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talesofstyles · 3 years

Text

Drs Styles

paediatric heart surgeon harry, husband harry and dad harry. honestly the holy trinity.

warning: they did it in the car. bloody animals.

Harry

“Move your car, please!”

“What are you going to do? Write me a ticket?”

“This is in the interests of safety for the children!”

I look at the time in the car. I’ve still got about twenty to twenty-five minutes to watch this drama unfold at the school gate. I just wish we had popcorn because drop-off and parking situations at the school gates are always more entertaining than Good Morning Britain.

The school gate is a strange social scene, and honestly, I don’t blame my wife for trying to avoid it like a plague. Sometimes, you don’t even have to talk to these people to know everything about their lives and more. I swear there are more gossips in the class WhatsApp group and daily playground chattering than in the copies of The Sun and Daily Mail combined. You know who’s married, who’s getting a divorce, whose husband shagged the au pair again, whose party you haven’t been invited to, even who’s looking for a builder.

I see the school caretaker chuckling to himself as he sweeps the autumn leaves off the pathway, no doubt also enjoying our morning entertainment.

“Why is Mrs Chambers screaming like that?” Alma, our eldest daughter, asks from the back of the car.

“Because that man parks his car in a drop-off zone,” I reply, still watching him as he removes a child from his car seat. “Do you know who that is?”

“I think the boy is your classmate,” Alma turns to her sister.

Fiona, our youngest, peers over to inspect. “Oh yeah, that’s Rufus and his dad.”

“Do we like Rufus?”

“Not unless we like boys who pee down the slides,” Fiona scrunches her nose up. “He stood at the top and peed down like a waterfall. I haven’t gone down the slide ever since.”

I shake my head and let out a chuckle. “M’sure they’ve cleaned it up since, button.”

Did you know that choosing a school for your child after nursery can be a head-throbbing, stomach-twisting, heart-pounding experience? Well, it can. How is one supposed to choose a school anyway? According to the proximity? Leavers Results? Adorable uniforms? Parents’ agendas?

After many, many discussions and visits through more schools than I can count, we ended up with Thomas’s Kensington. It’s a great school, and only ten minutes away from our home, making school runs easier. The downside of this school is the fact that it costs us an arm and a leg and that they’re always trying to rip us off any chance they get. Also, they only take the kids until 11, so after that, we’ll have to look for other schools again. But since our girls are only seven and five, we can worry about that later.

There’s a strange mix of parents at this place. I went to school up in the North and the school gate scene is nothing like this. Here there are more au pairs, fancy cars, nicer clothes and people coming with impressive tans from their last weekend break in Antibes. The kids here are suited up too: the PE kit is the size of a small weekender bag, and we put them in uniforms that make them look smart, hoping that will increase the size of their brains. A child walks past our car with a cello case, another with a hockey stick. It’s a different land here. One that my socialist in-laws constantly tease us about and one which my mum was hysterical about because she was scared her grandbabies would be little Tories. I promised her I’d keep them grounded by only giving them plain hobnobs. None of those luxury chocolate covered ones.

Jokes aside, my girls are happy here. They’re thriving. They learn French and Spanish and Mandarin, even if they share a class with kids who have ridiculous names like Kitty and Archibald.

A knock at my window calls me to attention. I wind it down.

“Are you Fiona’s dad?” A mum asks me.

“I am.”

“It’s about Ophelia’s riding party this Saturday at the riding stables.”

Like I said, it’s a different land here.

“I thought we RSVPed to that?” I look at her in confusion.

“Yes, you did, but we have to change the food options as one of the partygoers is allergic to nuts. I’m making everyone aware and we need to let the guests know that they can’t bring any nuts on the day.”

A dirty joke is right there on the tip of my tongue and I’m trying my hardest to keep it in. My wife would definitely find it funny though, I’ve got to remember this and tell her later.

“Noted,” I mean, I wasn’t going to send my daughter to a party with a packet of cashews anyway but I nod politely.

“And just gift vouchers for gifts please. Smiggle, if you can.”

Again, I nod, biting my tongue at the presumptuousness. But then I suddenly panic, because we haven’t entered the realms of pony riding just yet. Do I have to buy jods and boots? If I don’t, will my daughter be the odd one out? But Ophelia’s mum saunters off before I’ve got the chance to ask.

“Do I have to go to that party, daddy?” Fiona asks.

“Well, we’ve already replied, poppet,” I tell her. “Did you not want to go?”

“I’ll go if I have to.”

I don’t answer because I get distracted by a vacant space. I edge the car forward so my girls can hop off.

“I love you both. Have a good day, make good choices.”

“Bye daddy! We’ll see you after work!”

***

Evelina London Children’s Hospital is our second home. Of course, as a children’s hospital, we try to make the place as fun as possible as not to freak those little patients out at being ill. It is bright and primary coloured, and each ward is decorated according to its own theme with different colours and lovely artworks. There are televisions and toys almost in every corner. We have a giant slide on the ground floor, and even the bins are shaped like red London buses. The aim was to help the children to forget that they’re in a hospital and take their minds off their sickness.

Since my wife and I are in the same department, our offices are next to each other, both overlooking the Thames. It’s nice up here. Would’ve been nicer if we could sneak in a quickie, but that’s practically impossible with our shared secretary’s desk sitting literally in front of our doors.

Speak of the devil.

“Good morning. Here’s your tea,” my secretary follows me into my office with a cup of tea and a tiny plate with a couple of rich tea fingers. “Clinic until 3 pm, scheduled PDA ligation in the laboratory for 4 pm and then evening rounds on the wards.”

“Mornin’ Rhonda, you look lovely today,” I greet her cheerily. She’s a stern-looking woman who definitely likes her tea as strong as tits and who has probably never cried in her life. With such severity, she runs a tight ship, but she secretly has this affectionate side in her too. Not only is she a great secretary, but she also takes care of us in a way as a grandma does. She makes us tea, feeds us in between surgeries with biscuits or nice baby cheeses and crackers just so we wouldn’t starve.

See that sofa over there in the corner of my office? Rhonda got me that. It was around the time when I had just become a new father with the sweetest, most gorgeous little baby who did not sleep. Alma wasn’t a fussy baby though. For some reason, she just wouldn’t go back to sleep after her midnight feed for months. Believe me, I tried everything. I changed her nappy, I swayed and jiggled and rocked and sung her to sleep. Odd nonsensical songs like, ‘Alma darling go to sleeep. Sleepy sleep sleep. Pleeeeease. I’m so tirrrred. My eyeballs may actually exploooode. I don’t want you to see thaaat.’ And she would just look at me all wide-eyed like I’d lost the plot. Those were song lyrics? That was rubbish. Please don’t give up your day job. Also, it’s not sleeping time. I’m awake. I’m ready for life. Come on, entertain me, old man. Isn’t this nice, just you and me? Tell me everything you know. EVERYTHING.

Except of course she didn’t say all that. She would just stare at me and I had no idea what was going on in her little head.

I took over my wife’s patients at the hospital during her maternity leave, so I had longer hours at the hospital. One day Rhonda found me napping on the floor between surgeries, so she sweet-talked some porters into looking for any old sofas on the go and paid to have this one reupholstered. She even bought me a fleece throw for it too. We really don’t deserve her.

“You hittin’ on me?” She deadpans. “Yer wife not doing it for you these days?”

“It’s the blazer. I’m a sucker for a blazer.”

“If I’d known, I would’ve worn it more often,” she replies. “Did my nice dress yesterday not give you the fanny flutters?”

“It’s schlong shiver for me,” I roar with laughter. “And it’s the tartan, makes you look well old.”

“YN, yer husband’s a bloody git, did I ever tell you that?” Rhonda says loud enough for my wife to hear, and I can hear my wife’s laughter from her office next door. “Drink your tea. Your first clinic appointment is in twenty.”

“Yes ma’am,” I salute her.

***

The Arctic ward in the Evelina is home to many of our imaging, heart and kidney services. The name is probably giving it away, but everything is decorated in blue and white to go with the theme. We have several zones, and since paediatric cardiology clinics are held in the Walrus zone, I spend a great deal of time each day looking at walrus and snowflake decals.

“Doctor Styles!” I hear a little voice shouts in excitement as I walk towards the waiting room in the outpatient ward. I smile, because I recognise that voice even before I see the little person.

The waiting room is very open here compared to other hospitals. There’s a sea of noise, snacks, tiny juice boxes and colouring pages. There’s also always a look of expectation, judgement on the faces of parents and guardians every time I walk in. They want to see if their doctor is old or qualified enough to see their children. There’s always one child who has the whole gang with them; parents, two sets of grandparents and even several aunts and uncles, and there’s also at least one child running around in circles out of boredom.

This little lad bounces off his chair and hurls himself at me in a way like a little puppy would when its owner comes home from work. I put an arm out, hoping that he’ll apply the brakes but no such luck and he bundles himself into my arms. “Nice to see you, mate.”

His parents smile as they watch their son’s antics, who then runs off as I shake their hands. I turn around to see what caught his attention, and I can’t help but chuckle when I realise it’s my wife.

“Doctor pretty Styles!” He exclaims excitedly as he bundles himself into her arms. She gets a mouthful of curls in the process.

“Hi Rory,” she greets him as she runs her fingers through his curly mop.

“Oi,” I pout as I walk towards them. “You don’t think I’m pretty?”

“Your wife is prettier,” he says with a shrug, his tone matter-of-fact.

She laughs and gives him a high-five. “Rory, you are officially my favourite patient.”

She is right. Rory is one of our special patients for sure. We’ve both known him for about six years now, ever since Rory’s mum gave birth to this tiny human next door at St Thomas and his heart was literally broken. I remember watching proudly from the theatre when my wife replaced two of his valves when he was born. It was in our early years of training. Long time patients like Rory almost always feel like family. We’ve seen all their parents’ tears and watched over their children throughout the years. They send us cards and wine every Christmas and despite all attempts to keep a professional distance, their kids do feel like our own.

Rory shrugs off his dinosaur rucksack and unzips it, pulling out a drawing of a blue whale and an opened packet of KitKat. I like that the whale wears a top hat and appears to also don a moustache.

“I drew you both a picture. Only one though, because I figure you can share,” he says with a big toothy grin and hands the packet of KitKat to my wife. “And I’ve got half a KitKat here. Do you want it?”

“I’m good for now. Keep that KitKat for later on the tube,” she smiles and waves at Rory as she begins to walk away towards the fetal cardiology ward just down the hall. “Bye Rory, thanks for the picture.”

“Bye doctor pretty Styles,” Rory replies, making my wife laugh as she walks away. I give her a wave and a wink.

“Hey Rory, did you know a blue whale has a heart the size of a small car?” I ask him and his eyes widen.

“No way! That’s mega!” He exclaims. “Do you think you could operate on a whale heart?”

“I would need a very big ladder,” I tell him. “And a wetsuit. I’d give it a go though.”

A senior nurse from the outpatient ward, Florence approaches us with a junior nurse trailing behind her. “Dr Styles, always a pleasure.”

I smile at her. “Florence. How are we today?”

“Busy as usual,” she replies. “We’re about twenty minutes behind I’m afraid. We had Dr Goodridge in this morning and you know he likes to talk.”

“He always runs over,” I chuckle. “Well, don’t worry. I’ll skip lunch and get us back up to speed.”

“I’ll make sure to send some snacks for you. Here’s your chart, your files are already in your office. And this is Alice, your nurse today. She’s newly qualified so might need some instructions.”

The new nurse looks terrified so I smile at her to try and calm her fears. I totally get that. When you work in medicine, unfortunately, you’ll realise that there are a lot of rude self-important wankers.

I look down at my chart and find Rory’s name on the top of the list. “Well, look who’s coming with me to the exam room.”

Rory reaches out to hold my hand and we walk towards the examination room. His parents follow us closely, carrying the usual coats and devices that people do when they know they’re bound for a hospital waiting room. I see them inside and sit behind the desk.

“So, young man, I hear we’ve had a touch of drama with you. Can you tell me what happened?”

I’ve actually already got the information in the file, but I like the way this kid tells a story. He reminds me of my youngest.

“So… I was at school and we were doing PE and I wasn’t really feeling it because it was cold and really we should have been inside but Mr Witter makes us go outside because he used to be in the Army apparently and he says we should get used to the cold but that’s what they do in prisons.”

I smile. “Go on.”

“And then my heart started running.”

“You mean racing?”

He nods firmly. Racing isn’t even the word. It sprinted to the finish like Bolt at 252 beats per minute, three times the speed it should.

“It felt like bubbles in my chest and then the school went crazy panicky and they called the ambulance and they brought me to the hospital but not this one, it was another one and it wasn’t as good because you weren’t there and they had really bad biscuit.”

His mum adds. “And they gave him some drugs to bring it back to a steady rhythm; they were close to shocking him.” Her voice trails off and both parents’ faces look drawn and pale remembering the incident.

Rory looks absolutely unbothered by this. To be fair, we have put this little man through everything. We’ve cut his chest open more times than is necessary for someone so small, we hook him up to machines and put him on treadmills. His resilience and character amaze me, and I really can’t imagine what it feels like to see your child so vulnerable and helpless, to be paralysed and weighed down with such worry.

“Alright then, little man, we need to make sure that your heart is working as it should. This is Alice, and she is going to take you over for an ECG and we just need to make sure your tick-tock is in good shape.”

Rory nods and jumps off the chair. His dad offers him a piggyback, and his mum smiles at them. I can hear Rory offering that half KitKat to Alice as they leave the room.

His mother turns to me as the door is closed, her shoulders relaxing, allowing herself to breathe. “And how are you?” I ask her.

“You just think it’s done and then something like that comes along to scare you,” she says with a sigh.

“Let’s have these tests and then see if it’s anything major to worry about,” I try to calm her. “Episodes of rapid heartbeat is quite common in Rory’s case, and we can look into drugs to remedy that if necessary.”

She smiles, nodding.

“Did you have any other questions for me?”

She studies my face for a moment too long. “I… well, it will show up in Rory’s records soon, but my husband I are… I mean we’re getting a divorce.”

I pause for a moment. Of course, I know these things happen in life, but I’ve known this couple for years. I’ve seen them at their lowest ebb, bound by friendship and their love for that boy. I really do feel sorry for them.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I mumble.

“We just… we’re terrified about telling Rory.”

“He doesn’t know?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “We’re scared of breaking him. I mean, look at him. All of this stuff he’s been through and he carries on like nothing has happened. We don’t want to upset him.”

“It took a team of us the best part of six years to build Rory’s heart. There's a warranty on that workmanship,” I reassure her. “Have that chat with him. He’ll be fine.”

***

“Have we got time for dinner first?” I turn to my wife as we walk out of the hospital. We don’t normally have the luxury of ending our shift at the same time, but today is exceptional. We have parents’ evening at the girls’ school so Rhonda made sure to clear up our schedule after our evening rounds at the ward.

“No, but we can raid M&S and eat in the car?”

I’m starving and I almost cry with relief at the suggestion. “Always knew I married the right woman.”

She chuckles. “Damn right you did.”

We leave the car at the hospital and she drags me along the walkways to Waterloo, the breeze biting at our cheeks. I pull her into M&S, dodging the marching commuters and grab a basket.

“I’ll look for some wine,” she says before she saunters off. “Oh and I want sushi. None of that crap with the mayonnaise please.”

“Alright.”

I skipped lunch today so the whole place calls to me. I start taking very random things off the shelves: a packet of raspberry iced buns. That’ll do. I also take some hummus for my wife because she bloody loves hummus. I’m not even joking, I’ve seen her down a whole pot of it. Then I take some sushi as requested, some coleslaw, a family bag of mature cheddar and red onion crisps and a trifle. I hope I don’t bump into Rhonda. Next are cheese twists, noodle salad and cocktail sausages.

It takes me a while to notice that there is a man right next to me with a roll of yellow stickers in their back pocket. Hello there, you are one of my favourite people tonight. Have I managed to find that sacred hour when all the food is being marked down? He labels some prawns with dip and even though I get a little squeamish about eating fish near its expiry date, I put it in my basket. I then follow him around the corner. Now, this is dinner. I put all sorts of random food in my basket and smile at the thought.

Ooh, knockdown pizzas. I should get a pizza. That’s tomorrow’s tea sorted, the girls will love it. Although I can’t help but wonder, what’s the limit for us to feed our daughters frozen pizza in a week before they get taken away from us? But eh, we might be able to get away with it if we give them frozen peas on the side.

“Look at you,” says my wife, depositing two bottles of red in the basket.

“Yes, it’s me. I’m the yellow sticker bitch.”

She snickers as we turn to head for the tills. “Excellent work.”

***

“Mr and Mrs Styles, welcome.”

“Mrs Ebner, always a pleasure,” I shake the headmistress’ hand who’s standing at the door.

“Busy evening?” My wife asks her as she shakes her hand next.

“Always,” the headmistress replies with a smile, then proceeds to speak like she’s reading out of brochures. “But such a wonderful opportunity to connect with our parents and build on the special relationships we have with our school community.”

Two uniformed minions appear.

“Lewis, Maggie, could you please show Mr and Mrs Styles through to the drinks reception?”

They both nod in unison. The boy holds his arms out like a waiter showing us to our table. We follow them through the school’s grand corridors to the main hall. It’s the one thing I like about this place. It’s very Hogwarts-like with hefty engraved name boards and sepia photos of successful sports teams. In the hall, a throng of parents mill around waiting to see respective teachers. It’s the same every year. We all dodge the people from the PTA trying to sell us quiz tickets, and the bowls of crisps out of hygiene concerns.

“Red or white?” Asks a lady in an apron.

This right here is the very reason we get through parents’ evening. From the look of the bottle, it’s decent wine too. I think that’s where a good proportion of our fees is going.

“Red, please.”

We both take our glasses and walk to the corner of the hall. It’s essentially a holding area without the background music. The idea is that all the parents will get on and create a party vibe but it just becomes a strange family gathering. As terrible as it sounds, it’s sorted into cliques: parents who know each other via NCT groups, the international expat brigades who keep to themselves, the parents who’ve ostracised themselves by gossip, the ones who you know regularly brunch and ski together.

The boy from earlier suddenly appears in front of us. “Mrs Hughes is ready for you.”

I put my hand on the small of my wife’s back as we walk towards the classroom. Fiona’s teacher first and then Alma’s straight after. Right, we can do this.

“Mrs Hughes, we meet again,” I shake her hand. I’ve got no qualms about Mrs Hughes. She’s a seasoned teacher who likes a slack and sensible moccasin and we’re familiar with her since she taught Alma two years previously. When we enter the classroom, Lewis bows in reverence, taking his leave and I wonder whether to tip him.

“It’s always lovely to have another Styles girl in my classroom. Fiona is a particular delight.”

My wife and I smile proudly. I’m sure Mrs Hughes says this to every parent here about their child, but that’s always nice to hear.

“She talks a lot about you,” my wife says. “She seems to have settled in well.”

Mrs Hughes opens up a couple of books and it’s classic Fiona. Alma is ordered and neat—if she makes a mistake then she erases it completely and she underlines things with a ruler and listens to instruction carefully. She gets that from her mum. Fiona though, on the other hand, she’s all me. She has more wild abandon about her; no rulers, no rubbers. She puts giant crosses through things that don’t work and likes her bubble writing decorated with doodles of many, many cats.

I glance around the classroom as Mrs Hughes talks to us about standardised scores. The theme of the school is to show you how smart and educated these children are. Look at the copperplate handwriting, their reproductions of Van Gogh and our languages corner where they’ve all had a go at telling us what they like in French. I spy a contribution from my girl. J’adore les chats et le gâteau au chocolat.

I’ve lost track of the conversation so I try to catch up.

“So to push Fiona into those top scores, perhaps we can look into tutoring? For maths, in particular, so she can grasp some of the concepts a little more tightly,” says Mrs Hughes.

My wife and I look at each other confused. “Uh, I don’t think there’s a need, right? She’s only five.”

“It’s never too early,” replies Mrs Hughes. “We run an after-school tutoring club on Tuesdays that would help.”

Back when I was a youngster, clubs were fun endeavours that involved matching baseballs caps or were a chocolate biscuit that you had in your lunchbox. Maths tutoring session was not a club.

I ask her. “Is it free?”

“It’s fifteen pounds per session.”

See? My point being this should be a parents’ evening, not a sales session.

“Well, then it’s something to think about,” says my wife. “It could be that Fiona catches up with people throughout the year.”

“Possibly,” Mrs Hughes nods. Still, though, she proceeds to go into her folder and passes me a form. Sneaky. “Fiona has also shown great interest in languages and art. Her pictures have been a joy.”

Mrs Hughes goes to a file and pulls one of Fiona’s drawings. I glance down at it. It’s a standard child piece of art. The grass and sky are strips of colour to the top and bottom. It’s a family portrait, and we are as tall as the broccoli style trees. Wait, hang on a second. I count the number of people in the picture again. Is that-

“And Mrs Styles, I gather congratulations are in order,” she says with a smile. “Such lovely news.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Fiona told me it’s a boy,” she adds, and the sheer terror on my wife’s face at the realisation is priceless. “You must be very thrilled.”

I study the picture. There’s a house in the middle, and standing in a line in front of the house is our family. The one slightly taller than the broccoli tree is me. I’ve got my white lab coat, and I look like a serial killer because I’m holding a scalpel with the size of a butcher’s knife. Next to me is my wife, also with a white lab coat, but instead of a scalpel, she’s holding a very chunky baby who rather looks like a basketball with a head.

“Oh dear,” I chuckle. “Guess now we know what she’ll ask for Christmas.”

“Yeah,” my wife shakes her head. “We’re not expecting.”

“Oh, I apologise,” Mrs Hughes says with a sheepish smile.

“No worries, Mrs Hughes,” I tell her. “So, what else has our girl been up to here? Besides gossiping of course.”

Mrs Hughes laughs under her breath. “Well, in class, Fiona is attentive, bright and very helpful. She is a credit to you both.”

***

“I swear your daughter, Styles.”

We’re sitting in the car now. Finally done with parents’ evening, still laughing at the slightly creepy, chunky basketball baby in Fiona’s picture and the fact that three people, including Mrs Hughes, have congratulated us for the ‘baby’.

“You haven’t called me Styles in years,“ I turn to her with a grin. “Not since medical school.”

I can’t help but flashback to the good ol’ days when we had matching university hoodies and we’d test each other on the parts of a kidney whilst walking into lectures, sitting next to each other, sharing pens and cans of Lilt.

“Well, after that I became a Styles too,” she chuckles. “Would be confusing then, wouldn’t it?”

“True,” I laugh under my breath, then I grab her hand and pull it to my mouth so I can kiss her knuckles. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For being a Styles.”

“Aw, aren’t we soppy tonight?” She smirks. “Alright, stop the car.”

“What?”

“There,” she points to a dark empty spot and I oblige.

Then, before I can even ask her why, she reaches over and grabs me by the collar. Pulling me close to her and gives me a kiss. I kiss her back, and I smile when she bites gently on my bottom lip.

“Oi, oi. Something’s got you randy.”

The next thing I know, she undoes her seatbelt and then rolls her trousers down her legs along with her knickers, fumbling and giggling at the awkward movement. I push my seat back and pull my trousers down.

“Don’t fall on gearstick now,” I joke as she climbs over to straddle me. “Well, unless you want to, of course…”

She laughs as she lowers herself over my lap. I really can’t believe what’s happening here.

“Mrs Styles, we’re about to have sex in a car. Around the corner from our daughters’ school.”

“I know,” she says with a smile before she runs her tongue along my neck. “Not our first rodeo though.”

“Oh right, we did it in our Volvo years ago, didn’t we? Thought the suspension couldn’t take it.”

“And it turned out fine. Told you that you needed to have more faith in the Swedes, they’re a reliable breed.”

“I love it when you talk about Sweden.”

“Ikea.”

“Fuck.”

“Meatballs.”

“Billy Bookcase.”

She throws her head back in laughter and I take this as an opportunity to run my tongue along her collar bone. She gasps. I reach down to lift her before I slowly lower her over my cock. We both sigh as I enter her, a long exhalation with our lips barely touching.

“Viggo Mortensen.”

“Isn’t he Danish?”

“Tomato, Tomahto.”

I smile at my wife and push my hips up, silently telling her that we don’t need to talk about Swedish people anymore. She grabs onto the car seat and levers herself up and down. I look at her in the eye, a goofy smile still plastered across my face.

But then I squint. Light. Bollocks, what’s that? Where’s that light coming from? Crap, that’s bright. Shit. I see the flash of a hi-vis jacket, a knock at the window and someone shaking their head.

Oh sodding fucking bollocking shit wank.

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needletongues · 2 years

Note

past 1 2 and 3!! (sorry for being basic ALKGDLSFG)

omg no need to apologize they're all good questions! hm i should probably pick just one character to answer these for, knowing how much i tend to ramble... in that case, i'll go with my oc alva! (i'll also put like. an image and some brief info under the cut since i don't have a character select page yet, but i'm working on that haha)

ALVA (SURNAME UNDISCLOSED)

he/they

alva is from a planet i made called dralthiin, i might make a more detailed post about it soon! but to quickly imagine the area alva grew up in, think veeeeery small little village in the middle of some woods, kind of... skyrim adjacent aesthetic, i guess? every person on their planet has at least two lives, with the ability to die and come back at least once. alva has already died, and is on his second life. he currently lives alone in the woods, having been banished from his hometown.

