I've never seen the colour blue. I don't know what it looks like, but I've heard that the ocean is blue. If the ocean is blue, then I like the sound of it. Blue could quite possibly be my favourite colour; I'm sure I'd agree with myself if I saw it.Craft Note — The RevealThe opening sentence is the story's central misdirection and its eventual punchline. "I've never seen the colour blue" — a casual, philosophically-framed observation that only retroactively becomes the story's key. JL never says "I am blind." The reader is given every piece of evidence and trusted to hold it.
But I'm not by the ocean right now; I'm sitting outside a small coffee shop near DecodedHyde Park — LondonOne of London's eight Royal Parks — a 350-acre public park in the City of Westminster. The coffee shop near Hyde Park situates the story in a specific socioeconomic register: expensive enough to attract "all sorts," central enough to attract the accidental, overpriced enough to be worth noting. Consistent with the characters being south London types operating slightly out of their territory.→ Hyde Park on Wikipedia, having a cigarette. Why I started smoking, I have no idea, but these days it's one of my favourite things to do. The tobacco makes a soft crackle as it burns; most people never notice, but it's actually quite a pleasant little sound. Like a mini fireplace in my mouth.Craft Note — The Sonic WorldFrom the first paragraph, the narrative attention is sonic rather than visual. The tobacco's crackle. The coffee shop sounds. The strain in waiters' voices. The grinding and chopping. The narrator describes a world through sound with the granularity of someone for whom sound is the primary sense. JL builds the blind narrator through texture before ever making the condition explicit.
I come to this place almost every day, mostly because they let me bring Character DetailRufus — Guide Dog JokeGolden Retrievers are a common guide dog breed. The narrator's Rufus "never fetches a damn thing" and "just sits quietly next to me, panting and keeping an eye out for pretty girls." A guide dog who won't guide, who has his own aesthetic preferences, and who will — critically — fail to growl at the two men approaching. Rufus is both the dog's whole character and a gentle running joke about the narrator's reliance on unreliable assistance. inside. I've had Rufus about six years now, some old lady said he's a Golden Retriever, but he never fetches a damn thing. He usually just sits quietly next to me, panting and keeping an eye out for . I suppose he's fetched one or two of those in the past, but he and I have different taste in women.Feminist NoteThe narrator's relationship to women introduced in three words: "different taste in women." Women as objects of aesthetic preference — specifically visual preference, which is the narrator's diminished sense. Women appear in this story as: the object of taste, the sound of their shoes, and an unconscious body the two men bring up later. See full analysis via red underline.
I've come to the conclusion that this little coffee shop attracts all sorts and I'm pretty sure it's because the coffee is over-priced. But it is worth it, just to come and sit for a while and listen to the lives of so many different people. I usually bring a book so as not to creep people out with my pastime, but I'm pretty sure I'm The TellThe Book Is Upside DownOne of two structural tells embedded early for a second reading. An upside-down book is invisible to a blind reader. The quotation marks around "reading" are not coyness; they are the story's quiet admission. "Dropping Eaves" in the title — eavesdropping, listening — is what the narrator actually does. The book is a prop. Sound is the text.. On a quiet day, you'd be able to follow entire conversations and play out whole soap-operas in your mind...
This little hole in the wall can get pretty packed at times too, and you can hear the strain in the waiters' voices over the hubbub of people taking it easy for a while. On a busy night, or day, the best seat in the house is near the kitchen. It's a symphony of chaos, life is too, but the kitchen under pressure is the best example. The grinding and chopping and searing and the click-clack-clack mixed with the clangs and the thuds constantly mingling with worried shouts and precious inside jokes. It's not music, but I love it.
I wouldn't go as far as to call it busy today, but it isn't quiet either. I think I brought Lord of the Rings with me but I'm not sure. Right now, I'm waiting on a red velvet cupcake, a chocolate chip muffin and a pot of Character DetailEarl GreyEarl Grey is a distinctively aromatic tea — its bergamot scent is recognisable by smell alone. For a blind narrator, tea choices carry sensory weight beyond mere preference. The order as a whole (red velvet, choc chip, Earl Grey) tells us about a person who enjoys specific, textured sensory pleasures: taste, smell, crunch, warmth.. Rufus loves red velvet, he's salivating all over my leg just thinking about it. Familiar — that's what I'd call today. The music playing over the almost-blown speakers is soft enough to blend into the background. It might be pop that's playing but at least it isn't ReferencePan Pipe Moods (1994)A real compilation album — one of a long series of ambient pan pipe covers released throughout the 1990s in the UK. They were sold in service stations and became a cultural shorthand for aggressively inoffensive background noise. The narrator's specific horror at them suggests both cultural awareness and a finely tuned sensitivity to sonic environment.. There aren't a lot of cars passing and it's probably sometime in the afternoon, but the shicks and clinks of knives and forks underneath the low mumble of casual conversation is perfectly ordinary. Most people ignore these moments.
