BACK IN THE DAY

Once upon a time there were FM broadcasts that, if you had one of these, you could record on a cassette with the use of just two fingers. Progress! BBC iPlayer and listen again allows you to - listen again - or for the first time if you missed the live broadcast. But you can't record with the same facility. 


The BBC I remind you is a public service broadcaster fresh stocked with green from our taxes. Like a digitised version of the Mission Impossible briefs, anything you want to 'listen again' to, self-destructs after a fixed elapsed time.
Maybe there are some out there who still have one of these - my dad did for years and accumulated a huge stock of BBC radio drama and informative programmes for his personal use. For all its technical wizardry, iPlayer sets bounds on your listening in an intrinsically mean way. So I say thankyou to the wizzkids out there who, as soon as the BBC stymies downloading by one app, develop another one. The best application of two fingers since the radio-cassette player.


No story this week - too much going on, too many things to think about, all mental energy directed elsewhere and frankly, I can't be arsed.


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SUPERSTITION

Blogger down yesterday. So was I, for a while.



friday thirteenth
rain, clouds, cello
banjo sun in the heart still rising


Doesn't get much shorter than Haiku, does it?


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ENGLISHNESS

Is there such a thing? If there is, is it definable? Hard to say if your answer to the question "Country of birth?" is England. I don't feel UK, that's for sure. My view on Kingdom was made pretty clear in last week's post. United? In what sense united? A sharing of the mire so many are in? A common mistrust of bankers and politicians? Maybe, but these are unifying globally rather than nationally. Great Britain then? 'Great' strikes me as either aspirational or egotistical and in either case laughable. Britain? Has that been a useful term since the Romans found nothing more in Britannia to interest them? The British Isles, then, who could object to that? What? Check out an Irish view? Oh, I see what you mean. Whilst I'm about it, maybe I should check out a Scots and a Welsh view, maybe a Cornish too. Tell you what, how about "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"? No? No, it doesn't work. You are always drawn back to the dark heart of centuries of strife, war, compromise and conquest.


My intuition tells me you would be hard pushed to find someone who is able to define themselves as English by reference to generations rather than geography and that if you found them, key characteristics might well be large estates and small gene pools. To the best of my knowledge, and with ancestors with little to preserve through accurate record keeping, most of that knowledge is from oral history, I can claim (if that's the right word) English, Irish, Scots, Welsh and a smattering of Dutch ancestry. A bigger gene pool then, but a lost sense of place.


So what is Englishness? I think Calloway has it. Calloway, a further chapter of Cowboy Heart for week 16. Good egg.




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ISN'T IT ROMANTIC?

Royal Wedding day. You can't escape it. It's everywhere. Media coverage of propaganda intensity with only small dark chinks of questioning light. What can a republican do? Batten down the hatches, 24hour hermitage? It doesn't work. Red, white and blue is pervasive. A neighbour's side gate has become a Union Jack. Bunting, bunting, bunting. Egg-cups, paper plates, cakes. You know I could go on, so I won't. 


Can there be anything as anachronistic and divisive as the continued existence of a ruling class in a supposed meritocracy? It would seem there's a deference gene carried by a significant proportion of the UK population. But wait! An estimated world-wide audience of two billion people I hear. I can only hope that's a curiosity gene at work.


On the subject of mugs, the Steve Bell cartoon above has been put on mugs available from The Guardian newspaper. I guess this provides a mime show prop for more admirable national characteristics; defiant tea-drinking.


It's romance they say, but not as I know it. Romance as I know it is a far less arranged affair, lusty, dark and humorous, peppered with mundane tragedy and joy. On the pull, my story for week 15 draws on lives a bit different to those of Wills and Kate - I mean Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (throw in Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus for good measure). Bang goes my Knighthood. 




