“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.
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