F is for France

It was a fast train and I saw little of France initially.  At some time during the early hours of the morning, I woke and saw cold, blue apartment houses shuttling by the window, fractured through the condensation. I heard someone on the train say it was the suburbs of Paris. I shivered inside my blanket, a strange lonely and broken image of the Eiffel Tower like a jagged needle in the freezing, bleached out morning sky came into my mind and I drifted off again.

The next time I woke I was shaking and sweating. I felt the strong grip of Monty’s hands on me. Someone was talking about “cold turkey.” I thought it was my father but when I woke up again he was not on the train. I was alone with Monty and one of his rugby bully boy friends from public school. I had an image then of being a child and playing in a sun drenched yard with my sister Gracie. Her gap toothed smile seemed real enough to reach out and touch. Sweet, straw haired Gracie years before she became the indifferent adult she was today.

I turned to the window and was amazed at the sudden transformation. The chilly, high houses of Paris and the scaffold-like tower had been replaced with golden cornfields basking in the sun. A small Citroen farm van rolled down a dirt track flanked with poppies. The hillside was cut up by the serrated rows of a vineyard that wound high up the escarpment, ripe with fruit. The countryside literally rolled away from here like the strokes of an artist’s brush.

The scene blurred into an impressionist tableau again as the powerful medication they had given me kicked in. The next time I awoke the world outside my window had been transformed again. There was a blueness that was so bright it hurt the corners of my eyes and a line of crystalline whiteness that I could barely look at. I made out the snow on mountain peaks high and serrated, a town of spires and cupolas and a deep blue river that cut clinically through the heart of the town. Then darkness again. Monty and his minder took me out of the train and into a taxi outside the station. The car lurched up a long winding road and I thought my stomach was going to empty on the seats.

I caught occasional glimpses of the sharp little river again, now a long way below me. Finally we arrived at a chateau with turrets and imposing, ivy-clad walls. The first thing I noticed was the freshness of the air, the tang of pine and high snow that pierced my lungs. The bright light and the birdsong was cut out as if a switch has been flicked as I was led and prodded through a dark gatehouse.

I was taken to a hall with a high wooden vaulted ceiling. At the far end on a dias a small man with beetle black hair was scribbling away on a piece of paper. He barely looked up when I arrived flanked by my minders. He was not fazed in the slightest by my wild appearance. Finally he turned a moist eye to me “Monsieur?”

Monty took some documentation from the man. He scrawled his signature and handed it to me.

“Sign.”

“I don’t know what I’m signing, It’s in French.”

“It’s just the formalities for your stay here. See it says you will be here for six week to compete your rehabilitation. Then we will come and get you,” Monty informed me. The preaching tone he had adopted in the hospital had gone as had my parents. Monty was crisply formal like a delivery man handing over a parcel.

“I’m not seeing..”

The small beetled- haired man was making an impatient Gallic gesture with his hands and Monty’s rugby friend was impatiently stamping his oversized feet.

“Just sign. We have a lot to do,” said Monty.

I signed my name on the dotted line.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

E is for Emergency Room

They call it Emergency Room or ER in the United States or Casualty or Accident and Emergency in the United Kingdom. Whatever the terminology, it was not the best place to end up on a Friday night.

Meth amphetamine is known as Meth or Crystal Meth in the United States and Speed in Britain. If you take Meth or Speed you are more likely to end up in ER or Casualty than if you participate in other risky behaviors such as excessive cup cake eating.

There was no icing on the cake for me that Friday night. Just a severe pain in my stomach and chest, a soaring temperature  and violent convulsions that caused me to hit a police officer as much, as  for attention as anything else. When they told me the charges had been dropped as I was wheeled through the ward I didn’t care much. There was a pain behind my eyes from three nights without sleep and a feeling of guilt. I had cheated on my beloved brown powder for Speed and it was taunting me. I had a rush of love at that moment for Dr. K.

The faces of my family were indistinct. I read concern and also something more unpleasant. I had a vision of the egg shell blue skies above a Scottish castle and the soft lines on my mother’s face as she led me by the hand down the stairs of the clock tower.  It felt so long ago.

That failure had been eclipsed by this one. Now the crowd of people around my bedside parted like the Red Sea and a substantial figure in a trench coat filled the space under the arc lights. I noted the familiar features of Monty but they had hardened and matured in the six months since I had last seen him.