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MULTI-TASKING

With this post, I bring myself back on schedule. Fourteen weeks in and I've thoroughly confused myself with dates, week endings and beginnings. So I've gone for straight numbering now, in the expectation I can count from one to fifty without too much difficulty.
Work-life balance, that's what I'm after. Added to the writing, I have plans  for painting and a bit of jewellery making to compliment the beer brewing, plant growing, music listening, nature watching and reading. I don't have a quiet mind, there's always something going on in there. But all these things are life, or at least the kind I choose when I have a choice.
Work on the other hand, is a dense counterweight made of obscure big bang substance that defies understanding of its dark mass. I try to be Zen about such things - no light without dark, no life without death and all that, but find work to be a selfish, greedy partner in the duality deal and generally an all-round show off. The only thing I genuinely like about work are people. I guess without work, I would be perhaps unhealthily reclusive because whilst I like people, in keeping with the duality thing, I can empathise with whoever said (and variations are attributed to many) 'The more I see of people, the more I like my dog'.

Meantime, playing God with the written word, I can push Holly on to Vienna, where nothing that happens is for real whilst everything could be.

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WHY NOTTERY

So much gendering. Why shouldn't I dream of being rescued from mundane cares and worries? Where's the Prince of Publishing, dashing off cheques and plying me with champagne? Well, I guess whoever he or she is, they are perfectly happy as they are, wedded to many other talents.
Writing time is being eaten away by work and applying for jobs, seeds have been crying out for earth, water and a kiss of sun. The family motto needs changing - dolce far niente being my clear choice over the prosaic Recte et fideliter. Who would honestly prefer being just and faithful to the sweetness of doing nothing? However, I have to work my way up to doing nothing as it involves considerable effort because, it seems,  the path to doing nothing involves doing something first. So, in miserly fashion, I am hoarding my current creativity in the hope of it being bankable and drawing on the stash of Cowboy Heart for 50-50s. Why not? I like Holly a lot and I would like you to like him too or at least see something of yourself in him. In any case, I need to get on track with my self-imposed schedule and it's as good a something on the way to nothing as any other I can think of. So get aboard The Bonduca with Holly whilst I get back to waiting for my carriage.

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SUN SPOT INTERNET

Week 11 brought blue skies and warm, sunny days. Anyone who lives in the UK will know that this combination tests the resolve and self-discipline of most. What to do? Soak up rays or sit pounding the keyboard? Many have no choice. Currently, I do. So it's week 12 and I haven't completed my piece for week 11. 

'What me worry?' as the unfortunate-looking adolescent adorning MAD Magazine was wont to say. I can drag out the next chapter of the anathema Cowboy Heart. Not quite in the spirit of the enterprise but a pragmatic response to dissipation.

With the arrival of week 12 and departure of the sun, my broadband goes on the blink. Cue relocate computers, modem and router, run wires in trippable places so that my provider can conduct monitoring and tests to resolve a recurrent problem once and for all. Ho-hum. So come and save me Holly, on your journey Back East.

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TIME

Either there hasn’t been enough of it or I’ve not used what there has been very effectively.  

Kim began her two weekend exhibition of textile jewellery at 

York Open Studios last Friday - a lot of work but my, did it look good! I gave some help setting things up during the week and took leave from work to be at the opening night, joined by the family crew to give our support. Some wine and nibbles, some arty chat, then off to The Slip Inn. 

Because of work commitments, I haven’t been out on a Friday night for six months. I got hammered on Freddie Trueman Yorkshire Ale, ‘...a beer in honour of the great Yorkshire and England fast bowler and shite Test Match Special commentator, Freddie Trueman’ - to quote a fellow blogger. 

Then there was Mother’s Day  - hammered again. Ah! To be in the bosom of one’s family. Having put them before you dear reader, the week 11 offering is late and short. It would probably take longer to download it than to read it onscreen - so it’s onscreen, below.

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NO FIVE

One. He ran his hand through his hair, feeding his fingers through the rain-soaked strands, sweeping them away from his forehead and eyes. The rain was warm and heavy, weighty drops bursting the lonely street’s puddles. Gutters splattered, drains gurgled, neon hazed and sparkled the entire wet world, drowned in its watery soundscape. A car with a broken headlight went by, tyres making a sticky hiss. The door he was looking for was somewhere around here.

