The Four Seasons ~ Introduction to the Serialised 3rd Edition

TƒS & TƒW 2023

The 2023 (Serialised) 3rd Edition

The Four Seasons was written over twelve months in between October 2009 – September 2010.

I envisaged the four seasons, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer as four beautiful women, and based on the famed Art Deco canvasses by Alphonso Murco.

I had not envisaged that The Four Seasons would lead me to their brothers, The Four Winds, nor that this would enable me to write of Native American Culture.

That came as a result of a friend’s advice to consider his own People’s Story, wherein we have the Four Winds, North, South, East, and West, and we have four animals, Oyandone the Moose, Yaogah the Great Bear, Dajoji the Panther and Naoga the Fawn.

Then came the interweaving. Well, that is the task of the writer. Now, it is done. Whilst gentle and serene in some places, it is tense and brutal in other places. That simply reflects human nature.

Whilst the various storylines echo real-life events, the aim is simpler. A Children’s Story. Another friend in the United States encouraged this, as The Four Seasons was the one way she could get her very young sons to bed. Apparently, they had their favourite parts.

Let writing be enjoyable. Let writing convey a message. Let writing be the clarion call. Let writing be the dread Siren of Forewarning.

If we concentrate only upon enjoyment, we do a huge disservice, and we throw upon the bonfire of autocracy, populism, fascism and totalitarianism and existentialism the the very life and spiritual being of Humankind. We are past masters of this. We descended to the depths of hell itself in the last century’s two word wars and the Holocaust. In this Century, we seem absolutely intent upon doing the same again. Already, communities and minorities are singled out for special treatment and then extinction.

We watch helplessly the rampaging social media of this terrible century.

Write for personal enjoyment and without the pressure of finding publishers, self-publishing, or dealing with agents. Very few of those groups are, in the simplistic jargon of a story for children, very nice people.

Above all, you damned well write and make a record of events so that when we have become ancestors, our descendants have the evidence of what went on, so that they have the chance of not doing the same terrible acts that we did in the twentieth century and that we are now repeating and preparing to do at an even lower hellish level in this accursed twenty-first century.

1 October 2023
All Rights Reserved


LIVERPOOL

© 2023 Kenneth Thomas Webb

Oh, come on Ken!
Stop dawdling. Just walk across that cliff top. These walls have been here for thowwwwwwwwsands of years! If I can do it so can you!

Yes, but you’ve forgotten something.

What?

You’re a Mole, you’re a Field Mouse, and you’re a Butterfly.

SO? (A great chorus!!)

I’m a human.

Mousey: I told you Moley not to bring him. He’s one of that lot.

Butterfly: I agree. Look at the size of his shoe. It fills this cavern.

Moley: I tell you what, let’s all act nice and simple and smile and get the Captive Audience above to attract his attention, then when he’s not looking, RUN LIKE HELL!!!!!!!

Butterfly: And I’ll become a supersonic Jet!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMPF!!!!!!

That’s odd. Where did they all go?

Oh well, I think I’ll wander back.

“Good Idea!”

from the Captive Audience above!!!!!

The resident Captive Audience ~ on Bushcombe Lane, Nottingham Hill in Gloucestershire. No one seems to know why the Ordnance Survey Maps call this Nottingham Hill, especially as Nottingham is over a hundred miles north east of this hill, and Britain’s second city Birmingham lies in between which makes it rather difficult to even think that one might see Nottingham on a fine day!