“It’s cold out there,” said the taxi-driver as I got into the cab. He was soooo right. It was also very dark and very wet. It was, in fact, December in Mirfield, Yorkshire. I’d been invited to give a talk in the library and all I can say is, bless all those hardy souls who came on an absolutely horrible evening. “Never mind,” said the taxi-driver. “It’ll soon be Christmas, innit?”
I’d gaily thought, when planning this little expedition, that I’d drop my stuff off at the library and then find Ye Olde Hostelry to have some dinner. Well, the first part of the programme worked, but when I called into The Peartree the bloke behind the bar looked at me in a sort of pitying way. “Food? In the evening?” The same tale was repeated in The Railway and in The Navigation. It was as food in Yorkshire is an activity for the daylight hours alone. Ah well. The beer in the Navigation was good though.
Literature came to my aid when I finally sloshed my way back to the library. There was tea! And shortbread biscuits! And even a little cake with icing on in a packet. And, - again, bless them – an audience, including my old pal Anne’s mother, Margaret, who’s read all my books. Because I’d flung myself on the refreshments, the librarian, Julie, bowed to the inevitable and declared the tea urn and the coffee maker open and the biscuits open for chomping, even though this should have been reserved for half-time. Flexibility is a great virtue in a librarian.
So, thus fortified, this select group of Mirfieldians settled down to listen to the tale of how you go about dreaming up a book. Not that even I can talk for an hour and a half non-stop about my books, so I did what I’d done before, and invited everyone there to have a shot at writing too.
The idea is that everyone writes down a well-known phrase (this is part writing exercise and part party game) such as, “A stitch in time save nine,” or “When Santa got stuck up the chimney” (After all, it’ll soon be Christmas, innit?) and swap them with each other. Then choose a picture from the stack of pictures I had with me, and write the first couple of lines of a poem or a short story, getting in a least a couple of words from the phrase and inspired by the picture. The results were terrific! There was one group who did some genuinely creepy dialogue sparked by a moody picture of a Jack The Ripper type figure in the mist, another couple who got exactly the rights words to describe a haunted house and a lot of people having a lot of fun. Kids in school do this sort of thing all the time, but grown-ups thoroughly enjoy the chance to express themselves, too.
Then Julie wrapped everything up and gave me an entirely unexpected, but very welcome lift to Huddersfield Station. And there – this was really good – in the Head of Steam, the station bar, a jazz guitar group was meeting and a great many earnest middle-aged men who looked as if they should be talking about sheds, were instead playing guitars like Django Reinheardt. I curled myself into a corner and listened in complete happiness. And, as the man said, “It’ll soon be Christmas, innit?”
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
The Corpse in the parlour
One of my oldest friends (in every sense of the word as she’s just celebrated her 89th birthday) is Kath. We were talking about what kids did in the days before TV.
Well, according to Kath, one of the odder things that kids got up to was to go and look at corpses.
Nowadays, when someone dies, it’s almost de rigueur that the undertaker scoops them up and takes them to a Chapel of Rest, but that wasn’t always the case.
I can remember Grandma laid out in her coffin in the front room (lid off) and the neighbours coming to pay their respects, but although I might very well have seen other people’s deceased relatives, I can’t honestly say I remember it.
Kath, however, led by her pal Aileen, made an absolute hobby of it.
Now, before you think this is too morbid for words, I should explain that although Kath and Aileen were perfectly well fed, this was about 1933 and treats such as sweets and biscuits were rare. So Kath was a willing listener when Aileen came up with A Plan.
“Have you noticed,” said Aileen, “that when there’s a corpse laid out in the house, everyone who comes to see it gets a biscuit or a piece of cake? Why don’t we,” continued Aileen, getting down to brass tacks, “go and look at corpses and then we’ll get a biscuit too?”
It was dead easy (if you’ll excuse the expression) to spot the house with a corpse in it because the curtains were drawn at the front of the house.
So those two little girls went round knocking at doors to offer to “say a prayer,” (Kath’s exact words) “over the corpse”, upon which they were ushered into the parlour and, having admired how beatifully laid-out the corpse was, they'd get cracking.
Usually one Hail Mary would do the trick, but sometimes they had to throw in an Our Father as well before the biscuits were produced, while the householder looked on, sometimes moved to tears by this display of infant piety. There was one occasion, however, where Aileen decided to cut and run when, after a whole decade of the Rosary (!) no biscuits were forthcoming. “All that praying,” said Aileen in disgust when they were out on the street again, “for nothing!”
It came to an end, however, as all good things do, when the Headmistress of the school, a ferocious nun of the old-fashioned type, wise to any form of rannygazoo, called them into her office. “I hear,” she said, “that you’ve got a new hobby.”
Kath and Aileen looked at each other for moral support and Kath demurely said, “We’re only saying prayers.”
Even the most clued-up nun couldn’t actually object to that, but she wasn’t fooled. “In future, I think you should restrict your payers to church.”
So that’s what they did.
Well, according to Kath, one of the odder things that kids got up to was to go and look at corpses.
Nowadays, when someone dies, it’s almost de rigueur that the undertaker scoops them up and takes them to a Chapel of Rest, but that wasn’t always the case.
I can remember Grandma laid out in her coffin in the front room (lid off) and the neighbours coming to pay their respects, but although I might very well have seen other people’s deceased relatives, I can’t honestly say I remember it.
Kath, however, led by her pal Aileen, made an absolute hobby of it.
Now, before you think this is too morbid for words, I should explain that although Kath and Aileen were perfectly well fed, this was about 1933 and treats such as sweets and biscuits were rare. So Kath was a willing listener when Aileen came up with A Plan.
“Have you noticed,” said Aileen, “that when there’s a corpse laid out in the house, everyone who comes to see it gets a biscuit or a piece of cake? Why don’t we,” continued Aileen, getting down to brass tacks, “go and look at corpses and then we’ll get a biscuit too?”
It was dead easy (if you’ll excuse the expression) to spot the house with a corpse in it because the curtains were drawn at the front of the house.
So those two little girls went round knocking at doors to offer to “say a prayer,” (Kath’s exact words) “over the corpse”, upon which they were ushered into the parlour and, having admired how beatifully laid-out the corpse was, they'd get cracking.
Usually one Hail Mary would do the trick, but sometimes they had to throw in an Our Father as well before the biscuits were produced, while the householder looked on, sometimes moved to tears by this display of infant piety. There was one occasion, however, where Aileen decided to cut and run when, after a whole decade of the Rosary (!) no biscuits were forthcoming. “All that praying,” said Aileen in disgust when they were out on the street again, “for nothing!”
It came to an end, however, as all good things do, when the Headmistress of the school, a ferocious nun of the old-fashioned type, wise to any form of rannygazoo, called them into her office. “I hear,” she said, “that you’ve got a new hobby.”
Kath and Aileen looked at each other for moral support and Kath demurely said, “We’re only saying prayers.”
Even the most clued-up nun couldn’t actually object to that, but she wasn’t fooled. “In future, I think you should restrict your payers to church.”
So that’s what they did.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Thirty Nine Old Steps
I’ve been re-visiting some old friends recently. Books, I mean, but these are books I’ve known for years, and to pick up an old favourite is very like meeting an old friend.
Take The 39 Steps for instance. This book suffers, like other very well-known books, from people sure they’ve read the book whereas they’ve actually seen the Hitchcock film. There’s no problem with the Hitchcock film against which all other film adaptations are measured (Buchan himself enjoyed it very much) but it isn’t the book.
Now, the quest for identity in The 39 Steps can result in hilarity. Richard Hannay has an uncanny ability in the matter of disguises. Disguise, of course, was de rigueur for any detective or thriller hero of the time, more or less by public demand. Sherlock Holmes never felt happier than fooling Dr Watson whilst disguised as a tramp, a Lascar seaman, an out-of-work groom or whatever, and where Sherlock trod, fictional heroes for the next thirty or forty years or so more or less either reacted to or from this Canonical pattern, and Hannay faithfully followed suite.
He meets his match, of course, in the sinister chief of the Black Stone gang, who’s even better at disguise than Hannay. (The chief of the Black Stone, Graf von Schwabing, was such a useful villian, by the way, that Hannay has to defeat him all over again in Mr Standfast and this time, unlike a Fu Manchu, for instance, the elusive Big Black Spider of German Intelligence stayed dead.)
Now, so far, so jolly. However, the beginning of The 39 Steps does hint at something a little deeper. Hannay, in that hot summer on the eve of War, has recently arrived from South Africa, a mining engineer of Scottish descent who has made his money. Like many another Buchan hero, he’s achieved success and, having got it, doesn’t know what to do with himself. He doesn’t, in fact, know quite who he is. Fortunately for Hannay, the unfortunate Scudder, to whom he’s given houseroom, ends up pinned to the floor of the flat with a long dagger and Hannay, immediately suspected by the police, disguises himself as a milkman and – for no very clear reason – runs off to Scotland.
Hannay spends the rest of the book in a bewildering series of disguises and – follow me closely – it’s only when he’s pretending to be someone else that he feels he’s recovered the truth of who he really is.
Not only that, but Hannay, being Hannay, and not Sherlock Holmes, feels he has to explain his facility with disguise. He does it by citing his old fried, Peter Pindaar, the Boer hunter, who has told Hannay that if he wants to disguise himself properly – this obviously being a prime need in South Africa – he has to do more than put on another man’s clothes, he has to be the other man; he has to take on his thoughts, his feelings and his identity. It’s significant, isn’t it?
I’ve talked about The 39 Steps because it’s Buchan’s best-known book. Immensely readable, it hurtles along and is the book that has ensured the rest of the Buchan thrillers are continuously in print. However, in the rest of Buchan, the same themes crop up over and over again; success is greatly prized – and Buchan was a Border Scot with a proper appreciation of success – but it always leaves a “what now?” feeling. Buchan’s books usually start with a feeling of ennui. Then the hero has to lose himself; a process is that always physically demanding, usually calling for him to live on the edge of whatever society he’s in and almost always involves disguise.
I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to see this as having it’s roots in Buchan’s abiding uncertainty about his world. A poor boy, he had taken virtually every prize the world had to offer. He was a famous author, yes, but also figured prominently in politics. An enthusiastic hunter, fisherman, walker and mountaineer, he was forced by wretched ill-health to spend long periods as an invalid. He ended up as the greatly-loved Governor-General of Canada and even achieved, with a blissfully happy marriage, a successful home-life. (So does Hannay; one feels Hannay’s home-life is a reflection of Buchan’s but with fewer megalomaniacs plotting to take over the world.) Was it enough? Perhaps not.
It’s very touching that in Sick Heart River, his most introspective book and the one he completed a few days before his own death, Edward Leithen, the dying hero, is seen to be more, far more, than the English gentleman and Decent Chap that his companions thought him. At long last, he finds peace. It reads like an epitaph for his author.
Take The 39 Steps for instance. This book suffers, like other very well-known books, from people sure they’ve read the book whereas they’ve actually seen the Hitchcock film. There’s no problem with the Hitchcock film against which all other film adaptations are measured (Buchan himself enjoyed it very much) but it isn’t the book.
Now, the quest for identity in The 39 Steps can result in hilarity. Richard Hannay has an uncanny ability in the matter of disguises. Disguise, of course, was de rigueur for any detective or thriller hero of the time, more or less by public demand. Sherlock Holmes never felt happier than fooling Dr Watson whilst disguised as a tramp, a Lascar seaman, an out-of-work groom or whatever, and where Sherlock trod, fictional heroes for the next thirty or forty years or so more or less either reacted to or from this Canonical pattern, and Hannay faithfully followed suite.
He meets his match, of course, in the sinister chief of the Black Stone gang, who’s even better at disguise than Hannay. (The chief of the Black Stone, Graf von Schwabing, was such a useful villian, by the way, that Hannay has to defeat him all over again in Mr Standfast and this time, unlike a Fu Manchu, for instance, the elusive Big Black Spider of German Intelligence stayed dead.)
Now, so far, so jolly. However, the beginning of The 39 Steps does hint at something a little deeper. Hannay, in that hot summer on the eve of War, has recently arrived from South Africa, a mining engineer of Scottish descent who has made his money. Like many another Buchan hero, he’s achieved success and, having got it, doesn’t know what to do with himself. He doesn’t, in fact, know quite who he is. Fortunately for Hannay, the unfortunate Scudder, to whom he’s given houseroom, ends up pinned to the floor of the flat with a long dagger and Hannay, immediately suspected by the police, disguises himself as a milkman and – for no very clear reason – runs off to Scotland.
Hannay spends the rest of the book in a bewildering series of disguises and – follow me closely – it’s only when he’s pretending to be someone else that he feels he’s recovered the truth of who he really is.
Not only that, but Hannay, being Hannay, and not Sherlock Holmes, feels he has to explain his facility with disguise. He does it by citing his old fried, Peter Pindaar, the Boer hunter, who has told Hannay that if he wants to disguise himself properly – this obviously being a prime need in South Africa – he has to do more than put on another man’s clothes, he has to be the other man; he has to take on his thoughts, his feelings and his identity. It’s significant, isn’t it?
I’ve talked about The 39 Steps because it’s Buchan’s best-known book. Immensely readable, it hurtles along and is the book that has ensured the rest of the Buchan thrillers are continuously in print. However, in the rest of Buchan, the same themes crop up over and over again; success is greatly prized – and Buchan was a Border Scot with a proper appreciation of success – but it always leaves a “what now?” feeling. Buchan’s books usually start with a feeling of ennui. Then the hero has to lose himself; a process is that always physically demanding, usually calling for him to live on the edge of whatever society he’s in and almost always involves disguise.
I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to see this as having it’s roots in Buchan’s abiding uncertainty about his world. A poor boy, he had taken virtually every prize the world had to offer. He was a famous author, yes, but also figured prominently in politics. An enthusiastic hunter, fisherman, walker and mountaineer, he was forced by wretched ill-health to spend long periods as an invalid. He ended up as the greatly-loved Governor-General of Canada and even achieved, with a blissfully happy marriage, a successful home-life. (So does Hannay; one feels Hannay’s home-life is a reflection of Buchan’s but with fewer megalomaniacs plotting to take over the world.) Was it enough? Perhaps not.
It’s very touching that in Sick Heart River, his most introspective book and the one he completed a few days before his own death, Edward Leithen, the dying hero, is seen to be more, far more, than the English gentleman and Decent Chap that his companions thought him. At long last, he finds peace. It reads like an epitaph for his author.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Baking the Books
My sister bought me a bread maker, so I’ve been baking my own bread recently. Now some people, undoubtedly, think this is a bit of a cheat, as what the machine cuts out all the kneading, knocking down, more kneading etc – but I choose what goes in there and the end result tastes fantastic.
You put all the ingredients in, set the machine (which is really a mini oven with a mixing blade) and three hours or so later, out comes a loaf.
I was thinking about the bread maker when I read about an event called NaNoWriMo on the mystery website, DorothyL. NaNoWriMo (I can’t say it without doing a cod Chinese accent) is short for National Novel Writing Month.
That’s the first little hint to be wary. Is your life so frantic that you haven’t got time for a few extra syllables? Even when – granted that language is meant to be a means of communication – your listener or reader hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about? Chill, guys. You can write shorthand, but do you have to speak it?
So what is National Novel Writing Month? Well, the idea is to write 50,000 words in a month. If you’re not used to thinking in word counts, it’s useful to know that’s an awful lot, but the shortest published novels are usually round the 60-65 thousand words, which is 10-15,000 words short. A usual sort of average for a writer is something around a 1,000 or so words a day.
Some writers, of course, write a great deal faster. Barbara Cartland could knock out a book in a fortnight or so, Edgar Wallace dictated a entire novel in the course of a weekend (it’s called The Devil Man if you’re curious) and there are a good few others, most famously, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days. However, these surely are the exceptions.
The point of writing is to be read. And, by and large, the way to write the very best you can, is to plan it. Then to write it. And then to go over it, however many times it takes. And, incidentally, take time to do lots more planning on the way. If you are bursting with inspiration, as Stevenson was, don’t hang about, certainly, but that story came to him in a dream. That means his subconscious was bubbling away with it for how long beforehand?
Surely the most likely result of driving yourself nearly mental for a month to produce 50,000 words is to have a sort of literary fast food, when, with more time, you could have a gourmet meal.
To go back to the bread maker, the flour, milk and yeast etcetera go in the pan, together with any added extras that occur to you. It all, to be honest, looks a real mess and the only result of tucking into the bread-in-waiting at this stage would be a long, thoughtful stint on the loo! But give it time and heat, those separate elements miraculously transform into a delicious loaf. So give it some time. Anything less is half-baked!
You put all the ingredients in, set the machine (which is really a mini oven with a mixing blade) and three hours or so later, out comes a loaf.
I was thinking about the bread maker when I read about an event called NaNoWriMo on the mystery website, DorothyL. NaNoWriMo (I can’t say it without doing a cod Chinese accent) is short for National Novel Writing Month.
That’s the first little hint to be wary. Is your life so frantic that you haven’t got time for a few extra syllables? Even when – granted that language is meant to be a means of communication – your listener or reader hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about? Chill, guys. You can write shorthand, but do you have to speak it?
So what is National Novel Writing Month? Well, the idea is to write 50,000 words in a month. If you’re not used to thinking in word counts, it’s useful to know that’s an awful lot, but the shortest published novels are usually round the 60-65 thousand words, which is 10-15,000 words short. A usual sort of average for a writer is something around a 1,000 or so words a day.