1. Briefly describe the way their parents grew up, and how it affected the way they raised them.

it's a classic case of "we've lived in a tiny isolated community for our whole lives just like our families for generations before us and now we have a child that is Weird and Fucked Up and don't know how to get them help". alva's parents had a pretty typical upbringing for their time and place, not rich by any means but able to scrape by. their families were respectable members of the community, none of whom stood out all that much. normal. quiet. they would've given anything for alva not to have disrupted that, but blowing out a match doesn't mean it was never burning to begin with.

2. Which social class did they belong to growing up? How did it affect them?

alva's family definitely wasn't the richest in town, but they weren't the poorest either. their parents carried on family business (his mother married into his father's family, who were carpenters and builders. her brother took over their family's butcher shop), and it was always pretty stable. nobody in their village is particularly wealthy, at least not in a gaudy way. (the richest family in town is probably like, the chief and his family, and you can tell they're rich because his wife has a prize silk headscarf from the big city weeks away, and wears white linen that's always clean.) so while winters could still be particularly difficult, they were about average as far as wealth and status in their town.

3. Describe their family. Who raised them, and who had the most impact on them? Did they have any siblings? Who were they closest to? What were the family dynamics like?

it went like this: mother (thiivena), father (jurtenn), alva, his younger sister (marigold), and his younger brother (tenivet). thiivena and jurtenn did their best, but they did tend to be pretty stern and sometimes even cold. this isn't really uncommon in this area, but still. alva was born with a sort of sickness of the soul, which affected their behavior greatly. he would have periods where his limbs would be taken over by a mysterious force and it would often end in him hurting himself or others. the more distressed he felt, the worse it got, and nobody knew how to deal with it. his parents kind of took a hard approach, urging him to "just try harder" to control it. they meant for it to be encouraging. it was not. alva grew up strange and distant, afraid to get too close to anyone in case he hurt them. he was distant even from his own family, except for when his baby brother was born. he doted on the boy as much as he dared. he also adored his little sister, though she wasn't aware at the time and thought him strange and creepy. whenever she'd get picked on by other kids, alva would be there somewhere in the shadows, out of her sight but not theirs, staring them down and scaring them off. there were times, few and far between, when marigold would let alva braid her hair, when things were quiet and they were peaceful. alva remembers them vividly, and misses it very much.

#SORRY FOR TALKING SO MUCH KSJDLFKL i really should make a character select page #and brief intro pages for my lil planets #ANYWAY. thank u so much for the ask i am gently putting a soft blanket around your shoulders. i hope u have a wonderful day/night #answered #alva #info: alva

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bbwoulfc · 5 years

Text

Instincts Sucks - Ch. 4

A/N: I'm going to add a WARNING to this chapter. There is unwanted touching and what can easily be considered sexual assault occur in this chapter. It's nothing extreme like I've seen in some fics, but I wanted to offer a warning before those who read this fic. I don't know what triggers people now a days, so I want to cover my steps.

After three days of enduring the most tension building experience of his first rut, Adrien was finally glad to have the experience officially over.

To say he wasn’t appreciative of the amount of care that his parents gave him would be a lie. He greatly appreciated all the work and effort that his parents, Nathalie, and Arthur did for him. It was because of them that his first rut went off well enough to have survived it. Though that issue with feeling relief became an issue, it was miracle that he managed to receive it after many failed trails within the first two days.

However, even though things went as smooth as they could have gone, only one thing still penetrated his mind.

THOSE. DAMN. MARINETTE PHOTOS.

Even after a day Adrien couldn’t get those images out of his mind. Those legs, that body, that sexy gleam in her eyes. He wanted to know how they convinced Marinette to partake in doing those photos in the first place.

Did she want to take those photos?

Did she want to do those photos because she wanted him to see a side of her?

She had to have love him enough if she agreed to doing the photos, right? The thoughts continued to swim through his head as he continued to replay the entire magazine images. Gods, he’d do anything to have the chance to see Marinette in those outfits in person. Then another thought came to play. ‘How the hell am I going to face Marinette in a fews hours?!’

That simple thought halted him dead in his tracks. In just a few hours, Marinette and all his other friends and fellow co-workers would be arriving to the mansion for his eighteenth birthday bash.

Other than your typical sweet sixteen birthday, your eighteenth birthday was the greatest moment to experience. It was the marking of your maturity, the beginnings of reaching your full presentation stage. The time where you can officially marry and live with your mate. A huge milestone in a person’s life.

A moment that Adrien knew his parents were extremely proud of and excited to see their son begin the new chapter in his life. And one that he gets to share with his closests friends, aside from others due to his current employment. The best part about this large gathering is the change to spend it with his wonderful omega.

Looking around his bedroom, Adrien notices some disorganized messes scattered around the large space. His movie collection thrown about with movie cases scattered lazedly about along the tv stand and shelves, his bed undone from being transported to the heat room during his rut, and clothes scattered along the floor. Noticing the mess, Adrien hums in thought as he thinks and considers that he shouldn’t have thrown his clothes lazedly in the room and actually walked to his dirty clothes hamper.

Seeing the mess put a small hint of red on his cheeks at the embarrassment of his own unorganized self. That alone pushed further thoughts about others seeing his room like this. One in particular. ‘What if Marinette wanted to come up here?!’

What if he and Marinette wanted to kiss?

Adrien slapped a hand over his eyes, groaning at the thought. Could you blame the young man? The thought of Marinette and him sharing a kiss was wonderful. If he had to wish for one thing to come true for his eighteenth birthday, it would have to be the chance to have his first kiss with his beautiful omega, Marinette. Call him crazy, but nothing would be more perfect than that.

And if that moment were to arise, knowing Marinette as well as he did, she would want a nice, quiet place to share a loving moment.

Sliding his hand down his face, Adrien glanced around his room again and calculated. There was still five hours before his party and his parents, along with the staff of the house, were busy decorating and handling all the catering. Plenty of time to clean his room and reorganize.

He had a lady to impress. That gave him at least three hours to make sure his room was clean and at least two hours to get ready and prepare for his party. He’s got this. He can totally do this.

Peeking glances around his room he knows he’s got his work cut out for him. The things he does for his lady.

******

Across a few arrondissements, at the Tom and Sabine boulangerie, Marinette is sitting along her chaise with discarded fabrics, scissors, assortments of beads and other fabric decorative items scattered around her. Assortments along her chaise and scattered on her bedroom floor, it was clear that Marinette was in her prime and space of fashion. And she had a goal of finishing her last minute design for a special occasion.

Since the past three days after Adrien’s unfortunate, unexpected approaching rut cycle, Marinette planned a special outfit for her alpha. A tingle circulated through her body at the thought of calling Adrien her alpha. Though it was fairly new of her to take such action, something inside of her was convinced that if Adrien was going to refer her as his omega, then why not refer him as her alpha. And if she were being completely honest with herself, it felt magnificent calling Adrien hers.

After being asked to participate in a private photoshoot to model and dress in Agreste clothing for Adrien’s benefit, Mme. Agreste offered Marinette a shirt design that was to be released in their next catalog. She was ecstatic to say the least when she was gifted with this item, but it offered Marinette design inspiration to create a full outfit with the new shirt given to her. And once she received a text from the Agreste about Adrien’s party being held Saturday, it offered Marinette a perfect opportunity to show off and impress her alpha.

With Adrien’s party being today, she couldn’t wait to prepare and dress in the outfit she had been planning since receiving the text. And even though she and Adrien never planned on showing much affection other than the typical cuddling and contact of touch, a big part of her was feeling that he wanted a little more just like her.

Ever since he kissed her, well, on the corner of her lips and cheek, she’s never wanted anything more than to fully kiss the young man fully on the lips. With it being Adrien’s eighteenth birthday today, a large part of her wants to give him a special gift of giving them their first kiss. And if she truly thought about it, Alya and Nino were right. Her and Adrien shouldn’t wait and rely until they were both eighteen and rely on the possibility of the 'destined' mate. If they were able to be happy without even knowing now, they’ll still be happy even after knowing then.

Hopefully, those photoshoot images was enough to give Adrien the hint that she was there for him whether she was in person or not.

Stitching the last glitter disc shape piece on the lining of her red stain jean shorts, Marinette finally completed her outfit for Adrien’s birthday bash. With two hours to spare it was time for her to get ready and dressed for the party.

Standing from her chaise, Marinette gathered all the mess of scattered fabric supplies and cleaned up. Placing leftover fabric and other small pieces from being cut into her basket of fabrics, organizing accordingly so the leftover cut strips of fabric didn’t mix with the unused fabrics. Securing all her sewing utensils into her sewing box, Marinette set her finished product on her chaise.

Heading to the closet, Marinette retrieved her new shirt gifted to her by Mme. Agreste and brought it to her chaise to set beside her red jean shorts. Bending down, she reached under her chaise and grabbed her black converse shoes to wear with the outfit. Satisfied, Marinette grabbed a towel and headed to her bathroom to get ready for Adrien’s birthday.

******

Stepping out of her bathroom forty minutes later, wrapped in a fluff pink towel, she strolls to one of her drawers and picks out a lovely black lace bra and panties. Sure she thinks it might be unnecessary, it always felt pleasant to feel sexy. That, and she wants to use it as a confidence builder when she arrives at the party and interact with her awaited alpha.

Dropping the towel, Marinette put on her black lace bra and panties; feeling the comfort of the lce and soft fabric hug her body. Strolling back towards her chaise, Marinette reached for the red shorts and pulled them along her legs and secured the button closed. Glancing in her mirror, she smiled at the glimmer and reflective surface of the red bedding shining from the light of the window and room lamp. Turning back to her chaise, she reached for her new shirt and threw over her head and slid her arms through the sleeves and spun back around to look in the mirror.

Her smile grew as she looked at the outfit. The shirt gifted to her was a light grey hue in color that ran from her sleeves and down towards the bottom hem of her shirt, though gradually fading in gradients along the way down. In the front of her shirt, a light sepia, mixed with gradients of red and pink, was an image of the Eiffel Tower stood near the left side with some Parisian buildings running across the other side, the Champs Elysees taking place in the background behind some of the buildings. In the bottom right corner was a small image of red heeled, styled shoes and a pair or pink rings. The center of the shirt with perfect cursive text that said Paris, France. Finished with black and white zebra patterns blended towards the bottom to the end of the shirt.

In all, the shirt and shorts fit perfectly against the curves of her body. She couldn’t feel more proud of her comforting attire. And she couldn’t wait for Adrien to see her show up and admire the design. Even though the shirt wasn’t hers, the rest was created by her and designed to match along the Agreste original.

Turning to look at her cat, Tikki, lying in one of her cat hammy, the blue-eyed calico watched in comfort as her owner prepared for her mate’s party.

“What do you think, Tikki? Does it look good to you?” Marinette asked her calico.

Lifting her head, Tikki gave a pleasant and agreeable response, a smile running along her muzzle; tail swaying side to side in happiness and content.

Moving away from the stand alone mirror, Marinette heads to her vanity and reaches for her hairbrush to begin styling her hair. Looking into the smaller mirror of her vanity, she gazes at her raven hair and decides on a hairstyle. Her hair grown out through the previous years, passing a little further from her shoulder, almost reaching mid shoulder blade.

Brushing her hair straight, Marinette grabs the top half of her hair and ties it up in a small ponytail. The tail end resting and nearly blending with the lower half of her hair. Grabbing her flat iron, Marinette curled the ends of her hair until they flipped up, the different layers flipping in different lengths to offer volume. Then finally, she styled her bangs to one side, using hairspray to hold everything together.

Applying a light touch of blush, soft rose eyeshadow, and clear glitter lip gloss, Marinette was finished and ready for Adrien’s party.

Heading back to her chaise, Marinette placed a pair of grey socks and her black converse shoes on. Tying the laces, Marinette jumped up, giving a twirl in excitement, and headed to her desk to retrieve her gift for Adrien. Giving Tikki a pet goodbye, she headed downstairs and down to the bakery where her parents were finishing the last touches of Adrien’s birthday cake.

Once the decision was announced that Adrien’s birthday bash was scheduled for today, Gabriel and Emilie called Tom and Sabine about making a five layered cake for Adrien. The Dupain-Cheng’s happily accepted, agreeing to make other treats for other party goers. Besides, Tom and Sabine would take any opportunity to make something for their future son-in-law. It was pretty clear to both set of parents that their children were bonded to the end.

Finished with the cake, Marinette helped her parents with the pastry, holding the large box as her parents picked up the five layered creation and set in carefully inside the box. Securing it closed and tapping the ends shut, Sabine and Tom removed their aprons, both already dressed in nicer clothing for the party. Hanging up the aprons, the family of three locked up the bakery and exited through the back of the bakery’s kitchen the family’s car, a silver Peugeot. Placing the cake in the back of the trunk of their car, all three enter the car and drive off towards the Agreste home.

******

Back at the Agreste Mansion.

Adrien was standing in front of his large bathroom mirror, finishing the last minute touches before heading down to his party. Grooming his hair and styling it in his familiar, but the sides combed back more, and his bangs flipped and flowing closer. Shaving and trimming his jaw line, leaving a small stubble of blond facial hair. Though it’s not thick and still early in the growth process, Adrien couldn’t help but leave the new development of his growth. If he’s lucky, maybe Marinette would find it attractive.

Shaved, hair styled to his liking; Adrien takes a few steps back to get a better look of himself in the mirror. Standing tall, Adrien wore a green t-shirt, similar to the color of his eyes, with three gold stripes running across his chest. A thin black jacket over top his shirt with neon green trimming and interior, smokey grey fitted jeans, and green converse with his parent’s logo on the sides. And finally, Marinette’s lucky charm bracelet on his left wrist.

Hearing the doorbell of the mansion ring, all the guest begin arriving signaling Adrien to head down stairs. Grabbing his phone from his desk, he places the phone in his back jean pocket and turns to his bed where Plagg is lying and staring at him. Adrien stares back at the cat with a warning glare.

Pointing a finger at his cat, “Don’t get into anything, Plagg.”

Plagg raises a brow, questioning the boy before laying his head down on the bed. A huff escaping the cat as he flicks his tail.

Adrien closes the door and mutters, “Damn cat.”

Heading down the hallways and main stairway, Adrien comes into view of the entire entry way and side rooms where classmates and fellow models from his job begin crowding and filing in. Reaching the bottom of the steps, Adrien begins greeting everyone who’s arrived.

All greeting Adrien in return, Kim gives a playful punch into his shoulder, giving him a side hug afterwards.

Max coming up next to pat Adrien on shoulder, wishing him a happy birthday. It was still weird seeing Max at the same height as him, but was a great change when playing basketball with the others at school.

Alix came forward next, giving Adrien a quick hug, wishing him happy birthday, before giving a more forceful, playful punch to his shoulder, opposite of the one Kim punched.

Following the three came Juleka and Rose, both giving Adrien a hug with Rose becoming all gidding. Nathanael and Chloe following after, offering him birthday wishes and congratulating him for reaching his alpha maturity. Thanking them, the couple head off towards the food catering table for refreshments.

Ivan and Mylene following close behind after a few minutes, giving their greetings and heading off to refreshments table.

With others trickling in, Adrien moves aside and begins roaming around for his closest friends when he hears a familiar voice.

“Hey, bro!”

Turning around, Adrien catches Nino and Alya approaching the blond with smiles. Entering a three group hug, Nino is beaming when he looks around at all the decorations, foods, and refreshments set up.

“Damn, Adrien, you’re parents went all out from this party. It’s insane what you all have set up. Even the DJ they hired to play in the small hall over there is actually good.” Altering his features, Nino gives Adrien a glare, a playful gleam flowing within, “Though I’m hurt you didn’t ask your best friend to DJ for you. My heart crumbled when I saw that a DJ was hired instead of me.”

Chuckling, Adrien pats his friends shoulder, “My apologies, Nino. You know if I had any say in this, I would have most definitely hired you as the DJ. Unfortunately, my parents planned this all during my previous situation of being housed and spending majority of my time in the heat room. Though I will admit my parents did a pretty good job with this.”

“I’d have to agree with you sunshine.” Alya spoke up, “This is probably the most lively party of yours you’ve had. But I won’t mark it against you since you’re parents planned this one.”

“Thanks, Alya.” Adrien returned. “Did Marinette arrive with you two?”

He hadn’t seen his love anywhere amongst the crowd in the rooms. He would have thought his lady would have arrived by now. He wanted to be near her and hold her.

Adrien lets out a frustrated whimper, Alya and Nino laughing at his behavior.

“Calm down, lover boy. Mari should be here shortly. Be patient, Adrien.” Alya said as she tried to calm the blond.

Releasing a sigh, Adrien looks at Alya, “I’m sorry. I just haven’t seen her in...three days? I just feel like I have Mari withdrawal.”

The sound of whooping and clapping began echoing through the first floor of the mansion as Adrien, Alya, and Nino walked towards the entryway to see the commotion taking place. Reaching the entryway, all three peaked their heads up and watched as Tom and Sabine Dupain-Cheng entered through the front doors holding a large box. His mother and father walked forward and guided them towards a circular table standing in the middle of the foyer, right in front of the main stairway. No doubt his parents placed it there moments ago.

Walking towards the table, Tom and Sabine carefully placed the large box on the round table. Cutting the edges of the box where the tape resided, the couple pulled apart the sides of the box to reveal the five layered birthday cake. All the party goers were in awe at the intriquent and carefully crafted design of the five layered creation. Adrien himself was blown away at the creation, still amazed by the steady hands of the bakers. People took out there phones to take photos of the intriquent cake.

“Do you like it, minou? They worked really hard on it.”

Hearing the familiar voice from behind, Adrien spun around and came face to face with the love of his life. However, he wasn’t prepared for the gorgeousness that is his lady in the breathtaking spunky attire that she wore. The shirt being recognized from his parents next line and her red shorts hugging her hips and lower thighs wonderfully. But what caught his breath was the way her hair was styled. Beautifully framed around her face, and curled at the ends, the little amount of makeup breaking out her features further.

The entire image of Marinette standing before him brought back those distracting, enchanting, lovely photoshoot pictures.

OH FUCK.

Gods, his omega was going to kill him.

Her giggling broke Adrien out of his hormone induced brain to find her smiling up at him, her cheeks tinted in a soft pink. Wait. Did she know what he was just imagining?!

“Do you like it?” Marinette asked, taking a hand and flattening her shirt. “I specifically designed this around the shirt.” She looks up and moves closer to Adrien, resting her left hand on his chest. The heat of her touch could be felt through his clothing and it felt wonderful. “I wanted to make sure I impressed my alpha.”

Adrien’s green eyes bugged out a bit. Was he hearing things correctly? Did his omega just call him hers?!

Taking everything in, he watches Marinette slightly lean back, biting her lip in that adorable fashion that always drew him in and glancing towards her lips. Witnessing her saying he was her alpha ignited a spark of desire, possession, and relief. All the stress he built on himself had finally dissipate. A long waited breath leaving Adrien.

Wrapping an arm around her waist, Adrien pulls Marinette towards him until she was flat against his chest. Eliciting a giggle from Marinette, she leans against him without hesitation and rests her head against her alpha’s chest. Neither of them thought they’d break away from waiting til they were both eighteen to wait to grow more physical. But, if they were being true to themselves, they were thrilled to have broken that promise.

Both desired the closer physical contact. Whether it was for instinctual purposes or relationship purposes, Adrien and Marinette would gladly take the new bond as is. And to think, all it took to push the contact and relationship (one they will have to talk about) further was an unexpected early presentation cycle and the self confidence of a photoshoot for a mate.

“Your alpha, huh?” Adrien asked, looking down at Marinette.

Pushing her head up, leaning her chin in his chest, she gazed at Adrien, looking into those gorgeous emerald green eyes of his and simply smiled warmly back at him. “I figured since you keep referring me as your omega, I should return the favor and begin referring you as my alpha. I thought it only be fitting that we called each other ours.”

Suddenly feeling sheepish, she asks, “Is that alright with you, Adrien? I didn’t stop to consider to ask your feelings on this.”

Adrien’s heart burst further with affection for this amazing young woman in his arms. She didn’t have to worry about him feeling anything against this new development into their new bond, this new, dare he say it, relationship. He’s waited for so long to claim her as his own and he’s not gonna risk losing her now.

“I’ve waited four years to call you mine.” Returning the smile, “As long as you’ll have me as your alpha.”

Standing on her toes, Marinette leans up to rest her forehead against Adrien’s, him leaning down to accommodate the height difference.

“Yes.” Marinette replied.

Leaning away from from Adrien, Marinette unwrapped herself from his arms and handed him her gift for his birthday. “Happy birthday, minou.”

Taking the gift from her hands, Adrien pulled the ribbon wrapped around the decorative box, tossing the ribbon to the nearest side of the room, and opened the lid. What he saw inside pulled him into awe and warmth to burst into his chest yet again. He recalls all the gifts his parents had ever given him through his entire childhood growing up, but he couldn’t recall the last time he ever received a handmade gift.

People may question how he would know this gift was handmade, but if there was anything he knew about Marinette, and he knew a lot, was that she always created handmade gifts. So when he saw two handmade knitted scarfs in the box, he was breathless. Even without touching them, Adrien could see how comfortably soft the fabric was and no doubt how warm they would be upon wearing them.

Slipping the top of the lid underneath the bottom of the box, Adrien reached in to pull one of the scarfs out, rubbing his thumb along the fabric and knitted patterns, completely admiring the craftsmanship and dedication stitched into this gift. It felt incredibly soft to the touch, almost like he was running his fingers against silk. The creativity in this family never cease to amaze him.

“These are incredible, Mari.” Marinette watched the sincerity in his eyes as they gleamed in adoration. And Adrien indeed was worshipping these scarfs. A Marinette original. “Thank you.”

“Your welcome. I wasn’t sure about colors at first, but I thought blue would look rather charming on you, especially with your eyes during certain seasons or whenever it got cold. I also thought green would look gorgeous on you as well, since it would really go along with your eyes. So I decided to do both to save trouble. Figured you could wear whichever you preferred or whichever goes along with a certain outfit of yours.”

Wrapping his arms around Marinette again, Adrien draws her in and nuzzles his head against hers, leaning to to leave a kiss against her temple. A small tingle shooting throughout both their bodies from the contact.

“Alright everyone! Let’s get this party in motion!” Shouted Mme. Agreste.

Finding Nathalie, Adrien asked her to place Marinette’s gift up in his bedroom for safe keeping. He didn’t want to risk losing her gift amongst the others or risk someone stealing them.

Thanking Nathalie, Adrien reached for Marinette’s hand and walked her across the foyer to the other side of the house, opposite of the food and refreshments side. Making their way to the right side of the house, Adrien and Marinette arrived to the dance room.

Others were already dancing amongst each other, stepping to the bass of the beat from the music. The DJ dancing at his spot near the mixing soundboard as lights danced and glowed along with the bands being played. The current song featuring Adrien and Marinette’s favorite, Jagged Stone.

Stepping onto the dance floor, Adrien positioned Marinette in front of him, both facing each other as they begin dancing and swinging to the music. The beat moving their bodies as everyone attempts to match the tempo.

Grasping Marinette’s hand, Adrien twirls her around and spins her away and pulls her back in. Both falling in sync with each other and matching step for step. Following and repeating the same motions and movements.

As rock and pop instrumentals blend to a slow musical beat for the first slow dance, Adrien and Marinette moved in sync, as her arms wrapped around his shoulders, his wrapped around her waist. Pulling her closer, Marinette rest her head against his chest a second time today. The current moment being shared between them becoming one of their favorite memories. Yes, they’ve danced previously in the past, but to them, this is the first time officially bonded and within the realms of a relationship.

For Adrien this day couldn’t get any better.

As the slow song switched to a more upbeat song, Adrien and Marinette leaned back from each other. Small streams a sweat beginning to gather along their foreheads from the heat encased in the room from the amount of bodies scattered along the dance floor.

“Would you like a drink, my lady?”

“Yes, please.”

Agreeing on a refreshment, Marinette informed Adrien that she’ll step aside by the wall on the right side of the dance floor. Waiting for his return with the drinks. Nodding, Adrien exits the dance area and heads to the other side of the foyer to retrieve their beverages.

For Marinette, she found an empty space along the right wall of the dance floor, gazing out to the floor and watching others continue dancing amongst the music.

Following some of the dancers, she managed to find Alya and Nino amongst the other dance goers. Dancing and swinging freely with one another as the duo swerved along the other dancers like professional dancers; in complete flow and in sync like water running through various rocks along a stream.

Watching her two friends dance gave her happiness. She was happy for those two as they were always in sync. The two of them always there for the other, always supporting one another and their dreams. She couldn’t wait herself to finally begin a life with her bonded mate. To have the happiness as a whole from both halves like Alya and Nino do, as well as Chloe and Nathanael.