Two. He’d forgotten something. He didn’t know what it was yet, only that he had forgotten it. He checked his pockets, once, twice, haphazardly patting them, feeling for a tell-tale shape. He had a lot of pockets, jeans, jacket, inside, outside. Coins, keys, mobile, wallet, tissue, chewing gum. Those weren’t the shape. He checked a third time, systematically, emptying his pockets, turning them out, scrabbling deep into cotton lint, pulled out a folded-small, flat bus ticket. It was two-weeks old. That wasn’t it. What was it? What had he forgotten?

Three. The building was unfamiliar to him. It had a run-down feel. Not dirty but forlorn. The corridors had the kind of hard sheen that repeated mechanical buffing gave, a worn, scratchy diffusion of the overhead lighting - chainhung metalclad fluorescents of mismatched whites. All the doors off the corridor looked similar. Worn brown paint, reeded glass windows, grubby fingerplates and loose handles. The name plates on them ranged from screwed on brass to stuck on plastic in a variety of fonts and styles. He was looking for the one that read Dr Schapiro or was it the one that read EXIT? He stood in the empty corridor trying to remember but all he could remember was that he’d forgotten something.

Four. She looked stunning. The way she looked at him, with a steady drink-in gaze made him feel she had always been for him, always been waiting for this moment alone. So what was he doing there - the blonde guy in a blue suit with a cheesy grin? This was their moment, not his. She looked away from him, exchanged a knowing smile with the suit and unfolding herself from the couch said, ‘I better get ready.’ He watched her take her dress off over her head, hang it on the corner of a folding screen. She turned her back to him, showing a deep-set spine. Her shoulderblades shifted smoothly, as reaching behind her, she unclasped her bra, the reddened ridges of the straps left on her back. The suit smiled appreciatively at her front.

Five. It was still raining. It was still dark. The suit was empty. The red ridges were covered. If he hit snooze again, he’d be late. No five.

FIRST AID FOR AUTHORS

One of my favourite films, right up there slugging it out with The Big Lebowski for top spot in a bout too close to call, is The Third Man. 

I often wondered what happened to Holly, Calloway and Anna after the film’s wistful closing scene of Anna’s long, determined walk past a smitten Holly into an unknown, uncertain future. I had my own thoughts, which weren’t narratively conventional, although they started that way in a novel I began writing, Cowboy Heart. 

Blithely I worked away on it before deciding to check whether copyright would allow this conception to proceed to term. 

‘I have consulted the literary executor and I am sorry to tell you that I am instructed to say he would never in any circumstances permit the work you propose’. 

I must have really sold that one. Chagrin aside, I feel compelled to give at least a part of it an airing. That way, perhaps I’ll be able to move on more stoically. So here it is for week 10 - Out West - the start of the unfinished, a flavour of a feast that remains raw.

Back in the real world, it has been a busy week. I have passed my three-day course for ‘First Aid at Work’ and endured the horrible injury, burns, breaks and dislocation slides with only brief nods to nausea and the prospect of providing hands-on practice for my fellow delegates. So if someone is injured at work and I can avoid keeling over myself, I’m the man.

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ARS GRATIA ARTIS

Sure, when I can afford it, which if the hits on this blog are any indication of interest, is some way, way time away. Meantime I have a number of writerly projects tumbling about that may have commercial sinews. But I’m sufficiently anal to feel the ouija’d spectre of defeat if I don’t continue to post creative content on a weekly basis. What to do? 
Cunning plan - use a different writer’s muscle in order to maintain a measure of focus on lucre. So you have some poetry this week.  
Poetry works different bits of you to those worked by story. Drawn from the same vocabulary and experience but so different in the making and giving, so compassed and detachable. 

Last of Springs has worked different bits of me, forgotten and neglected in the pursuit of larger ambitions. I’ll do more. And I’ll have to review the ’index card’ presentation of Stories from nowhere for nothing - it’s starting to get unwieldy - I feel the dead hand of spreadsheet days stroking my cheek.