Monty adjusted his cravat and addressed me in a formal manner that seemed to indicate he was speaking for the whole family.

“We are very saddened to see you like this Campbell,” he said in a voice that sounded far too old and gravelly for his 18 years on earth. “Drug abuse is not something we like to talk about or to confront in this family and perhaps it was our inability to face this issue that has led you to this very sad juncture. I was very relieved to hear from the doctors that you will survive this episode but if you carry on with this reckless life, we cannot vouch for your future safety. I know I speak for the family as a whole when I say we cannot just stand by and watch you wreck your life in this manner.”

There was a general hubbub around the room and my mother finally piped up.“Please Campbell. Listen to him. Monty has just secured an apprenticeship from one of the top city banks. You are lucky not to be in jail. You can learn a lot from him. Please Campbell.”

A sickness was rising in my throat that was not entirely due to the drugs I had ingested. I nodded and muttered and looked through my family to a scene beyond where a drunk was being pinned down by four nurses.

I finally managed to spit out a few words. “If that’s all, I think I need to sleep now.”

“Very well,” continued Monty, his hand firmly inside his heavy coat like Napoleon directing his armies. “But we do need you to do something for us, although perhaps it has passed the phase when your permission or otherwise is important. We have secured you a place at a rehabilitation facility in France. We think it’s for the best all round.”

He continued in a long-winded manner that he had made his own, but I was no longer listening. I could sense the family around me was splintering up into small, nervous huddles, two fifths concern and the rest disapproval at my condition. The sickness rose in my throat. I felt dizzy like I was going to relapse. I grabbed the emergency cord and pulled it hard three times. I’m not sure whether it was because I really wanted nurses to come running to my bedside or I wanted the curtain drawn around me to shut out the small, jittery cabal at my bedside.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

D is for Druggie

My hometown was known for its fine buildings and artistic traditions. It prided itself on the the Pitville Pumproom, the racecourse and the Cheltenham Festival.

That’s not to say busloads of Americans came to Cheltenham or Cheltenham Spa as some insisted on calling it. Bath was on their tourist itinerary. Cheltenham was slightly off course and even those tourists who made it to Cheltenham never set foot in the Top Hat pub behind a council estate to the west of the city. The people in the mock half-timbered houses with the Audis would never venture down the ragged street that the Top Hat was on, past an industrial estate of walls topped with broken glass.

I had fallen in with an interesting crowd. My parents called it a bad crowd but I preferred the word interesting. The bar staff at the Top Hat turned a blind eye to underage drinking; in fact, it seemed to keep the place going. I started with cider – the rough edged curse of so many students in the West Country. I moved on to super strength lager, cigarettes, cannabis and then pills. I threw up and got into fights. My parents started to look at me as if I was a stranger. I told them it was a usual teenage thing.

But the night behind the garbage dump was different. Douggie said he had a treat for us. He posted look-outs on both ends of the alley, although it was hard to see how any right thinking and law abiding person would take a detour down the foul smelling alley by the dump. We had met guys who would sell us cannabis many times, but the character who showed up tonight was different. He wore a long trench that complemented his raw lantern face. As he approached I noticed the curious whiteness of his features. He was like an Albino or someone who had never seen the sun.

“This is Doctor K,” said Douggie. “He has the prescription to make you’re a day a lot better. Doctor K moved toward me. He was like no doctor I had ever met before. A foul and powerful smell of cigarettes  hit me, almost knocking me back. He stank of third rate pool halls.

“This will see you right,” he muttered, his eyes flitting back and forth like a nervous rodent’s. He pulled a bag with brown powder out of his coat and unrolled some cooking foil.

“Lighter,” he hissed.

Dave pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket.

“Cash.”

Douggie handed together our ill-gotten gains from gas station thefts and pickpocketing.

The pale hand kept switching and Douggie pulled some coins from his pocket. “Notes only next time,” said the good doctor, taking me in with his thin yellow smile. He took the lighter and heated up the end of the foil containing the brown powder. Then he solemnly handed out funnels of rolled up paper for us to inhale. It looked curiously innocuous there in cooking foil. He was known as Doctor K but at the moment he struck me as being more like a priest as he handed out the wafers that were the body of a corrupted Christ. As we took turns to inhale the savior’s name was invoked a number of times. The Godforsaken alley became a pleasurable tunnel and my brain throbbed and twitched. It beat sex any day.