Caught in her own thoughts of the hopeful future for her and Adrien, Marinette failed to sense the unpleasant presence of another body standing beside her.

The pheromones and energy growing heavy, it was enough to snap Marinette out of her reverie and twist her head over her shoulder to greet the other person standing beside her.

Standing beside her stood another young man, though based on the physical features, she was able to pick that this guest was older, if anything him at least two years older than Adrien. Though, she did not recognize this young man. Nothing about him offered a sense of recognition.

Marinette will acknowledge and agree that this young man was indeed attractive, pleasant features along his face. Light brown hair, styled with strands slightly spiked but with softness rather than hardness, probably held by a medium textured hair paste. Eyes coated with hazel, almost like honey itself was trapped within when striked by the right angle of light.

His physical body presenting muscular in every way. Nicely toned chest, small ab details seen from his smokey grey muscle shirt, arms built to perfect that common jock appearance. Overall, this young man screamed alpha.

Even with everything about this young man appeared attractive and perfect, nothing stood out more than the overall aura of this alpha that made Marinette feel uncomfortable and on defense.

Maybe it was due to her bond with Adrien and her complete devotion to him, but her instincts never strayed her the wrong way when an un-tameness sort of energy approaches and swerves around her.

Marinette watches as the man leans against the wall on his side, leaning in closely towards her.

“Hello, beautiful.” The stranger introduced, a slight hungry growl mixed within.

The simple greeting set alarms ranging within Marinette’s body. All sense of discomfort flowing around her as her instincts send brain signals to move away from this alpha. To leave this spot and search for the safety of her alpha.

As Marinette attempted to lean away from the wall and walk around the alpha, she was halted in her steps as the alpha stood in front of her and leaned into her space, his arms falling along her sides against the wall, trapping her in a small cage. Her omega senses increasing with the threat of this presence in front of her.

“Let me go.” Marinette demanded, a small snarl escaping as she glared into the young man’s eyes.

“Come now. Why the rush. Don’t you want an alpha to be claimed by.” The alpha lent further until he was face to face with Marinette. “I can give you all that your heart desires. I can even make it a wild ride and fun in the bedroom.”

The grin that he gave was nothing but predatory. Nothing came good from an alpha who bared an aura like the one he’s giving. And that grin all but sent shivers down her body, and the young man took that reaction in a completely different way.

As the alpha did seconds ago, he moved closer, until he pushed himself against her body. Her’s stuck between his and the wall, nowhere to move or go.

The last thing she expected was his head leaning against the space of her neck, the touch his nose running along the structure of her neck. Her body electrifying from the discomfort and assault. It was all wrong; everything about this man and his actions against her was assault and she wouldn’t stand by this.

Throwing all the strength she possessed as her current omega form, she shoved the alpha’s arms away and shoved the man’s face away from her neck. However, her actions were for naught, as the alpha grasped her wrist and slammed them against the wall, pinning her body between his and the wall.

He snarled at Marinette, anger and amusement seeping off the alpha. Looking up, she could see the alpha’s eyes bare gold, canines elongated as he bared his teeth at her. His grip tightened around her wrist. All she could do was snarl back, her own canines elongating, her eyes shifting to a light white-silver.

“My, my, we have ourselves a fighter.” He chuckled as he gave Marinette’s wrist a squeeze. Pain beginning to tingle along her skin. “I’ll make sure to break you from that. Can’t have that running through your mind and body. I need you as the submissive type.”

He moved her arms above her head, freeing one of his hands. Taking the free hand, he ran his fingers along the bare skin of her legs. The unwanted touch sending wrongness throughout her body. He wasn’t meant to touch her. She wasn’t his to touch, he wasn’t meant anything when it came to her body. The only person who had the right and privilege to touch her body was her alpha. Her Adrien. And she’d be damn that anyone else touch her.

“Get your hands off me!” Marinette snarled out. Her shouts falling short from the overbearing music overhead. She knew her strength wasn’t an equal match against him. She wasn’t in her maturity stage yet, but damn it she wished above anything that she hit her maturity age. That way it would have been an even playing field. But until then, she was vulnerable to him.

“I’ll release you once I claim you.”

“I’ve already been claimed asshole.”

The alpha jackass had the audacity to laugh in her face.

“Even if you were, my dear. The markless skin of your neck says otherwise. And as long as an omega has a bareless, markless neck, she’s all fair game. And you’re too gorgeous to escape.”

Her eyes widened when the facts displayed in her head. He was one of those alphas. He was one of those that felt privileged; felt that he could enforce any being below an alpha rank. This asshole where amongst the few who believed an omega is free for all as long as they bared markless on the neck, be damned if they had a destined or current relationship. If they desired an omega they had their sights on, and they were unclaimed, they were up for bid in their eyes.

To them, omegas where nothing but to cater to the alpha needs. Anything from catering their food, cleaning, and any sexual cravings and activities that the alpha desired. In their eyes, an omega was nothing but to please and cater to their every whim.

Unfortunately, some unlucky souls of an omega or even a beta who captures the radar of one of these alphas, are broken until they become the submissive partner.

She was not going to end up like those broken souls, not while she has a chance or say about it.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make it quick.” His grin displayed his canines as she shut her eyes, praying for any miracle as she felt him lean closer.

But as soon as she felt him lean towards her, the weight and grip on her wrist vanished. A breeze brushing against her, a loud bang echoed throughout the entire dance room causing her eyes to snap open.

And standing in front of her was the miracle she dearly hoped for.

******

Entering the other side of the of the foyer, Adrien walked towards the refreshment table and grabbed two plastic cups. Waiting patiently, he filled the two cups with ice from the ice bowl and filled the cups with fruit juice mix.

Weaving around the other party goers, dodging some of the large groups and fellow Agreste employees, Adrien crossed the foyer and re-entered the dance floor, glancing over to the far side of the wall for Marinette, only to come face to face with an unpleasant site.

Standing before him, across the wall, Adrien watched as young man, an alpha based off his pose structure, pressed himself against his omega, his princess . And worse, he saw the disgrace of a man and alpha as he touched her without her consent. He dared touch her against her will.

Seeing the alpha raise his lady’s arms above her head, taking his free hand and running along her bare legs set Adrien off. If there was one thing to piss him off more, it was another alpha, an unwanted one, touching his omega. Anger and rage began running though his body, his green eyes switching to a fiery gold as he glared at the alpha.

When the alpha grinned at Marinette and bared his teeth, leaning towards her to mark her, everything inside Adrien snapped. Instincts taking over as his canines elongated, dropping the drinks, and running to his omega’s aid.

Running at top speed, Adrien reached the two in a few strides. Gripping at the alpha’s shirt, Adrien honed all his alpha strength and flung him off Marinette, throwing the alpha across a few feet into one of the sound systems. The dance room falling into complete silence as all the guests halt in their movement and snap their attention towards the ruckus taking place near the entrance of the room.

For some of the party goers, manly friends of the two in the midst of the ruckus, all eyes were on the three. Alya, Nino, Chloe and Nathanael being one of the top few who were stunned and startled at what was taking place before them. Though out of the four, Chloe and Nathanael were able to figure out what was occuring based on the aura and mood taking hold amongst Adrien, Marinette, and the other alpha.

With all eyes on Adrien and the other alpha, none of the surroundings Adrien paid attention too. His focus was purely on the alpha in front of him. An alpha he had the displeasure of working with at his parents company.

Markus Blanceux. A fellow model at Agreste company. A fellow model and alpha with a disrespectful behavior and attitude amongst his fellow peers.

“Agreste.” Markus snarled, “She’s mine.”

A growl escapes through Adrien’s clenched teeth as he launched himself at Markus, slamming him against the marble flooring as both alphas began brawling against one another.

Both males snarling, each letting out a loud roar of rage. Tumbling and throwing each other across the space of the room that was given to them from the other guests. None wanting to speak up, fearing to intervene whatsoever.

The audience gathered stood speechless and in awe as they watch two alphas battle against each other. Amazed by the strength from Adrien as he landed fist after fist into Markus’s jaw and nose. A loud snap and a pained growl coming from Markus, his nose broken from one of Adrien’s punches.

However, Adrien hadn’t escaped any injury either. Markus managed to land a few punches at Adrien’s face, landing the Agreste’s jaw, nose, and eye. Resulting the Areste model with a busted lip and bloody nose.

Falling on his back, Adrien blocks another punch from Markus when he uses his feet to kick the alpha back, launching him against the marble flooring.

Before Markus could attack again, strong, bulk arms encased the young man as he turns to find the Agreste’s bodyguard holding him back. A glare engraving into the model. From behind, Gabriel, Emilie, along with Tom and Sabine come from behind. Hearing the noise and chaos coming from the room, the parents rushed in with the bodyguard rushing into duty.

Approaching the teens, Gabriel looks upon the situation and shoots a glare at Markus. Very familiar with the model from his and his wife’s company.

“Remove this man from my home. Keep him outside as I would like a word with him.” Gabriel demanded, his alpha voice seething through as he watched, with pride and pleasure, that Markus wilted at his employer's glare.

Turning back at Adrien, he saw the blood from his busted lip and nose. “Are you alright, Adrien?”

“I’ll be fine..for now anyways.” Came Adrien’s reply.

Lips thinning, Gabriel turned to Marinette, her body still stunned from the event. A inkling of a feeling of what occurred based on the scene.

“Marinette, will take Adrien up to his room and treat his wounds, please.” Gabriel asked.

Without any hesitation, Marinette removed herself from the wall and rushed to Adrien’s side. Helping him up to his feet as she walked beside him and headed up the main stairway towards his bedroom. Leaving the guests in silence from what occured, they’re friends worried about Adrien and Marinette.

Once the two were out of sight, Gabriel and Emilie requested the music continue and the guest mingle until Adrien and Marinette were able to return.

******

Up in Adrien’s room, Marinette set him on his bed as she ran into his bathroom to retrieve his first aid kit. Knowing where exactly the box was, Marinette returned with the kit in hand.

Sitting beside Adrien, Marinette handed the blond a cloth to hold against his nose, while she removed a disinfectant wipe and began wiping away the blood around his cut lip.

Feeling the comforting silence, Adrien placed his left hand on Marinette’s knee, rubbing his thumb in circular motions along the joint. The touch from Adrien felt soothing and welcomed for Marinette. The contact from him felt safe and protected.

“Thank you, Adrien.” Adrien turned his head to look at his lady, her movements to cleaning his lip stopping as she returned his gaze. “Thank you for saving me.”

Adrien gave her a smile full of warmth, “I will always be there for you, Mari. I will never let anyone harm you as long as I live.” He reaches for her left hand and brings it forwards towards his lips, leaving a kiss against her knuckles.

Both chest warming from the contact, Marinette leans forwards, removing her hand from his grip and places it along his cheek; her body leaning in as she presses her lips against his, igniting their first kiss. Adrien lent into the touch. Wrapping an arm around Marinette as he embraced her against his body.

Breaking the kiss, they rest their foreheads against each other, both gazing lovely into each other’s eyes.

“Happy birthday, Adrien. I love you.” She said as her lips brushed against his.

“I love you too, my lady.” Adrien returns before capturing her lips for a second kiss.

#ml #miraculous #miraculous ladybug #fanfic #fanfics #mlfanfic #omegaverse #a/o/b dynamics #alpha!adrien #omega!marinette #bbwoulf fics #bbwoulf writing #alpha/omega #alpha/omega/beta

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thegoodceai · 5 years

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Y’all I found this amazing aesthetic builder from @lavellanpls so of course I had to like... procrastinate everything and do this for my Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery siblings cause I’ve been low key obsessed with the game ever since it came out and I’m getting tired of always waiting for updates so yeah.

Some more info on my Ravenclaw sibs under the cut. Also hmu if y’all play this so at least we can complain about it together!!

I have a lot to tell u lot about these little shits so buckle up, but first some family history:

their mother is a Greengrass who married an american muggle, no less, and half the family loves him while the other half definitely hates him

her name’s Angelica, and she has a twin sister named Magnolia (plants names are big in the family, hence Nat’s and Jay’s middle names - they both hate them, and their aunt refused to respond to anything but Maggy since before she went to Hogwarts)

Maggy is an auror and was a Gryffindor to her twin sis’s Slytherin

Angelica decided to offer a big fuck you to all the pureblood expectations everyone had of her and went to become a well known international herbologist

that’s how she met David Foxglove in America - he came to pick up his little sister from a wizarding event that Ange was a speaker at and sparks flew (David and his older brother, Marcus, are both muggles, while their two younger sisters, Joanna and Elisabeth, are both witches)

they dated a couple of years while Angelica was making waves in the herbology community and David was getting his masters in mechanics, and then got married and moved to the UK permanently

anyway the war caught up to them and it was very sad and they constantly lived with the fear that someone will come after their children, but alas they all survived only for Jacob to fuck things up

Anyway so, Jacob:

is 7 and a half years older than Natalia

went ahead and got expelled from Hogwarts in February of his 7th year (good job bud u couldn’t hold on for like a few more months huh?)

only has two settings: not interested and utterly obsessed (which is why he ended up where ever he is now)

intelligent and resourceful, but has absolutely no idea how to explain what he’s thinking to people

introverted, never bothered to approach people first, but if he finds you’re worth his time he’s immediately ride and/or die

being sorted into Ravenclaw meant a lot to him because he always felt like he wasn’t as smart as his parents when it came to both muggle and wizarding stuff

got into a duel once because he stood up for a younger student, and punched his adversary in the face in the middle of it (unbeknownst to him, his sister pulled the same move too in her Hogwarts years)

loves his little sister fiercely, and sneakily taught her as much about Hogwarts as he could without their mum finding out

during the war, when there were long periods of silence from his parents, he always felt the safest in the Hogwarts library - something about the place always made him feel welcome and not alone

seems mild-mannered, even shy, but the moment he starts talking about something that interests him he becomes unstoppable

case in point - he had a 4 days long argument with his fellow prefect in 5th year about a specific method of transfiguration (they were both wrong, as professor McGonagall pointed out)

he can successfully cast a corporeal patronus (a gray wolf) - his happiest memory is of the Christmas after the war was officially over, when he got home and saw his little sister again (Natalia later uses the same memory for her maned wolf patronus - it was the last time she saw her brother happy, and not consumed with the cursed vaults)

saw his aunt Elisabeth wear a beanie once and fell in love with them; owns at least 20 of them, wears them with any opportunity, and even learned a spell to transfigure them from almost any fabric

absolutely loves spring and warm weather, but will wear thick sweaters at any give time and will charm them to keep cool so he doesn’t die of heatstroke when there are 25 degrees outside and he’s wearing wool

introduced his sister to american comic books and literature

has an owl named Albert Thomas Curie, because he loves to torment his father and his love of science

calls his little sister Natty, knows she absolutely hates it, yet won’t stop

Natalia:

hates when her brother calls her Natty, ends up calling him JayJay - they were at an impasse at the moment of Jacob’s disappearance when both of them hated their nicknames yet none were willing to back down

both her and her brother pretend their middle names do not exist - their mother loved to torment them both by calling them by their full names when calling them to dinner

if she gets good feelings about someone, she is also immediately ride and/or die (case in point: everything she does for her friends ever)

hates condescending people more than anything, along with bullies

absolutely adores Rowan, would kill and get killed for her (she sneaked into the library once at 1 am because Rowan was researching something and the common room library didn’t have the book she needed; got detention for 3 days for being caught out past curfew but managed to get the book to her best friend)

loves all of her friends fiercely, and always tries her best to encourage them to become better versions of themselves

also loves that she managed to befriend such interesting people and is always down to do whatever makes her friends happy as long as she’s with them

hates the fact that she had to involve them with the cursed vaults, does her very best to keep them out of trouble, and is always trying to make up for it

ever since she got detention in the kitchens all her friends got used to her appearing at random times with muffins or cupcakes or small sweets for them

low key hates flying, cause she’s terrified of heights, but is actually decent on a broom

likes quidditch well enough, but doesn’t see the appeal in playing it

has a good memory, and is plenty smart, just doesn’t bother studying stuff that doesn’t interest her (tries, though)

when she became an animagus at 14, Rowan laughed for a good five minutes when she saw the maned wolf form Natalia took - her best friend kept saying that the long legs were because she was always running to or from trouble

loves winter, and loves to ice skate

loves Hogwarts and considers it a second home, she’s more happy here than in any of the places she lived until she got her letter

was almost a hatstall, and if she wouldn’t have thought of her brother, the hat might’ve put her in Slytherin instead

is incredibly good with animals, and will try to pet each and every one of them she encounters, no matter how dangerous

she writes with a quill in class, but everything else is written with either pencils or fountain pens - she managed to charm a set of pens so that she always has one in the pocket of her clothes if she needs it

loves working in their home garage with her father (who owns an auto repair shop) and never really got her mother’s green thumb

is very good with the practical application of magic, but struggles to grasp the theory - she works best if she doesn’t have to think too much about it, which works in charms and transfiguration, but homework always evades her and often times Rowan ends up explaining stuff to her

has a black cat named Bucky who hates any kinds of dogs or dog-related animals, but doesn’t mind cuddling with Natalia in her animagus form

always carries extra quills and parchment in class because somehow one of her friends always needs it

I’m sure there’s more but this is what i can think about atm, anyways come yell with me about hogwarts mystery and tell me about your ocs and headcanons!!!!

#hphm #harry potter hogwarts mystery #hogwarts mystery #my ocs #my stuff #personal #hp #hogwarts mystery jacob #hogwarts mystery mc

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thefootballlife · 6 years

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Back Cataloguing The Strokes

In a departure for the site, please find a really long piece on music. Around the end of last year, I had an idea for a podcast to essentially tell the story of particular bands by going through their entire back catalogue chronologically. Then I found out someone was already doing that about two thirds of the way through writing the first batch so I decided to shift it into just a long form writing piece and post it so as it didn’t go to waste. If you like this sort of post, let me know and I can complete write ups for other artists over the off season for the football in between changing nappies and watching the World Cup! So, below, the complete history of The Strokes: Enjoy!

Looking back at the turn of the millennium from today and the world seems an extraordinarily different place and many people look at 9/11 as a turning point. Whether that is the answer or not, before we even take a single look at the lives and times of The Strokes, it’s worth recognising just where music and culture as a whole was the days before the release of “Is This It”.

The music scene was fragmented - 2000 saw the most UK number one singles of any year with such musical highlights as Geri Halliwell’s “Bag It Up”, Westlife simply existing, landfill garage reaching the top spot in the form of Oxide and Neutrino and, of course, Bob The Builder. This trend carried on into 2001 with groups such as Atomic Kitten and So Solid Crew. Jackass was beginning, American Pie was a cinematic phenomenon and Tom Green was still a thing.

In alternative culture, Britpop had run out of steam as bands either failed to evolve or simply fell out of love with the entire scene they were in while also seeing their own “attitude” sequestered and commercialised. People were looking for saviours in the most unlikely places, be it in the “post-Britpop” scene led by Travis, the alternative scene that ran under the radar during Britpop headed by Radiohead or in even odder places - such as NME’s record low sales after shoving Post-Rock Pioneers Godspeed You Black Emperor on the front page. Grunge was as good as dead and Indie music was fragmented, had no clear popular act to lead a scene with and, as such, was relegated behind some genuinely awful acts. Popular culture was, in no uncertain terms, a wasteland.

And into that wasteland came The Strokes. They weren’t the biggest band to come out of this era of New York. They arguably weren’t the most talented one either. But they are unquestionably the most important. A band whose first releases grabbed attention from across the music industry and kick started a revival in alternative music that would provide a solid half decade of new bands that consistently tapped a rich creative vein. The Strokes are simply the era’s seminal band not just because of their music but because of their image.

But who are The Strokes and what brought them together in the first place. To British eyes, their formation might seem very typical, built as it is around a series of encounters at private school. The story started with lead singer Julian Casablancas. Son of a former Miss Denmark and inheriting the model good looks, he first met bassist Nikolai Fraiture at the Lycee Francais de New York and maintained a friendship from there. In the meantime, Casablancas’ parents divorced and his mother married a painter who introduced him to “proper” music and entered a rebellious phase that would last long beyond his teenage years. Sent to boarding school in Switzerland by his father, he soon fell in with Albert Hammond Jr, the future guitarist of The Strokes.

Hammond, similarly with a model for a mother, was born into the music industry through his father, Albert Hammond Sr. Albert Sr was a prolific writer of hits, having written “The Air that I Breathe” for The Hollies and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” as covered by Starship. Casablancas’ time in Switzerland would be short, returning to America to attend the Dwight School in New York where he would meet the final two pieces of the puzzle - guitarist Nick Valensi, who had been playing guitar since age 5, and drummer Fabrizio Moretti. New York would eventually throw all of their paths back together as the band proper formed in 1998. They quickly got songs written and started playing live in 1999, rapidly improving the tightness of their sound and the quality of their live performances - off stage, they were simply a bunch of young men having fun yet working hard for it. In spite of what, on paper, look like privileged backgrounds, the band were workers at the beginning - Casablancas a barman, Hammond working at a record store, Fraiture at a video store - and that work ethic made them enjoy the success all the more. Hammond Jr: “The other groups were aggressive, bringing in dudes to drink with, while we brought in girls. We had a lot of fun. When everything exploded for us, we thought: ‘Wow! Does this mean we can keep doing this?’.”

It was an image, if one could even call it that, that came naturally to the band. They were five men with little in the way of responsibility having a good time and not giving much care as to what people thought of that. Writer Eric Ducker, who followed the band on tour in 2001: “their 23 year old manager Ryan Gentles gave me the Russell Hammond line, “Just make them look cool” I told him that they don’t need any help looking cool.” While good music is essential to getting a buzz around any band (and, as we’ll get on to, The Strokes did some good music), it was the Strokes’ image that truly got the band over and truly got the hype machine in motion. This wasn’t just a credible band, this was a credible band filled with attractive young men who were blaze about the whole fame thing. Ducker again: “Without hearing any music, the FADER knew months ago we were going to feature the Strokes the second photographer Leslie Lyons showed us the publicity photo she took of them.”

That photo, used in Ducker’s Fader article was fairly simple - the band shot from below stood against a wall with everyone but Julian looking at the camera, hands in pockets, casual as anything. It, like so many pictures of the band in this era directly prior to them attaining widespread fame, simply exudes Rock and Roll. Here was a band with boys that looked like you could take them home to your mum, but who you knew could and would drink you under a table as soon as they were unsupervised.

And all this without mentioning the music once so far, but it’s important to understand why so many people were willing to jump on their hype train and why they were so suitable for backing that up. Long before Is This It? Was released, their success seemed pretty certain - they had played everywhere they could in New York, had moved from opener, to middle act to eclipsing the headliner to being the headliners themselves all within the space of about 9 months in 2000.

With this extensive live experience behind them, they set to the next part of their seemingly pre-determined plan for world domination - The Modern Age EP. A demo was sent to Rough Trade who snapped them up as quickly as they could on the basis of it and, later that year, debut album, Is This It? Would hit stores and take over.

Is This It? Had so much going for it. The iconic cover of a glove on a naked thigh that defined the band’s cheek, their sex appeal and even harked back to parodying Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove - even if the band themselves weren’t entirely sold on it. The simple production that differed so much from everything else on sale at that time (and, often, what the band did after this album) but remained just accessible enough to immediately hook the listener into the band. It has a consistent rhythm that establishes itself straight away in opening track Is This It? Then solidifies through The Modern Age, of which a slightly amended version went on the album compared to the earlier EP, recorded in the same studio in Manhattan’s East Village after initial sessions failed to produce the raw sound which dominates the album.

Raw is perhaps a slightly inaccurate word to use in this case. The songs themselves in terms of pace and harmony are tight but pushed as far as they can be to stretch the envelope. Casablancas’ muffled vocals are the perfect accompaniment for this as he veers from conversational singing into passionate shouts in songs such as Barely Legal. From there, Is This It? Wanders into it’s iconic middle songs - the wistful Someday, the manic Alone Together and then into one of the most memorable three track sequences of any album - Last Nite, Hard to Explain and New York City Cops. Last Nite, the most famous of the trio is perhaps the most rough and ready song on the album, with it’s Tom Petty inspired opening bars through distortion and through Casablancas’ most slurred and hoarse vocals to become the band’s most famous (if perhaps not their best) song. Hard to Explain is, of course, the song that brought The Strokes to prominence in the first place and New York City Cops is the band at their most raucous - perhaps the closest they slide towards out and out punk on the album, even if it did have to be dropped from the US release of the album due to the events of 9/11.

Is This It is iconic for multiple reasons - be it as simple as being in the right place at the right time or be it that it was just so good as to be unavoidable. Both are true - a generation needed a figurehead to get behind and their peers needed a band to smash through the barriers of lack of interest that had dogged the scene in the five or six years prior to Is This It and, without this album, it’s unlikely that the bands who followed them not just from the New York scene but from across the world would have been able to garner as much visibility as they did. It was a bolt of lightning to revive a moribund scene that was creatively stuck in a rut.