Some writers, of course, write a great deal faster. Barbara Cartland could knock out a book in a fortnight or so, Edgar Wallace dictated a entire novel in the course of a weekend (it’s called The Devil Man if you’re curious) and there are a good few others, most famously, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days. However, these surely are the exceptions.
The point of writing is to be read. And, by and large, the way to write the very best you can, is to plan it. Then to write it. And then to go over it, however many times it takes. And, incidentally, take time to do lots more planning on the way. If you are bursting with inspiration, as Stevenson was, don’t hang about, certainly, but that story came to him in a dream. That means his subconscious was bubbling away with it for how long beforehand?
Surely the most likely result of driving yourself nearly mental for a month to produce 50,000 words is to have a sort of literary fast food, when, with more time, you could have a gourmet meal.
To go back to the bread maker, the flour, milk and yeast etcetera go in the pan, together with any added extras that occur to you. It all, to be honest, looks a real mess and the only result of tucking into the bread-in-waiting at this stage would be a long, thoughtful stint on the loo! But give it time and heat, those separate elements miraculously transform into a delicious loaf. So give it some time. Anything less is half-baked!
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Stephen Fry Gets It Wrong
I don’t know about you, but I love the TV programme, Q.I.
The main reason for loving it is that it’s presented by Stephen Fry who is dead funny, hugely urbane, unfailingly polite and very (not Quite as the programme title would have it) Interesting, with the amounts of facts, knowledge and quirky little bits of information at his fingertips. An ideal dinner guest? You bet. I’d even bring the wine. And the food. And my full attention. And bore everyone stupid about it for the rest of my life. He’s worth watching whatever he does, but sometimes he’s gets it wrong.
Last night, for example, he threw into the conversation (it was about the weirder ways of collecting tax, of all things) that there was no evidence at all – none whatsoever – for the famous census which took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. By the time he’d finished, the whole of idea of the Romans having a census, with everyone trooping back obediently to their place of origin, seemed downright dorky.
Now, it’s perfectly true that we don’t have the census record for Bethlehem in BC/AD whatever, but the Romans certainly did take censuses (or should that be censii?). They were a bureaucracy, after all and, like all bureaucracies, loved records. In Roman Egypt census returns were made every fourteen years from about A.D. 20 till the time of Constantine. Many of these census papers have been discovered (they were called apographai, the name used by St. Luke.) In the Venice Archaeological Museum, there’s the tombstone of a Roman Knight, one Q. Aemilius Secundus, who was decorated for his service in Syria under Augustus and who also conducted a census of 117,000 citizens. In the British Museum there’s a papyrus from Roman Egypt AD 104 which orders people to return to their homes for a census.
So although we haven’t got the actual census, to say that the idea is inherently silly seems – well, silly.
Incidentally, years ago, when things were a bit more settled in the Middle East, I heard a spokesman for the Bethlehem Tourist Board on the radio asking, in a rather despairing kind of way, that if people wanted to visit Bethlehem, could they do so at another time of year than Christmas. “You can’t,” he said, “get a bed for love or money in Bethlehem at Christmas.”
Some things never change!
The main reason for loving it is that it’s presented by Stephen Fry who is dead funny, hugely urbane, unfailingly polite and very (not Quite as the programme title would have it) Interesting, with the amounts of facts, knowledge and quirky little bits of information at his fingertips. An ideal dinner guest? You bet. I’d even bring the wine. And the food. And my full attention. And bore everyone stupid about it for the rest of my life. He’s worth watching whatever he does, but sometimes he’s gets it wrong.
Last night, for example, he threw into the conversation (it was about the weirder ways of collecting tax, of all things) that there was no evidence at all – none whatsoever – for the famous census which took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. By the time he’d finished, the whole of idea of the Romans having a census, with everyone trooping back obediently to their place of origin, seemed downright dorky.
Now, it’s perfectly true that we don’t have the census record for Bethlehem in BC/AD whatever, but the Romans certainly did take censuses (or should that be censii?). They were a bureaucracy, after all and, like all bureaucracies, loved records. In Roman Egypt census returns were made every fourteen years from about A.D. 20 till the time of Constantine. Many of these census papers have been discovered (they were called apographai, the name used by St. Luke.) In the Venice Archaeological Museum, there’s the tombstone of a Roman Knight, one Q. Aemilius Secundus, who was decorated for his service in Syria under Augustus and who also conducted a census of 117,000 citizens. In the British Museum there’s a papyrus from Roman Egypt AD 104 which orders people to return to their homes for a census.
So although we haven’t got the actual census, to say that the idea is inherently silly seems – well, silly.
Incidentally, years ago, when things were a bit more settled in the Middle East, I heard a spokesman for the Bethlehem Tourist Board on the radio asking, in a rather despairing kind of way, that if people wanted to visit Bethlehem, could they do so at another time of year than Christmas. “You can’t,” he said, “get a bed for love or money in Bethlehem at Christmas.”
Some things never change!
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Decling Dolores or What's In A Name?
My pal Elaine asked me to come and talk to the Girl Guide troop she runs about being an author. This was part of a evening devoted to giving the girls ideas about what sort of job they’d like in later life, so we had a doctor, a chief and a teacher (all women) and me.
The doctor, the chief and the teacher didn’t have a problem I had; convincing the kids I wasn’t an Evil Genius. The problem was my name.
If I had to put my hand on my heart and own up, I have to say I’m not crazy about the name “Dolores”. Hardly anyone can spell it and precious few can say it from a standing start. When I was a kid, my friend Anne’s mother used to sing an old Bing Crosby number, How I love the kisses of Dolores, every time I walked through the door. This was trying.
Moving on to secondary school, we did Latin. Wow. What an absolute scream. I mean, it’s bad enough trying to address a table (mensa, mensam, mensae – who wants to say all that to a table?) followed by the side-splitting moment when we – we being thirty-five thirteen year-olds, all anxious to point out one another’s shortcomings - reached the Third Declension and My Name was declined, so to speak.
Dolor, Doloris, Dolori, Dolorem, Dolore in the singular (and there was only one of me) or Dolores, Dolorum, Doloribus, and - I know it sounds like repetition but it’s the Accusative and Ablative - back to Dolores and Doloribus.
At this point Life teaches us it could be worse. I mean, I could have been Doloribus… Which sounds as if a kind Municipal Authority runs a transport service just for Me, but would (I feel this instinctively) have caused Hilarity.
The trouble is, however you decline it, the word Dolores means Pain, Grief and Suffering.
And I’d decline all that, no problem.
It’s because of the meaning of the word Dolores that JK Rowling bestowed the name Dolores on Professor Umbridge, Ministry of Magic employee, sometime Headmistress of Hogwarts, a woman whose idea of detention is to make Harry repeatedly carve on the back of his hand, in his own blood, the words, I must not tell lies. Add to that, being the most boring teacher in the world, undermining Dumbledore, flinging anyone in prison who disagrees with her and setting the Dementors loose in Little Whinging, Surrey, and you get a picture of an all-round bad egg. I mean, Voldermort is utterly evil, but Dolores Umbridge is just pants.
So, the girl guides reacted with alarm when Elaine brightly said, “Here’s Dolores!”
At least they didn’t sing Big Crosby at me. And Harry Potter was a good place to start talking about books.
But I still remember the wise words of Bertie Wooster, addressed to Jeeves; “My word, Jeeves, there’s some raw work at the font!”
Exactly.
The doctor, the chief and the teacher didn’t have a problem I had; convincing the kids I wasn’t an Evil Genius. The problem was my name.
If I had to put my hand on my heart and own up, I have to say I’m not crazy about the name “Dolores”. Hardly anyone can spell it and precious few can say it from a standing start. When I was a kid, my friend Anne’s mother used to sing an old Bing Crosby number, How I love the kisses of Dolores, every time I walked through the door. This was trying.
Moving on to secondary school, we did Latin. Wow. What an absolute scream. I mean, it’s bad enough trying to address a table (mensa, mensam, mensae – who wants to say all that to a table?) followed by the side-splitting moment when we – we being thirty-five thirteen year-olds, all anxious to point out one another’s shortcomings - reached the Third Declension and My Name was declined, so to speak.
Dolor, Doloris, Dolori, Dolorem, Dolore in the singular (and there was only one of me) or Dolores, Dolorum, Doloribus, and - I know it sounds like repetition but it’s the Accusative and Ablative - back to Dolores and Doloribus.
At this point Life teaches us it could be worse. I mean, I could have been Doloribus… Which sounds as if a kind Municipal Authority runs a transport service just for Me, but would (I feel this instinctively) have caused Hilarity.
The trouble is, however you decline it, the word Dolores means Pain, Grief and Suffering.
And I’d decline all that, no problem.
It’s because of the meaning of the word Dolores that JK Rowling bestowed the name Dolores on Professor Umbridge, Ministry of Magic employee, sometime Headmistress of Hogwarts, a woman whose idea of detention is to make Harry repeatedly carve on the back of his hand, in his own blood, the words, I must not tell lies. Add to that, being the most boring teacher in the world, undermining Dumbledore, flinging anyone in prison who disagrees with her and setting the Dementors loose in Little Whinging, Surrey, and you get a picture of an all-round bad egg. I mean, Voldermort is utterly evil, but Dolores Umbridge is just pants.
So, the girl guides reacted with alarm when Elaine brightly said, “Here’s Dolores!”
At least they didn’t sing Big Crosby at me. And Harry Potter was a good place to start talking about books.
But I still remember the wise words of Bertie Wooster, addressed to Jeeves; “My word, Jeeves, there’s some raw work at the font!”
Exactly.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Titles
I’ve been thinking about titles for the last couple of days. No, not those sort of titles! Not the Countess of Whatever or Lord Whoever or (descending down the social scale) The Reverend, Doctor or plain Mister, Missus or Ms.
No, I’m talking about book titles.
You see. titles are really important and it’s sometimes surprising for anyone who hasn’t written a book to find out that the poor writer can have cheerfully motored through hundreds of pages, thousands of words, zillions of re-writes and still doesn’t know what to call the ruddy thing.
It doesn’t always happen like that, of course. Inspiration struck almost right away with As If By Magic because it seemed to sum up the whole idea behind the book so neatly. It’s also a well-known phrase which (I hope) makes a prospective reader think they’ve heard of it, even when they haven’t.
The trouble is, a title has to mean something, and not just be a nice collection of random words. It has to say something about the story, not actively put off any of those rare, almost faun-like creatures, book-buyers, and - this is a bonus – sound good.
The latest of Jack’s adventures, which I’ve just sent in to the publishers, concerns a firm of coffee importers embroiled in various dark and underhand doings. When I thought of title Trouble Brewing I had a warm, fluffy feeling of satisfaction of having got it exactly right, but it took some considerable cogitation. Good, eh?
Off The Record is about gramophones and the race to develop a commercial electrical recording system. That’s OK. Dead clever, actually.
A Hundred Thousand Dragons is actually (obliquely I admit) about a hundred thousand dragons and sounds ace.
Mad About The Boy? is, of course, from the song by Noel Coward. It’s the right period, reflects Isabelle’s emotional turmoil as she tries to choose the right bloke, one of the aforesaid blokes is a Bit Odd (aka Mad) and that shrewdly placed question mark is meant to give a frisson of anticipation.
I wish, sometimes, I’d gone for broke and used Jack’s name in the title, such as Jack Haldean and the Murder in the Fortune-Teller’s Tent (it was actually called A Fete Worse Than Death) rather in the style of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Actually, I don’t half wish I had written a book called Jack Haldean and the Philosopher’s Stone, but some bright spark would probably say I’d copied it or something. They’d probably say the same thing if I turned out Jack Haldean and Pride and Prejudice or even Jack Haldean and the Flopsy Bunnies. You know how people are.
But I didn’t.
No, I’m talking about book titles.
You see. titles are really important and it’s sometimes surprising for anyone who hasn’t written a book to find out that the poor writer can have cheerfully motored through hundreds of pages, thousands of words, zillions of re-writes and still doesn’t know what to call the ruddy thing.
It doesn’t always happen like that, of course. Inspiration struck almost right away with As If By Magic because it seemed to sum up the whole idea behind the book so neatly. It’s also a well-known phrase which (I hope) makes a prospective reader think they’ve heard of it, even when they haven’t.
The trouble is, a title has to mean something, and not just be a nice collection of random words. It has to say something about the story, not actively put off any of those rare, almost faun-like creatures, book-buyers, and - this is a bonus – sound good.
The latest of Jack’s adventures, which I’ve just sent in to the publishers, concerns a firm of coffee importers embroiled in various dark and underhand doings. When I thought of title Trouble Brewing I had a warm, fluffy feeling of satisfaction of having got it exactly right, but it took some considerable cogitation. Good, eh?
Off The Record is about gramophones and the race to develop a commercial electrical recording system. That’s OK. Dead clever, actually.
A Hundred Thousand Dragons is actually (obliquely I admit) about a hundred thousand dragons and sounds ace.
Mad About The Boy? is, of course, from the song by Noel Coward. It’s the right period, reflects Isabelle’s emotional turmoil as she tries to choose the right bloke, one of the aforesaid blokes is a Bit Odd (aka Mad) and that shrewdly placed question mark is meant to give a frisson of anticipation.
I wish, sometimes, I’d gone for broke and used Jack’s name in the title, such as Jack Haldean and the Murder in the Fortune-Teller’s Tent (it was actually called A Fete Worse Than Death) rather in the style of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Actually, I don’t half wish I had written a book called Jack Haldean and the Philosopher’s Stone, but some bright spark would probably say I’d copied it or something. They’d probably say the same thing if I turned out Jack Haldean and Pride and Prejudice or even Jack Haldean and the Flopsy Bunnies. You know how people are.
But I didn’t.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Harvest Festival and Stardust
I was thinking about harvests this morning (as you do).
I actually had every reason to be thinking about harvests, as I was helped the kids in church celebrate a harvest festival, a very jolly occasion that involved putting lots of little kids under a brown sheet to be Seeds. Seeds giggle a lot. Then there’s the pretend rain that waters them and the pretend sun that warms them and – lo and behold! – the Seeds all grew, giggling madly, were harvested and got gathered into the (pretend) barn.
It’s great how much pretending little kids are prepared to do. It looks great too, as the kids’ Mums and Dads brought in food, such as fresh fruit and veg, chocolate treats and lots of useful tins which were then taken up to the altar in nice wicker baskets and then to a home for homeless young people (if you see what I mean) where teenagers who are too old for care homes have a halfway-house before living independently. Cooking is one of the skills volunteers teach in the home and that’s where the fresh veg and all the other gifts will be used.
Living in Manchester (not your most pastoral of areas) it’s sometimes difficult to see the connection between things that grow and what we eat and celebrating the harvest helps not only the kids but all the adults involved take some time out to appreciate that our tin of tomatoes or corned beef or chicken ding microwave dinner actually did start off growing.
Being a church service, of course, there’s some very old prayers and hymns about God who created everything and everyone, and the stunning thing is that despite being a very old idea, its absolutely true that all the universe and everything in it (including the giggling kids and the tin of tomatoes) have a common source.
For instance, the cabbage that was on the altar has about 40-50% of its DNA in common with the kind soul who gave it, and the same can be said for the tomatoes and the carrots. And we can trace the origins of absolutely everything back to that moment of the Big Bang when the universe started and the first hydrogen and helium atoms came into being.
The stars are chemical powerhouses and within them formed heavy elements and the complex molecules necessary for that tin of corned beef, the can-opener and the human being to enjoy the sandwich. It takes a star to explode as a Supernova to get the right sort of enriched interstellar gases to form a solid rock and metal planet such as the Earth and about three generations of stars to get the right material to form our sun, its planets and the right chemical mix for life to get going. All the molecules within you have been in two previous stars. Wow. We are, as the astronomer Carl Sagan said, made of stardust. As I said, it’s a very old idea…
I actually had every reason to be thinking about harvests, as I was helped the kids in church celebrate a harvest festival, a very jolly occasion that involved putting lots of little kids under a brown sheet to be Seeds. Seeds giggle a lot. Then there’s the pretend rain that waters them and the pretend sun that warms them and – lo and behold! – the Seeds all grew, giggling madly, were harvested and got gathered into the (pretend) barn.
It’s great how much pretending little kids are prepared to do. It looks great too, as the kids’ Mums and Dads brought in food, such as fresh fruit and veg, chocolate treats and lots of useful tins which were then taken up to the altar in nice wicker baskets and then to a home for homeless young people (if you see what I mean) where teenagers who are too old for care homes have a halfway-house before living independently. Cooking is one of the skills volunteers teach in the home and that’s where the fresh veg and all the other gifts will be used.
Living in Manchester (not your most pastoral of areas) it’s sometimes difficult to see the connection between things that grow and what we eat and celebrating the harvest helps not only the kids but all the adults involved take some time out to appreciate that our tin of tomatoes or corned beef or chicken ding microwave dinner actually did start off growing.
Being a church service, of course, there’s some very old prayers and hymns about God who created everything and everyone, and the stunning thing is that despite being a very old idea, its absolutely true that all the universe and everything in it (including the giggling kids and the tin of tomatoes) have a common source.
For instance, the cabbage that was on the altar has about 40-50% of its DNA in common with the kind soul who gave it, and the same can be said for the tomatoes and the carrots. And we can trace the origins of absolutely everything back to that moment of the Big Bang when the universe started and the first hydrogen and helium atoms came into being.