He might have said "boot" but he's cockney and a little far away, so I can't really be sure.
I can't help myself; this is too weird not to listen to. This second guy sounds like the bright one of the pair. He also sounds smaller and a bit whiny.Craft Note — Unreliable AssessmentThe narrator calls Johnny "the bright one of the pair" — which is demonstrably wrong based on J&C. Johnny is the one who got lost, shot a man who wasn't dead, and forgot to ask for directions. Clive is the philosophical one who correctly diagnoses the Boss's psychology. The narrator's blind assessment of character via voice alone is exactly as reliable as you'd expect: not very. The "smaller and a bit whiny" is consistent though.
Well for starters, I would think that doing whatever they're doing in broad daylight is wrong from the start. At least under cover of darkness, you'd expect this sort of thing. Aren't they worried about being seen? Not by me, obviously, but there are at least thirty witnesses. What if they're planning on mass murder after they've finished? No, I'm being paranoid. But I can't hear any whispers or gasps, from inside. Has no one noticed?
Wait. The cars are that way and they're… In the alley. That makes me feel better.
I really should not be listening to this. I should turn the page of my book. Oh thank goodness, the waitress is here with my order. I've never welcomed the sound of with more gratitude in my life.Feminist Note — The WaitressThe waitress — the only female character present in DE — is identified entirely by the sound of her shoes. No name, no face, no words. She exists as a sound that provides relief, then disappears. In J&C she re-enters via reported speech: she "told him to take a flying whatsit at a rolling doughnut" — an act of assertion, but still secondhand, still nameless. She is the story's most capable character and the least visible one. Rufus lets out a little bark of glee and scoffs his cupcake – it might be mine – out of my hand, leaving a slimy saliva coating in his wake. I hope to heaven they didn't hear him. They seem to be bickering, so I'm safe. I take a bite from my cupcake. Choc chip. Rufus is safe too.
I try to steady my breathing. Just calm down. But curiosity is so annoying sometimes. No, I tell myself. Don't listen. Don't pay attention. Listen to the birds. Or the cars. Let them do their thing and be on their not-so-merry way. Just don't —
That was ridiculously close, and very cockney. Rufus should be growling. Damn it! He's still doing that sloppy chewy thing dogs do with cake.
The whiny one's here too, and — balls — they're definitely, without a doubt, talking to me. I don't know what to say.
The whiny one is Johnny, the other is Clive.Craft Note — The Attribution RevealFour years after J&C, JL resolves the attribution — or at least anchors it. "The whiny one is Johnny, the other is Clive." The narrator gives the reader the key to the earlier story. But the narrator also says Johnny is "the bright one of the pair," which a reader of J&C knows is wrong. The naming is authoritative; the assessment is not. Got it. Now I can give names if I'm found, beaten to death, in the middle of nowhere. I still haven't said a thing, or moved.
For what?! What could these two possibly need me to help with? Keep silent. That's all I can think to do.
Nope, that wasn't meant for me. Clive continues:
The whiny one stomps off. He sounds like a penguin. An angry penguin.
"I think he's still a bit mad, because the waitress told him to take a flying whatsit at a rolling doughnut."
The penguin is by the car now, making a serious racket. Grunting and thudding and heaving and what sounds like meat being hit with a blunt object.
I don't even get a chance to say anything back. Next thing I hear is:
The doors close, the engine starts and they speed off. I think that this has to be, the most utterly bizarre experience of my life.
Challenger: Lee Watkins
Tell me a story about: The Sounds Around Me | Genre: Bananas | Style: 1st Person Narrative (Present Tense)
It must have: The sounds that you encounter in your everyday environment.