The people responded too - Is This It debuted at number 2 in the UK album chart, eventually selling over 600,000 copies and going double platinum. In the US, it broke a million sales and was probably burned and passed around a million more as it became one of the first alternative albums to get big in the era of Napster and sharing. Geoff Nelson: “The Strokes’ debut album emerged as the sound and physical pillar of our growing collections, the intersection of this new music and this way of sharing music. This was the birth of a new cool.” The Strokes got over in that respect simply by being a rejection of the arena sized rock that was taking over airwaves - be it an Incubus, a Creed or a Limp Bizkit, Is This It was a rejection of highly polished, highly marketed faux rebels in favour of scuzzier role models who simply didn’t give a crap. When everyone else wanted to sound big, The Strokes made a conscious choice to sound small - Casablancas called it “raw efficiency” in an interview with the NME. NIkolai Fraiture stated “Record-company people, radio people, journalists, they all told us, ‘The recording quality isn’t good enough to have any mass appeal”. To me, it was more that they were able to resist the temptation to smooth the edges from their music. They revolutionised simply by shunning the revolution in technology and smoothness that was going on around them.

NME and Time magazine would place Is This It as their album of the year in 2001 with NME placing it as their album of the entire decade - Rolling Stone would place it second behind Kid A. It remains an album universally adored and the reviews bear that out: Ryan Schreiber for Pitchfork compared the band to their contemporaries the WHite Stripes with this: “the difference between the two bands lies in their degrees of skill: the Stripes have an air of amateurishness that belies songwriter Jack White's obvious talents; the Strokes, even on their debut album, sound like experienced professionals for whom mastering the form seems only an album away.” NME’s John Robinson: ‘Is This It’ is a document of a group seizing a moment and making it entirely their own. Like any indispensable invention, you’re forced to wonder how you got by without it.” Joe Levy for Rolling Stone “The eleven songs on Is This It speed by in just slightly more than half an hour, each one so tightly constructed and urgently delivered that even the ballads seem fast. The Strokes are obsessed with rhythm, and at times their approach is more like that of a soul or funk band than a rock band: Each player, even the drummer, pushes at the melody from a different rhythmic angle until there are no more angles left to explore.” Finally, MIchael Delgado in his retrospective for ISIS magazine 15 years on from the original release: “With their debut, The Strokes achieved that rare thing—the Arctic Monkeys’s first album being another good example—of achieving a sound that is heavily rooted in its time and place, and yet is so enchanting that it manages to transcend that context.”

Is This It is perhaps best summed up as a mix of those last two review quotes - a relentless yet very purposeful rhythm added to coming out at exactly the right time but without ever sounding dated. Is each song perfect? No. Is it the greatest album of it’s decade? Probably not. But it is ranked as up there by so many people because of the feelings it evokes - for so many, it was their first real introduction to alternative music. For even more, it was the album that opened the floodgates to so much other music. Perry Watts-Russell, A&R at Warner Brothers: “this is the new movement — bands that are reminiscent of things that came before, but doing it in a different way. I’ve signed a band called the Sun, and I would say that was influenced by the fact that the Strokes and Vines have gone on to success”. Like the band or not, their success meant people were introduced to other bands and it made them, if not the original creators of their scene (as put forward in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom book on the New York scene of this era, that band would be Jonathan Fire*Eater), The Strokes would be the first to break through that ceiling even if others did it more successfully further down the line.

And, unlike so many bands, the Strokes saw their debut be recognised as a classic immediately. They didn’t have to wait for success - it came to them immediately and, like any group of young men they indulged in it greatly. The question that remained was how they would follow it up.

Between Is This It and their second album, Room on Fire, The Strokes were just about the hottest band in the world and each member of the band coped in their own different ways and, most crucially, with their own indulgences. Nick Valensi developed an addiction to Klonopin, Fab Moretti dated actress Drew Barrymore right up until the band went on Hiatus after their third album, Julian Casablancas slid into alcoholism as a reaction to the band unrelenting schedule (stating “Nothing I do productive I do sober”) and, most damaging of all, Albert Hammond began a drug addiction which would dominate his life until entering rehab in 2009. The demands of being the hottest act on the planet and the party boy image the band had made for themselves led them down roads which, for some members, would be completely self destructive.

But, in the meantime, they simply rode a wave of acclaim into 2002 and their famous 2 dollar bill concert for MTV. Playing in the round (and, eventually, all over the set!) to a small audience, it was an hour of prime time TV broadcast around the world but seemingly captured in the most retro, 70s manner possible. What remains of it on YouTube is grainy, blurred but, at the same time, completely apt for the band performing as if they were pulled backwards through a portal twenty five years. If MTV went and put out a HD re-release of the concert, it wouldn’t have the same appeal or impact. The band made cool by a rejection of mainstream values were made mainstream by it also. Later that year, they would be supporting the Rolling Stones and headline Reading festival ahead of Weezer and reformed legends Jane’s Addiction all of this barely two years on from playing New York dive bars to crowds in the tens. They were 2002’s band of the year according to Spin magazine without ever even releasing anything and earned it through an incredibly punishing touring schedule that even resulted in Casablancas being involved in a physical altercation with a record company exec and him having to perform sat down due to a knee injury.

Their mindset at this time is perhaps best captured in an interview with The Face where the band, most noticeably Julian, alternate between “playing the game” and being sick of it altogether - politely answering all the questions, opening up more than normal owing to the influence of alcohol and then writing in the journalist’s notes: ‘I’LL MISS YOUR CREEPY, IN THE SHADOWS, MAD SCRIBBLING,‘EXPOSE US FOR THE FRAUDULENT POSEURS WE ARE.’. The band were in the best place possible in their careers but, in doing so, had stretched themselves too thin and were all feeling the impact of it. This particularly affected Casablancas in terms of writing new songs as he finds himself unable to write new music on the road. Even at the end of 2002, the band would use the term 11 of 15 - they had 15 songs they were happy with all in all and 11 (12, if you count When It Started, the 9/11 replacement for New York City Cops) of them were already on Is This It.

And it is in that mindset they began to record Room on Fire.

The Strokes went straight from touring into what would be a disrupted recording session for their second album, Room on Fire. Initially beginning the sessions with Nigel Godrich, primarily known for producing Radiohead but then also often working with Beck, the partnership soon fell apart. Godrich stated, in 2009 to Drowned in Sound: “You know, the problem there was that me and Julian [Casablancas] are just too similar, we’re both control freaks. He wanted to do it his way, I wanted to do it my way, and obviously that’s the point of me being there. And I’m saying ‘Well, why am I here if you’re not prepared to try and do it the way I want to do it?’” Godrich goes on to praise the band’s first two albums, adding, “my ambition was for them to change, so that they would remain that force, and I felt like if they didn’t then they’d have nowhere to go. I think it kind of happened, but not really.”.

Julian Casablancas’ version of events would be retold to writer Neil Strauss in what Strauss would later call his worst interview ever - reproduced in the NME in 2011 and in his book Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead. Casablancas takes two attempts to tackle the Godrich situation over two attempts to complete the interview over two nights. His first attempt is as follows:

Strauss: Okay, so what’s your stock answer to the Nigel Godrich question?

Casablancas: “Fuck you. I’m not answering that question.”

Strauss: What the hell?

Casablancas: “Next question.”

Strauss: It’s interesting. People’s true personality comes out when they’re drunk…

Casablancas: “You’re too nice, man.”

Random woman at nearby table: “What’s he like when he’s sober?”

Casablancas: “Sober, he’s a fucking asshole.”

Random woman: “So what is he right now?”

Strauss: Half sober, half drunk.

Casablancas: “And when he’s tired, he’s a rapist. (Looks warily at the tape recorder, then speaks into the microphone:) Rape is bad. Very, very bad.”

Attempt two didn’t go much better…

Strauss: So what was your stock answer to the Nigel Godrich question?

Casablancas: “Yeah, it makes me nauseous explaining. It’s not even good. It’s like a run-on sentence, with little reference parts to lead to the next part. So…yeah, we just work differently. We got along great. All out parts need, you know, specific personalities, and the band comes in, plays live, and then he does his thing. And so we try to do it more hands off, blah, blah, blah, and that kind of thing.”

Strauss: That’s it?

Casablancas: “I said it in the wrong order. I started out with the working differently thing and I should have ended with it. And the whole thing is just a run-on sentence.

The Godrich situation sorted, if not exactly clarified, the band reverted to the producer of Is This It, Gordon Raphael, to produce Room on Fire over a three month period with the album having been written in two chunks - a few songs prior to their 2002 tour and the remainder in the run up to the recording of the Album. Nick Valensi would later state that that time period was slightly too short for the band to put out the album they really wanted to which would run contrary to much of what people would say about the album.

Room on Fire is an album that, on a personal level, probably holds more in the way of memories than Is This It coming out, as it did, in my first term of my first year at University. The album was my own introduction to the Strokes beyond the singles. For me, Room on Fire evokes memories of sitting around with my then girlfriend in the halls of residence and not being entirely sold on it.

That possibly best sums up my view on Room on Fire now - not entirely sold on it. It is, at once, completely similar to Is This It and but just different enough to remain interesting. Reptilia is simply the best track the band have ever made and the example of where Room on Fire works best - marrying the urgency of Is This It with a slickness and professionalism that Is This It eschewed but doing it right.

And that latter element is the key element that makes Room on Fire different from Is This It. Where Is This It was produced purposefully with the edges left rough, on Room on Fire, Gordon Raphael takes sandpaper to those rough edges and smooths them with varying results. Reptilia is, of course, the album’s peak, but the lead single, 12:51 is the most indicative of this slight variance in direction - Casablancas doesn’t shout, the level of technical ability across the band makes the song that much smoother - but in accepting those changes, slight though they may be, made the song itself that little bit less interesting. It feels that little bit less urgent and, as a result, that little bit less essential. Hence, when seeing Valensi state that the making of the album felt rushed (and it was compared to other Strokes albums) seems to run contrary to the actual music. Hearing those edges from Is This It being smoothed and refined, knowing the pressure the band was under and how members were coping (or failing to) with that gives the impression that this is an album where more care was taken and more bets were hedged than in the creation of Is This It and that is, I feel, to its detriment. Where Is This It is a great album driven by the energy and the feeling that the band are cutting loose on every track, Room on Fire is simply a good one in my own opinion because that element is lacking at times.

Obviously, other opinions are available and it’s to those we look now as it’s important to point out that opinion on Room on Fire varies quite wildly from some thinking it merely average to a fair portion of fans who actually prefer the album to Room On Fire. Making the argument for Room on Fire being better than Is This It in 2015 for Uproxx, Jon Hugel backed his argument up with the following: “Room On Fire didn’t have the chance to blow our minds the way Is This It did, because at that point we already knew what The Strokes were and could no longer be stunned by their greatness. With that said, when you ignore the historical importance of Is This It and simply view the first two Strokes albums as individual statements, the fight becomes a lot closer, and with all things considered, Room On Fire just barely comes out on top for me.”. And, at the time of release, it’s fair to say that reviews were rarely far from glowing - Metacritic may have it on 77 rather than the 91 of Is This It, but viewed individually, the reviews are positive - Rob Mitchum for Pitchfork: “Tracks like "Reptilia", "Meet Me in the Bathroom", and "Under Control" take their place alongside the highlights of the band's debut, all hitting that perfect contrast of woozy nonchalance and taut guitar work that appears to be the alpha and omega of their stylistic inventory. That there's nothing new or innovative to be found here is sure to be a common complaint, though only those who prize evolution over knowing one's strengths will cry fraud.” Alex Needham for NME: “What’s missing is the shock and delight that accompanied ‘Is This It’, the sense of territories being (re)discovered. ‘Room On Fire’ is a refining and tinkering with The Strokes sound, a carefully calibrated attempt not to fuck up too early in the face of untold temptations. The results are still sleek, sexy and thrilling, with a tantalising promise of even better to come” Finally, Dan Tallis for the BBC: OK, I was demanding the impossible when I asked to be as excited by this record as much as I was by Is This It. Bands should think themselves lucky to achieve such heights just once in their careers. However, they've done all they could have done. They've made Is This It part two. It's more of the same plus extras. And I'm more than happy to settle for that.”

These positive reviews gave sales the initial bump one would expect and, when added to the how anticipated the album was, to see Room on Fire match Is This It’s early chart success in the UK and surpass Is This It’s original launch success in the US was heartening but, ultimately, it petered out and Room on Fire only sold about half the copies of Is This It due primarily to lacking the enduring legacy that Is This It immediately had and keeps to this day.

The band would the go on tour supported by Kings of Leon to back up the album but, quickly, the dynamic would change within the band and within the wider world of alternative music itself. By 2006 and the release of third album, The Strokes had seen some of the bands that followed them such as The Killers, White Stripes and former support Kings of Leon gain success and shift far more records than Room on Fire did. The second wave of the early noughties alternative revolution walked on the ground that the Strokes had already trodden but had none of the barriers to success that the Strokes had as commercial success was more certain. Where Is This It peaked in the UK and went double platinum, Hot Fuss by The Killers (a far inferior album in every way), went 7 times platinum and sold millions more worldwide. Even as The Strokes were headlining festivals, seeing the fortunes of other bands outstrip them so much while also seeing their own fortunes fall created a real sense of dissatisfaction.

From an NME Interview prior to an Oxygen headline spot in 2004, the writer stated: “It’s their first (major festival) since ‘Room On Fire’ was released to a muted response and disappointing sales. The acclaim of ‘Is This It’ is becoming a faded memory and Franz Ferdinand are leading the charge of fresher, younger acts keen to prove they are the beating heart of music right now. The nonchalant boys from New York need to prove they can be winners.”. Entering the process of making the next album, The Strokes had something to prove - not just that they could shift the same volume of records as these newer bands but also to themselves as to how to blow those bands out of the water. It seems hard to doubt that there was a jealousy within the band that others were now getting the acclaim and the riches thanks to their own work.

Further to that, there were plenty of life changes as well - Nikolai Fraiture would get married, Albert Hammond Jr engaged, Nick Valensi would start a relationship with (and marry after the release of the Album) Amanda de Cadenet and Julian Casablancas would not just get married, he would also get sober. The band weren’t free of all of their personal baggage but, individually they were more settled while being collectively more pissed off. In that framing, it makes the hiatus the band took after First Impressions of Earth very understandable and the album would only exacerbate the issues that were already deep rooted within the band - the transition from the band of best friends prior to Is This It into five individual units come 2006. They grew more dissatisfied at the same time as they were growing apart. First Impressions of Earth would, not surprisingly, be a bruising experience.

Similarly to Room on Fire, the first problem would be one of production. Initially, the band started the album with regular producer Gordon Raphael but, midway through, Hammond suggested they switch to David Kahne, who had produced such artists as Sugar Ray, Tony Bennett and Paul McCartney after making his name producing The Bangles. These two men would collaborate at the start but issues with the working relationship meant Raphael would pull out of the recordings. Gordon Raphael, in an interview on his website: “First Impressions of Earth was really not a sound determined in any way by me. It reflects a real desire from the band at that time to move into a bigger-clearer production sense. You can hear it on the drums, bass- everywhere in fact. I think they wanted to break through to more people, escape the sonic trademarks of their earlier efforts and explore new ground. I have nothing but respect and admiration for David Khane’s musical and production abilities, they just are very very much different than my own. Perhaps some words that indicate those differences would be fun and immediacy, vs accuracy and marketability?”

Kahne wasn’t the most obvious choice for a new producer. While his earlier career was quite fitting, he was, as Raphael suggests, a producer more to try and reach the band’s aim to sell a lot of records more than to try and make an exceptional album. The band viewed Room on Fire as a disappointment - Fab Moretti to Spin: “This is like our second second album. It’s our chance to be born again.” This drive to change up their sound with a slightly different end game is what really drove the production changes - that the band only managed to make two songs in two months and Raphael served more as a translator to Kahne as to how to interpret Casablancas’ ideas. Once Kahne was fluent in Julian, then Raphael was no longer needed. The sound was always going to change and the relationship with Raphael was always going to fall apart - they simply needed him to transition to someone else. Raphael in Spin: “They wanted this record to be really serious and big and pro. They think that’s what held them back in America.”

Even if you’ve never heard the album, that’s the sort of statement that would set alarm bells ringing - a creative change driven by commercial interests as opposed to natural evolution. Would First Impressions of Earth simply be “The Strokes Sell Out”?

The run up to the release of First Impressions of Earth showed the dangers of the internet. With the album and first single slated for early 2006, songs started leaking in September 2005 starting with lead single Juicebox. This meant that the single’s release had to be shifted to October (for download, before a video had even been shot) and on CD in December. Commercially, it would be a success being their highest charting single in both the UK and the USA. Artistically, it featured a much heavier and meatier sound than any Strokes song prior. Critically, however…?

The NME ended it’s track review with this line: “Howly, scowly and punk-rock growly – the Yanks’ll love it. Which, um, may be something of The Point.” NME, the band’s biggest cheerleaders, even gave it a review that damned with faint praise. In Stereogum’s 10 year retrospective of the album, they republished some of their forum comments about the song and here is the one I feel sums it up the most: “I think this is just a bad song. Like someone said in the comments before, if the Strokes came out tomorrow and said “haha it’s a fake, shit isn’t it?” i’d breathe a huge sigh of relief and stop trying to trick myself into liking it.” Juicebox was high budget with it’s David Cross starring video and taking on the impression that the band was big everywhere but the US. The thudding guitars at the start reminiscent of Weezer’s Hash Pipe, the shouted chorus, the provocative sexual content in the video itself (featuring what can only be described as lesbian soft porn) - that the Strokes were attempting to force their way into the mainstream through shock and awe was blatant but the song itself was simply not good enough to do that - it was a pale imitation of the more successful bands they were trying to ape and, worse still, a pale imitation of the Strokes themselves.

Soon after, the album opener, You Only Live Once (a retooled version of a demo called I’ll try anything once which is, possibly, superior to the version that made the album) leaked and appeased the fans - the song remains one of the band’s very finest. Other songs would continue to leak until, at the end of November, a full 5 weeks before the album was to be released, the entirety of First Impressions of Earth leaked. Similarly to Room on Fire, initial sales were strong - their first UK number one album, number 4 in the US but it was a mirage. Those sales were driven by the hardcore Strokes fan (of which there were a lot) buying the album as soon as it came out and everything dropped off soon after ending up at roughly half the amount of Room on Fire which was, in itself, around half of Is This It.

Why was that? For a start, First Impressions of Earth is, by some distance, the longest Strokes album - over 15 minutes longer than Is This It and nearly 20 minutes longer than Room on Fire which automatically stretched The Strokes’ formula as far as it could possibly go. Is This It and Room on Fire were tight albums with little in the way of superfluous songs. First Impressions of Earth, however, was flabby to put it generously. Mojo’s description of it as “an overgrown squall of an album” doesn’t seem that inaccurate. NME’s “Album A&E” feature on the album just prior to the release of Angles “structured like an old-fashioned A-side/B-side LP, while the first half of the album speeds headfirst into a night, the flipside has a more contemplative feel” which would be fine if two things were true - if people wanted the Strokes to be contemplative in the first place and if those songs were actually any good.

Reviewers, generally, agreed and that played out in sales. Music analyst Chris Molanphy, writing for NPR, describes something he coined the AC/DC Rule after Back In Black performed far more poorly initially than the follow up to it, For Those About to Rock, but Back in Black shipped far more copies in the long run. At its simplest, early sales are a reflection of the popularity of the last album, not on the quality of the current one. People went out and bought First Impressions of Earth initially because they liked other Strokes music. People then stopped buying it because they didn’t like First Impressions of Earth.

So what was so bad about it? From my own perspective, listening to it then and to it now is that, beyond the fourth or fifth track, it all blends into one as the mood is taken a little darker and as tracks mould into one. It lacks hooks and is, bluntly, pretty unmemorable. It isn’t offensively bad or anything like that, it simply goes on and on. Unlike Is This It and Room on Fire, it has also aged terribly to the point where it becomes almost unlistenable. Cut by about 15 minutes (at least), then a good album could have emerged but, for various reasons, it didn’t.

Key in that was the troubled production and the changed lifestyles of the members. This was the first album not to be exclusively written by Casablancas - as he cleaned himself up, he became more collaborative but in a quite fake way - he was still the person coming up with the ideas, he was now simply bringing them in 90% finished rather than 99% done. That created a very different environment to the band of brothers the band had been before - Moretti called it “ “difficult to put on a smile everyday. It was a get-the-job-done kind of thing.” Fraiture “The certain thing that makes bands great — the communication, the focus — was starting to recede.” And Hammond: “Talk about not having fun — that’s the understatement of the year.”

The result was, according to Pitchfork: “the band's failures do, if nothing else, possess a certain schadenfreude, allowing a fascinating glimpse at a band futilely grasping in all directions for something new and meaningful, only to fumble with a half-fragment of unformed idea between its desperate fingers.” And, wherever the issues in production led to, the fact remained, as per Kevin Jagernauth in Popmatters: “it might be easy to point to the industry guy behind the boards, the album speaks for itself, and the Strokes managed to write a flop all by themselves.”

First Impressions of Earth, ultimately, served only to exacerbate the problems the band had after Room on Fire. Trying to change their sound only drove people away and the experience as a whole drove a wedge between bandmates. They had changed and gotten their own things to do just as the whole Strokes project faltered most and that the band was going to take a break was inevitable. At the end of their US tour in 2006, they would go their separate ways for the best part of four years and First Impressions of Earth songs would fairly rapidly become a rarity in their live setlists.

During their last US tour, manager Ryan Gentles announced the band would take an extended break. First Impressions of Earth would, for some time, be the world’s last impression of The Strokes.

This break that went longer than originally intended for various reasons, primarily an extended stint in rehab for Albert Hammond, who went into a tailspin after the break up of a relationship with model Agyness Dean. Hammond had had drug issues for some time, going deeper after Room on Fire and then spiralling into a habit he himself said meant he was taking substances up to 20 times a day including cocaine and heroin.

But that was hardly the only thing that was going on in the multiyear gap between First Impressions of Earth and the first post-hiatus and, to that point, most collaborative album, Angles and it’s to what each member was up to in this time that we look at now.

Albert Hammond Jr is perhaps the best place to start given he kept himself the busiest. Within a year of the release of First Impressions of Earth, Hammond would have a solo album pencilled in for release. Hammond, unlike Casablancas, wrote on the road and, with the band going on hiatus, he took the opportunity as the perfect time to get his solo stuff out there. Between First Impressions of Earth and Angles, he would release two albums - Yours to Keep and Como te Llama. Post-reunion, he would also release the AHJ EP in 2013 and Momentary Masters in 2015.

Yours To Keep, as the first Stroke Solo album is, of course, the most notable and, possibly, the best of the side project albums. It is admittedly slight but it is distinctive enough for it to be worth existing and, at points, reminds one of what you’d potentially get if The Shins started doing Strokes covers - there is an inherent Strokes-ness that one doesn’t have to look too hard for given that many of these songs were originally suggested by Hammond for the band but were rejected and retooled for this effort - In Transit, in particular, goes closest to simply being a happy Strokes, something that one wouldn’t associate with the band due to Casablancas’ writing and also Casablancas’ distinctive “singing”. You can see why some of the songs were rejected and it has more to do with tone than with quality - you couldn’t imagine a song such as the cutesy Cartoon Music for Superheroes, the opener, on any Strokes album but that doesn’t make it lesser and, in fact, it stands out as a better album than First Impressions of Earth.

While few would describe the album as essential, it makes up an important part of the transit from The Strokes as the head of an entire scene to The Strokes being simply a band as they are when they return from hiatus as it shows Hammond’s own evolution into a lighter but lyrically dark songwriter of his own as the Strokes transitioned from being a band with everything written by Julian Casablancas into more of a democracy.

His follow up, Como te Llama? Was less successful in almost every sense. The cheeriness of Yours to Keep is gone in favour of a heavier album stylistically and in tone, perhaps reflecting that Hammond was only about 12 months prior to a stint in rehab. It is clear that, unlike Yours to Keep, these are his own songs as opposed to his angle on things he had written during his time in The Strokes and this resultant lack of focus brings a more uneven, and even slightly stodgy, experience compared to his previous album.

In interviews, Hammond has admitted that his solo career at this time exacerbated his substance issues. To Rolling Stone in 2013: “I was never a "maintain" guy. I was never, like, "Let's just do just enough so that no one notices." I was always, like, "I'll just destroy myself for as long as I could, and then I'd be like, Ok. I need a break." And the break wouldn't be stopping everything, but it would just be stopping shooting up. I’d be like, "Oh, I'll just drink, and smoke, and take pills. I'll just slow down." And that's the only way you can function. Weirdly enough, whenever I'd go tour with my solo stuff, I’d always stop everything. So I’d always be in the worst place on tour. I'd be broken.”

Hammond would enter rehab during the recording for the next Strokes album, Angles, in 2009.