The stars are chemical powerhouses and within them formed heavy elements and the complex molecules necessary for that tin of corned beef, the can-opener and the human being to enjoy the sandwich. It takes a star to explode as a Supernova to get the right sort of enriched interstellar gases to form a solid rock and metal planet such as the Earth and about three generations of stars to get the right material to form our sun, its planets and the right chemical mix for life to get going. All the molecules within you have been in two previous stars. Wow. We are, as the astronomer Carl Sagan said, made of stardust. As I said, it’s a very old idea…
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Goodbye, Steve
It’s sad, isn’t it? England crashing out of the Rugby World Cup, I mean. Trust the ruddy French. They’ve been playing dreadfully and we’ve been doing OK. Then, as soon as they come up against us – bingo. They play like things inspired and we continue to play OK. So that’s the end of early morning sessions round the TV, with dogs unfed, cats look quizzically at their bowls and the goldfish and guppies in their respective tanks goggling hopefully though the glass while the Gordon-Smiths go “Ooo” and “Argh!” and “Pass it! Don’t kick it!” at fifteen men on the other side of the television screen in New Zealand.
Yes, of course we’ll watch the other games – and come on Wales, you’re the only home side left now – but some of the sparkle has gone out of Saturday mornings. Still, the dogs, cats and fish should be happy.
I wasn’t happy to hear the news about Steve Jobs. He did something really special, by making the design part of the product. I first came across a mention of a mysterious thing called an MP3 player in a Michael Crichton book - Prey I think it was – and my next encounter with an MP3 player was when the young Helen asked for one for Christmas. It’s amazing how this stuff creeps up on you, isn’t it? Suddenly everyone had an MP3 player and I was asked to marvel at a tiny device that could store gadzillions of tracks, more music than you could ever possibly listen to, and CD’s were now outmoded etc, etc and the fact that you couldn’t actually pick out a particular song was sort of lost in the gosh-wowness of there being thousands of songs or tracks on a hand-held device.
But, with Steve Jobs’ ipod you could pick out a particular track. The ipod looks lovely, feels great in your hand and works in the way all beautifully designed products do, by simply working simply. It’s dead easy to use and lets you listen to music without being a geek or computer nerd. In the many tributes to him, it was said that he went over designs again and again before, eventually, they were right. This is so similar to editing a book that it rang a real chord with me. The first effort, the first idea is vital, but after that comes so much extra work to fine-tune it and make it the best that you possibly can. This is where the real labour of love stuff comes in, to make what you’re working on much more than passable but better than it needs to be. (Perhaps England's rugby players could take note.) We’ll be playing music on the ipod tonight while we have our Sunday night bottle of wine game of Scrabble and I’ll raise a glass to Steve Jobs’ memory. Nice one, Steve.
Yes, of course we’ll watch the other games – and come on Wales, you’re the only home side left now – but some of the sparkle has gone out of Saturday mornings. Still, the dogs, cats and fish should be happy.
I wasn’t happy to hear the news about Steve Jobs. He did something really special, by making the design part of the product. I first came across a mention of a mysterious thing called an MP3 player in a Michael Crichton book - Prey I think it was – and my next encounter with an MP3 player was when the young Helen asked for one for Christmas. It’s amazing how this stuff creeps up on you, isn’t it? Suddenly everyone had an MP3 player and I was asked to marvel at a tiny device that could store gadzillions of tracks, more music than you could ever possibly listen to, and CD’s were now outmoded etc, etc and the fact that you couldn’t actually pick out a particular song was sort of lost in the gosh-wowness of there being thousands of songs or tracks on a hand-held device.
But, with Steve Jobs’ ipod you could pick out a particular track. The ipod looks lovely, feels great in your hand and works in the way all beautifully designed products do, by simply working simply. It’s dead easy to use and lets you listen to music without being a geek or computer nerd. In the many tributes to him, it was said that he went over designs again and again before, eventually, they were right. This is so similar to editing a book that it rang a real chord with me. The first effort, the first idea is vital, but after that comes so much extra work to fine-tune it and make it the best that you possibly can. This is where the real labour of love stuff comes in, to make what you’re working on much more than passable but better than it needs to be. (Perhaps England's rugby players could take note.) We’ll be playing music on the ipod tonight while we have our Sunday night bottle of wine game of Scrabble and I’ll raise a glass to Steve Jobs’ memory. Nice one, Steve.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Puns and Feathered Friends
I was tootling round the internet and stopped off at my old mate, Jane Finnis’s, blog where she (with a truly awful pun) was writing about blue tits eating caterpillars that munch their way through horse-chestnut leaves. Here’s the link so you can see that somebody really does make worse puns than I do: http://www.janefinnis.com/
It’s interesting – or, okay, it might not be that interesting, but I’m going to talk about it anyway – why we groan loudly when puns are made. After all, they’re fairly witty, aren’t they? I think they’re a bit like the jokes in Christmas crackers. Because they’re meant to be awful, everyone can join in. If Christmas dinner was actually a feast of wit and a flow of soul, reminiscent of an Eighteenth Century Salon or dinner with Oscar Wilde, it’d leave most of us looking and feeling like numptys, breeding resentment and discord instead of peace and good will.
It’s the same with puns. They’re awful and they’re meant to be awful – even when they’re really good – so everyone can join in with the pun-fest.
One of my favourite puns though, is the pun that wasn’t. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, because it’s one of my favourite stories.
A pal of mine – let’s call her Ethel - was in hospital recovering from a mastectomy (admittedly this isn’t one of the most promising openings you’ve ever heard to a funny story!) when she was visited by her old friend, Yorkshire Sid. Now both Ethel and Sid were very keen bird watchers, never happier when crouched beneath a rudely constructed heap of twigs with a pair of binoculars, watching Our Feathered Friends going about their everyday business. Sid was lamenting Ethel’s absence from the bird-watching fray.
“Eee, Ethel,” he said. “I do hope as how you’re up and about and can come out with us again soon. We’ve had some belting sightings. We’ve had nuthatchs and finches and some lovely t-t-t-t (gulp) and other birds!”
It’s interesting – or, okay, it might not be that interesting, but I’m going to talk about it anyway – why we groan loudly when puns are made. After all, they’re fairly witty, aren’t they? I think they’re a bit like the jokes in Christmas crackers. Because they’re meant to be awful, everyone can join in. If Christmas dinner was actually a feast of wit and a flow of soul, reminiscent of an Eighteenth Century Salon or dinner with Oscar Wilde, it’d leave most of us looking and feeling like numptys, breeding resentment and discord instead of peace and good will.
It’s the same with puns. They’re awful and they’re meant to be awful – even when they’re really good – so everyone can join in with the pun-fest.
One of my favourite puns though, is the pun that wasn’t. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, because it’s one of my favourite stories.
A pal of mine – let’s call her Ethel - was in hospital recovering from a mastectomy (admittedly this isn’t one of the most promising openings you’ve ever heard to a funny story!) when she was visited by her old friend, Yorkshire Sid. Now both Ethel and Sid were very keen bird watchers, never happier when crouched beneath a rudely constructed heap of twigs with a pair of binoculars, watching Our Feathered Friends going about their everyday business. Sid was lamenting Ethel’s absence from the bird-watching fray.
“Eee, Ethel,” he said. “I do hope as how you’re up and about and can come out with us again soon. We’ve had some belting sightings. We’ve had nuthatchs and finches and some lovely t-t-t-t (gulp) and other birds!”
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Oddly Quiet
It was very, very quiet in the Gordon-Smith homestead last night. Jenny was out at a party and Lucy’s gone to university. Now don’t get me wrong; I want her to go to uni, but it’s such a weird feeling to know that she’s not just out for the evening but actually living somewhere else. The whole process is a bit weird. There are some sort of everyday-ish experiences that are well covered in fiction; meeting the man or woman of your dreams (there’s a whole genre devoted to that!) the family novel, where it’s the ups and downs of family life (The Family At One End Street is one of my favourites) moving to a new house or a new country and there’s plenty more. But I can’t think of a single book which covers the experience of parents suddenly bereft of their offspring because they’ve gone to Uni. Going to uni, yes, but for those of us “Who also serve who only stand and wait” as the Poet Milton would put it – no.
And it really is quiet.
And it really is quiet.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Paperbacks!
I’m delighted to say that the paperbacks of A Hundred Thousand Dragons and Off The Record have been released. I saw them both in Waterstones yesterday (and it’s a very nice feeling to see your book on the shelves, I can tell you!) so you can, of course, get them from Waterstones or, as the phrase goes, from any good bookshop. They’re “Trade” paperbacks, which means they’re sold to the trade or, as we usually say, to bookshops. Trade paperbacks are bigger than mass-market paperbacks and have superior paper and binding. They are, more or less, a hardback book but in a stiff paper cover and, of course, they’re cheaper than a hardback.
Amazon.co.uk have them both in stock. Amazon.com (USA) have A Hundred Thousand Dragons. Presumably Off The Record will be coming soon. However, although A Hundred Thousand Dragons is available from Amazon.co.uk, it takes some finding, for some mysterious reason, so here’s the link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hundred-Thousand-Dragons-Haldean-Mysteries/dp/1847512534/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1315765321&sr=8-4
The Amazon.com link is:
http://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Thousand-Dragons-Haldean-Mysteries/dp/1847512534/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315766046&sr=1-11
The Amazon.co.uk link for Off The Record is:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Off-Record-Jack-Haldean-Mysteries/dp/1847513042/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315765495&sr=1-7
Amazon.co.uk have them both in stock. Amazon.com (USA) have A Hundred Thousand Dragons. Presumably Off The Record will be coming soon. However, although A Hundred Thousand Dragons is available from Amazon.co.uk, it takes some finding, for some mysterious reason, so here’s the link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hundred-Thousand-Dragons-Haldean-Mysteries/dp/1847512534/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1315765321&sr=8-4
The Amazon.com link is:
http://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Thousand-Dragons-Haldean-Mysteries/dp/1847512534/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315766046&sr=1-11
The Amazon.co.uk link for Off The Record is:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Off-Record-Jack-Haldean-Mysteries/dp/1847513042/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315765495&sr=1-7
Monday, August 22, 2011
Finish it!
There was a letter in a writing magazine I picked up from Puzzled, UK, asking for advice. Puzzled is a member of a writing class and has written the first three chapters of a novel. So far so good. Puzzled’s tutor thinks it has potential. Even better. But – and this is where Puzzled needs advice – he doesn’t want to write any more in case he’s going in the wrong direction. He wants to send it out to publishers to get advice (praise?) on how good it is and what direction the novel should go in.
*Sigh*
Poor guy.
Don’t do it; just don’t do it.
One has ordinary feelings of human pity, after all.
Look, it’s not easy writing novels, not even bad ones. There’s a lot of typing for a start and times when, in the throes of Literature, you could have your feet up in front of Top Gear, walking the dog, catching up with your jet-setting celebrity lifestyle, drinking cocoa or counting how many matchsticks it will take to complete your model of Nelson’s Victory. Any of these activities can be seen as preferable to stewing away in front of a computer screen. Oh, I’d include cleaning the cat-tray and knocking nails into walls with my forehead along with those.
A partly-finished book is just that; unfinished. It’s absolutely impossible to tell if it’s any good unless you have the finished article. If Puzzled could stop thinking of himself as a writer and think of himself as a reader, then he’d answer his own question.
After all, how many books have you bought, Dear Reader, (to use a charming, old fashioned phrase) where the end’s missing? (Not counting the tatty paperback from outside the charity shop!) It’s not just books, either. If, for instance, we all flocked to see Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull and it stopped just as Indy approached the Hidden Temple because the writer couldn’t think what happened next, then there’d be tart, disgruntled comments and then some.
You see, despite some evidence to the contrary, editors and agents are human beings. I’m not kidding. Yes, I know certain of the tribe wear barbed-wire vests, breath fire and sacrifice their young under the full moon (we’ve all got faults) but honest to God, they’re human. They like to know how a story ends. And if the author doesn’t know how the story ends – well, who does? And why should they care? And if the novel has skidded off in the wrong direction? Well, it’s up to the author to fix it. And what’s the wrong direction anyhow?
Besides that, it’s only after finishing a book that you, the writer, gets to look at it as a whole. Is that the best place to start? Should I move the passage about the exploding nasal-hair tweezers to Chapter Four? Do I really need to include all that information about the home-life of Nabopolassar and the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the thrilling chase scene in Chapter Ten and should I make Michael Finnegan a de-frocked priest with the best collection of cheese-lables in South Dakota or a Belfast bus driver? And hasn’t the line It was all a dream been used before?
Finishing a book is only the start; there’s stuff to do afterwards.
And what if, after having spent ages writing it and it gets rejected? Well, I’m not sure how to break it to Puzzled, but there’s a chance this might happen. Some years ago, I attended a workshop run by Simon Trewin, the well-known agent. Mr Trewin, a highly-experienced professional, is open to new ideas and very encouraging to unpublished writers. But no one, he said, needs another novel. Sad, isn’t it? Particularly when that novel’s yours. Yep. And how many manuscripts does Mr Trewin get a year? Oh, about six thousand. And how many does he take on? About six.
So don’t put unnecessary obstacles in your way. There’s enough real ones to go round, believe you me. Writing can be fun, an enjoyable way of getting stuff off your chest, of recording events, of remembering what happened. It can be all these things and many more. But if you want other people to read it, please, Puzzled, finish it first.
*Sigh*
Poor guy.
Don’t do it; just don’t do it.
One has ordinary feelings of human pity, after all.
Look, it’s not easy writing novels, not even bad ones. There’s a lot of typing for a start and times when, in the throes of Literature, you could have your feet up in front of Top Gear, walking the dog, catching up with your jet-setting celebrity lifestyle, drinking cocoa or counting how many matchsticks it will take to complete your model of Nelson’s Victory. Any of these activities can be seen as preferable to stewing away in front of a computer screen. Oh, I’d include cleaning the cat-tray and knocking nails into walls with my forehead along with those.
A partly-finished book is just that; unfinished. It’s absolutely impossible to tell if it’s any good unless you have the finished article. If Puzzled could stop thinking of himself as a writer and think of himself as a reader, then he’d answer his own question.
After all, how many books have you bought, Dear Reader, (to use a charming, old fashioned phrase) where the end’s missing? (Not counting the tatty paperback from outside the charity shop!) It’s not just books, either. If, for instance, we all flocked to see Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull and it stopped just as Indy approached the Hidden Temple because the writer couldn’t think what happened next, then there’d be tart, disgruntled comments and then some.
You see, despite some evidence to the contrary, editors and agents are human beings. I’m not kidding. Yes, I know certain of the tribe wear barbed-wire vests, breath fire and sacrifice their young under the full moon (we’ve all got faults) but honest to God, they’re human. They like to know how a story ends. And if the author doesn’t know how the story ends – well, who does? And why should they care? And if the novel has skidded off in the wrong direction? Well, it’s up to the author to fix it. And what’s the wrong direction anyhow?
Besides that, it’s only after finishing a book that you, the writer, gets to look at it as a whole. Is that the best place to start? Should I move the passage about the exploding nasal-hair tweezers to Chapter Four? Do I really need to include all that information about the home-life of Nabopolassar and the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the thrilling chase scene in Chapter Ten and should I make Michael Finnegan a de-frocked priest with the best collection of cheese-lables in South Dakota or a Belfast bus driver? And hasn’t the line It was all a dream been used before?
Finishing a book is only the start; there’s stuff to do afterwards.
And what if, after having spent ages writing it and it gets rejected? Well, I’m not sure how to break it to Puzzled, but there’s a chance this might happen. Some years ago, I attended a workshop run by Simon Trewin, the well-known agent. Mr Trewin, a highly-experienced professional, is open to new ideas and very encouraging to unpublished writers. But no one, he said, needs another novel. Sad, isn’t it? Particularly when that novel’s yours. Yep. And how many manuscripts does Mr Trewin get a year? Oh, about six thousand. And how many does he take on? About six.
So don’t put unnecessary obstacles in your way. There’s enough real ones to go round, believe you me. Writing can be fun, an enjoyable way of getting stuff off your chest, of recording events, of remembering what happened. It can be all these things and many more. But if you want other people to read it, please, Puzzled, finish it first.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
What Would Grandma Do?
Peter was in London this week at the height of the Direct Shopping Spree (also known as riots) that were kicking off. The point is, he didn’t know they were happening. Not that he’s chronically unobservant, you understand, but he was in central London, not Tottenham, Croydon or Hackney. They were harder to miss in Manchester, as they were in the middle of town. It was only by a total fluke I decided not to go into Manchester that afternoon but to go shopping elsewhere, where all was peace and calm.
It’s often been said that, notwithstanding the fact that, by and large, we have better houses, are better fed, better off and better clothed than people only a few decades ago (i.e. we have more stuff and live longer to enjoy it) we’re more nervy and less optimistic than previous generations. Part of it's envy (ask any rioter) that there's really cool stuff heavily advertised that we can't afford. Part of that is, of course, taking for granted the things we do have which used to be the privilege of a very few, such as eating well all the time, having a car and lots of clothes.
If, say, my grandma could pop in from the 1930’s she’d wonder what anyone had to grumble about. The idea of a machine which did the laundry by the press of a button instead of hours scrubbing away at a washboard, a cooker which could switch on or off automatically, chickens that came ready-done instead of covered in feathers (she kept hens) a car to do the shopping in and her grandchildren, instead of going into Service as maids, as she did at the age of twelve, are going to, are at, or have been to university would have seemed like a cross between pure fantasy and unimaginable luxury. She wouldn’t be able to wait to pin her hat on and nip round to tell the neighbours about it…
And the neighbours would probably be out. Or not know her. Why? Because instead of standing at the front doorstep, grumbling about the weather, they’re all indoors with the telly on.
