Liars' League

Fight & Flight

Your pulse is suddenly racing, your ears pricked, your breathing much, much faster - it can only mean that your body is alert and ready for... another packed evening at the Wheatsheaf in Central London for April's Liar's League: Fight & Flight.

And if you weren't there, our podcasts are sitting there waiting for you. A perfect antidote to the tedium of the tube, a long-haul to Laos or queueing at Queens Park Rangers. And what's more, by copying the following link into iTunes you will receive future Liars' League podcasts without lifting a finger, breaking sweat, let alone pumping so much as an iota of adrenaline.

I can't believe this is so easy - a link (hint, hint)

Touchdown by Christopher Samuels

Read by Camila Fiori

 

I was born in a storm, somewhere several miles above the Atlantic Ocean. This was unexpected, to say the least, as my mother was only six months pregnant at the time, but so it was. She went into short, sharp labour in the aeroplane toilet during the in-flight movie (Heaven’s Gate – she didn’t miss much) and by the time the nuts and Bloody Marys were being handed around, I was squealing and squalling tinily in the washbasin. 

 There were jokey, heartwarming articles in a number of newspapers, and a bit of debate about what nationality I was (it was a KLM flight from Amsterdam to New York, in international airspace), but all I got out of it in the end was dual Dutch-US nationality and a fascination with aeroplanes that led me to train as a pilot. And thanks in part to this, I haven’t set foot on solid ground for the last seven years. 

 It’s sort of a curse thing. 

The Summer My Mother Made Me Pretend I Was a Lesbian by Hedy Zimra

Now that she is straight again, she would not even come to my play. If I were the vengeful type, I could easily just call her church and out her. She is a piece of clay, firmly in the grip of her born-again husband. The one that won’t look me in the eye.

The Rage by Brindley Hallam Dennis

Read by Martin Lamb

Richard Meinhertzhagen, the famous soldier naturalist, said that if men do not hunt and kill animals frequently, a rage will build up inside them that will lead, inevitably, to the desire to hunt and kill other men.

The Cowboy Hat by Barry Walsh

Read by Marc Forde

London, 1963

I’m playing knockout with my younger brother James. It involves one of us kicking the plastic football at a goal on the school wall and the other, with his first touch, knocking the ball back on target – a sort of football squash. The rules are enforced as much by what we hear as what we see. The goal is an oblong of biscuit-like rendering. Hitting its crumbling surface is the sound of a ‘goal’; striking both rendering and glazed brick, is ‘post’, and if you hear the metallic ping of ball on brick only, you’ve missed. Today, we’re not trying to win but to keep the game going in regular, satisfying thuds that bring Mrs Johnson, who lives opposite, to the front door of her prefab.

Now we are One...

It seems barely a year since the first Liars' League event in the room above a pub in Holborn. Yet twelve months on we are delighted still to be here and raring to go with Fight & Flight this Tuesday at The Wheatsheaf, Rathbone Place, London, 7pm.

To celebrate we are starting podcasting. We've posted MP3s online since the start, but from now, simply copy the link below into iTunes and every time we post a new story you get it sent to your iPod (or other electronic storage device.)

From now on, if mysteriously you have a clash in the diary or have been summoned to New York, you can still enjoy the pleasures of the League.

Of course, that doesn't mean we don't want to see you in person

Yours in celebration,

The League.

http://liarsleague.typepad.com/liars_league/rss.xml

PS Copies of previous events' stories will be ported to this site over time. Until then, we're still on MySpace