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SOLITUDE

As a non-driver, I walk or cycle whenever I can. Cycling is a wonderful and cheaply acquired freedom. I just wish I was more mechanically minded and could maintain my bike properly. It creaks and groans, pings with strained and rusty cables and parts. But these sounds are a comforting accompaniment to the late cycle home along the quieted roads and there's a freedom to look about you, take things in, think.


Cycling home last night, I looked up to see the moon as it lay on its back. Astronomers tell us this is a spring and autumn phenomenon in the northern hemisphere. Daffodils are about to bloom the length of the Stray, its hedges are budding green, but winter won't let go. The tenacious chill keeps everyone brittle, waiting for the sun, waiting for the real spring.




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GET IT RIGHT!

It must have been something! I use Arnie here for reasons you'll understand when you read Stardom, week 7's story. But the real debt is to Philip K Dick, something I appreciated when I had finished the story.  I thought I would outline something that could be classified as Sci-Fi that I could write later as a much longer better-realised piece. I hope I do because there's so much else to occupy one's time.


This past week that has been nursing my first batch of home-brewed beer to bottlement. As an eternal optimist, I have ordered the necessaries for the next batch without having tasted the first. The extent of my optimism might be gauged in my ordering weiss bier for hot summer drinking. When tasting time comes around, I hope Arnie isn't recalled to haunt me.


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SOUTH WEST

I watched South West 9 the other night, a 2001 film titled after the old London postal district that is Brixton. Being the home turf of my childhood, I thought it would be interesting viewing. It was a bit geezerish and for the most part, poorly acted; the runty offspring of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Trainspotting. But it sparked some memories, one of which was an earlier recollection that prompted me to write a vignette of a time in life when 'best friend' was something mysteriously but unequivocally understood and felt. So I reproduce it here for week 6's story. 

Although it's not fiction, it's sepia-toned enough to suggest it could be.

Stockwell at 8 also has the merit of quickly clearing the writing desk ahead of tomorrow's England v France Six Nations Rugby International, which as I have the day off work, I will be able to watch with my similarly cursing, opinionated, armchair-expert friends. This counterpoint to earlier male bonding will no doubt confirm again the gendered insightfulness of women who perceive men as 'Little boys in long trousers'. If I spent more time thinking about this stereotyping, I could probably get round to feeling offended. But I have more important things to do, such as ensuring the beer and chicken are cold.

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OLDER

It's my better half's birthday next Monday and its tricky. It would be indiscrete to reveal her age but she's not feeling happy about it. Not celebrating it however, is out of the question. So the tricky bit is how and with what?

I've heard it said that you can never have too many handbags or pairs of shoes but she is close to proving the exception. Mystery clothes and jewellery still make appearances and I know I am a source of disappointment in not remembering their purchase often enough.

She's not a reader, so I'm reasonably safe writing this but by the same token, books are out. Technology is viewed with suspicion and fitfully operated with exasperation - I am her remote control - so a personal music player for audio books, whilst appealing in principle, wouldn't be so personal. Besides, she doesn't like sticking things in her ears. Whiskey or wine are always a good fallback but I tend to drink most of it. Chocolate is loved but unnecessary guilt sours it. Kitcheny stuff is too domestic and anyway, I'm the cook. Vouchers are a copout, cake is naughty.

It's Friday and I'm still undecided but when you have lived together for as long as we have, you get to a point where presenting tokens of affection should show the subtlety, understanding and nuance from our lives' journey together. Perhaps that's why I'm stumped. Getting older. That's the theme.

SHAMELESS

When I decided to go all things e to get my work into the ether or cloud or whatever the term is for upload-download interconnected webbery, I was wary of facebook. This despite the fact that I could see the possibilities for potentially geometric progression in the acquisition of readers. Nevertheless I got myself a facebook account at the beginning of the year (and made friends with Holgate Windmill), then just left it there as a toehold to come back to later.


