storm be saved? Why would you save a storm?

Questions, questions, questions.

If you could save a storm, where would you save it? Would you store it in a cupboard or a drawer? Maybe you would put it in a box, I don’t know. Are storms digital? If they were could you save them on a server?

Or, hang on a minute, maybe there is an answer, of sorts. Storms are not digital, so I guess they must be analogue, as one would imagine they use or relate to something which is represented by continuously variable physical quantity, a thunderstorm with rain and lightning and thunder is produced by cumulonimbus clouds and warm unstable air that is rising and clashing with the colder air above, thus producing electricity (lighting) and sound waves (thunder). Can they be saved in a cloud?

Probably not.

There are of course many other types of storms such as blizzards, cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons, to name a few. How would you save these storms?

Film. You could record them to many of the different mediums of capturing live images. You know, celluloid, video tape, mobile phones, camcorders, that sort of thing. If that’s the answer then there is hope of saving a raging storm.

Or do they need saving for prosperity? Or maybe they need saving from poachers or would be malignant storm hunters that want to kill them and hang them on a wall or use their ingredients for strange medicines?

Perhaps they need saving from themselves? Or saving from one or some or all the many, many fictitious deities that are out there in myth and religion?

Who knows?

One thing is for sure. I’m fucked if I know.

Prompted by this page

The boat was empty, except for one lone fish

The fish flopped about for a few seconds. Then it flapped about for a few seconds. Then it flopped and flapped about for a few seconds more. It lifted its head slightly, making that gulping fishy type gulping thing that fish do, as if it was making one lust gasp to fill its lungs with air. This, of course, is nonsense, well, partly. Fish don’t have lungs, although, unbeknownst to most folk, it was trying to breathe. If a fish has trouble breathing due to a lack of dissolved oxygen in water due to there being a deficiency of aeration or poor water quality, it will rise to the surface and gulp and gasp for air. I only know this as when I was a child I had tropical fish given to me by a co-worker of my mother, his name escapes me at the moment, I think it may have been Steve Something, although I can’t be sure. He gave me all that was needed, a tank, that looked a bit like a giant lava lamp, a heater, food and a variety of tropical fish, although after a few months all I seemed to have was a tank full of guppies and snails.

Anyway, I digress, the particular fish in question, that was lying in the bottom of the boat was, you see, trying to breathe, through its mouth. Fruitlessly, of course, as it would still need to get itself into water to survive and breathe properly. Besides. A few seconds later, it had stopped flopping and flapping and gulping and gasping for air through its mouth as it was dead. Not because it had finally succumbed to the lack of oxygen flowing through its vascular system, but because it had been ripped in half by two herring gulls and was now split between the stomachs of said birds.

Prompted by this page


Transfixed by the lights, she never noticed he was there.

It was beautiful, big, round, bright, and beautiful, there was an amazing spectrum of colours surrounding the outside of the circle and the more she looked at it the more beautiful it became, bursting with incandescence, glowing with luminosity from the edges and into the beyond of the periphery of her vision.

At the centre was an almost blinding whiteness.  The type of white brightness that would leave black dots in the centre of your vison if you looked away or closed your eyes. Except she was unable to look away. She was absolutely transfixed by the sheer brilliance of the lights, even if she wanted to, even if she tried to force herself, she simply could not tear her vision away from the lights. Sitting, in the middle of the road, utterly motionless, caught in the vastness of the brilliance as they came closer and closer, faster and faster, until…

Bloody rabbits, the driver said aloud as he sped down the country lane, swerving at the last minute in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable, imagining the sound of crunching bones as his wheel instantly crushed the poor, blinded, bunny as he zoomed toward his destination.

10 Minute Writing Prompt

Hello. I have had this wordpress blog site thingy for several years now and have never typed a thing into it.

Anyway, today I have. My old mate over at https://deaddeerblog.wordpress.com/ has told me to do this 10 minute writing prompt from here

December Writing Prompts

Todays prompt was/is: Holding her gaze briefly from across the room, he knew…

This is what I wrote, I haven’t read the rules so don’t know if I should edit out the typos and grammatical errors etc. so I have left it as I typed it:

Holding her gaze briefly from across the room he knew that it was just a matter of time before she came over and asked why he had just tipped his drink into the top drawer of their hosts sideboard. He glanced away then glanced back to see if she was still looking at him. She was. Quite intently. Damn it. He thought, why did she have to look at him at that precise moment of all moments? 

She was quite a stern looking individual, with a pointy, sticky out chin, with skin that looked as if it had been weathered to leather by years of facing into a north wind at the south pole. Her grey hair was tightly pulled into a top knot upon her head, which made the wrinkles of her forehead raise vertically instead of horizontally, which was made her look extremely odd.

She started moving towards him through the crowd of guests, stepping sideways to slip between a couple of portly gentlemen and ducking as she passed to avoid interrupting their conversation. As she did so, her chin dipped into one of the gentleman’s frothy beer, while her top knot snagged in the long bushy beard of the other fellow.

As the kerfuffle of entangled party guests erupted before him, he took his chance, slammed the sideboard drawer shut with enough ferocity to make the collection of family photographs, arranged on show on top wobble a little, and legged it out of the door.

It was a shit party anyway.


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