Next on the side project train was drummer Fab Moretti and his band Little Joy. While with The Strokes, he met and started a friendship with Los Hermanos singer Rodrigo Amarante and both The Strokes and Los Hermanos went on hiatus at around the same time so, as their scheduled synced up, Moretti and Amarante began to make music while Amarante was in LA working with Devendra Banhart. Moretti found a final piece of the puzzle in the fantastically named Binki Shapiro and put out an album, also “Little Joy”, which stands a possibly the best solo Strokes effort given as it isn’t borne out of any long held ambition to be a soloist nor is it made by someone undergoing some sort of existential crisis - it is simply some friends hanging out making music and has an innate easy-going affability that the efforts of others, and arguably of the band itself, couldn’t replicate.

Nikolai Fraiture came up with the original band name of Nickel Eye for his solo project - a collection of poems and lyrics from, primarily, his pre-Strokes life that he wanted to put to music. With a backing band in the UK and cameos from Regina Spektor and Nick Zimmer, Fraiture did most of everything on the one album The Time of the Assassins - vocals, guitar, bass, production. If that sounds horribly self indulgent, it’s because it was: the songs were passable but Fraiture, in the words of Pitchfork “as a singer, he’s a hell of a bassist” and, given Fraiture is more or less incapable of holding a tune on the album (and not in an endearing way), it’s hard to recommend.

In 2009, Julian Casablancas released his first solo album, Phrazes for the Young on which Casablancas did more or less everything himself. While, in a sense, that’s not too different to Room on Fire or Is This It, this included instruments and the album is a nice bridge between where The Strokes left off and where they would pick up with Angles - bridging the 70s, Scuzzy garage variety of Old Strokes and putting in more synthy and, dare one say, futuristic elements. Casablancas’ slurred vocals remain the same but the production is very different with the help of Jason Ladey, who had worked with Rilo Kiley and Maroon 5. It has a veneer that betrays Casablancas’ origins and repeatedly shoves one idea too many into a song with every song averaging over 5 minutes - even at 8 songs and 40 minute running time, it feels long. It may not have been critically mauled, perhaps due as much due to that people waited to hear it and that 11th Dimension is an absolute banger of a lead off single but it perhaps is best considered along with albums such as No Doubt’s Return of Saturn - over-produced, over-thought and a very imperfect lens through which to view the artist’s ideas.

Nick Valensi is the odd one out in so much as he didn’t release anything during the hiatus and was busy looking after his young family and, if anything, seemed to be not all that keen on others going away and doing their own thing. Admitting to writing songs during the hiatus with the main band in mind to Exclaim: “for me, it was more a question of doing the songs justice and not just doing a solo project for the sake of doing it because everyone else was.” To NME: “The time off was really frustrating for me. I didn't want to take all that time off. I was pushing to make a record and do a tour a lot sooner.” Valensi, was, if not irritated, then certainly angsty about the fact that everyone was doing their own thing as opposed to focusing on the band as opposed to collating their talents (and their music) into The Strokes.

And so, to the return. There is a key difference between pre-hiatus Strokes and post-hiatus Strokes not necessarily in the band themselves or in the music, but in the public perception of them. Prior to hiatus, they were important, they were vital. Post-hiatus, they transitioned to being “just a band”. That isn’t to diminish the effort they put into their records, but the specialness that the Strokes had around them prior to First Impressions of Earth had well and truly gone thanks to a combination of a poor third album and time itself having moved them on from being hot young things to elder statesmen of their scene.

Perhaps more than any other Strokes album, the return album, Angles, would have a particularly tortured creation due both to personal demons and the drawn out recording process that that resulted in. On the first part, as already mentioned, Albert Hammond Jr would enter rehab during the making of the album, but the other demon dogging the album was from Julian.

Much of this was because the album was the most collaborative Strokes album yet, with Casablancas making a conscious decision to try to keep away where possible to ensure the band didn’t rely upon his input as the final word. After the communication issues that hurt First Impressions of Earth, Casablancas decided to try to make the album a more open experience for the rest of the band. Valensi: “This is the first one where we are truly working democratically. It's taken a long time because this is a new model for us”

Taking a long time was no understatement, Angles took the best part of two years to put together. Initially, the band convened to write material and put live demos together before going into record parts separately with Joe Chiccarelli producing. Chiccarelli’s plan was to put the album together with as little editing as possible, meaning that each part had to be perfect with songs taking up to 70 takes to be considered done. What further complicated this was that, with Casablancas living in LA, he was not present at these sessions and was recording vocals separately to the rest of the band. Valensi again: "I won’t do the next album if we make it like this. No way. It was awful– just awful.” The band would scrap and rework all but one song from these sessions for the actual album itself.

While the remainder of the sessions would prove more fruitful, there was little getting away from the frustrating, albeit not outright rift-causing, nature of the recording of the album. Producer Gus Oberg: “ We'd taken a year to come to conclusions about how the track should sound and where to cut the drums, et cetera, and my actual mix was very quick. It took me 30 minutes! Later, when the decision had been taken to use my mix, I said: 'If that's what you like, I can do one that's a little better and cleaner.' I'd slammed the tracks very hard through the board, and it's so compressed that it has pops in places that sound like percussive hits. I had not taken the time to do any crossfades. So I spent a whole day re-creating and improving my mix. They sound virtually identical to me, but someone could hear the difference, and preferred the original. So we went with the one I did in half an hour!”

That quote perhaps best sums up the experience of recording Angles. There was little in the way of actual problems, there were simply plenty in the way of dead ends and that made the recording process a chore - work was done, the band tried to explore everything and be perfectionists but landed back, often, on the quicker sounds. Few modern albums have probably seen so much work done only to end up on the scrapheap - 18 songs were put together in these second sessions and only 10 would make the album. That, when added to the aborted first set of sessions show just how frustrating the creation of the album was and, as Valensi hinted towards, it was seen more as a chore than anything else by the time recording finished in late 2010 for Angles to be released in March 2011.

The album, at least, isn’t a chore to listen to in the main. It is certainly an improvement on First Impressions of Earth in so much as at no point is it just plain dull, but it is lesser compared to Room on Fire so, while Casablancas may have described the album and it’s workings as “Operation Make Everyone Satisfied”, it doesn’t. It blends the distinctly faux-Seventies original Strokes sound with Phrazes for the Young’s faux-Eighties futurism to mixed results - “Taken for a fool” blends the two best of all while the clunky welding together of the two influences doesn’t get in the way on opener Macchu Picchu. But it does almost everywhere else. Pitchfork savaged the album closing their review with “Everybody wants to quit while they're ahead. Some actually do it.” The Guardian: “Angles just sounds like an album made by people who really didn't want to make an album”.

That’s slightly unfair - if one were to compare it to Phrazes for the Young, probably the band’s album 3.5 given their old creative process, the album benefits from the democracy and having band members there to moderate Casablancas’ vision. There is no descent into the overly dense muddle of Casablancas’ solo effort at any point, there is simply the sound of a band almost Under Cover of Darkness fumbling to marry two fairly disparate sounds together in the best way possible and both failing and succeeding in equal measure. Under Cover of Darkness, the lead single, emphasised this - yes, it’s the band’s most traditional track, but it’s staccato rhythm and use of chords which don’t traditionally go together show the ideas at play - on Phrazes for the Young, it would have gone crazy and been awful but with the full band, it’s moderated into a decent little track on an album that is about as 6/10 as they come.

By the time Angles came out, threads of new material for the follow up were already starting to emerge due less to a creative burst and more due to the length of time it took to master Angles. Along with that, the Angles sessions left plenty of unused material and it seemed that the follow up would not be long in coming - within a month of Angles coming out, the band were already recording. However, the actual recording process was similar to Angles in so much as it was a democratic structure and songs were put together piece by piece. And all anyone could put together about the album, even five years after it’s release, is piece by piece as best as the next album, 2013’s Comedown Machine was supported by no tour, no interviews, no promos - a near total media blackout.

The reasoning behind this is pretty hard to work out - for one, it did definitely impact sales: it was the band’s lowest charting record with only 41,000 first week sales - and opinions differ. Was it to give the band some mystique back? If so, it failed massively. Was it because they wanted it to be judged on merit? Or was it because it was the last album of their deal with RCA and they couldn’t be bothered? All arguments have a grain of truth behind them, surely. But what it wasn’t was a result of another fractious recording session - while Angles was a chore perhaps because of the new structure, Comedown Machine is an album where the band members entered the creative process fully aware that that’s what was going to happen and, as a result, much of the sometimes jarring blends disappear.

Listening to the album is a cheerier experience than with Angles - things flow better and there are even hints of The Strokes having picked up on tips from those who followed after them and those before, such as on the punky 50/50 or the very Killers-y Slow Animals. What the album lacks is any obvious song that is better than anything else on it - Angles may have it’s issues, but Under Cover of Darkness is still an exceptional song. While the band veer closer to Casablancas’ solo work than they do Is This It, the album still possesses a feeling of Strokes By Numbers that makes it hard to recommend not because it’s a bad album per se, but because it feels inessential. The media blackout made it seem as if the band didn’t care all that much about what they had made and the album has a similar impact - Comedown Machine is a band playing it safe. Kitty Empire for The Guardian: “Full of clever sounds, with melodies butting up against countermelodies and more laughs than you might think, Comedown Machine is by no means a bad record. It just has the misfortune of being the record that few Strokes fans want from them.”

Comedown Machine perhaps shares most of it’s DNA with Room On Fire - an album that sounds better produced and slicker than the effort directly before it, but misses something. For Room on Fire, it was charm, for Comedown Machine, it’s a single. Angles may have been hit and miss, but Comedown Machine is neither - it’s not a 6/10 where it’s flaws are raised by the odd success, it’s a 6/10 because every song is pretty darned average.

There were, at least, live shows for the first songs post-RCA. Future Present Past, the 2016 EP, is a breezy 3 songs long without ever really being totally clear on which song represents the future, the present or the past yet all with the “Late Strokes” tendency to be overlong and to try to fit one idea too many into a song -Drag Queen, in particular, suffers from this particular trope, while OBLIVIUS and Threat of Joy at least sound like they could have been off-cuts from Is This It or Room on Fire due to their sound and their standard. It, at least, hints towards the band still having an ability to deliver crowd pleasing songs that would fit into their live set.

Post-hiatus Strokes are a funny beast and it is tempting to almost think of the pre-hiatus and post-hiatus as two entirely separate bands. Few bands have gotten as much mileage out of one truly great album but few bands have suffered as much due to it. Is This It is classic, Room on Fire is pretty damned good as well, but the sharp decline in quality and the break the band took saw the band siphon fans. The demographic who came of age with The Modern Age were, by the end of that decade, settling down into the point where they started moving out of the scene and into suburbia. When the Strokes returned with Angles, it simply didn’t register with plenty of people - Pitchfork’s review of Future Present Past tells of an interaction with a self-proclaimed Strokes fan who, when asked what they thought of the last album, Comedown Machine, simply went “What’s that?”

Is This It remains a seminal album which broke down walls and created an entire scene in its wake and began a half decade long indie revival that only really came to an end once Arctic Monkeys broke through. But that scene ate The Strokes up - it made objectively worse bands far richer and more commercially successful than tham (see The Killers) and, in doing so, it made the band bitter that they did all the leg-work only to see others make the most of it while they got panned. In a way, it almost parallels Britpop a decade before it with Suede breaking it through into the mainstream but Blur and Oasis being the ones to make the ridiculous money with inferior material. But while Suede changed themselves successfully, The Strokes never escaped the shadow of their first album. Room on Fire was too similar and whichever experiments they came up with after never fully worked and, on occasion, were just downright bad.

As a result, the band aged. Is This It is what comes to mind when their name crops up and it gives every listener a feeling, a timewarp back to 2001 and whatever it was they were doing at that time. Inadvertently, The Strokes became the exact thing they aped - those bands from New York in the late 1970s who made some classic music and then disappeared save for the odd reunion tour, like Television. People go to a Rolling Stones gig to hear Jagger sing Paint It Black or Satisfaction, not some ballad from Voodoo Lounge. In the same way, people go to a Strokes gig to hear Last Nite, not for songs made post Angles. The past near two decades of the band’s existence have seen them fight to define their own legacy only to become some sort of legacy band where only the old stuff matters to the point where they, if not embrace it, at least accept the reality because it pays the mortgage. New material is put out as an attempt to see if, this time at last, the band can reinvent the wheel while tours have become a chore as the band transfer from “group of friends having fun” to “business venture”,

The band are now in the realms not of the cutting edge, but of classic rock - a sound they initially embraced and a sound they’ve spent so much time and effort trying to kick back against but never getting rid of it.

Is This It all they will ever be defined of in spite of so much material, so much water under the bridge? Is That It?

Yes, it is.

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emmatrustsno-one · 7 years

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Brace yourselves A very long essay (like, a thesis) on the British class system with references to Harry Potter Part 1

OK, I did this already. It’s long, but stick with it anyway. And watch the videos.

In Britain, people are broadly split into 3 social groups: working-class, middle-class and upper-class. The factors which determine which class you belong to are varied and complex, but in a nutshell include: how wealthy you are, where you live (location and type of dwelling), what variety of English you speak (or whether you speak English), what level of education you have, what you do for a job, what you do in your free-time, who you are friends with, what you like and dislike, your political views and affiliation, the nature and number of the opportunities you have in life and, in some ways the most important of all, which family you belong to, how far you can trace your ancestors back through history and what those ancestors did and who they were.

Although people who fall into the following categories are often working-class because our society, like any other country’s, is still trying to eradicate prejudice, these categories are not factors in and of themselves: race, nationality, religion, disabilities, gender and sexuality.

It is not the case that people’s class is constantly mentioned or even at the forefront of one’s mind, nor does it harmfully imply natural divide in the way that, for example, the caste system in India does. Class is subtle, nuanced, exists unchallenged and often doesn’t occur to you as the cause of a problem unless you really go looking deeply for it. It is undoubtedly damaging, however. Your class determines your path in life. It determines where you will live, how much money you will have, what education you will be able to access, what job you will be able to do, who you will be able to socialise and have relationships with and what opportunities you will have access to.

It is impossible to outline concisely but accurately exactly what sort of person is in which class. I will aim to do my best here, with references to Harry Potter, since I want fans who aren’t British to be able to understand these nuanced class subtleties better.

A very crude, basic description is that working-class people do “unskilled” jobs, usually for minimum wage and earn just money enough to exist; middle-class people have professional jobs, an education higher than secondary school and earn enough money to live comfortably and buy things they want as well as things they need; upper-class people belong to certain families who can trace their ancestry back a long way and are usually very wealthy and often related to the royal family. Their lifestyles are often funded by taxpayers’ money.

An overview

It is already complex enough, but it gets even more murky. For one thing, there are layers within the classes. You can be lower or higher within your class and the terms “lower middle-class” and “upper middle-class” are very common. Where you come on these inter-class continuums affects your life just as much as which class you are in.

Secondly, there are also two distinct groups who don’t fit in to the three classes. 1) very wealthy people, usually celebrities, who are super-rich but come from lower class backgrounds. A great example of this is the Beckhams. They are so rich from his football career and her music career that he had his wages paid directly to charity in the latter half of his career. They live lavishly, spend a fortune on designer clothes and their wedding was an imitation of a royal wedding. However, they spent years being mocked for seeming stupid and uncouth and it was all because of one thing: how they sound. As soon as they speak, you can hear that they started life near the bottom of the social ladder. I will do a separate post about language and voice at some point. Here’s a clip from an impressions show.

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2) an “under-class” who lives on state welfare benefits and doesn’t work. These people tend to not have enough money for their needs and their chances and aspirations in life are extremely limited. People in this category range from those unable to work through disability to drug addicts to genuinely unpleasant people who would rather take hand-outs from the government than contribute to society. The right-wing media portrays them as lazy, worthless and a blight; the left-wing media portrays them as misrepresented people who have been failed by society. The truth is in the middle.

Thirdly, unlike upper-class, what constitutes “working-class” and “middle-class” are not fixed concepts. Rather, they are in a state of constant flux and progression. What those terms meant when I was a child and Harry Potter was being written are not the same as they mean now, nor were they the same as when my parents or grandparents were children. It changes slightly with every generation. Nowadays, the middle-class is much bigger than it was then. Efforts have been made to get working-class children to go to university and some do, meaning that more people are moving into the middle-class. We are more aware of class prejudice than we used to be and many people do try to avoid it, therefore options have opened up for working-class people and allowed them to access things they couldn’t before. The technological revolution has made a huge difference. The internet allows people to travel everywhere and find anything from their own sitting room and has given some people aspirations they wouldn’t have had before.

Conversely, the definitions of ‘working-class’ have broadened. Many people now consider themselves working-class when, in my parents’ youth, they would have been middle-class due to the house or street they lived in or the fact that they manage to go on holiday every year. The two lower classes are definitely more mixed than before and the lines between them are blurring. I guarantee someone younger than me will read this and think “I consider myself working-class but I have never had any of the experiences OP describes”. Another thing which has made a huge difference is the collapse of British industry. In the 80s and 90s, the majority of the working-class worked in factories or similar industrial businesses. Then the powers that be closed them all and sold production to firms abroad who could make things more cheaply, and unemployment boomed. Literally, cities just died. Some people eventually got different jobs, though jobs where their skills were undervalued, and which alienated them from their work value. Many people didn’t. Many people had to live off state welfare benefits, which were not adequate and somehow out of that, that “under-class” I mentioned was born. Many of the people who choose to live off the state are people whose families lost their livelihoods at that time and ended up broken; just gave up.

Linked to that, another factor which makes it all quite complex is pride. Those people (the film The Full Monty is all about this btw) were proud of what they did with their skills and then they were just thrown away like they were nothing. They lost their pride and many never got it back. Working-class people, in particular, tend to be fiercely proud of being working-class. I won’t comment on the psychology of that here, but to illustrate: my husband won’t have it that he is middle-class now. He is. His argument is that he has to work, but that’s a huge over-simplification of what “working-class” means. He can afford holidays abroad and organic food, he lives in a detached house in the countryside, he owns 3 houses which he rents out to tenants (and they are kept to a very high standard). He is without a doubt middle-class. A teacher at school once claimed he was working-class for the same reason, and a lecturer at university did, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what it really means to be working-class. There’s a good book about going back to your roots called Pies and Prejudice by the radio DJ Stuart Maconie, who is northern working-class originally but now lives a privileged life in London. He was inspired to write it when he had a friend over for lunch one day and they asked where the sun-dried tomatoes were, and he replied that they were by the cappuccino maker. Such ludicrously posh items made him stop in his tracks and think “what the hell has happened to me?”

Lastly, it is possible to move both within your class and to another class. This is called social mobility. I, for example, grew up almost at the bottom of the working-class. I lived in a very deprived area, had few opportunities and my family had only just enough money to subsist. I am now technically lower middle-class. I now live in a detached house in a sought-after village, I do a professional job, I have enough money to buy more things than just those I need and I am educated to postgraduate level. However, moving up a class is extremely difficult and many people never manage it. Those who do always carry markers of not quite fully belonging there, such as accent, vocabulary, etiquette etc. I have managed it, in short, because I am intelligent enough to have won scholarships for university, because my immediate family are also intelligent and exposed me, as much as possible, to other cultures, and because I married a builder whose parents had moved up the social ladder a little and gave him some land to build a house on. It is mostly down to luck and chance.

Sometimes people are very sensitive about their class and worry about it; sometimes British people themselves are not fully aware of it all. Such people are usually (and this is not meant nastily): middle-class from birth, therefore comfortable enough not to have thought much about it, or younger than early 20s, therefore they haven’t experienced and analysed hindrances arising from their class or had a university education where they would learn more about it. Very young people might have even more trouble getting their heads around it because of sheer lack of world experience and the modern world: it’s not quite the same as it used to be since the internet took over, since that brings opportunities to everyone that lower-class people might not have had before the turn of the century.

The reasons for class and the role of history

The reasons why this class system exists are even more complex. Keeping it brief, there are two key factors. 1. to maintain power for a privileged few and ensure the populace doesn’t try to take that power (people are too busy, pre-occupied and uneducated to challenge it). 2. historical influence: we used to have a feudal system where serfs worked the land for rich land-owners in exchange for living on it. During the Industrial Revolution some people managed to gain capital and power through production and factory ownership. They became the middle-class. This has evolved into what we have today.

The importance of the influence of the feudal system cannot be overstated if people are to grasp why race isn’t as critical a social issue here as it is in the USA. The USA is still recovering from Slavery, by which I mean the historical, slave trade triangle event, not the concept of enslavement. A major part of that country’s history is brutally, sickeningly forcing people who aren’t white to do the manual toil on US shores that kept privileged people in their positions of power. Racism and racist slurs equate to supporting slavery. Britain has a different history. Whilst we played an awful role in the slave trade, we didn’t have slave plantations on our shores. It wasn’t coloured people who did the toil. It was the working-class. For centuries the working-class were forced, at times with as much violence and as little food and rest as African slaves endured in the Americas, to do back-breaking work all day without a break, simply to have a place to shelter and some food. Under the feudal system this meant in the fields and during the Industrial Revolution it meant in dirty, dangerous factories. The working-class was, and to some extent still is, enslaved. That doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist here or that it’s not despicable. It does and is. But it doesn’t have the same connotations. Slurs about class, however, DO have those connotations. Here, making nasty comments about, or looking down your nose at, working-class people equates to supporting slavery, albeit more subtly than racism equates to supporting slavery in the US. Disparaging comments about the working-class are a bit like, for example, calling a black man “boy” in the US. But because a) it is more subtle and b) much longer has passed since we had the feudal system and the Industrial Revolution than has passed since America had slavery, class slurs in Britain are less emotive, emotionally-charged and offensive than racial slurs in America.

What makes you upper-class?

I mentioned that ancestry plays a huge role in determining class. I also mentioned that there is social mobility (moving up to a higher class or even down to a lower one). There are certain families who can trace their ancestry back centuries and are descended from royals and rich land-owners. That means that certain surnames and bloodlines are prestigious. These people form the upper-class.

It is very unusual for upper-class people to mix with working or middle-class people. I, for example, have only met one upper-class person in my life. They go to different schools from the rest of us and do different things socially. For this reason, upper-class people tend to marry other upper-class people, in fact most would frown upon anyone who did otherwise. Because it’s all about family status, marriage would be the only real way you could move up to upper-class, but it’s practically unheard of. You are born into the upper-class. If you inherit the surname, you inherit the status that goes with it, regardless of any other factors. For this reason, upper-class families tend to be ‘pure’. Here is a newspaper article illustrating my point. The comments are also interesting. It’s from a popular right-wing paper.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2838183/How-having-right-surname-sets-LIFE-ancestors-social-status-determines-rich-ll-study-claims.html

Another illustration: when Prince William married Kate Middleton, whose family are crazily rich, the media and nation went into a frenzy over the fact that he was marrying “a commoner”. They used that exact word. Kate’s family became wealthy during the Industrial Revolution and she, her siblings, her father, grandfather and great-grandfather all attended expensive, prestigious public schools. Her family is incredibly wealthy, has the best opportunities available and were friends of the royals for decades before she met William. Nevertheless it was huge news for her to marry William. Why? Because she wasn’t upper-class. Despite the privileged life she led, despite her family’s centuries of wealth, she didn’t have the name or the blood to be considered upper-class. It all comes down to family status. In crude terms, William married below him, and they were very lucky that it wasn’t a scandal. Some people were offended by it, in fact. Remember that in the 1930s Edward VIII had to abdicate in order to marry “a commoner”. To most people “a commoner” is someone normal, but here it is someone who doesn’t have the name or blood of a small, select group of families. It’s also interesting to note that she is rarely called ‘Kate’ by the media since joining the upper-class, but rather her full name ‘Kathrine’.

Two things out of this: firstly, don’t fall into the trap of assuming being upper-class doesn’t affect your life negatively. The lower-classes have worse struggles, but it would be wrong not to appreciate the difficulties associated with being upper-class. The expectations of you, the responsibility you have to your name, limitations on who you are allowed to socialise with and love, constant media and public attention and pressure to be someone important. It is exactly these issues which led Prince Harry to have a troubled youth.

Secondly, it is because of all this that many people feel it is incorrect to view death eaters in Harry Potter as a metaphor for Nazis. They are really a metaphor for the ‘pure-blood’ upper-class families. They do not round people up and exterminate them. They use power and influence to gain more power and to subjugate those they see as inferior because they do not share their names or blood. They do not base their ideologies on pseudoscientific claims about appearance, like phrenology. They base it on inherited blood. To highlight the fact of the class metaphor even further – there is a way to become effectively upper-class without being born or married into it. It is a lesser upper-class, because you don’t have the family name or blood, but you still become a de facto nobleman. The way is to become a Lord. You can google how to do it in the real world if you’re interested, but clearly the key point is that Tom Riddle’s adoption of the title Lord represents the change in his class. He does it because he knows he has upper-class blood but can’t prove it, so he has to indicate his status another way.

Why is Harry Potter about class?

The three blood statuses of wizards equate to the three classes: muggle born = lowest-class (working-class in the real world), half-blood = middle-class and pure-blood = upper-class.

It is because of this that the word “mudblood” is not the slur many people take it to be. It is not the wizarding version of the N word. It is not as offensive as that. It is offensive, yes, but it is not an unforgivable utterance which betrays inherent racism. The fact that the characters are prepared to repeat it when reporting it has been said shows that it is not comparable. I can’t even think the N word. If I think about it I don’t say it, in my mind I literally say “the N word”. Both characters and fans are prepared to say “mudblood”. It is not the same.