This past week, I've been trying to get to grips with it. Mostly, I've been wrestled to the ground pretty quickly. Following on from igoogle, blogging and putting up a website, I though I could breeze it, but it's been the most demanding of my e-education so far. One evening, I was struggling with navigating around when I got a friend request from a relative in California. I click a button, see a pop-up called chat, we start doing just that and I'm sold.


The next part of my shameless self-promotion is to provide a direct and obvious link from facebook to my blog - and my stories. I haven't worked it out yet as I've found these 'social networking' tools designed as much around not letting you do things how you want to as they are about possibilities. I sometimes feel using them is like being in a large store where the displays have been arranged to ensure you have to walk the way they want you to. But it's a minor irritation - if I stay strong! Now for some relaxation and sensual pleasure, I'm off to make some puttenesca sauce.


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WIND

A day late. Slippage already! My hands feel swollen, fingers like sausages. I put this down to an excess of manual labour. Whilst not beyond or beneath me, it's something I would rather not be doing. But needs must. I seem to have become the 'drinks' guy at Waitrose Supermarket in York, where I work the twilight shift, stacking shelves. Drinks are bastard heavy! How much Coke or jazzed-up water can people drink? Lots - beer buying seems puny by comparison. On the subject of beer, another of my doing instead of talking about doing 2011 resolutions will soon be underway. My micro-brewery kit arrived yesterday, 40 pints of ale waiting for water, warmth and the passage of time. This will be my first attempt at home-brewing and I feel a childlike excitement and impatience to get under way. But 50-50s comes first, even though my sausagey fingers and bacon head (drinks last night) have made my latest posting a clumsy experience. 


The finger thing is down to having to clear up a fallen tree in our garden. The UK has been windy this week and when I got home Thursday night, I found a pig-tail screw on the kitchen worktop. Kim told me meaningfully, that a tree had blown down, breaking exactly where I had put that pig-tail screw for my hammock (deep-down, I think she disapproves of my capacity to relax) and all the sawing and lopping to reduce the tree to manageable pieces has taken it's toll on my trusty right hand. None of this however, is intended as an excuse for slippage and now I have to think about getting on with the next story.


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ROLLING

I got myself organised in time for my first story and though the second is likewise in time, it was a stretch. Since my last post, I've been diagnosed with a double hernia, paid a weekend visit to see my mother in Lincoln and had my eldest daughter and her boyfriend round for a couple of nights talking about their wedding arrangements later this year over meals, wine and music.
I feel old. Which might account in some way for the tone of my second story, Sparkling Water.

I downloaded Kindle for Mac from Amazon to check the presentation of the Kindle versions of my stories. Not great. No surprise. The formatting seems awry - paragraph indents hardly worthy of the term. Whilst not a major discouragement, it looks less easy on the eye than it should. I'll try to get it solved.

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INCEPTION

Today is the day my 50 weeks to the end of 2011 start counting down and I was hoping for a leisurely beginning, lounging abed in Proustian reflection before my first post. Instead we have to make an early-morning visit to the vet because our dog, Ozzy, has a suddenly swollen face. This turns out to be due to a tooth abcess, which in keeping with my blog's organising principle, costs us £50 for treatment. Twenty minutes waiting in the company of a wailing cat and barking dogs, contemplating giant plastic fleas in a glass display case then a minor prang backing out of the car park complete my morning's discombobulation. The only thing Proustian left me are heavy-lidded eyes.
Howsoever this blog later progresses, not posting on day one of week one would be the most inauspicious of beginnings. I believe in auspice (and other life-enhancing superstition) - when it suits. Gratifyingly, the morning's domestics have swiped away the mounting pressure I had been feeling to begin with something impressive. As a mate of Bill Clinton (and any one else of note he could ingratiate himself with) liked to hum, 'Things can only get better'.
Now, I'm off to touch wood to avert the hubris that has made him so memorable, even though I may have left it too late for today.

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