And the telly, in between adverts for perfect lifes fuelled by More Stuff with the subliminal message that if you don't have this product you're a complete saddo, tells us that London is virtually in a state of civil war and Manchester’s apocolyptic. All the problems that used to be comfortably Out There are now very much In Here, in our homes. In some ways, of course, this is a very good thing. We’re having a collection at church tomorrow for famine relief in the Horn of Africa, just one of the many, many collections that been have taken up to help the poor beggars who are starving. It feels like something we ought to help with, because we’ve all seen pictures of the famine on the telly.
Absolutely. Instead of just dealing with our own problems, we’re confronted with every truly awful problem everywhere, such as earthquakes, famines, wars and – to come back to where I came in – riots. It can feel like mere frivolity to be happy when life is so ghastly for others. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that It Could Be You, even though it isn’t and probably won’t be.
It’s ironic that the telly, which really is a window on a wide world, has made that world so much smaller. So don’t feel guilty when yet another pundit ticks you off on the telly for being more miserable than your ancestors and demands, in that hectoring way, that you should Cheer up! Now! Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s still ignorance. I don’t know what grandma would do, but we’re stuck with, I’m afraid.
It’s often been said that, notwithstanding the fact that, by and large, we have better houses, are better fed, better off and better clothed than people only a few decades ago (i.e. we have more stuff and live longer to enjoy it) we’re more nervy and less optimistic than previous generations. Part of it's envy (ask any rioter) that there's really cool stuff heavily advertised that we can't afford. Part of that is, of course, taking for granted the things we do have which used to be the privilege of a very few, such as eating well all the time, having a car and lots of clothes.
If, say, my grandma could pop in from the 1930’s she’d wonder what anyone had to grumble about. The idea of a machine which did the laundry by the press of a button instead of hours scrubbing away at a washboard, a cooker which could switch on or off automatically, chickens that came ready-done instead of covered in feathers (she kept hens) a car to do the shopping in and her grandchildren, instead of going into Service as maids, as she did at the age of twelve, are going to, are at, or have been to university would have seemed like a cross between pure fantasy and unimaginable luxury. She wouldn’t be able to wait to pin her hat on and nip round to tell the neighbours about it…
And the neighbours would probably be out. Or not know her. Why? Because instead of standing at the front doorstep, grumbling about the weather, they’re all indoors with the telly on.
And the telly, in between adverts for perfect lifes fuelled by More Stuff with the subliminal message that if you don't have this product you're a complete saddo, tells us that London is virtually in a state of civil war and Manchester’s apocolyptic. All the problems that used to be comfortably Out There are now very much In Here, in our homes. In some ways, of course, this is a very good thing. We’re having a collection at church tomorrow for famine relief in the Horn of Africa, just one of the many, many collections that been have taken up to help the poor beggars who are starving. It feels like something we ought to help with, because we’ve all seen pictures of the famine on the telly.
Absolutely. Instead of just dealing with our own problems, we’re confronted with every truly awful problem everywhere, such as earthquakes, famines, wars and – to come back to where I came in – riots. It can feel like mere frivolity to be happy when life is so ghastly for others. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that It Could Be You, even though it isn’t and probably won’t be.
It’s ironic that the telly, which really is a window on a wide world, has made that world so much smaller. So don’t feel guilty when yet another pundit ticks you off on the telly for being more miserable than your ancestors and demands, in that hectoring way, that you should Cheer up! Now! Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s still ignorance. I don’t know what grandma would do, but we’re stuck with, I’m afraid.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Castles in Wales
I’ve just got back from Pembrokeshire where the Gordon-Smiths disported themselves for the summer holiday. Disported is about the right word, because the kids did hugely energetic things like jet-ski-ing (Jenny only fell off once) and I achieved a lifetime’s ambition; I bought a wetsuit. For the last diddly-dum years I’ve stood on the edge of the various crusty bits of Britain while Peter, a hardy type, assures my from the briny blue that, “It’s all right once you get in! It’s lovely! Come on!”
And I, shivering by the sea, am forced, despite my better judgement, to plunge in. And, d’you what? It is cold and I do freeze. Not this year though! That layer of neoprene makes all the difference. Within a day, the entire family, bar Peter, had also bought wetsuits. Score: one to me, I think! Here's Elspeth and Jenny being happy.
It wasn’t all swimming, though. Pembrokeshire is home to loads of castles. There were three within easy reach of where we stayed; Pembroke itself, Carew and my favourite, Manorbier. It’s not very well know, but you might have seen it in the BBC TV adaptation of the Narnia Stories some years ago.
There’s proper rooms with enclosed passages so (because it isn’t very well known) you can get a proper Indiana Jones-y feeling of discovery. Pembroke Castle also has proper rooms and passages but there’s far more visitors. What Pembroke does have, though, is the Wogan Cave. This is a big cave in the base of Pembroke Rock itself, which was lived in in pre-historic times. There’s a huge gated entrance that overlooks the water, but you get to it by the 56 steps of the medieval spiral staircase. Oddly enough, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently dreaming up a cave used in ancient times where Jack encounters some fairly dark doings. Admittedly my cave is beneath a neo-Classical temple but a Norman castle is sort of close enough for me to feel that this was the place I’d been imagining brought to life.
If you’ve seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part one, you’ll know another place we visited. The dunes and beach of Freshwater West on the Atlantic coast is where Bill and Fleur’s Shell Cottage was filmed and where poor Dobby meets his end. It’s an amazing beach with a great sweep of sand. Shell Cottage, unfortunately, had to be taken down after it was filmed, but the beach is unmistakable. I can’t think of a better place for a house-elf to be buried!
And I, shivering by the sea, am forced, despite my better judgement, to plunge in. And, d’you what? It is cold and I do freeze. Not this year though! That layer of neoprene makes all the difference. Within a day, the entire family, bar Peter, had also bought wetsuits. Score: one to me, I think! Here's Elspeth and Jenny being happy.
It wasn’t all swimming, though. Pembrokeshire is home to loads of castles. There were three within easy reach of where we stayed; Pembroke itself, Carew and my favourite, Manorbier. It’s not very well know, but you might have seen it in the BBC TV adaptation of the Narnia Stories some years ago.
There’s proper rooms with enclosed passages so (because it isn’t very well known) you can get a proper Indiana Jones-y feeling of discovery. Pembroke Castle also has proper rooms and passages but there’s far more visitors. What Pembroke does have, though, is the Wogan Cave. This is a big cave in the base of Pembroke Rock itself, which was lived in in pre-historic times. There’s a huge gated entrance that overlooks the water, but you get to it by the 56 steps of the medieval spiral staircase. Oddly enough, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently dreaming up a cave used in ancient times where Jack encounters some fairly dark doings. Admittedly my cave is beneath a neo-Classical temple but a Norman castle is sort of close enough for me to feel that this was the place I’d been imagining brought to life.If you’ve seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part one, you’ll know another place we visited. The dunes and beach of Freshwater West on the Atlantic coast is where Bill and Fleur’s Shell Cottage was filmed and where poor Dobby meets his end. It’s an amazing beach with a great sweep of sand. Shell Cottage, unfortunately, had to be taken down after it was filmed, but the beach is unmistakable. I can’t think of a better place for a house-elf to be buried!
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Beginings...
There was the beginning yesterday of an event which I hope will be repeated. It was a sort of travelling party. Jane Finnis, Rebecca Jenkins, Jennifer Palmer, myself and assorted family all met up in Manchester for a very merry lunch in Bella Italia and then went for a shufti round the newly re-opened costume museum. Good friends, decent food and something interesting to look at… Good all round, yes?
Jane Finnis, of course, writes the adventures of the Roman innkeeper, Aurelia, which happen round Aurielia’s inn, The Oak Tree, on the road to York. Rebecca Jenkins’ hero is the ex-cavalry officer, Raif Jarret, is the Duke of Penrith’s agent in 1811, who discovers murder and mayhem in Durham and the surrounding countryside and I, of course, chronicle the adventures of Jack Haldean, the ex-R.F.C. pilot, in the 1920’s. So, as yesterday was a new beginning, I thought it would be a nice idea to see where Jane, Rebecca and my fictional counterparts began!
It was a beautiful August dawn, the best sort of summer weather. The only thing that spoilt it was the body.
I didn’t notice him at first. I unbolted the front door and strolled out across the forecourt and up the short track to the main road, enjoying the fresh morning air. The market day traffic was coming down the hill, heading into town. I watched three farmers leading donkeys loaded with baskets of vegetables, then a creaking ox-cart piled with sacks, and two barefoot girls carrying a cage of chickens and driving some goats. The goats scattered as one of our neighbours trotted past in a smart Roman two-wheeled gig, calling out ‘Morning, Aurelia,’ and I gave him a wave. A gang of native field-slaves shambled into view, driven uphill by a couple of mounted Roman overseers with whips. One of the natives turned and spat in my direction when the overseers weren’t looking. The low sunlight coloured everything gold, even the scruffy slaves.
Get Out Or Die by Jane Finnis.
It was early evening in late July. The vast sky was brushed with clouds. Pinks intermixed with soft blues and dim charcoal all hung against a luminous satin ground. A rider plodded along the path that ran through the wide expanse of wheat grass spreading out to the horizon. Both man and horse bore themselves with that air of detached resignation common to travellers who know it is a steady pace that goes the distance. The road crept up a broad flank of land then dropped towards a squat manor house tucked away in a dell. At the shoulder of the rise the rider checked his horse. Straightening his back and rubbing the aching muscle at his neck, he sat contemplating the scene before him.
The Duke’s Agent by Rebecca Jenkins
With a feeling of relief, Jack Haldean walked into the dim green interior of the beer-tent. My word, it was like an oven out there. A noisy oven, where the laboured thump of the Breedenbrook band mixed with the shrieks of excited children on the helter-skelter, hoarse shouts from the hoop-la and coconut shies, sharp cracks from the rifle-range and the hollow, oddly mournful music of the steam-organ on the roundabouts, all grilling under a blazing sun.
He took off his straw hat and fanned himself. It was easily as hot as Spain, the difference being that no Spaniard, and certainly none of his relations, ever expected him to do anything in the middle of the day but sleep. They certainly wouldn’t lug him out to a village fête.
Haldean found a space on a bench and wriggled his backbone into a comfortable position against a sturdy tent-pole. His cousin, Gregory Rivers, was standing at the trestle-table bar, waiting patiently to be served. Haldean relaxed, soaking up the low rumble of conversation, savouring the contrast between the muffled din outside and the slow, placid voices within. The smell of hot canvas, the smell of hot grass, the pungent reek of tobacco and the sweet smell of beer…
“Cheers,” said Greg, handing him a pewter mug. He took a long drink. “Good Lord, I needed that.” He looked at Haldean suspiciously. “You seem jolly pleased with yourself.”
A Fête Worse Than Death by Dolores Gordon-Smith
Jane Finnis, of course, writes the adventures of the Roman innkeeper, Aurelia, which happen round Aurielia’s inn, The Oak Tree, on the road to York. Rebecca Jenkins’ hero is the ex-cavalry officer, Raif Jarret, is the Duke of Penrith’s agent in 1811, who discovers murder and mayhem in Durham and the surrounding countryside and I, of course, chronicle the adventures of Jack Haldean, the ex-R.F.C. pilot, in the 1920’s. So, as yesterday was a new beginning, I thought it would be a nice idea to see where Jane, Rebecca and my fictional counterparts began!
It was a beautiful August dawn, the best sort of summer weather. The only thing that spoilt it was the body.
I didn’t notice him at first. I unbolted the front door and strolled out across the forecourt and up the short track to the main road, enjoying the fresh morning air. The market day traffic was coming down the hill, heading into town. I watched three farmers leading donkeys loaded with baskets of vegetables, then a creaking ox-cart piled with sacks, and two barefoot girls carrying a cage of chickens and driving some goats. The goats scattered as one of our neighbours trotted past in a smart Roman two-wheeled gig, calling out ‘Morning, Aurelia,’ and I gave him a wave. A gang of native field-slaves shambled into view, driven uphill by a couple of mounted Roman overseers with whips. One of the natives turned and spat in my direction when the overseers weren’t looking. The low sunlight coloured everything gold, even the scruffy slaves.
Get Out Or Die by Jane Finnis.
It was early evening in late July. The vast sky was brushed with clouds. Pinks intermixed with soft blues and dim charcoal all hung against a luminous satin ground. A rider plodded along the path that ran through the wide expanse of wheat grass spreading out to the horizon. Both man and horse bore themselves with that air of detached resignation common to travellers who know it is a steady pace that goes the distance. The road crept up a broad flank of land then dropped towards a squat manor house tucked away in a dell. At the shoulder of the rise the rider checked his horse. Straightening his back and rubbing the aching muscle at his neck, he sat contemplating the scene before him.
The Duke’s Agent by Rebecca Jenkins
With a feeling of relief, Jack Haldean walked into the dim green interior of the beer-tent. My word, it was like an oven out there. A noisy oven, where the laboured thump of the Breedenbrook band mixed with the shrieks of excited children on the helter-skelter, hoarse shouts from the hoop-la and coconut shies, sharp cracks from the rifle-range and the hollow, oddly mournful music of the steam-organ on the roundabouts, all grilling under a blazing sun.
He took off his straw hat and fanned himself. It was easily as hot as Spain, the difference being that no Spaniard, and certainly none of his relations, ever expected him to do anything in the middle of the day but sleep. They certainly wouldn’t lug him out to a village fête.
Haldean found a space on a bench and wriggled his backbone into a comfortable position against a sturdy tent-pole. His cousin, Gregory Rivers, was standing at the trestle-table bar, waiting patiently to be served. Haldean relaxed, soaking up the low rumble of conversation, savouring the contrast between the muffled din outside and the slow, placid voices within. The smell of hot canvas, the smell of hot grass, the pungent reek of tobacco and the sweet smell of beer…
“Cheers,” said Greg, handing him a pewter mug. He took a long drink. “Good Lord, I needed that.” He looked at Haldean suspiciously. “You seem jolly pleased with yourself.”
A Fête Worse Than Death by Dolores Gordon-Smith
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Frankie's Letter
I had some great news yesterday. Severn House are going to publish my First World War spy story, Frankie’s Letter. So that was two bottles of champagne and some pretty hearty celebrating chez Gordon-Smith.
Incidentally, the first chapter’s on the Books page of the website, if you’d like a preview.
Frankie’s Letter was a real labour of love. First and foremost a spy thriller, yes, and, I hope, a cracking good story, but also the result of a ridiculous amount of thought and research about the First World War. For instance, I was lucky enough to attend a two-day conference at the University of Birmingham run by Professor Gary Sheffield, one of the foremost historians of WW1, and, over an absorbing couple of days, got some real historical insights that were reflected in the book.
One point I did want to make (and this fitted very nicely with the story) was that the people who actually fought the war didn’t think it was a futile struggle. They thought it was an essential fight for survival that couldn’t be avoided, anymore than the Second World War could have been sidestepped. After the war was over, you’d expect, wouldn’t you, to have a flood of memoirs and war-based fiction. In fact, there was a curious silence for about ten years. Oddly enough, the same thing happened with the Americans and Vietnam. That also took about ten years for the floodgates of war memoirs to open.
Maybe that length of time is needed to put such a massive event in perspective. Anyway, ten years on from 1918 brings us very neatly to the start of the Great Depression and, as the Thirties progressed, it isn’t surprising, in view of the horrific casualties, that people wondered what it had all been for. We’re still influenced by that view, but if you want to find out what it really was all for, I can heartily recommend Richard Holmes’ books Tommy and The Western Front, Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock and Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory.
Incidentally, the first chapter’s on the Books page of the website, if you’d like a preview.
Frankie’s Letter was a real labour of love. First and foremost a spy thriller, yes, and, I hope, a cracking good story, but also the result of a ridiculous amount of thought and research about the First World War. For instance, I was lucky enough to attend a two-day conference at the University of Birmingham run by Professor Gary Sheffield, one of the foremost historians of WW1, and, over an absorbing couple of days, got some real historical insights that were reflected in the book.
One point I did want to make (and this fitted very nicely with the story) was that the people who actually fought the war didn’t think it was a futile struggle. They thought it was an essential fight for survival that couldn’t be avoided, anymore than the Second World War could have been sidestepped. After the war was over, you’d expect, wouldn’t you, to have a flood of memoirs and war-based fiction. In fact, there was a curious silence for about ten years. Oddly enough, the same thing happened with the Americans and Vietnam. That also took about ten years for the floodgates of war memoirs to open.
Maybe that length of time is needed to put such a massive event in perspective. Anyway, ten years on from 1918 brings us very neatly to the start of the Great Depression and, as the Thirties progressed, it isn’t surprising, in view of the horrific casualties, that people wondered what it had all been for. We’re still influenced by that view, but if you want to find out what it really was all for, I can heartily recommend Richard Holmes’ books Tommy and The Western Front, Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock and Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
E Book, anyone?
Have you got a Kindle or e-reader? The reason I’m asking is that Off The Record, Jack’s fifth adventure was published as an e-book on 1st July. Here’s a picture of Jack looking all suave on the cover. 
