Esther Chilton

Happy Friday! It’s time for my guest writer slot. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Cee Tee Jackson for the first time. He has a very interesting story to tell. Here’s the blurb to tempt you:

AN UPBEAT AND POSITIVE TALE OF SURVIVAL!

Only around 8% people survive an out of hospital cardiac arrest. It’s certainly no laughing matter.

Everyone who’s been through the trauma will deal with it differently.

This is my story – one of extraordinary coincidences aligning to keep me alive; one that turns a new, exciting chapter in my life; one that gives me another chance to live … and laugh.

I’m sure many of you know Cee Tee. If you don’t here’s some information about him:

Cee Tee (Colin) Jackson is an ex-Bank Manager, now professional dog walker of fifteen years’ experience.

A short-arse, with an even shorter attention span, it’s no surprise that this and his two books to date, ‘Give The Dog A Home’ and ‘Damp Dogs & Rabbit Wee’ are also on the short side. Of course, you know what they say about good things coming in small packages …

A keen blogger, Cee Tee also previously wrote for UK national music magazine, Artrocker.

Back in the day, he competed at athletics, football and baseball. Nowadays he enjoys playing tennis, though not nearly as much as his opponents do, and is a frequent visitor to the gym / circuit training sessions.

Cee Tee has been married to Diane for forty years, and they have two grown sons, Greig and Brett. They also have two cats, Suki & Lulu.

They do not have any dogs.

Now for the first chapter of the book:

“PLEASED TO MEET YOU. MY NAME IS DEATH.”

It’s funny, I’d never really thought about death much, other than it being an inevitable consequence of life; not until I became a fan of Terry Pratchett’s series of Discworld fantasy novels, that is.

One character, Death, features regularly either as a focus of the storyline, or by popping in and out of the books with little cameo roles. Now, he is funny.

Obviously, from the perspective of a visited character, his appearance can prove a tad worrying. However, his sympathetic appreciation for humanity, coupled with a sardonic wit, provides some degree of succour for the shortly-to-be deceased – and a great deal of mirth for the reader.

Discworld’s Death comes across as a congenial chap, with a wicked and dry sense of humour and a love of cats. He is in many ways, a man after my own heart … though on this occasion he didn’t quite get his hands on it.

*****

I like to regard our real-life, Death along those lines; in a cartoon-like fashion. It comforts me to regard him (for he is a ‘he’) as a helpful soul – one equal partner in a triumvirate completed by his pals, Life and Fate. They each acknowledge the others’ existence and work as a team to guide and cajole us mere mortals through our lives.

Together, they are the ethereal equivalent of the Directing Staff (DS) in the television series, ‘SAS: Who Dares Wins.’

Like Santa Claus and The Tooth Fairy they’re omnipresent; they can be anywhere and everywhere at the one time. Unlike Santa Claus and The Tooth Fairy, they tend to neither leave presents under a tree, nor a shilling under our pillow.

They run a successful business with a tried and tested model perfected over the eons.

Life is a creator; the archetypal influencer and brand agent, generating an astronomical income via his endorsements. Death’s contribution comes from a surreptitious cut of the Inheritance Tax excised by the various governments of the world.

Fate has always adopted more of an admin role, keeping meticulous records and preparing the various size of hourglass appropriate to everyone on the planet. He’s also responsible for sourcing the sand and calibrating the rate at which it flows from the top bulb to the bottom.

As you can imagine, calculating individual algorithms for each life born on Earth then quickly assembling the correct sized sand-timer is stressful. Fate has always given me the impression of being perpetually harassed.

All of which probably explains his clumsiness on the evening of Tuesday 25th April 2023 when he accidentally bumped into the timer inscribed in a flowing, ornate, Gothic font with the words Colin Thomas Jackson / 05081958.

By the time Fate had righted the fallen hourglass and re-apportioned the grains of sand that had errantly spilled into the wrong bulb, Death had arrived in Linwood, Renfrewshire.

With his long, wood-handled scythe placed on the ground beside me, he fumbled around the dark depths of his robe pockets. But before his cold, bony hands could retrieve his business card, the call came through:

“Sorry Death. My bad … you can stand down.”

If you’d like the buy the book, you can find it here:

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If you’d like to be a guest on my blog, please get in touch: estherchilton@gmail.com. Poems can be up to 60 lines and prose 2000 words. If you’d like to add a short bio and photo, then great.