Guy Fawkes Night – Debbie Young's Writing Life

Flight of Fancy

Posted on October 7, 2020October 16, 2020 by Debbie Young

In my Young by Name column for the October issue of the multiple-award-winning Tetbury Advertiser, I’ve been musing about superheroes and superpowers

One of the few Marvel Movies superheroes I can actually recognise (Photo by Judeus Samson via Unsplash)

Losing the plot early on while watching a Marvel movie with my teenage daughter, I fell to wondering which of its superheroes’ superpowers I would most like to have myself.

Thor’s exceptional physical strength, de rigueur for most superheroes, doesn’t appeal. While it might come in handy for removing a stubborn lid from a jam jar, it’s not something I’d have much use for in my everyday life. Besides, my handy gadget from Lakeland serves the same purpose just as well.

Nor is there much call in the Cotswolds for Captain America’s martial arts expertise, especially while social distancing rules apply. Turning green and increasing my bodyweight ten-fold, like the Hulk, is a non-starter. I’d need a whole new wardrobe. Jessica Jones’ immunity to mind control might come in handy in our era of social media manipulation, but I’d far rather have her ability to fly.

Flight Envy

Being able to take off and soar like a bird would be an undeniably environmentally-friendly form of transport, even more so than my electric car. Just think how many calories it would burn. Plus it would be far more fun than going to the gym.

photo of pheasant on road — The least careful road user I know – the pheasant (Photo by Michael Hoyt via Unsplash)

This makes me wonder why pheasants, designed by nature to fly, are so reluctant to take to the air whenever a car approaches them. There’s always a stand-off between bird and vehicle. Just when you’re starting to think your car is more likely to become airborne than they are, they tease you with a Gallic shrug of resignation and take flight with an “Oh, if I must” expression.

The pheasant’s first choice of tactic to escape from any threat is to run. This is not the smartest move in a single-track country lane with high banks and hedgerows on either side, allowing them only to run ahead of an approaching vehicle rather than to divert out of its path. Although I admire their optimism, their physiology dictates that they will never outrun my car. However, they are capable of flying at up to 60mph*. Surely it’s a no-brainer?

Bird Brain

photo of pheasant in undergrowth — Possibly the worst camouflaged bird in Britain? Even so, on the endangered species list, it rates as “of least concern” due to the zillions bred for shooting each year (Photo by Zoltan Tasi via Unsplash)

And there we reach the heart of the matter. If logic is not the pheasant’s long suit, we can blame the size of its brain: a mere 4g**. Although impressive compared to a goldfish’s 0.097g of little grey calls, the pheasant doesn’t fare much better than the hedgehog (3.35g), and we all know how ineffective the hedgehog’s preferred self-defence method is against cars. (In case you’re wondering, your own brain weighs around 1400g.)

All this makes me wonder which superpower pheasants would pick to enhance their chances of survival on the road. Given their track record on decision-making, my money is on invisibility.

* Source: https://www.pheasantsforever.org/Habitat/Pheasant-Facts.aspx

** Source of brain size data: faculty.washington.edu.chudler/facts.html

In Other News

cover of The Natter of Knitters Despite a post-cold voice like gravel, I really enjoyed giving a talk via Zoom to a local WI (Women’s Institute) group earlier this week, talking about how living in a Cotswold village has inspired my novels.

Pictured left is the cover of a story that was actually inspired by another WI, from Chudleigh, down in Devon, about a yarnbombing event that goes wrong. The Natter of Knitters is a quick read (about 20% the length of one of my novels) and is available in ebook and a slim postcard-sized paperback – the perfect stocking-filler, for anyone who is already thinking about Christmas shopping! Part of my new Tales from Wendlebury Barrow series, it features all your favourite characters from the Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries and introduces new ones too.

Cover of Trick or Murder? Like The Natter of Knitters, the second Sophie Sayers novel Trick or Murder? takes place during the autumn. This story sees a conflict in Wendlebury Barrow between Halloween and Guy Fawkes’ Night, fuelled by the strange new vicar, the Reverend Neep.

In the village where I live in real life, Hawkesbury Upton, we usually celebrate both of these occasions in style, but due to Covid restrictions, there’ll sadly be no trick or treating or bonfire parties this year. However, we’re now gearing up for both a Pumpkin Trail along the route of our HU5K fun run, an event I helped found eight years ago, and the annual Scarecrow Trail, for which this year I’ve rashly volunteered to make not one but two scarecrows, one to go outside my house and the other outside the parish church of St Mary’s. So you can guess what I’ll be doing this weekend…

The theme for this year’s Scarecrow Trail is “Heroes and Villains” – and I’ll show you photos of mine once the trails have started. It’s all top secret till then – but it’s a safe bet that neither of mine will be of Marvel Superheroes!