The fact that Voldemort and Snape are high-ranking death eaters also proves the story is not a metaphor for racial aggression: they are half-bloods and Snape comes from a working-class background and yet they have moved from their groups to be prominent members of the highest group. They have moved from lower classes to upper classes. It hasn’t happened by marriage like in the real world and it was very difficult – they had to be great wizards to manage it. But they did manage it. It is not possible to change your race, but you can change your class. Therefore, the wizarding war is a metaphor for class struggles not racial struggles, therefore “mudblood” is a nasty way of saying “commoner”. If you have dirty blood you aren’t part of the pure, select group. You don’t belong to the wizard upper-class. People shouldn’t say “mudblood” because it implies inferiority and enslavement, but if you do say it you are not racist, it isn’t the same as being racist, and isn’t as offensive or as unforgivable. It’s only slightly more offensive than saying “chav” or “ned” in a nasty tone of voice.

So it would be great if people could stop calling Snape a racist based on him saying “mudblood” one time as a teenager under extreme stress.

This all also explains why joining the death eaters was attractive to half-blood, working-class Snape in his youth and why JKR said he did it because he thought it would give him power and impress Lily. Those people who are confused because Lily wouldn’t be impressed by his joining the wizard Nazis – this is the answer. It’s because he wasn’t joining the wizard Nazis, he was joining the wizard upper-class.

Real class-based insults

A quick note on terminology – “chav”, or “ned” in Scotland, means a similar thing to “white trash”, but anyone can be a chav/ned, regardless of skin colour. The opposite of that insult is “toff”, which means upper-class and posh, but it’s negative. Here’s a picture of fictional chavs from the comedy TV series Little Britain.

Here are some comedy clips of some chavs interacting with the higher classes. You might not make all of it out, especially if English isn’t your first language, because working-class people generally speak with strong regional accents and use dialects (this couple are from London). You will probably notice though, bits where you can understand it much better – that’s because they are switching into “proper English”, or their version of it.

These vocab tips might help you out:

‘to have it off’ means to ‘to have sex’ as well as simply turning something off

‘winalot’ is a dog food brand; ‘camelot’ is the national lottery organisation

‘giro’ means welfare cheque

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Education and class

In general, working-class people go to state-maintained schools. These vary enormously in quality, mostly in terms of what resources and spaces can be bought and built for the budget the government gives them. Middle-class people normally go to these schools too, though a substantial number go to grammar schools, which are state schools that you have to pass a test to go to when you are 10/11, or private schools, which are schools independent of the state which charge fees and can be boarding schools. Both of these have good sites and resources and get good results.

Upper-middle class and upper-class people go to public schools, which is another level of private school. They are incredibly expensive, very old, boarding schools which select students based on who they are, as in, what family they belong to, and how much money they have. Teaching and the content of lessons is similar across all three types of schools; the difference is in funding – what the school can afford to offer in terms of books, experiences, classrooms, class sizes etc. Having a public school on your CV basically guarantees you entry to any university.

Private and public schools get good exam results because of their facilities and the fact that the students’ families are educated and encourage (or pressure) them to achieve highly. State secondary schools get mixed results because their facilities and resources are not adequate and many working-class families don’t value academic achievement, so don’t encourage it. A lot of students are unable to cope with the level of critical analysis required to succeed at A-Level (qualification at 18 years old) because independent thinking and reading non-fiction hasn’t been encouraged at home. I left school without finishing my A-Levels because I found that too difficult and had to build up my abilities gradually until I was able to handle that level.

The top universities now have to release data showing they are trying to admit students from working-class backgrounds, but nevertheless attendance by working-class kids at top universities like Oxford and Cambridge is low, because those universities demand things working-class kids don’t have: varied extra-curricular activities, the ability to pass an entrance exam, a proven track record of independent enquiry, enough money to pay double the fees most universities charge, the etiquette (e.g. dining manners) required to interact with all the upper-class kids etc. This is a poor state of affairs and denies working-class students access to ground-breaking research and thinkers. The bigger issue, however, is that it keeps them away from power. All the influential people: politicians, big businessmen, investors, lawyers etc, go to the same few universities. They meet there, get to know each other through secretive clubs (google the Bullingdon Club for more info) and this enables them to network and make contacts, which they use later in life. Working-class people never get those contacts, therefore find it almost impossible to get any power.

To demonstrate the prejudice, an anecdote:

My friend Claire is middle-class and went to a grammar school. She got As in her A-Levels and went to Cambridge University. On the first day she met the people who would be on her course as well. Every single one of them had gone to private or public school. When she told them which school she had come from, they said, with what they believed was genuine praise and kindness, “wow, you’ve done really well to manage to get As and get into Cambridge considering where you’ve come from”. She isn’t even working-class. She had led a pretty privileged life. Yet they were astounded and condescending towards her. They viewed her achievement of coming from a middle-class grammar school with good exam results the way many of us view Malala’s success and entrance to university after her experiences in the Swat Valley. They were, like many people of that class, totally disconnected from popular reality.

This leads me to the defence of another Slytherin: Slughorn. Some people view him as racist because of his comment that Lily’s academic success was even more impressive since she was a muggle-born. As I have shown already, blood status in HP is a metaphor for class struggles not for racial tensions, so it is not correct that he is racist. In fact, he was doing what those people on Claire’s course were doing: expressing shock that someone from the (wizard) working-class could achieve so highly in academia. It’s inherent prejudice, it’s patronising, yes. But it’s not racist, and it is even well-intentioned.

Another point to mention here is access to knowledge outside the content of lessons. That has improved a lot with the internet, but still, access to books is limited. A few years ago the government started talking about closing some libraries and it caused an uproar. Without libraries, most working-class people would have very limited access to books. It is yet another case of failing to understand that most people do not have the privileges they do, as well as desiring to limit the extent to which the working-class can get an education, so as to keep them in their place.

Personal hygiene and class

This issue is very close to my heart because as a child I had very poor personal hygiene and I was bullied terribly for it. It is not a nice thing to have to admit, but some working-class people don’t have brilliant personal hygiene. It isn’t unusual for very low-class people to smell, have bad teeth, not change their clothes regularly, rarely change their bed sheets and not to wash every day. To take myself as an example first, when I was little I was not bathed regularly, nor was I made to clean my teeth. I hate saying this, because I know it’s horrible, and believe me I am OCD with washing now, but when I was a child I went weeks without a bath or a change of clothes. We didn’t have a shower. It was neglect, there’s no way around it. However, it wasn’t malicious. In my parents’ generation and before them, it was normal not to wash very often if you were working-class. These days, hygiene practises amongst the working-class are much much better, but even still you do even now get smelly, dirty people.

It wasn’t just me. In my year (grade) alone at secondary school there were three students who were showered at school by the matron (in a kind way) because they didn’t wash at home.

Why? Well obviously that is complex, but I’ll try to explain. It is absolutely linked to being working-class. For a start, facilities were a problem because of poverty. When I was born (1985) we didn’t have a bath or shower, our bathroom was just a toilet. We also didn’t have a washing machine. We just couldn’t afford those things. To use a bath we had to go to my grandparents’ house. When I was a few years old we got a tin bath, which is like an unconnected bathtub that you fill with jugs. We didn’t have much money for water and soap though so use of it was limited. My mother washed clothes in it as well by hand. When I was around 5 or 6 we got a proper bath. However, our house was so cold that it was physically painful to use it. We didn’t have any heating except for an open fire in the living room and this was the north of England I’m talking about. In winter the bed sheets got damp from the cold. When we had the tin bath you could put it in front of the fire, but the plumbed in bath was upstairs in a bathroom. My dad braved it more often than my mum, and since I was little I didn’t bath myself. Those three students that got showered at school I mentioned did so because even by the late 90s, they still didn’t have a bath or shower at home.

Another reason is lack of education. People just aren’t taught about personal hygiene at school, so if they don’t already know at home you won’t find out either.

On top of that, many working-class people are too busy or pre-occupied to remember about or find time for things like washing. They work long hours, often multiple jobs, and when you aren’t sure if you’ve got enough money to eat, getting washed just doesn’t seem that important.

Another factor is depression. Living in poverty, working hard just to survive, knowing you have little opportunity in life creates depression. Depressed people can lose interest in things like personal hygiene.

Not washing is so ingrained in working-class history that the phrase “the great unwashed”, originally a term used by Victorian authors, is now a reasonably common way of referring to the masses. It is used both derogatorily and ironically:

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/the-great-unwashed

I was bullied terribly, especially at primary school, for being smelly and dirty. It was constant, day in, day out, and is definitely the reason I am now over-the-top in cleanliness. One of the main things people made fun of was my hair. I was bullied for having greasy hair to the extent that, on a school trip where we were staying overnight, 2 girls that I was forced to share a room with, having tortured me for hours, including ruining my shoes, said they would stop it if I washed my hair.

I understand that some people say cruel things when they are young, but the fact remains that if you choose to make fun of someone because they are dirty or greasy or smelly, you are actually making fun of them for being poor, not having basic facilities at home, not having been taught proper personal hygiene because their parents didn’t know or were too busy or depressed. You are behaving like you are socially superior to them.

This is obviously the main reason why I love Snape. I immediately saw myself in him, and every time someone mentions his greasy hair it alludes to his working-class childhood. When he joined the death eaters he moved up the ladder, but the disadvantaged start he had in life is still written all over him. It is also why I love Slytherin – the house is populated mostly by pure-bloods, or in other words by upper-class people, and yet they embrace him and allow him social mobility anyway. They looked at him and saw something other than his class.

It’s not just about wealth

Since membership of the upper-class is brought about through ancestry, it is possible to be upper-class and not rich. Most upper-class people are descended from rich people and have inherited wealth alongside their name and blood, but occasionally there’s a family whose ancestors lost most of the money, so they are left with just a title and the estate (house and land). It costs a lot of money to run an upper-class house because they are invariably old, listed, castle-y buildings in the countryside. That means they are big and cold and cost a fortune to heat. Stuff breaks or wears out so the maintenance costs a fortune as well. They might be so big that they need staff as it’s too much for just the family to keep on top of, so there are wages to pay too. On top of that, they try to live an upper-class lifestyle to keep up appearances, which is very expensive. A good few years ago now there was a documentary called The Fucking Fulfords, about an upper-class family who couldn’t afford their lifestyle or house and swore all the time. Even though they weren’t wealthy they didn’t get jobs, largely because they had been brought up to believe it was beneath them, and as a result they are lazy fucks. It’s on youtube if you want to watch it.

youtube

Lazy is not the only stereotype of the upper-class. There are quite a few, all based in fact, such as that they are eccentric and strange. Fulford is definitely that. Another is that they are stupid. Since they don’t understand life in the same way as regular people, because they don’t have jobs, some things they don’t know are astonishing. There was a reality TV series years ago where this entitled, upper-class girl did working-class, minimum wage jobs, and it was painful to watch. She didn’t know how to do basic tasks like make a cup of tea, because she never did anything for herself at home. She didn’t know what a gas bill was. A lot of these people barely wipe their own arses so it’s no wonder they appear incapable. The Monty Python sketch “twit of the year” utilises that stereotype to make fun of the upper-class. It also pokes fun at the stereotype of having ridiculous multiple-barrelled surnames. My husband does building work for an upper-class family occasionally and the woman’s surname is Booth-Clibburn-Shimmins. The Pythons are doing that thing with their faces because yet another stereotype is that upper-class people talk weird.

youtube

#Harry Potter #british class system #BRITISH SCHOOLS #British history #britain vs america #class in harry potter #slytherin #snapedom #@deathdaydungeon

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lillotte17 · 7 years

Text

slips this into @feynites pocket and crab scuttles away

*whispers* I’m sorrrrryyyyyyyyyyyy

Aili is eighteen, and her face is bare.

The lack of vallaslin seems like such a minor detail to strike a blow at her, when so much of this new world feels strange and wrong. But it does. She has the mind and the body of an adult again, though if things progress the way they did the first time she grew up, she might round out a little more here and there. Still. She has become herself once more.

And yet, somehow…she has not.

Her hair is kept longer. Washed and brushed into gleaming perfection. Her complexion is spotless. Immediately scrubbed free of dirt or sweat or any other unseemly thing her mother might disapprove of. Her magic is noticeably more potent. And her mother…

Her mother is Sylaise; to whom she used to sing the evening hymns when they lit the fires for their camps.

She has never shown her how to fletch an arrow from a wild bird’s feathers. Or cook a meal. Or sew her own clothing. Aili supposes that it might not be beyond her capacities, but why should Sylaise bother to teach her such things? There are servants and attendants and artisans for that.

And her father is June; the great builder. The name that had rung out across the Dalish camp in a steady pounding rhythm as the smiths and craftsmen plied their trade. She almost hears the echo of them in the sounds of his footfalls when he walks through the halls of his tower at the head of his procession. And she wonders what he would have made of that.

He is many things, imperious and slightly awkward among them, but he is not soft and inviting. Not steady and patient in a way and invites trust from anyone and anything that meets him. He does not laugh and tease and be silly with her. To show her how there is strength in being kind.

They are her parents.

And they are not.

She cannot have the same life twice.

Barring some unforeseen catastrophe, she will never bend her knee and allow the blood writing to etched back into her flesh. Daewyn will not kiss her on the night she is recognized as an adult in a haze of alcohol and teenage giggling. Deshanna will not choose her as her First.

She will not marry Uthivr.

Not while standing in the Great Hall at Skyhold in the dress Vivienne and Josie had insisted upon. And Leliana’s ridiculous shoes. Not with a pause as she walks down the aisle because her father is crying too hard and has to take a moment to collect himself.

It cannot be the same. Just as Uthvir cannot be the same, if they ever come to exist in this world. Glory had not seemed to heed her warning, but perhaps what she said will make it a little more cautious. Maybe a few more defenses and places to hide in the Dreaming will be enough to keep the Evanuris at bay.

But somewhere in the deepest, quietest corners of her heart, she knows.

She knows it will not.

Glory will be lost, like all the others. Like slender arms folding themselves around her. Sharp, deft fingers smoothing their way across the growing swell of her abdomen. Tracing the changing shapes of her body with wonder and wanting. The murmur of warm breath carrying a warmer voice pressed into the skin of her neck.

Come to bed, Vhenan.

There are mornings when she still catches the smell of them hanging in the air. As though they have simply gotten up before her to get some work done, and their scent is lingering on the bedsheets. She keeps her eyes closed when that happens, knowing it is nothing more than fragments of her own memories slipping after her from the Dreaming. Even so. She will take what she can have.

There are ways to revisit those times, of course. Spirits who would happily show her the reflections of all she has lost, for the right price. But a person cannot live in a dream, no matter how lovely, and she knows that if she dared to step into such a place, she would be far too tempted to remain there. Her world is gone, and she cannot call it back to her through sheer force of will alone.

Her daughter will not return to her with wishing.

They always say that grief is a heavy thing. That the weight of loss bears you to the ground and crushes you until you cannot move or think or speak without pain and effort. Aili has had her share of days like that. Of frustration and tears and a white-hot rage sharp enough to stab at anything within reach.

But more often than not, she simply feels…empty. Numb. Gutted like a fish. Brittle as a dry twig. Raw and aimless and aching.

If anything, she thinks she needs more weight. Something solid and real to tie her to this place. To prevent her from being swept away by a passing breeze.

The weight of her child growing within her womb. And the, later, the weight of her nestled in her arms, warm and heavy. Settled over one hip and curled into her chest, one hand balled into the fabric of her shirt as she fights her hardest to fend off sleep.

She had never wanted to miss anything.

In the end, that is the hardest memory to part with; the sight of her daughter discovering the world. Her gaze had been the soft deep purple of late twilight, bright as a set of polished gemstones. Curious and clever, and sparkling with mischievous intent more often than not. Or scrunched up with laughter. Blazing with disapproval. Heavy-lidded with impending sleep.

Little Mealla, marvel-eyed at the sight of a distant dragon rising up above the tree line as their carriage slowly made its way through a mountain pass, one hand cupped over her mouth as she let out a gasp of unexpected delight.

Mamae, can we go closer? I wanna see it! I wanna see more!

Those are the eyes that haunt her the most. The eyes filled with such wonder. And certainty. Mealla had never had a doubt that the world was hers, and she could have all the time for adventures and growing up that she could ever want from it.

That her parents could keep her safe from everything.

It is a failure Aili has no words for. A loss that seems so insurmountable that even Lavellan would be beyond its understanding. And there is a part of her that believes she deserves this. The weight of the dead. The weight of everything and nothing, all at once.

She had carried Mealla into the world, and she had carried her back out of it again. She cannot set her down now. She will not. If she lets her go, if she forgets, even for an instant, then it would be erasing the last vestiges of her existence. There is no one else to remember that she lived. That she breathed the air. That she woke with the sun and slept beneath the stars.

That she was real.

Aili is eighteen, her face is bare, and her heart is empty.

Or else it is too full. Fit to burst, as it is on this night. Throbbing like a wound that needs lancing so it can heal without festering.

Which is why she finds herself sneaking off after the largest part of the festivities finished up, when the pomp and spectacle had bled more into couples dancing and wandering off into whatever secluded corner they can find to have a bit of a party by themselves.

Nearly two decades, and she still feels mortified by the fact that her mother insists on involving the entire city of Arlathan in the celebration of her birth. There had been times when she had faced scrutiny as the Inquisitors wife, of course, and the eyes of the clan were always on her when she took up the mantle of Deshanna’s First, but this is different. She feels like some sort of fascinating butterfly, pinned to a card and placed in a glass casing for upper class people to entertain themselves with.

The lower ranking followers have their own revelries, of course, which is slightly mollifying. At least all this fuss is giving them a chance for a break. And a party is always a good cover for Lavellan’s agents to do their work. It’s…something.

Not enough, though.

She decides to head to her father’s tower instead of Sylaise’s palace. Her rooms there are slightly less ostentatious, if only because June is mostly content to let her have her own way about decorating them.

Not that she particularly feels like going to bed at the moment. Being alone in the dark with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company hardly sounds appealing. Not without a little liquid comfort to ease things along.

Haninan finds her halfway through her second cask of wine, propped up amongst some crates, with tears streaming down her face.

“Whatever happened, I’m sure there are better solutions than drinking your way through two casks of seven hundred-year-old wine,” he says quietly, offering her a hand to help her get to her feet.

“Well, if tha firs’ had made me pass out like I wanted, I would’na have ta open the second one,” Aili slurs out bitterly.

Without another word, her grandfather scoops her into his arms and carries her back up through the twisting passages of the tower. Aili muttering belligerently into the front of his tunic all the while.

He sets her down again once they have finally made their way up to the roof. Which is not somewhere she even knew a person could get to through the tower. However, if anyone was going to find a way to get someplace no one else was supposed to be, she would bet it would be Haninan.

Her daughter would have liked him, she thinks.

“Sorry I threw up on you,” she mumbles hoarsely as the cool breeze helps sober her up a bit.

“It wasn’t the first time,” Haninan reminds her with a smile, “Although you are capable of making much more of a mess now than when you were a baby.”

“I’m still a baby, if you listen to Sylaise go on about things,” she sighs, her mouth twisting in discontent as she stares out over the city. There are still drifting orbs glowing in a wide range of pastel colors, meant to be reminiscent of flowers, and music wafting up from the Pleasure District, as well as from her mother’s palace. Even more than the usual amount of light and noise and color that the city generates. It is very beautiful, in its way.

And horrible, too.

“Not a baby,” Haninan consoles her, reaching over to tuck a stray curl behind her ear, “Just…young. Young enough to still merit a bit of fussing and hovering. And you are your parents’ first and only child. You cannot hold it against them too much for wanting to coddle you a bit.”

“Lavellan told you about the place we came from, didn’t she?” Aili asks with another long exhale of breath. When Haninan nods an affirmative, she continues, “In the world I come from, someone my age would be old enough to get married, if they wanted. They would be expected to work and earn their keep and look after themselves. They’d be old enough to have their own child, if they were so inclined. And here… Here, I cannot do anything. I cannot attend council meetings, or fight in tourneys, I can’t even hunt unsupervised. Mother wouldn’t even let me attend my own birthday party unless I stayed with her the whole time. This place… This life, is a prison. A punishment for my failures in that other world. I can’t say I don’t deserve it, but still…it chafes.”

“I am certain you are being too hard on yourself,” Haninan soothes, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, “A wolf came, and destroyed your worlds. You did your best to stop it. You may grieve at the fact that you were not successful, but you should not blame yourself for your defeat.”

“But…I could have done things differently,” Aili tells him thickly, “Vhenan was always suspicious of him. Never wanted to let him too close. I thought they were just being over-protective, but… Maybe we should have cast him out. Been more thorough when we searched for spies. We probably could have killed him, if we had tried early enough. Maybe I could have changed something, even if I couldn’t save the whole world. I could have- I might have been able to save…”

She pauses, overcome, as Haninan pulls her more fully against his chest. Hushing her tears, and running his hands across her back in slow, calming circles.

“Tell me their name, little heart,” he says. “If it will help ease some of your grief, give me their name, and I will mourn them with you. I have never lost a child, but I am no stranger to heartache.”

“Mealla,” she whimpers between sobs, and it is such a relief to speak the word aloud to listening ears. To say it as the name of her daughter, instead of a muffled cry chanted into the folds of her blankets. She had not slept those nights, both hopeful and afraid that passing spirits might visit her whilst wearing the guise of her child’s face, as a comfort or a torment. She is never certain which would be worse.

“A fine name,” Haninan commends, “A flash of light in the darkness.”

“She was so…so little,” Aili hiccups, “And fierce as anything. So clever. You…you would have loved her, Haninan. Everyone…everyone loved her. Even he… The wolf, he held her in his arms. Told her stories. Watched her grow. I never understood how he could just… And my poor Heart… They died…so I could save her. But I couldn’t. I was too late… Too late. When I got to her, she was already gone.”

She keeps talking, memories and stories pouring past her lips like a breached floodgate. Running together until she is not certain she can tell the difference between a true recollection, and the idle fantasies pieced together by her aching heart.

The mischief her daughter used to stir up. Her talent with magic. The shape of her smile. The weight of her little body in her arms, never to wake again. Spirit trapped beyond the Veil.

The times she blames her spouse for everything. The blind flashes of rage that twist themselves into moments of ugliness and hate. Their failed wards. The wolf’s victories. Letting her bring a child into the world in the first place, when they knew that gods and monsters were hovering around the edge of their existence, waiting to rend the world apart.

The immediate guilt that follows those thoughts. Her heart had given their life, after all. Which is more than she did. They would have given more, if they had it. She knows. Their love for their daughter was just as strong as her own.

Bright as the sun.

Haninan holds her and listens without judgement. Letting her have those feelings, and acknowledge them without shame. Allowing her to share her burden, as much as she can, until weariness and mild inebriation win out, and Aili falls asleep in his arms.

Her last thought is, as always, of her daughter.

The little lightning girl.

They should have known better than to choose that name, she thinks blearily. Because lightning only brightens the sky for an instant. A shining moment of beauty.

And then it is gone.

#Aili lavellan #Haninan #Uthvir #Mealla #Sylaise's Daughter AU #idk what we're even calling it anymore #>_>#fic #this took forever because i had to put my brain in a Sad Place for a long time #to get it right #the sharp one likes your shine!

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badgerpride96 · 5 years

Text

A Wild West Experience Part 10

Part 10 is here! I actually made a writing tracker in my bullet journal for September to guilt myself into actually doing any writing ever. So here you go! Part 11 will (hopefully) be out soon!

Gio sent Sam on ahead to tell Mary that they had a guest for dinner. Mary graciously tipped him, and put an extra loaf of bread in the oven. She then hurried to the Sean’s butcher shop, for some additional stew meat, and at home browned and added it to the stew already cooking. Her husband had said they would be home at 7, 7:30 at the latest, and it was nigh on 6. She hurried about the house, duster in one hand and her latest design portfolio in the other. Mary was a woman who appreciated order, even if their guest was a literal outlaw who’s last worry would be the state of the house. But Mary cared.

Thus, an hour and a half later, Kelly was ushered into the parlor by Gio to see everything comfortably neat. Her first impression was that she wanted to sit down and stay for ages. Mary had hit an excellent chord, making everything neatly lived in.

“Honey!” Gio called. “We’re here!”

“Right on time.” Mary came sweeping into the parlor. She kissed her husband, and turned to her guest. “It is lovely to meet you, Miss Rose.”

“Kelly, please.” Kelly let her hands be seized and herself be led into the living room.

“Dinner will be ready in only a few minutes, the bread is just cooling. Is beef stew alright?”

Kelly nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yes, anything but sausage. I see and eat it all day at the Goose.”

Mary smiled, sitting across from her on the armchair. “Oh, I understand. There was a year where my parents’ corn crop simply exploded. I remember telling my sister, ‘if we have one more creamed corn dinner, I shall go to bed hungry!”’

Kelly laughed. “Gio was quite right. You are a woman of fortitude. If I had said that, there would have been a shouting match of unrivaled volume.”