He was a dubious looking doctor but the medicine seemed to be doing something. In no time at all the doctor seemed to be rising as if on a celestial cloud and his arms were stretched high into the heavens. As if by a miracle the blemishes on his face and the dark clouds under his eyes had been airbrushed out.

“Welcome to the wonderful world of heroin boys,” the doctor proclaimed.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

C is for Clovelly

You get to an age when the family holiday  - once the highlight of the year – becomes a cringing embarrassment and a last resort for teens with no better offer to take up.

To me Clovelly was the last resort. It wasn’t big and brash like Newquay or Bournemouth. There were no nightclubs or even fish and chip shops. Clovelly was a cobbled street that wound up the side of a cliff. It was tumbledown homes and blind alleys. Clovelly was nowhere to hang out with and no one to do it with.

"Clovelly - Harbour by Franzfoto 

From the table by the bay window of the Blue Dragon, I watched two fishermen struggle with their nets. The rope was slippery and the water the viscous, dark green of a sea monster. My gaze switched from the fishermen to my fork and the sausage languishing in a watery lake of baked beans. It was 9 a.m. I had exactly 13 hours until I could sleep again.

I looked at Gracie as she scribbled in her notebook. Gracie was just over a year older than me but the gap felt as wide and cold as the Atlantic out beyond the foreboding cliffs. In an hour the low slung convertible owned by the boy she had met a month ago would bounce over the cobbles and he would take her out of this place, to Ilfracombe or Barnstaple or God knows where, but it would more closely resemble civilization. Gracie looked through me as if my 15-year-old complexion made me as dour as the rugged walls of the Blue Dragon.

Dad looked sheepishly on. “So. I suppose it will just be you and me Campbell as your mother has a headache. I can take you out fishing.”

I looked back at him but the nausea was rising in my gullet from the baked beans and the cheap sausages and my bowels were muttering. The idea of the cold, briny water left me underwhelmed.

“I don’t want to go.”

Dad said nothing but I could see his face working. I knew he wouldn’t keep his silence long. Finally he stood up and the words rose up in him.

“Campbell. Was there really any point in this? I can’t see why you wanted to come away with us. All you’ve done is mope. At least your sister is getting out.”

I muttered a few half formed words under my breath.

“I beg your pardon, Campbell.”

“Nothing Sir.”

“Oh cut out that Sir crap.”

I looked balefully over the harbor, my eyes as bleak and grey as the day that was wrapping Clovelly in its clinging garments. I waited for a final salvo. My father always had to get the last word in.

“Honestly Campbell. I don’t see why you can’t be more like your cousin. You know he’s leading a young mission trip on a walk to Santiago de Compostella. He’s a model of youth.”

Great uncle Arthur was slumped in the corner. I had watched carefully as he’d moved a clumsy hand up to scratch his testicles through his pants. Now he twitched and sat up at the sound of Monty’s name.

“Yes, yes,” said the old man. “A fine and upstanding model of youth. The very best.”

And he went back to examining the spittle that had gathered in a frothing pile on his pipe.

I pushed my chair back and went silently to my chilly bedroom. I stayed their reading and gazing at the clouds that drifted over the Bristol Channel for eight hours. Then under the cover of darkness, I walked up the steep cobbled hill. I found an alley that was sheltered from the drizzle. I rolled a joint and felt the warmth and mellowness make my body slack. Later back at the harbor that the American visitors told me was quaint, I heard the fishermen talking. They had finished their long day of toil and one of them was telling the other what he would do to his wife. Or maybe it was the other man’s 

wife. I could not be sure because the conversation was fractured by the keen breeze. 

The bleakness of the night was palpable and I was already missing the cozy intimacy of my joint.

B is for Bravo

“Oscar Bravo, Oscar Bravo, do you read?” shrilled Carl Phillips into the radio headset. “Sod it. He’s off air. He’s dead in no-man’s land.”

I kept my thoughts to myself. We were hunkered down in the room that smelled of cheap disinfectant behind the drill hall. No-man’s land was an area strewn with old tires behind the hangar. The worst thing that could happen to Davies was being caught by Team B and subjected to an hour of boredom out of the exercise. They called it demobilization. These weekend warrior games were feeling increasingly pointless.