Someone must say: "We're going to need a bigger boat…"
The same event seen twice: once from inside (two men, a body, a field), once from outside (a blind eavesdropper, a coffee cup, a guide dog who couldn't care less). The stories were written four years apart, in reverse order to how they sit chronologically — J&C first, DE second. What JL built was not a sequel but a refraction: the same material rendered in a completely different register, from a perspective that can only access sound.
J&C covers the body's entire journey: the discovery of death, the arguments, the burial in the field, the spaghetti digression, the pub. DE covers only one incident from that journey: the moment Johnny and Clive tried to repack the body into the boot — apparently after the field burial failed, or before it, or they've moved locations. The timeline is compressed and slightly fuzzy.
What the narrator overhears in DE is the boot-packing argument that J&C never depicts — it falls in the gap between J&C's dialogue and its stage directions. DE doesn't retell J&C. It shows us something that happened offscreen in the first story, observed from an angle that makes it both funnier and more frightening.
The narrator's blind perspective enforces exactly the reader's position in J&C: you know what's happening, but you can't see it clearly. Both stories are acts of eavesdropping on violence.
The Boss is the unseen authority of the British crime genre — a figure whose whole function is to make other people afraid without ever being present. He has an "evil lair," a missus who hates him, a wounded ego about killing order, and enough power to make two men panic in a field for an entire story. He never appears in either text.
This is structurally essential to the comedy: the threat of the Boss is the engine of everything Johnny and Clive do, and everything they do is wrong. They got lost. They forgot to drill holes. They shot a man who wasn't dead. They shouted a confession in a coffee shop. The Boss would be horrified. The Boss never finds out, because the story ends at "grab a pint."
The Boss is also the story's only figure of actual power — and he is a balding fat fart whose wife hates him. The crime world's most feared authority figure is, at ground level, a domestic disappointment. His absence from the text is the joke.
Barry is never characterised before his death. He has no backstory, no motivation, no name until Clive invents one. He exists in both stories entirely as an object — something to be moved, disposed of, joked over. The eulogy is the closest thing to characterisation he receives, and it consists of two men inventing the most ordinary possible life for him (IT guy, probably no kids, maybe an internet wife) and then dismissing it.
The body's physical presence — heavy, difficult, messy — is the comedy engine of the digging scene. But Barry's absence as a person is also the story's quiet ethical register. Nobody knows what he did. Nobody knows who he was. He's a dead git. He might have been the Boss's nemesis, or he might have been an IT guy with a low sperm count. The story provides no answer because the characters don't know, and don't need to know.
Barry is also the story's only character with an entirely passive role. He is acted upon. He moves once, involuntarily, and is shot for it. In a story with no female characters of substance, he is the closest thing to an object — and he is male. The feminist critique of the story has to contend with this: the objectified body here is Barry's.
The narrator is never named, never gendered explicitly (though the narrator refers to "taste in women" in a way that reads as male), never described. They sit outside a coffee shop near Hyde Park, drink Earl Grey, bring an unread book, and listen to the world.
The blindness functions on three levels. Practically: it explains why the narrator doesn't react to the men discussing body disposal — they can't read faces, can't gauge threat from physical presence, can't make eye contact to signal awareness. Comedically: it explains the upside-down book, and it's the punchline of the final line. Thematically: the story is called "Dropping Eaves" — pure listening, no watching. A blind narrator is the logical ultimate form of the eavesdropper.
The narrator also models the correct relationship to the stories: attentive, non-reactive, gathering information from sound alone, unable to intervene. That is exactly what the reader of both stories does.
Two stories, four years apart, written in opposite directions — the event seen from inside, then from outside. The primary critical lens here is feminist: these are stories that were written without women, and that fact is worth examining carefully, because the absence is systematic rather than incidental.
Both stories sit in the tradition of British crime comedy — specifically the Guy Ritchie tradition of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000): working-class London men, organised crime as a backdrop of mundane incompetence, violence rendered comic by the people involved in it being fundamentally useless. The Boss, the associates, Nowhere, the boot — all canonical.
The specific sub-genre is the gallows comedy of the hired hand: not the kingpin's story but the foot soldiers', who have been given an impossible task by an absent authority and are making a mess of it. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead works the same structural ground — two minor characters stuck in the logic of someone else's plot, arguing about semantics while larger events proceed around them. J&C's Clive and Johnny are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a shovel.
