One of the pleasant oddities of writing life is that sometimes you can throw yourself in at the deep end with some of the wildest ideas and it’s simply the greatest fun to write. I’ve written a poem for no good reason I can discern, except I woke a couple of days ago with the first four lines and quickly texted them to my dear collaborator-in-writing-crimes before I lost them to the wild vagaries of consciousness and responsibility. More on responsibility later.

So today the amusing oddity is The St Mary’s Incident Report Competition. Having entered a previous competition I’ve got early access to Jodi Taylor’s Substack posts and so it arrives as a newsletter each week. This week features an entry for the competition and I enjoyed reading it, so it prompted me to have a go.

The premise is to write an official St Mary’s incident report describing a historical jump that went slightly wrong. It must include one real historical figure, one entirely unexpected object and the phrase: “This was not my fault.”

Anyone who has read The Chronicles of St Mary’s will immediately understand the spirit of this.  An opportunity to record the absolute chaos of St Mary’s and their jumps in time but with someone I feel like writing about and with the most inane thing I could conjure up.

I’ve always loved Jodi Taylor and the strange universe she built. Historians who travel through time in the name of research and somehow leave a trail of chaos across several centuries. I’ve read them all twice.

I was in the mood for a bit of Roman Britain and some wild feminism. Enter Boudicca, the wild warrior Queen of the Iceni, if I could be anyone it history it might be her. So with a bit of research, some of which peculiarly leads me back to another manuscript loitering on my laptop, I know more than I did this morning about Boudicca, what her warriors wore and what happened at Colchester. Handily there also happens to be a statue on the Victoria Embankment which has now been co-opted for the purposes of my St Mary’s adventure.

Realistically the statistics are not entirely on my side. I was lucky enough to have a story included in the St Mary’s anthology last year which probably means lightning is unlikely to strike twice quite so quickly. If it were me I’d want to spread the joy a little and have more new writers featured in the competition. So I’m approaching this one with a fairly relaxed attitude and the fun I’ve had in writing it. And the idea of Boudicca colliding with the world of St Mary’s is right up my street.

The competition closes on 24 March, after which the entries go to a reader vote. Have a go if you can.
If my report appears among them you’ll recognise it easily enough. It contains a very dignified explanation of events and a clear statement of responsibility.
Which is to say, once again, that none of it was my fault.