I wish this was Harry Potter land (I wish it was anyway!) because then the cover would move and show Jack doing all sorts of exciting things, like jumping off roofs, tackling villains, dodging bullets and thinking furiously. I’m not sure how you depict someone thinking furiously, as a matter of fact. Rodin, of course, sculpted The Thinker in the nude (maybe he’d just got out of the bath) and Sherlock Holmes always put on a dressing-gown to think, but Jack remains fully clothed with his brain buzzing.
Anyway, Off The Record got a cracking review from the Historical Novels Society. I’m not sure about the use of the word MacGuffin because, as I understand it, it was a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe a fairly arbitrary object that the characters in a film charge round after, such as the diamond necklace or the secret cipher. It’s desperately important but doesn’t, in itself change things. Now I made my brain fizz with the all-singing, all-dancing recording machine in the book. I’ve invented strings of fabulous emeralds without any bother, but I had to work at this ruddy gramophone! I even (yes, I know, this is verging on the obsessive!) built myself a cat’s whiskers wireless just to see if I could. Anyway, these are mere straws and I won’t pick them, so to speak with a really great review. E book anyone?
Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society (USA and UK) Issue 56, May 2011
Off The Record was Editor’s Choice
Recording tape and gramophones probably don’t sound like promising grounds for a novel, but in Off The Record the technology is the MacGuffin for a splendid mystery, a story so deftly put together I read it a second time to see how it worked.
The setting is 1920’s England. The First World War still haunts people who are now enduring the fading of the British Empire, the crumbling of social tradition.
In the village of Stoke Horam, opinionated baronial Charles Otterbourne has a gramophone factory. Nutty genius Alan Carrington comes to him with a revolutionary new idea for recording sound. They meet but don’t mesh. Soon bodies are showing up all over the place and detective story writer, Jack Haldean, who has captained several other novels by Gordon-Smith, comes in to make sense of it all.
Gordon-Smith’s writing is quick and sure; her characters emerge as real people within a few lines. The period dialog is especially good, colloquial with affectation and the historical detail, unobtrusive and precise, coveys a beautiful sense of the time before instant communication collapsed all our lives into a single moment.
Rereading the novel was a thorough pleasure. The plot is seamlessly assembled; Gordon-Smith, a devotee of Agatha Christie, puts the truth always there in front of you, manipulating emphasis and expectations to keep it all a surprise. The solution to the mystery, incorporating the technology that started everything off, ties up the whole story in a single satisfying knot. Off The Record should appeal equally to lovers of historical fiction and detective novels and doubly to fans of both.
Cecelia Holland
I wish this was Harry Potter land (I wish it was anyway!) because then the cover would move and show Jack doing all sorts of exciting things, like jumping off roofs, tackling villains, dodging bullets and thinking furiously. I’m not sure how you depict someone thinking furiously, as a matter of fact. Rodin, of course, sculpted The Thinker in the nude (maybe he’d just got out of the bath) and Sherlock Holmes always put on a dressing-gown to think, but Jack remains fully clothed with his brain buzzing.Anyway, Off The Record got a cracking review from the Historical Novels Society. I’m not sure about the use of the word MacGuffin because, as I understand it, it was a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe a fairly arbitrary object that the characters in a film charge round after, such as the diamond necklace or the secret cipher. It’s desperately important but doesn’t, in itself change things. Now I made my brain fizz with the all-singing, all-dancing recording machine in the book. I’ve invented strings of fabulous emeralds without any bother, but I had to work at this ruddy gramophone! I even (yes, I know, this is verging on the obsessive!) built myself a cat’s whiskers wireless just to see if I could. Anyway, these are mere straws and I won’t pick them, so to speak with a really great review. E book anyone?
Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society (USA and UK) Issue 56, May 2011
Off The Record was Editor’s Choice
Recording tape and gramophones probably don’t sound like promising grounds for a novel, but in Off The Record the technology is the MacGuffin for a splendid mystery, a story so deftly put together I read it a second time to see how it worked.
The setting is 1920’s England. The First World War still haunts people who are now enduring the fading of the British Empire, the crumbling of social tradition.
In the village of Stoke Horam, opinionated baronial Charles Otterbourne has a gramophone factory. Nutty genius Alan Carrington comes to him with a revolutionary new idea for recording sound. They meet but don’t mesh. Soon bodies are showing up all over the place and detective story writer, Jack Haldean, who has captained several other novels by Gordon-Smith, comes in to make sense of it all.
Gordon-Smith’s writing is quick and sure; her characters emerge as real people within a few lines. The period dialog is especially good, colloquial with affectation and the historical detail, unobtrusive and precise, coveys a beautiful sense of the time before instant communication collapsed all our lives into a single moment.
Rereading the novel was a thorough pleasure. The plot is seamlessly assembled; Gordon-Smith, a devotee of Agatha Christie, puts the truth always there in front of you, manipulating emphasis and expectations to keep it all a surprise. The solution to the mystery, incorporating the technology that started everything off, ties up the whole story in a single satisfying knot. Off The Record should appeal equally to lovers of historical fiction and detective novels and doubly to fans of both.
Cecelia Holland
Saturday, June 18, 2011
The Goldfish from Glasgow - Part Two: The Tank Of Doom
This is a true story and it happened about three weeks ago chez Gordon-Smith.
It was like a scene from CSI or Bones or – if you follow me – like Cluedo. The scene was the Conservatory, there were four dead bodies in a lavishly-appointed and, as the estate agents say, a highly desirable residence, there was no visible cause of death, no signs of violence, only these poor mortal remains. Only one remained alive and he, one would think, would be the obvious suspect. However…
Hang on. Before anyone wonders why this Tale of Horror hasn’t been all over the newspapers, perhaps I should mention the four bodies in question were guppies, jolly little tropical fish who had, for reasons which were unclear, made the Great Change.
The cats were guiltless. It’s not that they hadn’t been interested, you understand, but the glass lid baffled them. It wasn’t, as The Other Half, postulated, extreme heat, caused by my wanton buying of a heater and whacking it up to full temperature. No, the thermometer showed the temperature to be just fine. So what the dickens was it?
As I said last week, I’d slipped into Guppiedom by accident, as it were. Now I went looking on the internet and found my preparations of a heated tank, a filter, plants and a bottle of Tapsafe to de-chlorinate the water were all very well, but not enough. What had seen off the finny denizens was the chemical imbalance of the water. Under the reproachful eye of the last remaining guppie, a little orange chap called Carrot, I hastened to correct my mistake.
I lovingly tended the water in the tank with an aquarium start-up kit. It’s pleasantly scientific to faff around with vials and pipettes and take water samples and add other chemicals to see how its all doing. It takes about twenty days or so, and all the time, Carrot, the great survivor, hung on in there.
The Book (the leaflet that came with the start-up kit) said to add Zebra Danios and Harlequins, hardy little tykes that can take a bit of chemical imbalance and help the process along. So in went three stripy Zebras, Spot (natch) Crossing and Serengeti, with the two Harlequins, Easter and Evans. (Named after the Harlequin Rugby players by Lucy.) And Carrot, despite the fact he should have been dead, continued to flourish. Mind you, the Zebras confused Carrot. He wanted to swim along, to shoal out with his mates, but Zebras don’t swim like guppies. He tried, bless him, but went off sulking in the waterweed. The poor thing obviously was having an identity crisis.
Came the great day. The water in the test vials was clear; the tank was now chemically balanced and – thank goodness – I wouldn’t have to subject Poor Carrot to a course of Freudian analysis but could simply Add More Guppies.
I picked Jenny up from college that evening. After chit-chat about the day, I said brightly, “I’ve bought five guppies.”
She looked at me in stark horror. “Mum,” she said, in a sort of death-rattle whisper, “How could you? Whatever will Dad say? He’ll go mental!”
“Your Dad’s fine,” I said, puzzled.
“You’ve told him!!!”
“Yeah, I spoke to him earlier on the phone.” She continued to look worried to death. “There isn’t a problem. He doesn’t mind.”
She continued, as they say in old-fashioned fiction, to search my face, then understanding dawned. “Hang on. You didn’t say puppies, did you?”
It was like a scene from CSI or Bones or – if you follow me – like Cluedo. The scene was the Conservatory, there were four dead bodies in a lavishly-appointed and, as the estate agents say, a highly desirable residence, there was no visible cause of death, no signs of violence, only these poor mortal remains. Only one remained alive and he, one would think, would be the obvious suspect. However…
Hang on. Before anyone wonders why this Tale of Horror hasn’t been all over the newspapers, perhaps I should mention the four bodies in question were guppies, jolly little tropical fish who had, for reasons which were unclear, made the Great Change.
The cats were guiltless. It’s not that they hadn’t been interested, you understand, but the glass lid baffled them. It wasn’t, as The Other Half, postulated, extreme heat, caused by my wanton buying of a heater and whacking it up to full temperature. No, the thermometer showed the temperature to be just fine. So what the dickens was it?
As I said last week, I’d slipped into Guppiedom by accident, as it were. Now I went looking on the internet and found my preparations of a heated tank, a filter, plants and a bottle of Tapsafe to de-chlorinate the water were all very well, but not enough. What had seen off the finny denizens was the chemical imbalance of the water. Under the reproachful eye of the last remaining guppie, a little orange chap called Carrot, I hastened to correct my mistake.
I lovingly tended the water in the tank with an aquarium start-up kit. It’s pleasantly scientific to faff around with vials and pipettes and take water samples and add other chemicals to see how its all doing. It takes about twenty days or so, and all the time, Carrot, the great survivor, hung on in there.
The Book (the leaflet that came with the start-up kit) said to add Zebra Danios and Harlequins, hardy little tykes that can take a bit of chemical imbalance and help the process along. So in went three stripy Zebras, Spot (natch) Crossing and Serengeti, with the two Harlequins, Easter and Evans. (Named after the Harlequin Rugby players by Lucy.) And Carrot, despite the fact he should have been dead, continued to flourish. Mind you, the Zebras confused Carrot. He wanted to swim along, to shoal out with his mates, but Zebras don’t swim like guppies. He tried, bless him, but went off sulking in the waterweed. The poor thing obviously was having an identity crisis.
Came the great day. The water in the test vials was clear; the tank was now chemically balanced and – thank goodness – I wouldn’t have to subject Poor Carrot to a course of Freudian analysis but could simply Add More Guppies.
I picked Jenny up from college that evening. After chit-chat about the day, I said brightly, “I’ve bought five guppies.”
She looked at me in stark horror. “Mum,” she said, in a sort of death-rattle whisper, “How could you? Whatever will Dad say? He’ll go mental!”
“Your Dad’s fine,” I said, puzzled.
“You’ve told him!!!”
“Yeah, I spoke to him earlier on the phone.” She continued to look worried to death. “There isn’t a problem. He doesn’t mind.”
She continued, as they say in old-fashioned fiction, to search my face, then understanding dawned. “Hang on. You didn’t say puppies, did you?”
Saturday, June 11, 2011
The Goldfish From Glasgow
It was Elspeth who started it. When she rang up from Glasgow to say she’d bought two goldfish (CJ and Marylyn) I chirruped happily down the phone to her about goldfish. We’d had goldfish some time ago. Lazarus, who changed his name after I brought him back from the dead by giving him the kiss of life (you blow air through a straw over the finny friend’s gills) and Warty Pete, who lived up to his name (he could have been an extra on Blackadder) who lived a long, long time.
So Elspeth = 2 goldfish = Fine. Until she wanted to bring them home for the holidays. We’d long since got rid of the watery home that contained Lazarus and Warty Pete. No problem, I said. We’ll buy a new tank.
The expense? said The Other Half.
Sorted, I assured him. We’ll buy a cheap plastic tank. Don’t worry.
So the kids and I went shopping.
Well, you know how it is. Once actually in the shop (and I’m a bit of pushover for this sort of thing anyway) the My First Fishtank and the one with Spongebob Squarepants decals seemed a bit naff compared to an elegant glass cube, complete with LED lights and a combined air pump and filter. And once we’d got it home, filled it with gravel and planted it up, it looked lovely. If Barbara Hepworth had designed fishtanks, they’d look like this. It was, I have to admit, just a tadge more expensive than I’d bargained for.
There were grumbles within the Home.
Especially when, struck by just how nice it did look, my mind turned to tropical fish. Before the Warty Pete era, we’d kept tropical fish. I can’t say they ever did frightfully well, as they seemed to drop dead with grim regularity, but, before they made the great change, they did look nice. Maybe this time it would be different??? After all, it was so posh, it seemed a bit elaborate for a holiday home for two visiting goldfish.
So I added a heater to the elegant glass cube and popped in five guppies.
What about the expense? said The Other Half. What about the goldfish?
Sorted, I assured him. We’ll buy a cheap plastic tank. Don’t worry.
So that’s what I did (that’s what, perhaps, I should have done in the first place, I know) adding, to turn a bog-standard B+B for goldfish into something more resembling a luxury holiday let, a pump and filter, some plants and a little arch for them to swim through. CJ and Marylyn are, even as I write, disporting themselves happily on the windowsill of the kitchen.
But what about the guppies in their elegant cube? Fate had slipped the lead into the boxing glove and was waiting in the wings…
TO BE CONTINUED….
So Elspeth = 2 goldfish = Fine. Until she wanted to bring them home for the holidays. We’d long since got rid of the watery home that contained Lazarus and Warty Pete. No problem, I said. We’ll buy a new tank.
The expense? said The Other Half.
Sorted, I assured him. We’ll buy a cheap plastic tank. Don’t worry.
So the kids and I went shopping.
Well, you know how it is. Once actually in the shop (and I’m a bit of pushover for this sort of thing anyway) the My First Fishtank and the one with Spongebob Squarepants decals seemed a bit naff compared to an elegant glass cube, complete with LED lights and a combined air pump and filter. And once we’d got it home, filled it with gravel and planted it up, it looked lovely. If Barbara Hepworth had designed fishtanks, they’d look like this. It was, I have to admit, just a tadge more expensive than I’d bargained for.
There were grumbles within the Home.
Especially when, struck by just how nice it did look, my mind turned to tropical fish. Before the Warty Pete era, we’d kept tropical fish. I can’t say they ever did frightfully well, as they seemed to drop dead with grim regularity, but, before they made the great change, they did look nice. Maybe this time it would be different??? After all, it was so posh, it seemed a bit elaborate for a holiday home for two visiting goldfish.
So I added a heater to the elegant glass cube and popped in five guppies.
What about the expense? said The Other Half. What about the goldfish?
Sorted, I assured him. We’ll buy a cheap plastic tank. Don’t worry.
So that’s what I did (that’s what, perhaps, I should have done in the first place, I know) adding, to turn a bog-standard B+B for goldfish into something more resembling a luxury holiday let, a pump and filter, some plants and a little arch for them to swim through. CJ and Marylyn are, even as I write, disporting themselves happily on the windowsill of the kitchen.
But what about the guppies in their elegant cube? Fate had slipped the lead into the boxing glove and was waiting in the wings…
TO BE CONTINUED….
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Sherlock Holmes and the Viking's Dilemma
I had looked into Baker Street to update my website, www.mymatesbrighterthanme.com when I found a laughable misunderstanding had arisen. Mrs Hudson, mounted on a penny-farthing bicycle, was cycling round and round our room while Holmes, in a state of some perturbation, was attempting to make her desist by loading the contents of a box of boxer cartridges into his hair-trigger revolver and taking pot-shots at her as she whirled past.
“Great Heavens, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “Why is our worthy landlady biking round the room?”
“Because she is a little deaf,” he explained, stepping to one side as Mrs Hudson whirled past. “I said, “Admit the VIKING, not, “Do a bit of BIKING!”
He loosed off another round of bullets and this time a shot went home.
Mrs Hudson, leaving the remains of the mangled bike behind, leapt lightly from the saddle. “Very good, Mr Holmes,” she said and, laughing heartily at her own mistake, scurried from the room to return seconds later with a magnificent yellow-bearded, yellow-haired man, dressed in leather and swinging a huge hammer.
“Great Heavens, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “You astound me! How did you know this man was a Viking? What little clue, what subtle indication, what almost imperceptible fact led you to that conclusion?”
“The fact he is wearing a helmet with bulls’ horns,” said Holmes.
I was amazed at his perspicacity.
“Now, sir!” said Holmes, addressing our guest. “In what way can I be of assistance?”
The Viking kicked the remnants of the penny-farthing out of the way and sank down upon the ottoman, his face a frenzied mask of worry.
“Mr Holmes, you are my only hope! My only remaining relative in the whole world is my aged Aunt, who I love dearly. Crippled, infirm and with her sight failing, she waits for me at my little home, Dunpillaging, across the wild, tempestuous sea. Her one desire, Mr Holmes, is to own a beautiful stainless steel sink. And can I find one? No. My life is bitter indeed when I think of how she yearns for a beautiful stainless steel sink and how crushed with sorrow she will be when I have to Confess All and return empty-handed, feasting on the acid fruit of failure. Which will be,” he added, “about all I’ll get to eat when she realises she hasn’t got what she wants.”
“She’ll have a sinking feeling?” I suggested.
Holmes idly hit me over the head with a violin to curtail my levity. As I emerged from the wreckage, I felt I had struck the wrong note. Several wrong notes, in fact.
“You say your Aunt is crippled?” said Holmes, his sympathies keenly engaged.
“Yes.”
“Infirm?”
“Yes.”
“With failing sight?”
“Yes.”
