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holmes_minorTitle: Milieu
Author: gardnerhill
Fandom: ACD
Pairing: None
Word Count: 221b
Rating: G
Warning: None
Summary: Too much of a good thing…
Author's Notes: Written for the August 2022 Holmes Minor monthly prompt “Sun, Sea and Sand.”
Story in Dreamwidth
Story in AO3
Sun and sand. I had plenty of both; I marched under one and through the other for hours every day.
I had worked my way through all the music-hall ditties I knew about the joys of the seaside. They did not work very well – not when the air was as hot and dry as the sand and sun, with no cool hint of ocean breeze. Instead of peanuts and candyfloss we had ship’s biscuit and ghastly tinned beef, and stale warm water sloshed in our canteens instead of beer. Worst of all, our Punch-and-Judy shows traded the smack of Punch’s stick and the rascal’s squeaky voice for cannon-booms and screams, and the salt spray was blood.
No, I could not trudge with the Fusiliers and pretend this sun and sand was anything but an arid Hell. Not the oasis of summertime bliss that buoyed a chap deep in the throes of …
Oh Dr. John Watson you utter fool. When, precisely, does one yearn for summer sun and hot sand?
So I made the march as before. But now I pictured myself in a wintertime flat – the sky grey, the outer air icy, the bedsheets freezing, the air indoors sullenly cold everywhere except the small aura right at the hearth.
And it was that, that made the sun and sand bearable.
Author: gardnerhill
Fandom: ACD
Pairing: None
Word Count: 221b
Rating: G
Warning: None
Summary: Too much of a good thing…
Author's Notes: Written for the August 2022 Holmes Minor monthly prompt “Sun, Sea and Sand.”
Story in Dreamwidth
Story in AO3
Sun and sand. I had plenty of both; I marched under one and through the other for hours every day.
I had worked my way through all the music-hall ditties I knew about the joys of the seaside. They did not work very well – not when the air was as hot and dry as the sand and sun, with no cool hint of ocean breeze. Instead of peanuts and candyfloss we had ship’s biscuit and ghastly tinned beef, and stale warm water sloshed in our canteens instead of beer. Worst of all, our Punch-and-Judy shows traded the smack of Punch’s stick and the rascal’s squeaky voice for cannon-booms and screams, and the salt spray was blood.
No, I could not trudge with the Fusiliers and pretend this sun and sand was anything but an arid Hell. Not the oasis of summertime bliss that buoyed a chap deep in the throes of …
Oh Dr. John Watson you utter fool. When, precisely, does one yearn for summer sun and hot sand?
So I made the march as before. But now I pictured myself in a wintertime flat – the sky grey, the outer air icy, the bedsheets freezing, the air indoors sullenly cold everywhere except the small aura right at the hearth.
And it was that, that made the sun and sand bearable.
