Here’s a free story, to say thank you to everyone new who is following me (and all you lovely people who’ve stuck with me all along).
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark*
The orchestra pit smells of sweat and rosin. Here in the first violins the sweat smell is faint – it’s rarely a physical job, producing the sweet strains of fiddle music, unless they’re doing one of the long, complicated Mozarts or some tricky modern stuff. Of course, if the First Violin is playing a particularly demanding solo the sweat flies along with the fingers, and the ambience becomes just that bit riper.
Next come the cellos. There are interesting scrapes in the floor, marring its polished finish, all running more-or-less parallel to each other. The cellos’ points stab into the floor, and slip a little when the cellists really get going. The grooves are almost impossible to see in the darkness. They are sticky with rosin. It’s not pleasant to walk across this section – she does it on tiptoe.
It’s no fun going further forward. There’s that big box where He stands. He has a funny smell – pungent, spicy, makes you sneeze. Nasty – and the box is too high for a comfortable jump. Better to go back, into the woodwinds.
Here, there’s a faint metallic smell – flutes and piccolos well warmed up – and a whiff of the grease that lazy wind players use to make their instruments easy to adjust. The trumpeters are gone in a waft of Brut and Brasso, but further round some of the larger horns have been left behind, upended. She rubs herself on their fingerpads and winds round the chairs, heading for the percussion section.
This – this is her favourite part. Lots of things that swing, and glitter, and chime. It’s fun to pat the sleigh bells and knock them against each other. Tubular bells knock back, and she gives them a wide berth. It’s back here amongst the drums that the best smells lurk – yeasty, fulsome smells of large men with interesting body odours, drumsticks imbued with sweat and dirt, very nice to chew. And skins. The gorgeous, meaty, tantalisingly faint smells left in skins when they have been bleached and stretched out across drum heads, reverberating with the strangled cries of the creatures they once covered.
She jumps up onto the largest of the timpani. Its taut surface booms faintly as she lands, releasing a faint mist of dust that she analyses minutely, detecting the timpanist’s tuna sandwich lunch, his neighbour the triangle player’s athlete’s foot and even a faint scent of aftershave all the way from the rostrum. She sneezes and turns her back, and turns and turns again, enjoying the tiny vibrations that shake the skin. She settles down and regards her domain, before lifting a back leg and proceeding to groom her impeccable fur. The orchestra pit is ready for tomorrow, and the orchestra cat is ready for her evening snooze.
*Any relationship between this story and the New Wave group of the same name is purely coincidental.
It was a strange picture outside the modern University Hospital’s main doors when an emergency vehicle arrived in the middle of the night, hotly pursued by an obscure figure in black robes on a white horse. Seeing the signs in French, an observer might have been surprised to hear the shroud-wearer talking English to a shadow in a pointy hat, stout shoes, stripey stockings and shapeless female garb.
The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet 
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