A rare smile crossed Holmes’ finely chiselled features. “Fear not! The solution is elementary.”
“Great Heavens, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “You astound me! What solution can there possibly be to this poor wanderer’s abstruse problem?”
For an answer, my friend picked up a builder’s hod which was lying, together with other bits and pieces, such as a speckled band, five orange pips, a blue carbuncle and a beryl coronet on the mantelpiece. “Give this to your Aunt,” he said, pressing the hod into the Viking’s eager hands. “This is the object of her desires, this is all she craves. After all,” he added as our visitor got up to leave, “a hod is as good as a sink to a blind Norse.”
“Great Heavens, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “Why is our worthy landlady biking round the room?”
“Because she is a little deaf,” he explained, stepping to one side as Mrs Hudson whirled past. “I said, “Admit the VIKING, not, “Do a bit of BIKING!”
He loosed off another round of bullets and this time a shot went home.
Mrs Hudson, leaving the remains of the mangled bike behind, leapt lightly from the saddle. “Very good, Mr Holmes,” she said and, laughing heartily at her own mistake, scurried from the room to return seconds later with a magnificent yellow-bearded, yellow-haired man, dressed in leather and swinging a huge hammer.
“Great Heavens, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “You astound me! How did you know this man was a Viking? What little clue, what subtle indication, what almost imperceptible fact led you to that conclusion?”
“The fact he is wearing a helmet with bulls’ horns,” said Holmes.
I was amazed at his perspicacity.
“Now, sir!” said Holmes, addressing our guest. “In what way can I be of assistance?”
The Viking kicked the remnants of the penny-farthing out of the way and sank down upon the ottoman, his face a frenzied mask of worry.
“Mr Holmes, you are my only hope! My only remaining relative in the whole world is my aged Aunt, who I love dearly. Crippled, infirm and with her sight failing, she waits for me at my little home, Dunpillaging, across the wild, tempestuous sea. Her one desire, Mr Holmes, is to own a beautiful stainless steel sink. And can I find one? No. My life is bitter indeed when I think of how she yearns for a beautiful stainless steel sink and how crushed with sorrow she will be when I have to Confess All and return empty-handed, feasting on the acid fruit of failure. Which will be,” he added, “about all I’ll get to eat when she realises she hasn’t got what she wants.”
“She’ll have a sinking feeling?” I suggested.
Holmes idly hit me over the head with a violin to curtail my levity. As I emerged from the wreckage, I felt I had struck the wrong note. Several wrong notes, in fact.
“You say your Aunt is crippled?” said Holmes, his sympathies keenly engaged.
“Yes.”
“Infirm?”
“Yes.”
“With failing sight?”
“Yes.”
A rare smile crossed Holmes’ finely chiselled features. “Fear not! The solution is elementary.”
“Great Heavens, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “You astound me! What solution can there possibly be to this poor wanderer’s abstruse problem?”
For an answer, my friend picked up a builder’s hod which was lying, together with other bits and pieces, such as a speckled band, five orange pips, a blue carbuncle and a beryl coronet on the mantelpiece. “Give this to your Aunt,” he said, pressing the hod into the Viking’s eager hands. “This is the object of her desires, this is all she craves. After all,” he added as our visitor got up to leave, “a hod is as good as a sink to a blind Norse.”
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Crimefest
This time last week I was living in the lap of luxury, eating an enormous four star breakfast in a four star hotel surrounded by people who wanted to talk about writing. This week I’ve just had my usual two pieces of toast with Marmite, one of my titchy little tropical fish has died, Lucy is glued to the TV watching rugby and I’ve got to do the ironing.
This is called real life. (*Sigh*)
Last week was, of course, one of the highlights of the year, the annual Crimefest held at the Bristol Marriot Hotel. It’s the fourth time I’ve been to Crimefest and it just keeps getting better and better. The best thing about it, from my point of view, is being able to talk about books and writing from a standing start. Usually you have to edge into these conversations, but here they just happen.
John Curran, for example, who’s edited the monumental Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, a labour of love if there ever was one, will chat quite happily about the Queen of Crime and gave a fascinating short talk on Golden Age writers. Deryn Lake recounted any historical writer’s dream job, where she was asked to research the history of Rawlings and found John Rawlings, her apothecary hero, in an 18th Century newspaper.
This is in addition to catching up at length with old friends such as Suzette Hill, Jane Finnis, Rebecca Jenkins and Lyndon Stacey and, I’m glad to say, others such as Jennifer Palmer and Frances Brody.
I suppose one of the biggest stars was Stella Rimington, ex-head of MI5. I was lucky enough to be on a panel with Stella Rimington. She, of course, writes the Liz Carlyle books (highly recommended) which give a real insiders’ account which certainly sounds plausible of how the Intelligence Services conduct an operation. As the Liz Carlyle books are, of course, fiction, she’s able to add the reasons why people do what they do and it’s a great mix.
Another real pleasure was meeting Carola Dunn. Carola, the author of the much-loved Daisy Dalrymple series, has lived in America for many years but is (as her accent immediately reveals) English. As we both write mysteries set in the 1920s, it was fascinating to compare notes. I have her new book, Anthem For Doomed Youth, on my to-be-read pile.
Perhaps the nicest thing about Crimefest is the complete lack of them-and-us-ism. I’ve come across this at other events, where some guests are treated like VIP’s and the rest of us are merely invited to marvel. I’m not quite sure why this doesn’t happen at Crimefest, but it doesn’t. It’s a terrifically friendly atmosphere, aided by excellent organisation in a very friendly hotel.
Now I suppose I’d better do the ironing!
This is called real life. (*Sigh*)
Last week was, of course, one of the highlights of the year, the annual Crimefest held at the Bristol Marriot Hotel. It’s the fourth time I’ve been to Crimefest and it just keeps getting better and better. The best thing about it, from my point of view, is being able to talk about books and writing from a standing start. Usually you have to edge into these conversations, but here they just happen.
John Curran, for example, who’s edited the monumental Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, a labour of love if there ever was one, will chat quite happily about the Queen of Crime and gave a fascinating short talk on Golden Age writers. Deryn Lake recounted any historical writer’s dream job, where she was asked to research the history of Rawlings and found John Rawlings, her apothecary hero, in an 18th Century newspaper.
This is in addition to catching up at length with old friends such as Suzette Hill, Jane Finnis, Rebecca Jenkins and Lyndon Stacey and, I’m glad to say, others such as Jennifer Palmer and Frances Brody.
I suppose one of the biggest stars was Stella Rimington, ex-head of MI5. I was lucky enough to be on a panel with Stella Rimington. She, of course, writes the Liz Carlyle books (highly recommended) which give a real insiders’ account which certainly sounds plausible of how the Intelligence Services conduct an operation. As the Liz Carlyle books are, of course, fiction, she’s able to add the reasons why people do what they do and it’s a great mix.
Another real pleasure was meeting Carola Dunn. Carola, the author of the much-loved Daisy Dalrymple series, has lived in America for many years but is (as her accent immediately reveals) English. As we both write mysteries set in the 1920s, it was fascinating to compare notes. I have her new book, Anthem For Doomed Youth, on my to-be-read pile.
Perhaps the nicest thing about Crimefest is the complete lack of them-and-us-ism. I’ve come across this at other events, where some guests are treated like VIP’s and the rest of us are merely invited to marvel. I’m not quite sure why this doesn’t happen at Crimefest, but it doesn’t. It’s a terrifically friendly atmosphere, aided by excellent organisation in a very friendly hotel.
Now I suppose I’d better do the ironing!
Saturday, May 7, 2011
The Last Post
The last veteran of World War One, Claude Choules, died this week at the grand old age of 111. It’s very strange to feel that our last living link to the war has gone. I was born 12 years after the end of the Second World War and, throughout all of my childhood, “The War” – there was only one – was always there. (When I read Gone With The Wind many years later the constant references to “Before the war” struck a very familiar chord.)
The influence of Second World War was so persuasive that it was only by logical deduction I knew (this is as a kid, remember) that there must have been a first war for there to have been a second. I came across my Grandfather’s medals in a long-unopened drawer and my mother reacted with a shuddering horror. The first world war was a sort of “naughty” war, the one we didn’t speak about, so naturally, that was the one I was interested in!
Incidentally, my mother’s reaction was a classic case of distrusting remembered experience. By her account, my granddad, who together with a approximately 100,000 other Britons, volunteered as soon as war was declared, was stuck in a muddy trench for four years with no training, hardly any food, and no respite while idiotic generals blindly sent wave after wave of trusting Tommies off to die. There wasn’t any point to the war which had been declared because of the incompetence, stupidity and sheer heartlessness of the upper classes.
That is, of course, a total myth. The German Army of 1914 was very large, very well trained and very well equipped. The German war aim was total domination of Europe. The absolutely chilling plans, as detailed by the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg in September 1914, envisaged the whole of Europe as a puppet state. Any neutral country would be allowed a figure-head of a leader but would be under German economic control. France would be “Forced to her knees” which meant, with free access to the Channel ports, the Germans could “Impose their will on England”.
This was a very real threat. The Germans could have won and for a long time it seemed very likely they would do just that. They’d had a long time to prepare for the war, while Britain managed a huge Empire with a tiny army that was more akin to a police force. (Hitler could never understand how the British managed it.) That tiny army had to expand (Hi, Granddad!) be equipped, meet, fight and defeat the enemy in France. After all, the Germans had invaded France and Belgium and weren’t shifting unless forcibly removed.
In the end, Britain and the Allies won a stunning victory, but the human cost was frightful. In the Depression of the Thirties, when the homes fit for heroes had failed to materialize, “Before the war” was seen as a golden age. What had the war been for? No one was any better off as a result. It had all been, so the myth ran, pointless…
But it wasn’t. Thanks to men like Claude Choules, my granddad and thousands like them, we lived – freely – to fight another day. Rest in peace.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
What Else Is There To Write About?
There doesn’t seem much else to write about other than The Wedding. What with the weather and the friendly crowds and everyone exuding good cheer and happiness, it was a brilliant day, wasn’t it? I watched it on the telly with enough family around to make it feel a bit like a party and the nice thing about watching it in the comfort of one’s own home, is that a) you can put the kettle on as and when b) you can make all the comments that you want to make in church but are constrained by the social decencies from voicing. Like, isn’t Kate’s dress gorgeous and thank God it’s not a meringue crossed with a circus tent and isn’t she beautiful? And will her poor father ever get the circulation back in his hand? (Never did a bride grip her Dad’s hand more tightly). And didn’t the trees in the church look good? And what on Earth were Eugenie and Beatrice wearing on their heads? And isn’t William handsome? And, come to that, Harry isn’t half bad either. And aren’t the titchy bridesmaids wonderful, especially the little one, firmly shepherded by the lovely Phillipa Middleton, who kept one hand on her head with an iron grip on her wreath?
London in party mood is a great place. I was there for the Jubilee and the whole city becomes one happy place where complete strangers talk, don’t push, make friends and are simply glad to be there. It’s great to stand on Westminster Bridge with no traffic, to have people from all over Britain and all over the world chilling out and being nice, picnicking on the grass and – on occasion – bursting into song. I don’t know why it’s so great to stand by the Victoria Memorial with thousands of other people, singing their hearts out, but it is. And there’s another Jubilee next year…
London in party mood is a great place. I was there for the Jubilee and the whole city becomes one happy place where complete strangers talk, don’t push, make friends and are simply glad to be there. It’s great to stand on Westminster Bridge with no traffic, to have people from all over Britain and all over the world chilling out and being nice, picnicking on the grass and – on occasion – bursting into song. I don’t know why it’s so great to stand by the Victoria Memorial with thousands of other people, singing their hearts out, but it is. And there’s another Jubilee next year…
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Take the Pascal Moon away from the first moon you thought of…
Hasn’t the weather been wonderful? I’m only hoping it lasts until Easter Sunday, as we’ve got eight for lunch plus a few more relatives in the afternoon. As Easter is very much a Movable Feast, I hope we can get out in the garden!
Easter is, of course, the season of new life. The name is the last remnant of the worship of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the Spring, Estre or Oestre. As to when Easter should be celebrated (here comes the movable feast bit) we celebrate it on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, where the day and night are of equal length, causing, if you believe the archeological programmes on the telly, a lot of people long ago to build stone circles and chant a lot.
Now, I must admit, should anyone think I've got this sort of information at my fingertips, I looked it up, but this is where it gets confusing.
The spring equinox – pay attention at the back there! - is fixed for this purpose as March 21 and the "full moon" is actually the paschal moon, which is based on 84-year "paschal cycles" established in the sixth century, would you believe. It rarely corresponds to the astronomical or actual full moon. Just to make life even more interesting, the Eastern churches, such as the Greek and Russian orthodox, count it up the same way, but use the Julian calendar (on which March 21 is April 3) and a 19-year paschal cycle.
I think I’ll just check the calendar same as usual and celebrate at the same time as everyone else.
The new life bit is absolutely unmissable though. The garden’s gone mental. Only a few weeks ago, there were bare patches on the so-called lawn and now it looks (from a distance) green. All over. Mostly.
Mind you, I did help it along. To the intense amusement of my Other Half, I bough a pair of rigid plastic sandals with huge spikes sticking out the bottom and walked around the grass, aerating the lawn. Apparently grass-roots like a bit of fresh air, which makes you wonder why it grows underground.
I mean, if the roots likes air that much, why not stick them above ground to take a breather now and again, rather than waiting for someone with huge spikes sticking out of the soles of their feet to come and give it a dose of the much needed? It seems like a rum state of affairs to me and one that might have given Darwin a bit of pause for thought. It’s hardly survival of the fittest, is it? Although, by the time two dogs and various humans have romped over it, it’s more a case of the survival of the flattest.
Happy Easter everyone! I hope you get lots of eggs.
Easter is, of course, the season of new life. The name is the last remnant of the worship of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the Spring, Estre or Oestre. As to when Easter should be celebrated (here comes the movable feast bit) we celebrate it on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, where the day and night are of equal length, causing, if you believe the archeological programmes on the telly, a lot of people long ago to build stone circles and chant a lot.
Now, I must admit, should anyone think I've got this sort of information at my fingertips, I looked it up, but this is where it gets confusing.
The spring equinox – pay attention at the back there! - is fixed for this purpose as March 21 and the "full moon" is actually the paschal moon, which is based on 84-year "paschal cycles" established in the sixth century, would you believe. It rarely corresponds to the astronomical or actual full moon. Just to make life even more interesting, the Eastern churches, such as the Greek and Russian orthodox, count it up the same way, but use the Julian calendar (on which March 21 is April 3) and a 19-year paschal cycle.
I think I’ll just check the calendar same as usual and celebrate at the same time as everyone else.
The new life bit is absolutely unmissable though. The garden’s gone mental. Only a few weeks ago, there were bare patches on the so-called lawn and now it looks (from a distance) green. All over. Mostly.
Mind you, I did help it along. To the intense amusement of my Other Half, I bough a pair of rigid plastic sandals with huge spikes sticking out the bottom and walked around the grass, aerating the lawn. Apparently grass-roots like a bit of fresh air, which makes you wonder why it grows underground.
I mean, if the roots likes air that much, why not stick them above ground to take a breather now and again, rather than waiting for someone with huge spikes sticking out of the soles of their feet to come and give it a dose of the much needed? It seems like a rum state of affairs to me and one that might have given Darwin a bit of pause for thought. It’s hardly survival of the fittest, is it? Although, by the time two dogs and various humans have romped over it, it’s more a case of the survival of the flattest.
Happy Easter everyone! I hope you get lots of eggs.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Simple machines
It was my birthday yesterday (21 again!) and my lovely Other Half bought me a new sewing machine.
New to me, that is, as it’s actually one of the last made by the Glasgow factory in 1934. The thing is, it’s so wonderfully simple. Lucy loves it because it looks like something out of Sylvanian Families (you know, those cute toy dressed rabbits and squirrels and so on that come with little houses and lots of stuff for children to collect) but it’s actually a very solid, beautifully made machine that works.
I’ve had an electric sewing machine before and the principle is more or less the same as a hand operated machine, but the damn thing goes so fast that when you make a bish of things (and as a very plain sewer, that’s what I tend to do) it very soon becomes an inextricable mix of knots and problems. This goes at my pace (slow) but it works.
Understandable mechanical stuff is one of life’s more simple pleasures. Don’t get me wrong, electronic stuff is great – I’m typing this on a computer, I’ll watch a DVD on the TV later today and I love my ipod but you can’t see how those things work, can you? You can’t lift the lid and see cogs connected to wheels powered by springs or whatever. Being able to see how things work puts us in control in a way that pushing a button simply can’t. I think that’s why understandable machines, such as steam engines, old aeroplanes, vintage cars and stonking great big engines in old cotton mills or historic ships generate such great affection.
Oh, and I’ve made a tea towel!
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Spring Forward
I made a garden gate this week. Not that, you understand, the Gordon-Smith garden has been hitherto open to the public to wander in at will. No, this is an additional gate to stop the ruddy dog howling at the bottom of the garden.
Lucky, the aforesaid Ruddy Dog, only has three legs. We got him from the dogs’ home in this tripoded condition (I imagine his card was marked as soon as he was called “Lucky” by his previous owner). He lost his leg by taking issue with a lorry. Despite making a fair old bit of it, the Dumb Chum hates noise.