I had been the Air Training Corps for six months but the drill hall still carried a menace of its own. Where else in my world could one half-hearted salute or drooping beret lead to a grown man shouting at me?

“You just take it don’t you,” Phillips would shriek. “You take it you dumb mother.”

He’d always be jabbing at something with a pen or twitching. He oozed ADD in the same way his facial acne wept on a humid day. Increasingly I was beginning to feel this was not the real deal.

 I joined because I wanted to fly and my first experience was a positive one. I had been ushered into a room with a small and wizened red headed man who was the Commanding Officer. There was a tiny, lovingly-painted model of a Spitfire on his desk.

I had joined with Billy Brown who had not lasted the course due to an uncontrollable mouth disorder. He moved to pick up the Spitfire and the CO made a small motion like swatting a fly that stopped Brown’s hand in mid air, although it didn’t stop his mouth.

“In the Battle of Britain or sommit?”

“That’s right,” said the small CO, his eyes not moving from the joining papers.

“No way. You didn’t fly a Spitfire?” said Brown.

“I was indeed a Spitfire pilot. Biggin Hill.” The CO was clipped and economical with his words.

As Brown’s mouth meandered on I fell to musing about how this small man had been scrambled round the clock to the skies black and bristling with Nazi Heinkels.  I thought about how his comrades had risen into the clouds at breakfast and never returned for lunch, how his plane had plummeted hundreds of feet over London with the docklands ablaze from the fires from German bombs. He was one of the few who had triumphed against all odds against the many. Now he signed documents and made uniform requests for cretins like Billy Brown.

Two months after joining the Air Training Corps, the CO had a stroke and was taken to a nursing home. His replacement Peter Hall was a car salesman from Tewkesbury.

My cousin Monty joined the regiment at the same time. Despite having no previous knowledge of drill maneuvers, he picked it up quickly. Monty gained stripes before me, but I was eventually promoted to corporal.

Two years into my time in the regiment we conducted a night exercise on a disused airfield in Wales. By this time Carl Phillip’s shrill voice was a distant memory. He had left to sniff solvents or skirt. My team was young and keen, but the map reader mixed up his hangars. We hunkered down behind an old air raid shelter, where we could ambush Flight C. I looked up into the cold night sky thick with a web of stars, peaceful and unclouded by bombers, and I drifted away. I lost all notion of time and command. I was as anonymous as the stars. The exercise seemed insignificant and distant. Suddenly there were shouts and the sounds of a struggle.  The flight we intended to ambush had crept up on us and taken us prisoner.

I was in the debriefing. It was uncomfortably hot in the drill hall. Sergeant Monty DeVere had his small pointer stick. He pulled down a map of the airfield on the screen with an efficient snap, folded his muscular arms and looked squarely at me.

“This was a classic case of an inability to think outside the box,” he said levelly. “Flight A had a clear ambush plan. It did not work but when they failed to see the enemy they didn’t switch to a plan B. They also failed to take stock of where they were and to make adjustments. If you are a one trick pony I’m afraid to say, you are not going to win any races.”

“Is that original or did you steal it from one of your father’s friends?”  I muttered.

The low backdrop of whispering ended in the drill hall and the air cadets started to pay attention.

“If that was a question, you should know the rules,” continued Monty. “Save them for the end. I am only a very small way through my extensive criticism of your performance tonight.”

It was the last time my patchily shined boots would squeal on the drill hall floor.

A to Z Challenge - A is for April

It's April Fool's Day but the A to Z Challenge is not a ruse. It's actually here. My theme this year will form a mini-novel. I'm thinking it may be too late to back out right ???

A is for April

April is the cruelest month. Everyone knows that. But April can be the most beautiful month too. I recall how it pushed tulips from the ground like spears and waxed sweet-smelling hyacinths.  The grounds of the castle were dotted with them, but I felt empty and sick at the sight of them. They were like an army of stiff sworded flowers between me and the clock tower and the egg shell blue water of the Irish Sea.

(Scottish tourist board)

It was a day that was frozen in time, but a day that could never curl up and become comfortable and sepia due to the gentleness of the colors – the blue of the sea, the yellow of the daffodils and the exquisite purple of the irises. I lined the day up in the viewfinder of my camera but the colors leached and were lost in the reproduction.