“You shouted at your parents?” Mary said, a somewhat surprised note in her voice.

“Oh yes. We are a volatile family. Everything was always forgiven, and I’m grateful for that fighting. It taught me to hold my ground. Much to my father’s chagrin, I’m sure. He probably thanks the Lord every day I’m an only child.”

Mary made sure Gio was out of hearing range, having gone to change his clothes. “If this is too personal a question, please don’t answer, but do you miss them?”

Kelly smiled. “Ask personal questions, dear. It means you’re interested in me as a person, and I appreciate that. Yes, I miss them dearly. I can’t even write them, as they couldn’t reply. I hope they don’t believe what everyone says about me.”

“You’re close, then?”

“Oh, very. It’s just the three of us, and the dog and cat. Everyone was involved in the other’s business, which you think would be aggravatin. But really, when I married, I would call on them at least three times a week, just to get out of the house. They never liked John anyway, they’d have much preferred someone like...well, just someone more attentive and carin.”

Mary laughed. “My parents were alarmed at how attentive Gio was! They thought for sure he was makin a show of it.”

“Well he certainly isn’t!” Gio had come back in time to defend his honor. “Are we gossipin already?”

“Oh yes we are dreadfully vapid,” Mary assured him. “Nothin but the most scandalous tidbits for us.”

Kelly laughed. “Speakin of tidbits, is there anythin I can do to help with dinner?”

“Well you could help my husband set the table, if you’d be so kind.” Gio helped his wife to her feet, gave her a kiss, and led Kelly over to the silver drawer. He passed her the steel set (the true silver was all antique, family heirlooms. He quite hated the design). Mary and Kelly chattered between the dining room and the kitchen; Gio noticed Mary tactfully did not mention the trial. He assumed she knew of the other sheriff’s arrival, as word had spread like wildfire. Mary asked her what she would like to do as a vocation, if she could. Kelly seemed surprised, but answered that she would like to write; “Books and articles and such. Maybe I could take up art.” She said as Mary pulled the bread from the oven. “But in any case, I would like to stay in Haven. Perhaps move my parents here. My mother would be right at home. My father would certainly enjoy the Goose, he loves a good pub. And he could find work here. He’s a builder.”

“Oh, certainly, folks are fixin up left and right these days.” Mary brought the breadboard out, Gio following with the tureen of stew.

“You both are so kind for havin me.” Kelly said as Gio handed her a steaming bowl.

“No no, we love havin dinner guests. And please forgive me for saying this, but you are the most interestin dinner guest we’ve had in a long time!” Mary quipped. Kelly laughed.

“Hey, Sass is interestin!”

Mary rolled her eyes at her indignant husband. “Oh, Sass. We’ve known him since childhood, we know everythin already!”

“Have you really?” Kelly exclaimed enthusiastically, poised with her wine glass. “Oh tell me everythin! What was he like when he was younger? Was he quite as grouchy?”

“Oh he was positively wild,” Mary said, buttering her slice of bread. “Always running off these two, to some big adventure. Though I must admit, I tagged along more often than not.”

“More often than not, my hat!” Gio cried. “You were the chief architect in those adventures. Why, you built our carts! Our slingshots! This woman you see before you,” he appealed to Kelly, “could hit a fly out of the air at 50 paces with a slingstone! She built a raft for us, and when the springs were no longer full enough to sail, she turned it into a sleigh for haulin supplies for campouts. Sass and I were but her lowly subjects, toilin in the hot hours of the day, lest she sent a stone at our -”

“Now see here, I’ll sling that stew right over your head!” Mary chided as Kelly cried with laughter. Gio threw his hands in the air with an enormous grin. “Do ye remember the time we had to rescue Elek from the schoolhouse before Miss Heather caught him writin dreadful messages on the blackboard?” Mary asked him.

“He didn’t!” Kelly giggled. “Did you succeed?”

“Oh yes, but we had to sneak him out in a cart full of dirty chalk rags! He looked like a ghost for a week, clouds comin off him every time he sneezed!” Mary told the story, Kelly laughing and Gio objecting, and they passed a very pleasant evening.

“Have you always been friends?” Kelly asked them over dessert.

“Sass and I were raised together, and Mary moved to Haven when we were 7 or so.” Gio said. “I never thought I’d be so lucky.”

Mary smiled at her husband, and Kelly sipped the last of her wine, closing her eyes and letting herself enjoy, perhaps only once more, the feeling of safety and peace and softness of friendship.

With the trial looming, Elek released Kelly from her official duties at the Goose and offered the bar as a workspace. In the two days leading to opening statements, the Admiral and Kelly poured over every aspect of the case. There were few photos of the crime scene, but the Admiral said he could still glean information. His list of witnesses included several of Kelly’s relatives, in-laws, a banker, a renowned gunsmith, old friends. A few names had not responded, and some witnesses the Admiral refused to tell her about. They hadn’t even been on the list of addresses he asked her for.

“Trust me, my dear, I have a plan. Now, about this clause of the will…”

The day of the trial, Kelly awoke at 5:00 on the nose. She heard the front door close, and Jones whistle to his horse. She sat on the edge of her bed, looking at the grey frock she’d chosen last night. She felt quite numb. The sound of birds outside, carts going by, seemed dulled in her ears. She wondered for a brief moment if perhaps the universe outside her room had stopped existing, and she was hearing echoes. She fervently hoped it had. But then she remembered Gio smiling at Mary over dinner, Sass laughing at her jokes, Owen’s stories at the bar, the Admiral’s reassuring voice, Persephone’s gentle nudge for more oats. She put on the dress.

As she looped a ribbon around her frenched braid, there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” she said. Gio stepped into her room.

“Oh, good morning,” she said, smiling at him in the glass. “I’m ready. I thought this-” she gestured to herself “would look right.”

“You look lovely. Deceivingly demure.” Gio nodded. “I just came to see if you needed anything.”

She let her smile fade. “No,” she said quietly, “no, I’m not quite sure what I'm feeling right now.” She rubbed her side. Walt had taken the stitches out the day before, but it still ached.

Not for the first time that morning, Gio was glad he was not acing as judge, as he did for small cases. He had grown to like this young woman, and feared for her. She was a good friend for him, even with the unorthodox situation. “Shall we?” Gio opened the door.

“Gio,” she said. He turned back to her. “If I come through this...that is, if I am found innocent and free, I was wonderin...I don’t know where to go and-”

“Kelly,” Gio said, in the most heartfelt interruption, “Haven is, and always will be, lucky to have you, and a home if you have us.”

Kelly made a choked squeaking noise and flung herself at him for a hug. He hugged her back, and laughed. “Oh little lady, I wouldn’t have it any other way. And neither would Mary, nor Sass. We’re here for you, ye know that, don’t ye?”

Kelly nodded into his shoulder. He patted her head and she pulled away, hastily dabbing at her eyes, though smiling now. “Now let’s get some coffee and a good breakfast in ye. You’ll need it.”

The courtroom was packed. Nearly all of Haven had turned out to see the trial. Kelly nervously walked to the council desk. Mary reached out from the rows of seats to squeeze her hand as she passed. The Admiral was waiting at the gate separating the onlookers from the proceedings; he opened it for her and pulled out her chair. Just 20 paces to the left, Thomas and his council leered at her.

“An excellent choice of outfit, my dear.” The Admiral whispered to her. “Very understated.”

“It’s the only thing! Look at all these people! My god, Admiral, less people were at Jesus’s trial!”

The Admiral chuckled as the courthouse usher called out, “All rise for the Honorable Judge Fauna!” A stately, purposeful woman strode into the room. Kelly was unsurprised; the Admiral had told her before the Haven had elected one of the first female judges in the country. Thomas, however, looked livid.

“What is this?!” He burst out. “I will not be handed a verdict by a mere woman pretending to wear the robe!”

The judge, not yet at her bench, turned to him frostily. “Then,” she said in a clear and cool voice, “You are fortunate in that I am no mere woman. I am a judge of American law, certified and with better credentials than any other judge in 5 counties...including your own. You may sit, Sheriff.”

Thomas sat, shaking with rage. Kelly smiled. The judge sat at her bench, smacked her gavel, and commanded, “Let this case, 331, State v. Rose, commence. Opening Statements!”

And with that, the trial began.

–

Buy me a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/badgerpride

-–

For more Content, check out @contentcreatorshaven or www.contentcreatorshaven.com! We are a creator collective dedicated to helping each other make it in this very crazy world.

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neilchax · 6 years

Text

His last gift

It was the happiest day for Sarla on the occasion of passing post graduation in architecture with flying colors. She started her own office in the heart of Bengaluru city. On the first anniversary of her office, she got a prestigious client Radha Mohan Construction company Limited based in Bengaluru.

Jayant was a structural engineer who joined the same company just six months before Sarla got this assignment. Sarla was quite surprised to see Jayant at the new project site. She and Jayant were childhood friends. They were meeting after six years. The occasion was the launch of 500 apartment complex at the outskirts of Bengaluru city. Sarla was invited as a special guest.

“What a nice time to see you Sarla after a long time. I am really overjoyed to meet you here. You have not changed.” said Jayant “Yes, Jayant I am also feeling the same,” replied Sarla “We are meeting after six years. May I ask you how did you spend all these years,” asked Jayant Sarla affectionately calls him Jay and he reciprocates as Saru. “Jay, we parted each other after Pre-University Course.I got admission to the Engineering College, Kolkatta. After the degree, I went to Delhi for Post graduation in architecture. Thereafter one year, I worked as a junior with a famous architect of Delhi. I didn’t like the climate of Delhi, I returned back to Bengaluru” said Sarla

“Saru, I stayed in Bengaluru and completed Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Structural Engineering. I joined a private college as a Lecturer and resigned after one year. At present I am before my beloved girlfriend.” said Jayant.

“Jay, do you remember when I was six years old, we both went to see a kids movie. There was a disturbance when two boys started fighting with each other. The reason was simple. Two unknown boys seated side by side. One boy was eating popcorn. Another boy unknowingly hit his popcorn packet. The paper bag full of popcorn fell on the ground. The two boys start quarreling. All the audience mostly men were upset. It took five minutes to convince the boys. We both left the cinema hall. We were unable to tolerate the shouting.”

“Saru, I too remember an incident of childhood days.I was a just 7-year old boy. My father gifted me one music player on the occasion of my birthday. You were invited on that day. You asked me to give you the music player. I refused to give you. You became angry and pushed me from the little-elevated place. I fell down on the ground. You expressed sorry in the presence of all the guests. I had seen tears were coming down through your eyes. I was wounded in the right-hand palm and the blood was flowing. You were afraid and you asked my mum for forgiving you. Mother took me to a nearby hospital for a bandage. My mother told you not to worry.”

Prabhu, Chairman of the company was closely observing the conversation of Sarla and Jayant. He went there and asked, “Both of you know each other since childhood.”

“Yes sir, we used to stay at the Maheshwari layout, Bengaluru. My father and her father were colleagues and working in the Bharat Bank. We used to meet almost daily,” said Jayant

“Very good. When I was the 8-year old boy I lost my mother. After one year I lost my father. I became orphan and grown up in the orphanage. I was a brilliant student completed Bachelor of Engineering(Civil) with highest marks. Initially, I worked with the builder for 5 years. The builder helped me to start my own company. I started a company in the name of my parents Radha Mohan,” said Prabhu

The launching of the new project was conducted in the presence of about 50 prospective buyers. The function commenced with religious rituals and ended with lunch.

Later on, Sarla and Jayant used to meet frequently in connection with the project. Whenever they find time used to recollect the past memory and share the experiences of childhood days. Prabhu was happy to see their hard work. He asked them to work jointly until the completion of the project. He didn’t know both these guys were lovers.

In the meantime, Ambika the only daughter of Prabhu returned from the United States of America after completing post graduation in information technology. She wanted to join a company in America. But she changed her mind and joined in her father’s own company.

She was observing Jayant closely for his skill and attitude towards the work for about one year. Ambika was very happy with Jayant. She was confident that the project would be completed before the schedule. Prabhu was asking his daughter to closely monitor Sarla and Jayant and obtain progress report once in a quarter. Sarla and Jayant were quite sincere and honest in submitting their reports before the due date. Ambika was accompanying Jayant for the inspection of the spot. She was very much impressed by Jayant and fell in love with him. One day, she called Jayant to her chamber along with the project report for discussion. He went to her chamber and explained the latest position. Ambika was happy to see the wonderful progress within a short time.

“Jayant, it is amazing.You are doing excellent work. My dad is satisfied with your work.” said Ambika “Thank you, Madam. One person is behind me to encourage for my hard work,” replied Jayant “Who is that person?” asked Ambika “Madam, she is Sarla, the architect of the company. Ambika could not understand the intention of Jayant. Observing his knowledge, fair complexion and personality, she fell in love with him. Ambika decided to reveal her wish directly to him.

One day, Ambika asked, “Jayant, I am very much impressed the way you work. I love you Jayant. If you like me, let us continue our relationship.

Jayant was surprised. He was already in love with Sarla. He could not disclose this fact to Ambika. “Ambika, I am coming from a rural place and belong to a middle-class family. My father is a bank employee and mother is just literate and doing household work. You are from an affluent family. How can it be possible?” “Jayant, don’t worry about all these factors. My decision is final. I will convince my dad to agree on this proposal.” “Madam, give me some more time to think.” “Okay.”

After this development, Jayant was not happy. Sarla was a good-looking, soft-spoken and perfect in her profession. Moreover, she was a childhood friend. Ambika was fat and complexion was not fair. Her height was just 5 feet, whereas Jayant was tall with a 6 feet height. Ambika told her father that she liked Jayant and wish to marry him. In the beginning, Prabhu refused to accept her wish and told her to rethink. But she was hell-bent upon marrying Jayant. At last Prabhu agreed to fulfill the wish of his only daughter.

One day Prabhu called Jayant to his bungalow for a breakfast. He expressed his desire in the presence of Ambika. “If you accept my proposal, you will be elevated to the post of the managing director of the company.”

Jayant didn’t like this proposal. He could not refuse his boss. He was puzzled. Ambika was anxiously waiting for his response.

“Sir, I am already in love with another girl. We know each other since our childhood. I am sorry, I am unable to accept your proposal”

Ambika was disappointed and angry too. Jayant was already in love with another girl. She remembered the day when Jayant told one girl was his inspiration and success.

Prabhu was also unhappy. He wanted to convince Jayant in all possible manner. All his efforts resulted in vain. Prabhu became angry and planned to take serious action. Jayant left the place.

One day, he called Jayant to his chamber. Jayant was present at the appointed time. Boss asked him to sit beside him. “Jayant, I am telling you for your own bright future. Please accept my only daughter Ambika as your life partner” “Sir, my conscience does not permit to ditch the girl, who had full confidence in me. I have already promised to marry her.’ “Let me know, who is that girl?” asked Prabhu “She is Sarla working as Architect in your company.”

Prabhu was surprised to know that Sarla was already in love with Jayant. Sarla had a very good relationship with her boss Prabhu. He treated her as a second daughter. “Jayant, stop meeting Sarala. I will search another suitable boy for her.” “In that case, I will resign from your company,” said Jayant

Prabhu was not expecting such a reply from him. Jayant told this episode to Sarla. She was perturbed to know the latest development.

Another one month passed. Jayant submitted resignation mentioning personal reasons. He applied for the job in another construction company. While leaving the job, he told his boss that with a heavy heart he was leaving the company. His resignation letter was kept pending for some time. Ambika was unhappy to know this development. She suggested her father not to accept his resignation and give him trouble by booking false cases against Jayant. Her intention was to blackmail Jayant. He was surprised to know the false allegations against him. He thought it was a reward for the honest and sincere employee. He failed to prove himself as an innocent. The case went to magistrate court. Jayant was called to a police station. The Police Inspector grilled him for about half an hour. Ambika created such a situation, where Jayant had no option except to accept Ambika as a life partner and break up the love already had with Sarla. His friends and relatives also advised Jayant to marry Ambika. To come out of the bad situation, he agreed. Prabhu immediately withdrew all the cases against Jayant. As promised earlier Jayant was elevated as the Managing Director of the company.

Jayant sent a mail to Sarla in three lines for the break-up of love with her. How painful for me to send this mail. I agree to marry Ambika under pressure. Felt very sad for the break-up.

She stared at the email message on her computer, her mind racing so fast that the words blurred together and no longer made any sense. Just three lines, but enough to make her life–the life she’d worked so hard and sacrificed so much to build–begin to crumble around her. Sarla responded to his mail.

Every relationship has its own ups and downs. Breaking up of relationship is really a serious matter. If you reconsider our relationship, I feel like lucky. I will not try to convince you in this regard. You are a learned person, I need not explain more.

Jayant sent another mail to Sarala to meet him urgently at the park in the evening at 6. She went there on time. He was waiting for her arrival. Jayant informed everything right from the beginning.

“Jay, please find out a way to come out of this situation.” “Saru, my mind is disturbed.” “Jay, don’t worry. For every problem, there is a solution.” She closed her eyes for few seconds. Sarala opened her eyes and smiling. “Saru, What happened? Why are you smiling?” “Jay, once I visited a restaurant along with Ambika. She started the conversation about the progress of the project. Suddenly, she changed the topic and revealed about her personal life. She told me that she was married in the United States of America and divorced after one year. The reason was she was suffering from an incurable disease. Then she stopped abruptly. I am planning to meet Prabhu tomorrow and request him to give up the idea of Ambika- Jayant marriage in view of her personal life.”

“Saru, fine, go ahead with your plan. My best wishes to you.”

Sarla had a free access to Prabhu. She need not take the appointment. Following day, Sarla met Prabhu and requested him to treat her as a daughter. “Prabhu, you are doing injustice to Jayant,” said Sarla “Sarla, do you know with whom you are speaking?” “Yes sir, I know I am speaking with my boss with full responsibility,” replied Sarla “How do you say, I am doing injustice to Jayant?” “Sir, your daughter is a divorcee and suffering from an incurable disease.” “Who told you?” “Sir, Your daughter Ambika,” said Sarla Prabhu was speechless at that time. “Sarla, you are right. At first instance only I refused the proposal of Ambika- Jayant marriage. But she was hell-bent on marrying him.” Sarla left the place with satisfaction.

Everybody’s astonishment the marriage of Ambika with Jayant was canceled. Prabhu decided to cancel the marriage of Ambika and Jayant. Ambika argued with her father for the cancelation of marriage. She realized her defect and blamed her fate. Realising the danger in future Ambika went to Sarla home.

“Sarla, please excuse me. I did crime by forcing Jayant to break-up your love. I wanted to marry Jayant with the hope that he is a most suitable life partner for me. I was under the false impression with the money power, I can do whatever I want. It is nothing but a myth. Your love is pure. I wish you a successful married life.” said Ambika “Ambika, after all, we are human beings. We commit mistakes knowingly or unknowingly. I appreciate your noble thinking. You are great. I wish your speedy recovery of health.” “Sarla, I will treat you as my younger sister. Please do not praise me. You and Jayant continue service in our company. “Ambika, thank you very much.” Sarala and Jayant became life partners. Prabhu blessed the newly married couples. Jayant and Sarla left Radha Mohan company after the successful completion of the project. Jayant continued to work along with Sarla in her office.

#His last gift

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kenzieannbeattie · 7 years

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I got engaged in December of 2013. It was one of those engagements where we didn’t know when we were going to get married but as long as we knew it was going to happen we didn’t mind. We had our minds set on a few dates but with Tyler in college and getting pregnant, we decided we were going to wait. I wasn’t even 21 yet and anyone who knows my family or our friends knows how silly it would be to be under the age of 21 and have a “Beattie” wedding. So we finally agreed on August 5th 2017. We struggled so much on what date to go with until one night I had a dream and Tyler had said, “let’s get married on August 5th….”. I woke up and looked at the calendar and found August 5th and looked for the year that is fell on a Saturday. Thats is how August 5th 2017 became the day we would get married.

Lets recap some of the big moments we experienced all while trying to figure out how to have our wedding before we reached that awkward five year engagement stage…

We had our daughter Ariyana on February 12th 2015 and bought our first house December of 2015. We then moved to Maryland for Tyler’s internship in May 2016, where he got a job offer to stay but we decided it wasn’t in our best interest. Tyler then graduated college with his Bachelors in December 2016 and in February 2017 we finally relocated to Chesterfield MI. So with all of this taking place I forgot that, “Oh hey…you are getting married in six months and you have nothing planned”. That four-year head start I thought I had was meaningless. Not to mention we were a good four hours away from our wedding location and every company we used. But we made our obstacles work and that is why I know, so can you.

So where does one even start when planning a wedding?

Here are some tips and ideas to help make planning your day, easier!

Guest List: Holy crap! This was the most irritating part of the whole thing. I think that I had at least three different lists going at one time because it was so hard to decide who was going to be invited to one of the biggest days of my life. You would think this would be the easiest part, just invite everyone! YEAH I WISH! It would have been awesome to invite every single person Tyler and myself have known over the course of our relationship. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the location, or funds to make that dream a reality.

Do I invite immediate family or all family? Close friends or do we invite college and high school friends also? Then don’t forget, family friends, parent’s friends? Kids? No kids? Who is that going to upset? Trust me its overwhelming to say the least.

This was the biggest obstacle I faced because I am a people pleaser and I did not want to offend anyone or have anyone think that they weren’t important enough to be invited to our wedding. But that is simply not the case.

You have to be realistic when it comes to your guest list. You have to think about who would actually come. Have you talked to this person in the last year? Would this person be someone you walked up to if you seen him or her at the store? Would they walk up to you? Has this family member talked to you in the last few years? Have they met your kids? Life is busy so its understandable that not every single person that is important to you has been able to stay in touch as much as they may have liked, but I promise you, it is not hard to see its someone’s birthday and take five minutes out of the day to say Happy Birthday. One thing that really helped me was asking myself these questions: have they came to things you have invited them to in the past? Did they have a valid excuse if not? You have to take those little things into consideration because lets face it, invitations alone cost a good amount of money.

Venue: This was one thing that I did research on for what felt like forever! The biggest thing you need to know when deciding where you want your venue is your budget. The next thing you need to decide is whether or not you want to have someone cater your food and provide your alcohol or if you want to do so yourself. Either option is a good option. Doing it yourself can save you money but it also requires more work. I went the do it yourself route in order to save money, so I needed to find a venue that was going to let me do my own food and alcohol. After long hours on the Internet and asking around, I found the Loading Dock in Shelby Michigan. It is a two-story building that is beautiful and you are able to provide everything yourself. I decided I wanted to have my wedding and reception at the same location just because it was a little further away from where most of us lived. However, I had a large amount of guests attending, and limited space for both ceremony and reception set up, so about a month before, I rented out the pavilion that was right next to it. It honestly couldn’t have worked out more perfect!

Here is a list of different locations in the West Michigan Area.

The loading dock: http://www.renttheloadingdock.com

The Double JJ: http://www.doublejj.com

Leighton Hall: http://www.leightonhallmi.com

Lewis Orchards: http://www.lewisorchardweddings.com

The Cheney Place: http://www.thecheneyplace.com

All Saints Church: http://allsaintsfremont.org

Little red Barn of Nunica: http://www.littleredbarnofnunica.com

Century Club Ballroom: http://centuryclubballroom.com

The Barn at Town Corners: http://www.thebarnattowncorners.com

You will also need to figure out if the venue provides things such as tables and chairs. This is something that can add up as well. I ended up renting tables from Oceana builders in shelby MI ( http://oceanabuilders.com). I went with round tables because I liked the way it looked. However, if you need to fit more people in a space, I recommend getting long tables.

Save the dates: Lets just start by saying this is something that can be done differently based on budget and still have the same outcome. Its just going to depend on what methods you want to take. We had my cousin take the pictures for our save the dates. We got lucky because we had someone to do that. Otherwise honestly there are a bunch of cute save the date cards and invitations out there these days that look just as good without a picture. I spent a while looking for deals on the Internet for both save the dates and invitations. I recommend looking and waiting for certain deals because you really can save a ton of money this way. My best friend literally just got all her save the dates for free from Wal-Mart because she found a deal where you could print an unlimited number of 4×6 pictures. So can you guess who just made her save the dates in form of a picture and saved so much money? And to top it off, they looked just as good as mine did.

You could honestly even buy heavy-duty paper and make cutes ones using Microsoft programs. This was one idea I had but for me it just wasn’t as convenient because ink and a printer, paper and envelopes added up to just as much as going through a company. But some people can make it work!

Here are the two websites that I used. They had fast shipping and the packaging was always very nice. My favorite part is that they are always running good deals.

Ann’s Bridal Bargains: www.annsbridalbargains.com

Shutterfly: (Wedding Paper Divas’): www.shutterfly.com

One thing to remember though, is that if you are not planning to travel city to city to hand deliver each of these yourself, you are going to have to purchase stamps. This was not something that even crossed my mind because who would think that stamps would be a big-ticket item when it comes to money. But with my 200 save the dates, 200 invitations, 200 RSVP cards, bridal shower invites, at .49 a stamp… it adds up and it adds up quickly. So saving money by finding good deals is really important, especially if you are not trying to take out a separate loan just to tie the knot.

