© The Stygian Lepus
My short story A Man about a Dog is featured in the new, eighth issue of The Stygian Lepus Magazine, a short-fiction and poetry publication that ‘leans to the dark side’. And as usual with my writing that leans that way – dark-wards – it appears under the penname of Jim Mountfield.
A parable about how human beings treat and mistreat dogs and, indeed, how human beings treat and mistreat each other, A Man about a Dog is set in an anonymous north-of-England city during the grim, austerity-stricken years of the 2010s. Well, the setting was inspired by the three years I spent living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which strictly speaking isn’t a north-of-England city but a northeast-of-England one. I lived there from 2002 to 2005, when the place had a buzz and sense of optimism about it, largely due to new developments like the Quayside, the Millennium Bridge, the Baltic Gallery, the Sage (now known as the Glasshouse) Music Centre and Antony Gormley’s striking Angel of the North statue. Okay, most of those things are actually in Gateshead, which has its own council, independent of the Newcastle one. So, I’m really talking about ‘Newcastle-Gateshead’ here.
From all accounts, though, the place took a battering during the 2010s, when the just-installed Conservative government imposed an austerity programme on Britain. 300 million pounds had been cut from Newcastle’s council budget by 2019 and the decade saw the closure of local libraries, youth clubs, children’s centres and other amenities. Between 2013 and 2018 there was even an 89% reduction in the number of its lollipop men and women, leaving just seven of them to shepherd the city’s schoolkids safely across the roads. By an evil coincidence, the week A Man About a Dog was published also saw the return to public office of the smug, oleaginous and stuck-up architect of austerity, former British prime minister David Cameron – Rishi Sunak has ennobled him as ‘Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton’ and made him the country’s Foreign Secretary.
An American publication, The Stygian Lepus requests its contributors to submit their work in American English. I slipped up slightly and made a few references to ‘wheelie-bins’ in my submitted story. When I saw the version of A Man about a Dog that appears in the magazine, it amused me that the wheelie-bins had been changed to ‘dumpsters’. So, it’s just as well I kept the city in the story anonymous and didn’t identify it as Newcastle. You don’t hear many Geordies talking about dumpsters.
For the next while, A Man About a Dog is accessible to read here, while the main page for The Stygian Lepus, Issue 8, can be reached here.