And, at the bottom of the garden is a street with children racing up and down with roller skates, skateboards, little prams, bikes and all sorts of things with incredibly noisy wheels. Lucky, taking this as a personal affront, goes and howls through the gate at them. And, by the way, when I say “howl” I mean it. It’s not a polite little wuff. The animal stands there simply baying; take a line through the hound of the Baskervilles in the big scene when it comes tearing out of the Dartmoor mist and you’ll get the idea.
So I made another gate to enclose the area that leads to gate proper, if you see what I mean, solely to baffle the dog. And, when working on the gate, it was totally weird how quickly the light went once the sun went down. Yes, yes, yes, I know, night is a well-observed phenomena and has been with us on a fairly regular basis for some time, but we’re so used to having light literally at the click of a switch, it’s strange to have to stop work just because it’s dark.
Next week, after the clocks have Sprung Forward an hour, I’d have another hour of daylight to work in and that extra hour is why, during the First World War, British Summer Time was introduced. Although the idea was first proposed by an Englishman, William Willett, an early-bird type, in 1907, it took until 21st May 1916 for the government to be convinced. Germany and Austria had introduced Daylight Saving Time on 30th April of that year and that seemed, to some parliamentarians, a good reason why we shouldn’t have it in Britain. Lord Balfour, obviously a man who wanted to be prepared for every eventuality, asked his fellow peers to consider the plight of twins born during the change of the clock, with the result that the second-born might be held to have been born earlier than the first-born and thus mess up the first-born’s inheritance. Wow.
Anyway, we got BST and in the Second World War there was double Summer Time. There’s a story of an American GI out with a girl and looking for some privacy. When moved on by a policeman, he said in disgust, “Say, doesn’t it ever dark in this country?” Poor guy.
Don’t forget to put your clocks forward!
Lucky, the aforesaid Ruddy Dog, only has three legs. We got him from the dogs’ home in this tripoded condition (I imagine his card was marked as soon as he was called “Lucky” by his previous owner). He lost his leg by taking issue with a lorry. Despite making a fair old bit of it, the Dumb Chum hates noise.
And, at the bottom of the garden is a street with children racing up and down with roller skates, skateboards, little prams, bikes and all sorts of things with incredibly noisy wheels. Lucky, taking this as a personal affront, goes and howls through the gate at them. And, by the way, when I say “howl” I mean it. It’s not a polite little wuff. The animal stands there simply baying; take a line through the hound of the Baskervilles in the big scene when it comes tearing out of the Dartmoor mist and you’ll get the idea.
So I made another gate to enclose the area that leads to gate proper, if you see what I mean, solely to baffle the dog. And, when working on the gate, it was totally weird how quickly the light went once the sun went down. Yes, yes, yes, I know, night is a well-observed phenomena and has been with us on a fairly regular basis for some time, but we’re so used to having light literally at the click of a switch, it’s strange to have to stop work just because it’s dark.
Next week, after the clocks have Sprung Forward an hour, I’d have another hour of daylight to work in and that extra hour is why, during the First World War, British Summer Time was introduced. Although the idea was first proposed by an Englishman, William Willett, an early-bird type, in 1907, it took until 21st May 1916 for the government to be convinced. Germany and Austria had introduced Daylight Saving Time on 30th April of that year and that seemed, to some parliamentarians, a good reason why we shouldn’t have it in Britain. Lord Balfour, obviously a man who wanted to be prepared for every eventuality, asked his fellow peers to consider the plight of twins born during the change of the clock, with the result that the second-born might be held to have been born earlier than the first-born and thus mess up the first-born’s inheritance. Wow.
Anyway, we got BST and in the Second World War there was double Summer Time. There’s a story of an American GI out with a girl and looking for some privacy. When moved on by a policeman, he said in disgust, “Say, doesn’t it ever dark in this country?” Poor guy.
Don’t forget to put your clocks forward!
Saturday, March 19, 2011
This blog is not about a bus with a gas-bag on the roof
We’ve all met gas-bags on the top of buses. The woman who won’t stop talking, the man on his mobile phone… Here’s a picture of one in real lifeI’ve put the picture in because my pal, Jane Finnis, was astounded that such things could be, and it does look a bit odd, I must say. It should really have gone with the last blog but better late than never, as they say. Jane voices her incredulity in the comments. Mind you, Jane’s last post on her blog, (have a look at it on http://janefinnisblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/beware-the-ides-of-march/) left me scratching my head a bit.
It’s about how the Romans dated things. You know, as in, “Shall we meet up on the 19th?” “No, make it the twentieth, instead.” You couldn’t have this conversation in Ancient Rome. They had a peculiar system, involving counting backwards and forwards and probably turning round three times, crossing your fingers and making a wish. Considering how we’ve all been told that the Romans were a red-hot superpower, with efficiency as their middle name, the truly bizarre way they worked out their calendar does make you think a bit. Jane and myself once did a talk at the library together which more or less turned into a debate on which of us had the best historical period to work with. Jane loves her Romans dearly and was a persuasive speaker, but I think I’ll stick to my Agatha Christie-like 1920’s. At least you can get the date right to actually turn up at the talk without mental gymnastics and possible recourse to black magic.
Talking about Agatha Christie-ish stuff, there’s been a dickens of a fuss this week caused by the remarks of Brian True-May, the executive producer of Midsomer Murders. Mr True-May said that the success of the programme is down to – get this - “The lack of black and Asian faces.” He told the Radio Times, the official magazine of the BBC, “that the programme “wouldn’t work” if there was any racial diversity in the village life.
“We are,” said Mr True-May, “the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it like that.”
I loved the response of David Edwards, a café manager in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, the real-life setting of the fictional Midsomer. Mr Edwards is black, and he reckons that Midsomer is the safest place in Britain to be black, granted that every one of the victims of the 272 murders to date have been white.
True-May’s comments, apart from being offensive, are nonsense, of course. The murderous English village, in all its fascinating glory, is associated indelibly with Agatha Christie, and her villages are very diverse indeed.
Mysterious foreigners? They turn up by the bucketload. Not black or Asians, particularly – this is pre-War Britain, after all – but Greeks, Italians, French, Eastern Europeans etc., etc. Poirot himself is Belgian, of course, and often travels to fairly exotic locations. “Englishness” is a subject which often comes up. Take this, for example, from Murder On The Orient Express. The very English Colonel Arbuthnot comes to the defence of the very English Mary Debenham.
“About Miss Debenham,” he said rather awkwardly. “You can take it from me that she’s all right. She’s a pukka sahib.”
Flushing a little, he withdrew.
“What,” said Dr. Constantine with interest, “does a pukka sahib mean?” (He’s Greek, you’ll notice.)
“It means,” said Poirot, “that Miss Debenham’s father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot.”
Time and again Agatha Christie punctures that pompous idea of “Englishness” with that most English weapon, humour. Dave Edwards, the café manager, was pictured grinning his head off. So who’s got the last laugh now?
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Getting it right
In Finding Nemo, Albert, the clown fish’s wife and whole family-to-be- of clown fish eggs are eaten at the start of the film. One egg, which hatches into Nemo remains and, when Nemo gets lost, Albert sets out to find him. It’s a delightful story and very funny, too. However, when a mother clown fish is killed, the male clown fish turns into a female. I know this, because the director said so on the DVD extras. The makers of Nemo chose to ignore it because it would make the film just too damn complicated and they were absolutely right. That’s a creative decision that makes the story work better.
However, on the weblist DorothyL this week, a point was raised about accuracy in historical fiction.
The heroine of a book set in the First World War motors around Britain without any thought of petrol rationing. Was there, Dave Bennet asked on the list, any fuel restrictions? The question pulled him out of the world of the book. The notion of fuel restrictions should at least have been raised, because there were petrol restrictions and, like most things which seem like a problem at first, the very problem could have been creatively used to give a better sense of the period.
Restrictions, in the form of licences, were imposed early in the war and were tightened up as the war went on. I had to think about this for my WW1 spy thriller, Frankie's Letter, where the villain whizzes round in a Daimler (so handy for kidnapping heroes and carrying them off!). That's 1915, but by the following year, newspapers would report incidents of joy-riding very censoriously. Private driving became semi-respectable again in the summer of 1917 by attaching large gas-bags, which looked like miniature Zeppelins, on a wooden frame to the car with six feet of pipe for recharging at gas-points. There were plenty of cases of drivers filling up illegally at lamp posts! (All lamp posts were fuelled by gas, often tapping into the sewers for a supply).
Is it important to get it right? On one level, no. The story can be good and the writing fine, but if you are setting a story in a particular era, it seems like only fair play to the eventual reader to at least try to get it right. And, by getting details right, the chances are, the overall impression of the time will be right, too, so the reader gets the impression of living in another world. Besides that, it’d be fun watching the heroine get free gas from a lamp-post!
However, on the weblist DorothyL this week, a point was raised about accuracy in historical fiction.
The heroine of a book set in the First World War motors around Britain without any thought of petrol rationing. Was there, Dave Bennet asked on the list, any fuel restrictions? The question pulled him out of the world of the book. The notion of fuel restrictions should at least have been raised, because there were petrol restrictions and, like most things which seem like a problem at first, the very problem could have been creatively used to give a better sense of the period.
Restrictions, in the form of licences, were imposed early in the war and were tightened up as the war went on. I had to think about this for my WW1 spy thriller, Frankie's Letter, where the villain whizzes round in a Daimler (so handy for kidnapping heroes and carrying them off!). That's 1915, but by the following year, newspapers would report incidents of joy-riding very censoriously. Private driving became semi-respectable again in the summer of 1917 by attaching large gas-bags, which looked like miniature Zeppelins, on a wooden frame to the car with six feet of pipe for recharging at gas-points. There were plenty of cases of drivers filling up illegally at lamp posts! (All lamp posts were fuelled by gas, often tapping into the sewers for a supply).
Is it important to get it right? On one level, no. The story can be good and the writing fine, but if you are setting a story in a particular era, it seems like only fair play to the eventual reader to at least try to get it right. And, by getting details right, the chances are, the overall impression of the time will be right, too, so the reader gets the impression of living in another world. Besides that, it’d be fun watching the heroine get free gas from a lamp-post!
Monday, March 7, 2011
University Choice 2
I recieved a fascinating response to the blog I wrote about the TV series Bones and how to choose a university (it's last but one in the blogroll). I thought Kathy's response was so interesting, I've posted it here rather than in the comments section.
SPENSER’S MYSTERY BOOKS
364 Main Street
North Andover, MA 01845
(978) 689-0629
www.spensersmysterybooks.com
Kathy Phillips wrote:
I read your comments about the “Bones” bit where Cam’s got problems with her foster daughter about school choices. I’ve spent a good bit of time in England, especially in my late-teens (London, Somerset), and I’m pretty familiar with your educational system. Your definitions of “student” and “academic hot-shot” have no parallel in this country, and particularly not for a student in a Washington D.C. area school system. At 18, our kids graduate high school and are not nearly at a level that compares to your university-bound hot-shots. Out SATs are generic exams that colleges use for admission criteria, but they bear absolutely no relation to your A-Levels and O-Levels. Achievement here is a relative thing. Grades here are a relative thing.
Not to put too fine a point on it, American kids, unless coming out of the premier prep schools on the level of Phillips Andover or Choate, are largely immature, and even the better students have merely achieved success when measured against a less than elevated standard. I could go into details that would make your eyes glaze over (no classics, history limited to American history or “world civ” – a general overview that makes no effort to distinguish between cultures and norms, English literature studies limited to the very most basic texts). The simple fact is: American education is available to everyone through the age of 18 – or the 12th grade – and the numbers that have to be reached insure that the standards are lowered to meet a mean of ability.
In any event, Michelle’s comments were very familiar to many of us. At least in theory. I’ve known some pretty sharp kids choose schools based on weather, sports, appearance of campus, and nearby cities. And I wouldn’t have said no to any of these criteria. My extremely bright goddaughter (whom I help to raise) chose to go to Duke University, a premier school in North Carolina. She just liked it, liked the feel of the campus and – yes – the weather. She had no idea what she would major in so she wasn’t looking for any particular school or academic. Frankly, we don’t expect our very brightest kids to achieve very much in school – unless they go to Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, Princeton and the like after attending a premier preparatory school – and to find their feet in graduate school. Kate is now in medical school after the kind of search for a place to study along the lines that you describe in your blog. She knew then what she wanted and went after it. But even a very smart and mature 18 year-old kid here isn’t going to apply the same criteria to their choice as one of yours would.
Good luck to Lucy. I hope she gets to do what she wants to do. But I’d give her advice I’ve gleaned from my nephew’s education: he went to Princeton University, one of our premier institutions, intent on becoming a mathematician. Princeton is known for its math and physics departments. After a year, he was disillusioned and floundered around a bit – he didn’t like the department or the professors. He found his footing. He graduated from Princeton summa cum laude with a degree in Chinese Language, Literature and Linguistics and is now a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Poetry and Linguistics from Harvard University.
SPENSER’S MYSTERY BOOKS
364 Main Street
North Andover, MA 01845
(978) 689-0629
www.spensersmysterybooks.com
Kathy Phillips wrote:
I read your comments about the “Bones” bit where Cam’s got problems with her foster daughter about school choices. I’ve spent a good bit of time in England, especially in my late-teens (London, Somerset), and I’m pretty familiar with your educational system. Your definitions of “student” and “academic hot-shot” have no parallel in this country, and particularly not for a student in a Washington D.C. area school system. At 18, our kids graduate high school and are not nearly at a level that compares to your university-bound hot-shots. Out SATs are generic exams that colleges use for admission criteria, but they bear absolutely no relation to your A-Levels and O-Levels. Achievement here is a relative thing. Grades here are a relative thing.
Not to put too fine a point on it, American kids, unless coming out of the premier prep schools on the level of Phillips Andover or Choate, are largely immature, and even the better students have merely achieved success when measured against a less than elevated standard. I could go into details that would make your eyes glaze over (no classics, history limited to American history or “world civ” – a general overview that makes no effort to distinguish between cultures and norms, English literature studies limited to the very most basic texts). The simple fact is: American education is available to everyone through the age of 18 – or the 12th grade – and the numbers that have to be reached insure that the standards are lowered to meet a mean of ability.
In any event, Michelle’s comments were very familiar to many of us. At least in theory. I’ve known some pretty sharp kids choose schools based on weather, sports, appearance of campus, and nearby cities. And I wouldn’t have said no to any of these criteria. My extremely bright goddaughter (whom I help to raise) chose to go to Duke University, a premier school in North Carolina. She just liked it, liked the feel of the campus and – yes – the weather. She had no idea what she would major in so she wasn’t looking for any particular school or academic. Frankly, we don’t expect our very brightest kids to achieve very much in school – unless they go to Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, Princeton and the like after attending a premier preparatory school – and to find their feet in graduate school. Kate is now in medical school after the kind of search for a place to study along the lines that you describe in your blog. She knew then what she wanted and went after it. But even a very smart and mature 18 year-old kid here isn’t going to apply the same criteria to their choice as one of yours would.
Good luck to Lucy. I hope she gets to do what she wants to do. But I’d give her advice I’ve gleaned from my nephew’s education: he went to Princeton University, one of our premier institutions, intent on becoming a mathematician. Princeton is known for its math and physics departments. After a year, he was disillusioned and floundered around a bit – he didn’t like the department or the professors. He found his footing. He graduated from Princeton summa cum laude with a degree in Chinese Language, Literature and Linguistics and is now a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Poetry and Linguistics from Harvard University.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Boots Not Made For Walking
It’s a busy weekend in the G-S household. Elspeth is driving down from Scotland with her young man, Jessica moved house last week and talks to me about Plumbing, Helen is moving flats in Edinburgh and Lucy and Jenny continue their party-focused life. Geez, the social life of an eighteen year old! It seems every weekend brings yet another 18th birthday with dancing into the wee sma’s. You’d think the supply of eighteen year olds would run out eventually (I suppose it must at some time) but, at the moment, it seems a fairly endless stream.
The dancing is usually provided by our local hairdresser and barber, Keith. Let me explain. I don’t mean that his salon is fitted out with flashing lights, a disco ball and a sound system, but Keith, like most hairdressers, has another job, and Mr K is a DJ. It’s a neat trick; first he does your hair, then sees you let it down on the dancefloor. He was doing my hair yesterday, as (gasp) I was going to a party. Not a disco, unfortunately; but a 60th birthday meal. While he was doing my hair, Mr K provided a moment of pure stand-up comedy. The shop has a large plate-glass window which looks out onto a fairly busy square. He stopped snipping and gazed at the window.
“What’s happening, Keith?” I asked. I couldn’t see because I’ve got to take my glasses off to have my hair done in the first place. You know that bit at the hairdressers where they hold a mirror up and show you the back? I always say, “That’s lovely,” as I’ve got the idea there’s some hair there, but I can’t actually see anything.
“A young lady in boots,” he said, returning to the matter in hand. (ie My Hair; very important.) “I love girls in boots. It does it for me every time.”
At this point the young lady in boots entered the shop. “Hello, Keith,” she said.
“Hi,” replied Keith, then, took up his previous train of thought. “Nice boots.”
She looked rather startled and, putting her hands under her chest, hitched up her boobs. “Thanks,” she said in a puzzled sort of way. “They’re all mine!”
The dancing is usually provided by our local hairdresser and barber, Keith. Let me explain. I don’t mean that his salon is fitted out with flashing lights, a disco ball and a sound system, but Keith, like most hairdressers, has another job, and Mr K is a DJ. It’s a neat trick; first he does your hair, then sees you let it down on the dancefloor. He was doing my hair yesterday, as (gasp) I was going to a party. Not a disco, unfortunately; but a 60th birthday meal. While he was doing my hair, Mr K provided a moment of pure stand-up comedy. The shop has a large plate-glass window which looks out onto a fairly busy square. He stopped snipping and gazed at the window.