I lined up my fragile family in the view finder. Mum – her hair too corn yellow; dad – his hair thinning and Gracie, always circumspect, inward and to herself.

Monty my cousin had come along for the ride from Glasgow and he was a different kind entirely. Monty was just 13 but he had already filled out his blazer. He was a year older than me but the gap could have been five. Monty was always quoting from a non fiction book. Even now his clipped tones cut the spring silence on the lawn. Monty was comfortable with an audience.

“The Titanic was the largest liner of her generation. She spanned 883 feet from stern to bow. She was divided into compartments that were presumed to be watertight,” he announced.

Monty’s face sprung a leak and his eyes darted around in his head as he reached the climax of his tragic tale. On the night of April 14 she struck an iceberg. On April 15, 1912, she went down in the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 1500 souls.

Gracie’s face set in a firm frown. My sister’s birthday was on the same day. She was not amused. We had celebrated with party hats a day earlier.

“To the clock tower, to the clock tower,” said Dad, his joviality a little over hyped. We picked our way through the wild flowers to the mellow old sandstone tower.

“I was here as a kid. There is a great view from the top,” said Dad.

Once inside the tower, the uneasy warmth of the April sun was cut out as if we had descended into an undersea tunnel. There was a dampness and an unpleasant mustiness of floor boards. The stairs had gaping holes between them and they creaked. The higher we climbed the more hollow the space below us. My foot slipped in a gap and dad moved his hands to support me. “Steady son,”

Monty was up ahead. I caught the flap of his blazer and a whoop as he emerged into the sunshine at the top of the tower. But something was wrong. The tower was lurching in a sickening motion and my head was starting to spin. I sat down on the floor but the tower continued to moved.

“Are you alright Campbell? You look pale,” It was mum. She had that cajoling, nagging tone she usually reserved for burnt toast. Now the sickness of this morning’s eggs was upon me and I thought of embryos and babies strangled in the cold spring.

“I need to sit down,” I gasped and sat on the heavy wooden floor boards.

The party stopped and looked at me. “Why don’t you take him down Sylvia?” said Dad.

My mother took my hand and 10 minutes later we were back in the weak and inconstant sun, looking up at the clouds drifting high over the clock tower. A row of heads appeared at the top in high spirits. Monty waved in a grand arc, but his silhouette was obscured by the sun. I still felt queasy, grounded and defeated.

I had learned one of life’s most painful lessons at the age of 12. The world was inhabited by people like Monty and people like me.

A to Z Theme Reveal - A Novel Theme

Seriously I did some sort of bloghop A-Z theme reveal a couple of years ago but I am a bit out of touch with all of the blogishphere these days.

Still I have seen a few posts about the A-Z theme reveal and I thought it was high time to post as I have no theme to reveal really after doing music and animals in the past. This year's is far more exciting and ambitious. I will be writing a mini novel with one chapter every day. In many ways this is a lot more difficult than a theme and, although, I have done some forward planning I still feel the cold chill of A approaching me fast on April Fool's Day. It's less a clarion call to action that the mocking bells on the toe of a court jester but, nevertheless, it's coming at me fast.

My novel is about a troubled young man called Campbell who finds himself alone and adrift in the heart of Europe. It's about what he does next and his troubled relationship with his cousin Monty who is successful in everything he does - and knows it. In short, the type of cousin we love to hate. In order to find out if he gets one over his coz, you will have to read the whole thing, Come to think of it, I will have to write the while thing - not to mention thinking of a title. I have such trouble with titles.

Maybe it will come to me soon...but without further ado, it's time to lift the velvet curtain...

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Recently I had a passing conversation about poetry with someone. Of course, it was on text. Aren't all conversations these days?

I inquired about a favorite poet and she said poems were just for weddings and funerals. I was rather shocked. Although Auden's poem from Four Weddings and a Funeral, did become rather famous, I have no intention of bowing to the trite notion that poetry is only for weddings and funerals and - heaven's forbid - Christenings.