Wedding Dress: We all I am sure have seen the TV show Say Yes to the Dress. It would be awesome to say I just spent $10,000 on so and so original…or not! But seriously, I know of people who have spent $60 on their wedding dress and I know others who have spent $5,000+.

I personally had a budget of less than $1,500 and for me I had a wonderful mother who had me covered. I got my wedding dress first thing, so about a year early. I don’t regret that one bit. I got my dress at David’s Bridal in Grand Rapids. They had a ton of different options that suited me well. I went dress shopping with my best friend who was also getting married so we went with our moms, her dad, my grandma and my cousin who happens to be best friends with us both. I got a lady that was super nice and all about making sure I was happy. She got a lady that was less concerned in making it a great experience for her, which was super annoying but happens. I went in not knowing what type of dress I wanted and knowing nothing about designers. I had always thought I wanted a princess style dress with a ton of bling so, I tried on four dresses, no princess style, all bling, and I fell in love with the fourth. I said yes to the dress, got to ring the bell and then checked out. A few weeks later my mother and I made a trip down to Grand Rapids to pick up my dress. The lady working comes out saying “oh I Love this dress it is so pretty”. I looked at the dress and it was the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I just remember saying, “okay that is nice but this is NOT my dress”. I looked over at my moms face praying she wasn’t about to have a freak out Mother of the Bride moment…but she calmly got out her phone and showed the lady what the dress was suppose to be. Turns out the store marked two dresses with the same identification number and it just so happened to be not the one I wanted. However, it actually worked in my benefit because the dress I picked out was a few hundred dollars more and because of their mess up, we got it at the same price as the other dress. This was proof that good things can come out of bad situations.

So if you are not planning to drop 50 pounds before your big day, I recommend getting this done and out of the way as soon as possible. Your dress and your bridesmaid dresses!

Bridesmaid Dresses: Getting all my girls together at the same time wasn’t as hard as I imagined it would be. I had six of the very best bridesmaids. We picked a date and time and all met at David’s Bridal in Grand Rapids. The best part about getting the dresses there was that if there wasn’t a sale going on they were guaranteed $20 off because of the fact that I got my dress there as well.

I was not a picky bride and I surely didn’t want them to spend $150+ on a dress that was ugly. So the only thing that I asked was that it was a long dress. Other than that I really didn’t even care if it was the same dress, as long as the colors matched. So we found the dress we all liked and the lady there said it would take about four weeks to come in.

So with the normal “I need to slim down” goals that every girl has before walking down the aisle in a wedding, the girls waited a few more months before putting their order in. When the time came to order the girls called and the lady said, “we can’t do that color in the time frame because it is a popular choice this time of year”… Nightmare!

I started looking at other stores, but all were either way more expensive then I wanted them to spend or not in the right color. This left me the option to change the color. It all worked out in the end because the gold metallic we went with was super pretty and just happened to go with the rest of my decorations. But can you imagine the panic if it didn’t work out or I would have had a bridezilla moment?

Anyways, some of the girls went and got measured and some just ordered online. The dresses all came in within a few weeks of them ordering, which was awesome. The only thing I stress is making sure they all try on the dresses right away so that any alterations that need to be made can be done in time! That way you have zero dress dilemmas day of! We lived and learned on that one! Just remember that no matter how picky you are and what expectations you have, be thankful for the bridesmaids. It is not the cheapest role to take on and it definitely can be one of the more stressful.

Groomsmen Attire: The best part of figuring out what the guys are going to wear is that it can literally be anything. If you want casual it can be casual. If you want full suit, that would look great also. We shot for somewhere in between. My guys had black pants, a white shirt, suspenders, bow tie, and a jacket (which they ended up ditching right after pictures). I loved this look! But I have also seen jeans and a vest look good too, so it really is all up to what you are picturing.

We went to Men’s Warehouse because it was the most convenient for us. All the guys were spread out across Michigan, so the fact that there were stores also spread out across Michigan really helped. I was able to design the look online and create an account. The guys were able to go in and reference the number and order their suits that way. My favorite part was that they have online chat so if you needed to change anything about the look, you were able to without having to make an extra trip into the store.

Also if you had a certain number of tux rentals, the groom gets his free! And we all know by this time, anything helps! $$

Decorations: We made all of our decorations ourselves. I waited for Hobby Lobby and Michaels to have there 50% off sales for the items I needed: glassware, candles, picture frames, fake flowers, etc.

I got my tablecloths from the website Linen Tablecloth: www.linentablecloth.com. This was the cheapest website I found tablecloths from and trust me I looked everywhere. I wanted the cloths to go all the way to the floor because to me that just really brought the appearance to another level.

I bought plastic plates from the company www.boxed.com. I was able to get over 400 plates for $200, which was awesome! You could also go with paper plates, especially if you are doing buffet set style food. I however had the plates set up at the tables before hand to tie together the simple decorations that I used.

The last thing we did was hung lights everywhere! We are so thankful for my father and mother in-law for taking the time to do that! It made the world of a difference. For lights you can get them basically anywhere. We used the stands of Christmas lights that our family had and then my mother bought the bigger style ones from TJMaxx!

Overall my decorations, plates and tablecloths all cost under $500 and I couldn’t have asked for it to look better!

Flowers: I went super simple with flowers. I did baby’s-breath for my bridesmaids, groomsmen’s, my father, ushers and officiant. My flowers were simple as well, but turned out beautiful. You can also do flowers for the mothers and grandparents. It all just really depends on how traditional you want to go. For me, I have so many grandparents and to get them flowers would have cost me close to $100 with just them. So it made the most sense for me and my budget to just get the people flowers who were in the ceremony.

I went through Jenifer Vincent who is located in Fremont Michigan. Her business is called Linden Floral, LLC. (http://www.lindenfloralllc.com) She recently moved her store to Hidden Treasures right down town Fremont. She was amazing to work with and her pricing was great! Especially because I changed my mind a few different times because of budgeting concerns and she was so helpful and patient with me.

The great thing about flowers is that you can go big or small and they will look fantastic. I just recommend getting someone to do it; it is one less thing you have to worry about getting done!

Photography: When it comes to wedding photography there are a few different options. You can spend 1000+ on a photographer or you can take the cheaper route and have someone you know take them.

For me, the pictures were not the most important part. I knew that no matter what, I was going to be able to get a few good photos that I could post online and get blown up for my house décor. Other than that I knew they were just going to sit on the computer or in a photo album.But I am not going to lie getting a professional to do your pictures would be less stressful. I got lucky because my cousin was just beginning her photography career, so I hired her and she did great. I got a ton of photos that were wall worthy, plus she was able to capture great moments all throughout my reception.

There were a few mishaps that we had to deal with though so my biggest advice is to make sure whoever is taking the pictures has enough memory cards to last the entire wedding. You can’t even imagine how fast those things fill up! It is better to be extra prepared than anything! So when hiring a professional photographer, you would not have to worry about the little hiccups like that, but it will cost you a pretty penny.

Another thing is giving yourselves time to take the pictures. I literally had like 45 minutes to load up my bridal party, get pictures with all my family and go and get pictures done. It did not leave us much time. Although we got good pictures with the group, we were majorly lacking on pictures of just the two of us, which is a total bummer. We will probably just end up doing that new anniversary photo-shoot where you dress up in your wedding attire and take photos. I am just glad someone did that first so now I have that option.

Entertainment: We went with a DJ. Anyone who knows me knows that music was one of the most important things to me. Getting married to the love of my life was one thing, but getting to dance the night away with all the people that make my life complete was another.

We went with the company Sounds R Us because it just so happens to be Tyler’s brother. But other than that we heard great things about the company and their abilities. I had seen him perform at two other weddings prior to my wedding as well, so that made the decision very easy for me! He already has booked a few of my friends since then, so go look him up on Facebook! Or shoot me a comment and I can get you his number!!

He even did as much as save my wedding ceremony because my brother had dropped my speaker and broke it the night before, so you can say I was extra thankful when he said he could do it without a problem!

Honestly, the night turned out great. We had great music all night and we were able to request what we wanted when we wanted.

Transportation: Don’t wait! Seriously. If you plan to have a limo/ party bus get this rented and done right away. We didn’t.

We originally went through the online company www.price4limos.com. This company finds you the best priced company for your event and area. We were able to find a limo company through them and give them details on when and where. We got as far as paying the deposit and confirming everything. The next day we were informed that they didn’t pay attention to the zip code and they thought it was a different location. At this point, I was devastated and in tears. I just had to remember that this was not the point of getting married and it had to be happening for a reason. Luckily, with the help of my awesome husband, we ended up finding a company that had a karaoke van that they let us rent out. It all ended up working out just fine but this is why I recommend getting this out of the way first.

Party favors: This was one thing I didn’t put much thought into. When I go to weddings the last thing I care about is what I get to bring home. So while I was planning, I initially didn’t even think I was going to end up having anything. But at last minute the website totally promotional (https://www.totallypromotional.com) was having a great deal that I could not pass up. The company took about a month to complete the order but it was great.

I ended up getting stadium type cups that had a cute little saying on it along with our initials and the date.

Here are some other ideas for wedding favors: mason jars, chap stick, koozies, cups, pens, candies, etc.

*One of my wedding favorites so far was at my uncles wedding; he had someone make the alcoholic beverage “apple pie”. They put it in cute little mason jars and it was a huge hit!

You can’t really go wrong with wedding favors, but just make sure you have enough for everyone!

Salon apportionments: This is one thing you are going to want to plan and schedule right away. Especially if the salon you use is always busy.

I went to Snipperz Salon In Fremont Michigan and they are the only people I would recommend. The staff is beyond amazing and you will 100% leave happy. Just make sure you make your appointments right away. I made mine well in advance and still had another wedding the same day as mine! So don’t ever think you have time! Get those appointments made and make sure you give yourself enough time to get everything else done.

As for nails, it is usually easy enough to get in the week of your wedding, so you don’t have to worry about that. Just make sure you don’t get them done too early because you don’t want to risk them getting broke or scuffed.

So with all that being said

I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better wedding day. It was beautiful weather, everything went according to plan, and I got to marry my best friend.

Overall my advice is to make the day about you. Don’t forget that. I had someone tell me once that my wedding day was for my guests. I just don’t agree with that statement. The wedding is for you. You are the one who put forth the effort to make it to this moment. You are the one who has dealt with the good, the bad, and the ugly. So just have fun, don’t stress too much and go marry the one you love.

Have you said I DO? I got engaged in December of 2013. It was one of those engagements where we didn’t know when we were going to get married but as long as we knew it was going to happen we didn’t mind.

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oselatra · 7 years

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HIA Velo brings bike-building back home

The Little Rock manufacturer says the heck with Asia, builds carbon-fiber bicycle frames in Little Rock.

You may think it has nothing in common with the bike that Bicycling magazine has proclaimed the "hottest bike of 2017," Allied Cycle Works' Alfa, a sleek racing ride practically as light as air thanks to its carbon fiber construction.

But it does. Like AMF's old Roadmasters of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the Alfa is manufactured in Little Rock. The factory, on Brookwood Drive in Riverdale, doesn't turn out 3,000 complete bikes a day, as the AMF factory did on West 65th Street, but what it does is special this way: With the exception of billion-dollar bike-maker Trek and artisan builders, Allied Cycle's is the only carbon-fiber frame manufactured in the United States, and Trek is making 99 percent of its bikes in Asia.

Little Rock native Tony Karklins, who founded and is CEO of the manufacturing company HIA Velo, which created the Allied Cycle Works brand, says the company will have produced between 800 and 1,000 bikes by the end of this year and plans to double that number in 2018.

So not only does the Alfa model have a "Made Here" label on it, Arkansans also can take pride that it's made in Little Rock. That's thanks to Karklins.

"What separates HIA Velo from anybody else setting up a bike company comes down to Tony Karklins," says cycling journalist Patrick Brady. Brady, who writes about cycling on his blog, "Red Kite Prayer," came to Arkansas from California in May to see the operation and try out the Alfa All Road, the multisurface member of the Alfa family. "I don't have any reason to build up the legend of Tony Karklins — it doesn't do me any favors," Brady said, "but he's one of the most interesting people in the bike industry right now."

Plus, Brady said, he's smart. "He understands what it takes to make a quality bicycle."

So here's how you become a quality bike frame manufacturer in Arkansas: You raise close to $3 million from some well-heeled folks — they trust you because of your 36-year career in the bike business — and buy at a bankruptcy auction a factory that had been in business for 24 years (Guru) in Montreal. (The $400,000 loan you get from the Governor's Quick Action Closing Fund and the $50,000 grant for training helps, too.) Then you haul the factory to Arkansas in six semi tractor-trailers. You fly Specialized bike company engineer Sam Pickman to town from California and put him up at the Capital Hotel ("with all the upgrades," Karklins says); Pickman immediately buys a house in Hillcrest. Guru's mechanic, Olivier Lavigeuer, decides he'll join you, moves from Montreal to downtown Little Rock. Jim Cunningham, founder of CyclArt, knowing nothing about humidity, agrees to move from San Diego to Little Rock to create the amazing paint finishes on the bikes. You spend your first year in business putting in about 100 hours a week developing the frame, hiring and training dexterous workers to place the 351 small and weirdly shaped pieces of carbon fiber that go into the making of the frame. Then you hire another 25 to cure the frames, machine them, sand them, paint them, put them on a rotisserie so the paint doesn't drip and ship them out, either fully assembled with parts ordered by the customer or the frame alone.

The process — from bringing the factory to Arkansas in March 2016 to putting out five to six bikes a week now — has been accomplished at "hyper speed," Pickman said.

But the business is still ramping up, tweaking the technology and production time and proving that the investment was a good one. Karklins envisions a factory that one day will employ 250 to 300 people and sell several thousand bikes a year. But right now, marketing is taking a back seat to catching up with the orders that "clobbered" Allied after Bicycling magazine wrote that the Alfa "absolutely rips."

Why in Little Rock? Because it's Karklins' hometown, where he's been in the bike business since he was 11 years old, when he had a job at Chainwheel fixing flats. And because investors wanted it here.

"I knew it could be done very economically here," Karklins said. The factory space "costs $6,000 a month to rent here. That would be $50,000 to $60,000 in Southern California."

Why bikes? "Because I was a troublemaker growing up," Karklins said. "My parents had been saving money for a minivan — they were both social workers — but instead they figured out a way to buy a small piece of Chainwheel so I could get a job. They knew I was going to get in trouble in the afternoons if they didn't plop my ass in Chainwheel. It gave me structure. So I grew up in bike retail in Little Rock."

By age 16, Karklins — who didn't even ride a bike before he began working at Chainwheel — had purchased a third of the business and become manager. "It gave me a home and it was really cool. The people were cool in the bike world. And I loved the equipment and I loved selling bikes. ... I loved selling bikes to people like you," he said, nodding to this reporter, "because I'd teach them about bikes and see that that customer would come back and buy a better bike and then a better bike and within two or three years be doing the Big Dam Bridge 100. I'd think, 'I did that to that person.' I love that."

The annual Big Dam Bridge 100 is in its 11th year. By the time it rolled around, Karklins had been in the bike business more than two decades: He'd bought and sold Chainwheel and brought the U.S. headquarters of the Spanish bike brand Orbea to Little Rock. He was Orbea's North American managing director from 2004 to 2014.

"Then," Karklins said, "I went off on this quest on what to do next." After visiting 20 bike companies that he thought should be in the United States, he decided he didn't want to do that again. "I had this sort of epiphany," he said. "Nobody makes anything here. It's really kind of sick." So, rather than marketing a bike made in Asia, Karklins decided to create and manufacture a brand here.

Bikes aren't manufactured in the United States for the same reason nothing else is made here either: It's cheaper to manufacture abroad. "It's hard," bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., "and after being involved in this project, we know how hard it is," Karklins said. To make it in the U.S., "we have to be smarter, faster and do it in a place like Arkansas," he said.

But if it's hard to build here, it's equally hard to be innovative when you don't, engineer Pickman said. The 36-year-old — one of the fastest amateur cyclists in the U.S. before he got married and settled down — began working at Specialized right out of college in 2004. Unlike at Specialized, for Allied he doesn't have to fly back and forth across the Pacific Ocean to meet with manufacturers, and he doesn't have to convince his company to invest to come up with something new. "You're handcuffed" at big companies, Pickman said. "You say, 'I want to try this,' and they say, 'Nah.' ...

"If you really want to evolve, take bicycles to that next step, you have to break out of that model. That's what drew me to this."

At HIA Velo, where he is hands-on during the whole frame-making process, Pickman can not only improve on the Allied brand; he can also improve on "literally every unit" of the Alfa the plant turns out.

"Our business model," Karklins said, "is to identify all the things that the big companies that manufacture in Asia cannot do, and that's exactly what we are doing."

The Alfa, which comes in 12 sizes and can also be custom-sized ("in case you have extremely short arms, or something," Pickman said), sells for between $4,000 and $10,000, depending on the needs of the buyer. Allied Cycle Works will fit the frame out with the gears and handlebars and seats, etc., of the buyer's choice; the buyer chooses the color, as well.

The bikes are competitive with those sold for $2,000 to $4,000 more, cycling writer Brady said. "The Alfa All Road — it's a bike that I put alongside the best from the biggest companies in the world." And, he added, he's reviewed thousands of bikes. "So this Alfa that I'm reviewing, I'm going to make it mine."

What makes the bike so good, Brady said, is the quality of fiber work going into the frame: "It is an order of magnitude more complicated" than other work he's seen.

Carbon fiber is both light and strong, which is why it's used in aviation, but the fibers run in only one direction. For strength, they must be laid into the frame form in pieces in varying orientations — Brady compared it to papier-mache. In addition to coming up with the strongest fiber recipe for each frame, Allied has partnered with polypropylene fiber manufacturer Innegra Technologies of South Carolina to add another layer of strength to the carbon.

For Little Rock cyclist Traci Howe, however, the reason she decided to buy an Alfa when she wanted to replace her old Orbea bike, was not just its quality, but because "I wanted a bike that was made here in America. I thought, 'How cool is that?' "

Howe, 45, who rides with the bike club CARVE (Central Arkansas Velo, no connection to HIA Velo), also likes the look of the bike. "There's a little symbol on the downtube," she said, referring to the eagle logo, and the word Allied in small print on another part of the bike, and that's it. Other bikes, she said, have their names all over them. The Alfa has a clean, sophisticated look.

HIA (which stands for Handmade in America) Velo (bicycle in French, deriving from the Latin for speed, as in velocity) owes a large part of its success to cofounder Doug Zell, Karklins says. Zell, the founder and CEO of Chicago's Intelligentsia brand coffee and a bike enthusiast, co-founded HIA Velo. The Times couldn't get an interview with him, but Karklins described him as "one of the most interesting persons I've ever encountered. He lives in Boston, Chicago, bought a house in Napa and now he lives [in Little Rock] in the Heights; he relocated his primary residence to North Jackson Street."

Zell, who founded Intelligentsia in 1995, sold a majority stake in the company to Peet's Coffee in 2015; Karklins knew he was looking for a new project. "I really went to him because I wanted his help in crafting a brand. That's hard stuff. I've been in other projects, you create a brand and present it to the world and it's like crickets. Doug was very instrumental in bringing the Allied brand together."

When Karklins took the first finished Alfa to Philadelphia to meet with the editors of Bicycling last year, he was nervous. "We were flying to Philadelphia with this bike that was going to be on the cover and no one had ever seen it." He took it out of its case, "and everybody went, 'Oh, my god.' It was the coolest, most genuine moment."

The bike — which had come off the line only three days before — was chrome red and classy. "The bike industry has been in this Nascar graphic thing: How many times can you put your name on a bike?" Karklins said. He'd once sold a bike that had its brand name on it 21 times.

The look of the bike was important because the old way of selling bikes had changed. "When I was with Orbea," Karklins explained, "the way it used to work was you would find the fastest rider and he would be in every one of your ads and your catalog. And then they'd all get busted for drugs. So we thought, 'Shit, we've got to come up with a new way.' "

The eagle logo on the bike is just like the eagle on the Intelligentsia coffee packaging, only its wings are lifted; it's in flight.

Zell is also the founder of The Meteor coffee shop, which opened in June at the corner of Kavanaugh Boulevard and Markham Street, in the same building as Spokes bike shop. Zell also bought Spokes, which is now known as Spokes at The Meteor; it will gradually coast away from the Spokes name. The Meteor is co-owned by Chris St. Peter, a lawyer and friend of Zell's from Chicago.

St. Peter said coffee shops and bike shops complement each other: "There's a general sense of community. Coffee houses bring people together and cycling also serves that purpose." So it made sense to him and Zell to combine the businesses. It also made sense to do it in Little Rock: Zell was involved in HIA Velo and Little Rock had a "vibrant" community of cyclists, St. Peter said. The historic building that Spokes is located in — the old Little Rock Paint and Wallpaper Co. — also seemed perfect. The Meteor has renovated the famous Little Rock Paint sign and will restore its neon.

St. Peter, who enjoys racing, was surprised at the number of bike enthusiasts in Little Rock. He participates in the once-a-week "Velo lunch ride" that sets off from the Brookwood office and heads to Burns Park over the Big Dam Bridge. It's as fast a ride as any St. Peter participates in, he said, with cyclists zipping along at 30 miles per hour.

Not surprisingly, St. Peter rides an Alfa, which he calls one of the best all-around racing bikes, "proficient in all categories," from stiffness of material to aerodynamics to comfort. "It's among the best bikes I've ever owned," he said. He hopes to be able to sell them in the bike shop when Allied Cycle is geared up to get ahead of its orders.

Arkansas may be flyover country, but it is in the early stages of becoming known as a destination for cyclists. There are a number of biking clubs in Little Rock — Mello Velo, Major Taylor Cycling Club, Arkansas Heels on Wheels, the Arkansas Bicycle Club among them.

"I had no idea that the cycling culture was so strong here," Pickman said. He finds it curious that Little Rock doesn't do a better job of selling its River Trail to tourists. Little Rock's cycling is known regionally, but not nationally yet.

That's not the case in Northwest Arkansas, where the Walton Family Foundation has poured money into creating bike trails. The trail system — which includes more than 200 miles of mountain biking as well as the Razorback Regional Greenway from Fayetteville to Bentonville — "scrambled my brain," said cycling journalist Brady. "It's colossal. And the cost of living there ... I could move to Bentonville tomorrow and all my money woes would disappear." (Brady lives in Santa Rosa, Calif.) "The imagination used in creating those trails is world class," he added.

The Big Dam Bridge, which opened in 2006, has undoubtedly contributed to Arkansas's biking and hiking culture. It has given Arkansas an identity other than the place where Orval Faubus called out the troops to keep nine black children from desegregating Central High, a reputation happily replaced by its being the birthplace of Bill Clinton. The Big Dam Bridge 100, the Tour de Rock and the Little Rock Gran Fondo may not be as famous as the Mt. Tam Century in Marin County or the Leadville 100 in Colorado, but they do attract cyclists in the thousands.

But Arkansas's noncyclists have a long way to go, noted members of the CARVE group gathered last week at the Clinton Presidential Center for an evening ride along the Southwest Trail to the Terry Lock and Dam. A woman named Sheila — this writer didn't get her last name before she pedaled off — said she's had bottles of water thrown at her from passing cars, once in the Rockwater riverside neighborhood in North Little Rock and once in the parking lot of the Two Rivers Bridge, which is dedicated to pedestrian and bike traffic. Sheila's companion said cars have gunned it behind him and passed with little room to spare; they do not understand, nor do they want to understand, road etiquette. One of Little Rock's rides, the Wampoo Roadeo Metric Century, honors the memory of cyclist Marilyn Fulper, who was killed by a driver who just didn't see her on the road. Upholstery tacks have been scattered on Highway 300 and Pinnacle Valley Road, a popular biking route northwest of Little Rock.

But if Little Rock could get its motorists educated, it would find that having a cycling infrastructure improves the quality of life in a city. It's a way to not just attract tourism or new business but, Brady said, to convince people who might otherwise move off to literally greener pastures to stay.

That bike trails increase the appeal of a region is an idea that seems to have finally sunk in at the Pulaski County Quorum Court, which in June turned down a $2.6 million federal grant to engineer a 65-mile trail between Little Rock and Hot Springs, part of a "rails to trails" program. A few justices of the peace said the grant's match — $520,000 to be split between Pulaski, Grant and Garland counties — would be better spent on highway improvement. A study's conclusion that the trail would be a multimillion-dollar boon to the economy by bringing tourist dollars and jobs to the county did not convince them. Last week, however, the JPs reversed course and voted 10-3 to accept the grant.

Central Arkansas Water is also studying putting a mountain bike trail around Lake Maumelle. "That would be huge," Karklins said.

In the meantime, Allied Cycle Works will build its business. Karklins hopes to get ahead of orders and have a showroom in six months or so. The company, which is working with distributors in five companies in Asia, has also worked out a deal to distribute the bike in Scandinavia. The United Kingdom and Spain are next.

HIA Velo brings bike-building back home

#HIA Velo brings bike-building back home

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