“What’s happening, Keith?” I asked. I couldn’t see because I’ve got to take my glasses off to have my hair done in the first place. You know that bit at the hairdressers where they hold a mirror up and show you the back? I always say, “That’s lovely,” as I’ve got the idea there’s some hair there, but I can’t actually see anything.
“A young lady in boots,” he said, returning to the matter in hand. (ie My Hair; very important.) “I love girls in boots. It does it for me every time.”
At this point the young lady in boots entered the shop. “Hello, Keith,” she said.
“Hi,” replied Keith, then, took up his previous train of thought. “Nice boots.”
She looked rather startled and, putting her hands under her chest, hitched up her boobs. “Thanks,” she said in a puzzled sort of way. “They’re all mine!”
Sunday, February 27, 2011
University Choice
In a recent episode of Bones, Cam was much exercised about her daughter, Michelle, who’s about to go to university. Michelle, we are given to understand is an academic hot-shot, red-hot brainy and uber-bright and should, therefore, be a prime candidate for seriously academic universities such as John Hopkins.
The trouble is that the aforesaid academic hot-shot, red-hot brainy, uber-bright Michelle doesn’t want to go to John Hopkins or any of the other uni’s that Cam’s chosen. She wants to apply to a much lower-grade university at the far end of nowhere because her boyfriend is going there.
This all rang lots of bells with me, because daughter Lucy is in the middle of choosing a university. And, being bright, she hasn’t lost sleep about where her boyfriend’s going, she concentrating on the courses being offered. The writers of Bones set it up as conflict between Cam’s ambitions and Michelle’s desires, with a touchy-feely ending where Michelle, as she’s an academic hot-shot etc., etc., is bound to make the right decision and all Cam has to do is trust her. Fluffy fade-out.
Yeah, right. Seriously intelligent people can make bad mistakes and going to a duff uni is one of them. I think the trouble is, that the writers didn’t seem to have any real idea of what being dead bright is actually like. We’re not told how Michelle’s intelligence manifests itself, for instance. Is she entranced by language, fascinated by physics, haunted by history, bewitched by biology? No, she’s just Bright. About everything? Well, that can certainly happen, therefore the poor kid should have gone through hoops trying to decide what to study. Does she ever say words to the effect of, “If I go to X uni, I can study with Professor Y. S/he’s written the book about earthworms, is this close to finding the composition of a black hole, knows more about the Georgians than anyone else,” or whatever? No.
It’s a pity, especially on a series like Bones which centres round a very bright scientist, (Ms) Temperance (Bones) Brennan and her cohorts at the Jefferson. But Temperance Brennan, though nice, is seriously odd. There’s a lot of fun in Bones with her Mr Spock-like literal approach to social situations which I thoroughly enjoy. But nobody would want to be Bones, she’s so socially inept. Because, you can dress it up however you like, there’s still this idea in popular TV that very intelligent people (women especially) are somehow strange. Popular TV can really make a difference to teenagers, providing a powerful role model that might be lacking at home. So can’t it be cool to be clever? And do the clever kids have to be dorks? Perhaps, as it makes us dumb types watching feel better about being dumb. But I, for one, could get over it. And I’m sure you could too.
The trouble is that the aforesaid academic hot-shot, red-hot brainy, uber-bright Michelle doesn’t want to go to John Hopkins or any of the other uni’s that Cam’s chosen. She wants to apply to a much lower-grade university at the far end of nowhere because her boyfriend is going there.
This all rang lots of bells with me, because daughter Lucy is in the middle of choosing a university. And, being bright, she hasn’t lost sleep about where her boyfriend’s going, she concentrating on the courses being offered. The writers of Bones set it up as conflict between Cam’s ambitions and Michelle’s desires, with a touchy-feely ending where Michelle, as she’s an academic hot-shot etc., etc., is bound to make the right decision and all Cam has to do is trust her. Fluffy fade-out.
Yeah, right. Seriously intelligent people can make bad mistakes and going to a duff uni is one of them. I think the trouble is, that the writers didn’t seem to have any real idea of what being dead bright is actually like. We’re not told how Michelle’s intelligence manifests itself, for instance. Is she entranced by language, fascinated by physics, haunted by history, bewitched by biology? No, she’s just Bright. About everything? Well, that can certainly happen, therefore the poor kid should have gone through hoops trying to decide what to study. Does she ever say words to the effect of, “If I go to X uni, I can study with Professor Y. S/he’s written the book about earthworms, is this close to finding the composition of a black hole, knows more about the Georgians than anyone else,” or whatever? No.
It’s a pity, especially on a series like Bones which centres round a very bright scientist, (Ms) Temperance (Bones) Brennan and her cohorts at the Jefferson. But Temperance Brennan, though nice, is seriously odd. There’s a lot of fun in Bones with her Mr Spock-like literal approach to social situations which I thoroughly enjoy. But nobody would want to be Bones, she’s so socially inept. Because, you can dress it up however you like, there’s still this idea in popular TV that very intelligent people (women especially) are somehow strange. Popular TV can really make a difference to teenagers, providing a powerful role model that might be lacking at home. So can’t it be cool to be clever? And do the clever kids have to be dorks? Perhaps, as it makes us dumb types watching feel better about being dumb. But I, for one, could get over it. And I’m sure you could too.
Monday, February 21, 2011
The King's Speech
I went to see The King’s Speech on Saturday. What a great film! Incidentally, going back to what we were saying about titles last time, what a terrific title, too. A well-known phrase that’s given an enhanced meaning is one of those titles which is so exactly right, nothing else would do. The King’s Speech is perfectly cast, brilliantly written and really does seem to strike a chord across all ages. 16 year old Jenny loved it, 23 year old Jessica loved it, plus all the Gordon-Smiths in between and my 88 year old Dad, which is some trick to pull off.
As everyone knows by now, the story is about Bertie, the future George the Sixth, who has a terrible stammer that can render him virtually dumb. As afflictions go, that might not seem too bad, but we’re immediately shown just what that means. Bertie is commanded by his father, King George the Fifth, to give the closing address at the massive Wembley Empire Exhibition, an address not only to the huge crowd but, through the medium of the BBC, to a quarter of the world’s population. And he can’t speak. As the silence lengthens, we can feel the poor man dying the death before the silent, waiting crowd.
How Bertie finds his voice makes enthralling viewing, as he reluctantly learns to trust the cheerfully irreverent Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue. It’s a personal quest at first, prompted by his wife, Elizabeth, and then, with the Abdication crisis and the rise of Nazi Germany, the stakes get much higher. Bertie’s brother, the gifted, handsome, loquacious David, the man who should be king, who’d been beloved by society and the people all through the 20’s and 30’s, who brought glamour and style to the throne after the stodginess of George the Fifth, doesn’t want to be king. With war looming, he walks away from the job. Hitler (a man who was never stuck for words!) is inspiring the Germans to war. Bertie is the King and simply has to speak.
As I said, it’s perfectly written, cast and acted. The thing about really good acting, as with really good writing, is that, when you’re watching or reading, you’re living in the world. It’s only afterwards you realise how good the acting and writing has been. Helena Bonham-Carter (last seen as the gleefully over the top, completely barking, Bellatrix Lestrange) is outstanding. It’s a very subtle performance. It’d be easy, with such a personal film about royalty, to pretend that everyone is just dead ordinary really, that they’d actually be happier as Mrs Average living in a bungalow and all this fame nonsense is just for show. Helena Bonham-Carter doesn’t do that. We’re always aware of who she is and, at the same time, always rooting for her.
When The King’s Speech first came out I thought speech therapy sounded a really odd premise for a film. (I mean, where’s the conflict? Where’s the chase? Where’s the explosions? Where’s the story, for pete’s sake?) To work at all, it would have to be brilliantly done. It is.
As everyone knows by now, the story is about Bertie, the future George the Sixth, who has a terrible stammer that can render him virtually dumb. As afflictions go, that might not seem too bad, but we’re immediately shown just what that means. Bertie is commanded by his father, King George the Fifth, to give the closing address at the massive Wembley Empire Exhibition, an address not only to the huge crowd but, through the medium of the BBC, to a quarter of the world’s population. And he can’t speak. As the silence lengthens, we can feel the poor man dying the death before the silent, waiting crowd.
How Bertie finds his voice makes enthralling viewing, as he reluctantly learns to trust the cheerfully irreverent Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue. It’s a personal quest at first, prompted by his wife, Elizabeth, and then, with the Abdication crisis and the rise of Nazi Germany, the stakes get much higher. Bertie’s brother, the gifted, handsome, loquacious David, the man who should be king, who’d been beloved by society and the people all through the 20’s and 30’s, who brought glamour and style to the throne after the stodginess of George the Fifth, doesn’t want to be king. With war looming, he walks away from the job. Hitler (a man who was never stuck for words!) is inspiring the Germans to war. Bertie is the King and simply has to speak.
As I said, it’s perfectly written, cast and acted. The thing about really good acting, as with really good writing, is that, when you’re watching or reading, you’re living in the world. It’s only afterwards you realise how good the acting and writing has been. Helena Bonham-Carter (last seen as the gleefully over the top, completely barking, Bellatrix Lestrange) is outstanding. It’s a very subtle performance. It’d be easy, with such a personal film about royalty, to pretend that everyone is just dead ordinary really, that they’d actually be happier as Mrs Average living in a bungalow and all this fame nonsense is just for show. Helena Bonham-Carter doesn’t do that. We’re always aware of who she is and, at the same time, always rooting for her.
When The King’s Speech first came out I thought speech therapy sounded a really odd premise for a film. (I mean, where’s the conflict? Where’s the chase? Where’s the explosions? Where’s the story, for pete’s sake?) To work at all, it would have to be brilliantly done. It is.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
What's in a name?
My pal, Jane Finnis, was talking about titles on her blog this week (see for yourself – it’s at
http://janefinnisblog.wordpress.com/)
The reason why Jane is pondering about titles is because Jane’s working on the fourth of her mysteries set in Roman Yorkshire (Yo!) and her publisher, not unreasonably you may feel, wants to know what the book’s going to be called. Jane eventually decided on Danger in the Wind which gives a nice frisson of lurking menace.
It’s amazing how hard it can be to come up with the right title. It has to be pithy, memorable, relevant to the book, a few words – maybe one word - that will jump out at the reader from the bookshop shelf and inspire them to part with hard-earned cash. Geez.
Names are often a good bet and carry their own baggage of expectation. You don’t pick up Emma, for instance thinking she’s going to turn into Dracula. (Which would be confusing but fun.) Or it may reflect the book’s theme: Pride and Prejudice or Death on the Nile.
In the heyday of the gothic novel, you could get away with titles such as Geralda, The Demon Nun, which could still be – just about – be used today. Joanna Polenipper, Female Horse Stealer, Foot-Pad, Smuggler, Prison Breaker and Murderer is probably too wordy for modern tastes but you’d be wrong in thinking that Joanna came to a bad end. At the end of the book, “Joanna was transported for her crimes, retrieved her character in Australia, married a rich settler and lived for many years respected and beloved by all who knew her.”
If you found Joanna’s unexpected embrace of virtue unsettling, you’d probably be better sticking to another novel of the 1830’s, Lovel Castle, where the anxious author told his readers exactly what they were getting: Lovel Castle, or The Rightful Heir Restored, a Gothic Tale Narrating how a Young Man, the supposed son of a Peasant, by a train of Unparalleled Circumstances, not only discovered who were his Real Parents, but that they came to Untimely Deaths; with his Adventures in the Haunted Apartment, Discovery of the Fatal Closet, and the Appearance of the Ghost of his murdered Father; relating also how the Murderer was brought to Justice, with his Confession and the restoration to the Injured Orphan of his title and estates.
They don’t write them like that any more.
http://janefinnisblog.wordpress.com/)
The reason why Jane is pondering about titles is because Jane’s working on the fourth of her mysteries set in Roman Yorkshire (Yo!) and her publisher, not unreasonably you may feel, wants to know what the book’s going to be called. Jane eventually decided on Danger in the Wind which gives a nice frisson of lurking menace.
It’s amazing how hard it can be to come up with the right title. It has to be pithy, memorable, relevant to the book, a few words – maybe one word - that will jump out at the reader from the bookshop shelf and inspire them to part with hard-earned cash. Geez.
Names are often a good bet and carry their own baggage of expectation. You don’t pick up Emma, for instance thinking she’s going to turn into Dracula. (Which would be confusing but fun.) Or it may reflect the book’s theme: Pride and Prejudice or Death on the Nile.
In the heyday of the gothic novel, you could get away with titles such as Geralda, The Demon Nun, which could still be – just about – be used today. Joanna Polenipper, Female Horse Stealer, Foot-Pad, Smuggler, Prison Breaker and Murderer is probably too wordy for modern tastes but you’d be wrong in thinking that Joanna came to a bad end. At the end of the book, “Joanna was transported for her crimes, retrieved her character in Australia, married a rich settler and lived for many years respected and beloved by all who knew her.”
If you found Joanna’s unexpected embrace of virtue unsettling, you’d probably be better sticking to another novel of the 1830’s, Lovel Castle, where the anxious author told his readers exactly what they were getting: Lovel Castle, or The Rightful Heir Restored, a Gothic Tale Narrating how a Young Man, the supposed son of a Peasant, by a train of Unparalleled Circumstances, not only discovered who were his Real Parents, but that they came to Untimely Deaths; with his Adventures in the Haunted Apartment, Discovery of the Fatal Closet, and the Appearance of the Ghost of his murdered Father; relating also how the Murderer was brought to Justice, with his Confession and the restoration to the Injured Orphan of his title and estates.
They don’t write them like that any more.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
An American Point of View
I’ve just solved a bit of a puzzle. Last August I published a book on Amazon’s Kindle. The book, Frankie’s Letter, isn’t a Jack story but one I wrote as a bit of a refresher. It’s a First World War spy/detective story, a sort of John Buchan/Agatha Christie mix of dark doings, country houses, deception, beautiful women, heroes and villains. It very very nearly got taken up by Hodder and Stoughton but was finally turned down, with sincere regret by the editor as the massive bookseller, Waterstones, didn’t think it was really for them. Pause for a sigh here, I think.
Long gone are the days when editors could take a punt on a book they liked and hope sales would follow. For instance, The Lord Of The Rings, was liked – very much liked – by its publisher, Stanley Unwin of Allen and Unwin, but he was convinced it wouldn’t make any money. He believed it was worthwhile, though, and went ahead and published it anyway. Well, we all know that story had a very happy ending and the world was enriched by the doings of Middle-Earth (although Legolas does break into rather too much poetry for my taste.)
So what, failing a Stanley Unwin, does a writer with a book on their hands do? Especially one they believe in? Imagine a light-bulb going on at this point. Yes, that’s right! Ebooks! It’s time-consuming to publish on kindle but it’s possible. So I did it. Now, to read what’s written on the interweb, at this point it should go ballistic. Did it? Er… no. Waiting for a reaction to Frankie’s Letter was like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Why, I asked, as I paced my lonely garret?* So I asked the good people of the website Murder Must Advertise and got some fascinating answers.
I’d diligently linked Frankie’s Letter to Amazon with a nifty little logo on the Books page (go and see for yourself – it’s there!) BUT the link only works in Britain. I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have known that if the nice American websiters hadn’t told me. It is on Amazon.com, the US site, but you have to come off my website, log on to Amazon.com and start from scratch and in the meantime you’ve probably put the kettle on, put the cat out, walked the dog, made the dinner and generally lost interest in the entire process.
Hopefully, these problems are being fixed. And a big thank you to all those kind Americans. It’s genuinely appreciated.
*This is artistic licence. It’s a sort of metaphorical garret.
Long gone are the days when editors could take a punt on a book they liked and hope sales would follow. For instance, The Lord Of The Rings, was liked – very much liked – by its publisher, Stanley Unwin of Allen and Unwin, but he was convinced it wouldn’t make any money. He believed it was worthwhile, though, and went ahead and published it anyway. Well, we all know that story had a very happy ending and the world was enriched by the doings of Middle-Earth (although Legolas does break into rather too much poetry for my taste.)
So what, failing a Stanley Unwin, does a writer with a book on their hands do? Especially one they believe in? Imagine a light-bulb going on at this point. Yes, that’s right! Ebooks! It’s time-consuming to publish on kindle but it’s possible. So I did it. Now, to read what’s written on the interweb, at this point it should go ballistic. Did it? Er… no. Waiting for a reaction to Frankie’s Letter was like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Why, I asked, as I paced my lonely garret?* So I asked the good people of the website Murder Must Advertise and got some fascinating answers.
I’d diligently linked Frankie’s Letter to Amazon with a nifty little logo on the Books page (go and see for yourself – it’s there!) BUT the link only works in Britain. I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have known that if the nice American websiters hadn’t told me. It is on Amazon.com, the US site, but you have to come off my website, log on to Amazon.com and start from scratch and in the meantime you’ve probably put the kettle on, put the cat out, walked the dog, made the dinner and generally lost interest in the entire process.
Hopefully, these problems are being fixed. And a big thank you to all those kind Americans. It’s genuinely appreciated.
*This is artistic licence. It’s a sort of metaphorical garret.
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