DE has no direct generic analogue — a blind eavesdropper narrating a crime story through sound alone is JL's own invention. Its closest relative is the radio play: a form in which all information is sonic and the audience, like the narrator, cannot see.
J&C is written without dialogue attribution tags — no "he said," no "Johnny replied." The reader builds the identity of each speaker from verbal patterns that emerge over the course of the story. Clive: philosophical riffs, literal interpretations of figurative speech, the funeral proposal, the spaghetti detail. Johnny: outcome-focus, blame, shooting, "grab a pint."
These patterns are consistent enough that most of the story attributes cleanly. The exception is the five-line sequence after the Clark Kent argument: "I'm not going to argue with you now. I have to figure out how we're gonna get out of this." / "Down that road I expect." / "Out of this mess you idiot." / "I know what you mean. I'm just having a laugh. Don't you have a sense of humour?" / "Not when I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere with a dead guy in my car."
Here, the character patterns overlap. Both men are frustrated. The literal/figurative confusion could go either way. The "I'm just having a laugh" could be Clive defending a philosophical digression or Johnny defending a misreading. Dropping Eaves anchors the names but doesn't resolve this sequence — it names the men after this moment, not inside it. The attribution is, genuinely, the reader's choice.
The most interesting reading: this is the moment the two men briefly become interchangeable — the character markers dissolve under pressure. The contested section is where the story admits that Johnny and Clive, for five lines, are not reliably distinct. That instability is itself a craft observation about how people under stress stop performing their usual roles.
J&C was written first — it is the source material, the event. DE was written four years later as a challenge response to a completely different brief: "sounds around me," "bananas," first person present tense. JL solved a challenge about everyday sound by placing a blind narrator at the scene of an existing story and letting her overhear it.
The result is a structure where the reader of both stories occupies a position of maximum irony: they know more than the narrator (they know what's in the boot), more than Johnny and Clive (they know the narrator is blind and heard everything), and more than any single character in either story.
Reading them in chronological order (J&C then DE) gives one experience: recognition, the pleasure of seeing a known event refracted. Reading DE first gives another: a mystery that J&C retroactively explains. Neither order is wrong. Both are designed into the pair.
What the reverse-writing order also reveals: DE does not contradict J&C, despite being written years later without the notes in front of the author. The characters' voices are consistent; the boot detail connects; the "Backstreet Boys" measurement unit fits exactly. Either JL remembered precisely, or the characters were real enough to maintain themselves.
The challenge demanded: "the sounds you encounter in your everyday environment." The blind narrator makes sound the story's entire mode of access — not a device applied to the challenge, but the condition that makes the challenge meaningful. A sighted narrator would have glanced at the men, assessed the threat visually, looked away. The blind narrator must work from the tobacco's crackle, the hooker heels on concrete, the thud of meat on metal.
The "Bananas" genre demand is met by the situation itself: two men disposing of a body in a coffee shop alley, asking a blind eavesdropper to settle an argument about round pegs and square holes, shouting a confession into a patio, driving away. The absurdism is structural, not decorative.
"We're going to need a bigger boat" — required to be said by someone. Clive says it about the boot. The line works because it's accurate: the boat/boot/trunk is too small, the obstacle is too large, the situation is Jaws-scale inadequacy in miniature. The challenge requirement and the story's internal logic are completely aligned.
J&C refuses to say what Barry did. The men don't know; the reader doesn't know; it doesn't matter. What matters is that his death is an accident caused by incompetence. The Boss's authority — the entire justification for the operation — is revealed as both wounded pride and structural absurdity. Barry died because someone forgot to drill holes in a boot. The moral weight of organised crime deflates to logistics.
DE refuses to resolve what the narrator does next. They've overheard a murder disposal. They have names. They have a description of two men driving away with a body. The story ends on their observation that this is "the most utterly bizarre experience of my life" — not on a decision about what to do with the information. Whether they report it or not, whether they can (no visual evidence, no licence plate they saw), is never addressed.
Both refusals are meaningful. J&C's refusal to explain Barry keeps the comedy clean — explanation would require moral weight the story isn't offering. DE's refusal to resolve the narrator's dilemma keeps the register comic rather than thriller. Both endings are deliberately inconclusive because conclusion would require a different genre.
The texts below place the stories in their genre tradition, explore the feminist structures they inherit, and point toward the critical tools for both.