Buying Links

You can buy all my books online or order paperbacks from your local bookshop. Here are the online buying links for the books mentioned above:

The Natter of Knitters – ebook – paperback
Trick or Murder? – ebook – paperback

Events, Personal life

Of Jealous Guys and Ambitious Bonfires

Posted on November 26, 2016November 26, 2016 by Debbie Young

(This is my November column for the Hawkesbury Parish News, published just before the annual village Bonfire Night celebrations)

Cover of the Ladybird book entitled James I and the Gunpowder Plot — All you need to know about Guy Fawkes in child-friendly detail (image: Amazon UK)

I’m old enough to remember not only the time when “Penny for the Guy” was a common cry at this time of year, but when a penny would be enough to buy something.

You could get four fruit salad sweets or a chocolate mouse for a penny. Or for just a few pennies, you could buy the cheapest fireworks from our local Post Office. My favourite was a box of coloured matches, while naughty boys preferred bangers or jumping jacks. Children were allowed to buy them, and we did. These days we may complain that health and safety regulations have gone mad, but looking back, you can see why we needed to invent them.

My favourite childhood memory of Fireworks Night was our family party. Raised in London suburbia, I was lucky enough to live in a house on the corner of the street, with a wrap-around garden big enough to host a decent bonfire without torching either the guests or the neighbours. That’s something you couldn’t do in most modern estate houses.

Each year our guy got sent on his way atop a pile of crumpled newspaper and sticks. In that simpler age, it didn’t occur to us to build a bonfire shaped like anything other than a bonfire.

Not so now we live in Hawkesbury, where the village bonfire is always a spectacular structure: Tower Bridge last year, complete with London bus. What shape will this year’s be? Whatever it is, if the old guys we used to make could see it, they’d be flabbergasted. Some guys have all the luck, they might say.

Picture of giant model of train in bonfire — The answer: Hawkesbury’s 2016 Bonfire Night set fire to the Hogwarts Express (Check out the two people standing to the left of the picture for an idea of the giant scale of the train!) Photo by Andy Musty

Family, Personal life

Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving

Posted on November 9, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

“Shall I put some Christmas decorations up now, Mummy?”

My daughter has just put the Halloween decorations away in a box to be stored in the cellar till next October. She’s acquired quite a collection of plastic pumpkins in her seven years, each with a different feature – a ghoulish laugh, an integral torch, a battery-powered spooky judder. It made a surprisingly cheering montage in our front window.

Since Laura was tiny, we’ve enjoyed making seasonal displays that can be seen from the front path, echoing our house’s past as the village post office with a permanent shop window. Now that there’s a post-Halloween void, she’s itching to fill it.

“Wait until after Guy Fawkes Night,” I plead, taking a rare opportunity to dust and polish the bare windowledge.

Obediently, she potters off, humming a Christmas carol. I’m unwilling to fast-forward my thoughts to December, but I realise I’m unlikely to gain much of a stay of execution. We’ve already had to pack our Christmas shoeboxes for school and the Nativity Play has been cast.

“I’m going to be Mary!” piped up an excited voice as a throng of infants headed out of school on Guy Fawkes Night.

I appreciate their teachers need a long run-up to the festive season, to be sure that the children know all their lines in time. I just wish I didn’t feel compelled to rush in to December when November has barely begun. As it is – whoosh! not only will November hurtle by, but in no time at all 2010 will be a thing of the past, and we’ll be giving a nostalgic sigh each time we remember to write 2011 on a cheque.

What we really need is a late November festival to act as a brake on the speed of the year. Harvest Festival is long over, but there are still some leaves on the trees – why not an Autumn Leaf Fest to mark the baring of the skeletal trees, victims of the late November winds? Or a Winter Warmer Day, when everyone finally accepts that there is no Indian summer around the corner, stashes their cotton clothes in the back of the wardrobe, and dons their thermals for the first time. Or a pre-Christmas Purge, chucking out the old toys that haven’t been played with since last Christmas Day, clearing the decks ready for this season’s excesses. Any of these could fuel Laura’s passion for window displays and hedge off the onslaught of Advent.

How I envy the Americans their Thanksgiving Holiday – perfectly placed to fill the void between Guy Fawkes Night and Christmas. Would it seem churlish to celebrate it here too, as if we were glad to get those pesky Puritans off our soil?

Perhaps we can engineer an acceptable alternative of our own. After all, we have plenty else to be thankful for. And acknowledging our blessings might also serve to constrain the unnecessary excesses of the modern Christmas.

Happy November, everyone!