The Dismal Swamp Canal (David Macaulay)

My notion that poetry is for everyday life may be as unfashionable as poetry itself but I stand by it. Poetry takes its rhythms from life and can enrich it. I say this even though I had little interested in getting my daughter, who is a voracious reader, to read The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeates. it's hard to convince a 10-year-old that the poets of yesteryear make the One Directions of today look like they are going the wrong way down a one way street.

During the recent snowfalls I stopped by the Dismal Swamp Canal just over the North Carolina border to take in the solitary, glittering world of the dark water as evening approached. It made by think of a poem by Robert Frost who once arrived at this forbidding wilderness to end his own life. However, something about the silent swamp made him change his mind.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

What Color is the Accursed Dress?

There are many great mysteries in the history of the world. How did the stones get to Stonehenge? What happened to the Amber Room? What happened to Lord Lucan? What is the riddle and the meaning of the Spinx? Who was Jack the Ripper?

You can add to that what color is this dress after a user posted a picture on Tumblr of a dress worn by the mother of a bride at a Scottish wedding because she was confused about the color of the dress.

The result was in Internet meltdown and the most famous blue dress since the one worn by Monica Lewinski. By Friday 28 million people had seen the dress. Chances are you have seen this already. Unless you have been living under a rock. The dress has even drawn in psychologists who have asked weighty questions such as if you see it as darker are you prone to depression.

The dress is blue and black apparently....really....

Fifty Shades of Grey was Fifty Shades of Snooze

I can't say I was dragged kicking and screaming into the movie theater to see Fifty Shades of Grey on Valentine's Day but nor was I oozing enthusiasm - not that oozing anything is ever particularly pleasant.

Exactly one hour and five minutes into the movie it was going all fuzzy and indistinct. About five minutes later G nudged me to say I was snoring and the woman next to her was funding it funny. I said I was rather glad she was able to get a laugh out of the movie because generally speaking it was uninspiring stuff, although it left me wondering about new uses for my Kohls ties.

At least I went into the theater forewarned by reading reviews - all of them which said the movie was dire. I actually emerged into the chilly sunshine remarking that the movie was not as bad as I had imagined it would be. Even so it was up there with the average kind of fare you watch on Lifetime TV and made me want to go and find somewhere to watch Birdman or Boyhood.

For anyone who has been living under a rock for the last few years Fifty Shades of Grey is a series of novels written by the English author E.L James about two people who do various things with nipple clamps, toilet brushes and drain cleaner - I may be a bit off about that as I haven't read a single page - but you get the drift.

Sebastian Grey is one of those creepy sleazeballs who takes his first dates on a helicopter ride and gives them new Audis as love presents. To be honest I'd be fine with the Audi love present thing but guess I just need to be content with a used coffee table.

The coffee table comparison is quite apt because the Grey actor perfects the art of wooden in this film, although I had a bit more time for Anastasia Steele, notwithstanding her dumb soap opera name.

Fifty Shades of Grey made about $81 million in its first weekend. The bad news is the whole saga will be drawn out over three movies. I can't recall when kinky sex was last so boring. Maybe I'm just at that age..

Oversized Rat Punxsutawney Phil Predicts More Snow

The whole Groundhod Day tradition must be one of the most weird things out there. But, true to form, earlier today, a rodent called Punxsutawney Phil stuck his whiskery head out of the ground and predicted six more weeks of snow.

It may not have been a hard one to predict as another big snowstorm was heading his way and he lives in part of Pennsylvania that's up there.

Phil's prediction is based on whether he sees his own shadow, which sounds rather unscientific to me, but I'd still trust the fat rodent more than Michael Fish.

Also, which is unsurprising, given his size, Phil seems to see his shadow more often than not - 102 times since 1887 and just 17 times without seeing his shadow. The last time he predicted an early spring in 2013, winter dragged on and a local attorney petitioned for Phil to be put out of marmot misery.

Phil makes his predictions at Gobbler's Knob which is uncommonly accurate because back in the day, the Germans who settled these parts actually ate the groundhog, according to Time Magazine. He was said to taste like a cross between chicken and pork. They even mixed in some vodka and mad Groundhog punch, which sounds less than appetizing.

Phil's accuracy rate is just 39 percent, which means his may end up on a menu somewhere. In contract his New York cousin Staten Island Chuck, boasts an 82 percent success rate.

To find out more about Groundhog Day you can read my old blog post, if it doesn't feel too much like going back over Groundhog Day.