A Portfolio Life - Writing

A Portfolio Life

With a wicked pack of cards...

29/5/2020

Anne looks at me. 'Here' she said, 'is your cardigan.
Put it on.' Thank you. I'd be lost without you.
I'd already be dead without you.
But we are all like the drowned Phoenecian sailor, I said.
We come from water, we go back to water.
We need to realise that we are water,
merely vehicles for water.
Anne said 'Yes dear, cup of tea.'

Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!

8/5/2020

We are vehicles for water
without which we are dust
and water must move
always be on the move
and when it's done with us
when it's had its fill
it discards us as a crab
might shed its shell
or a snake might
slough its skin, leaving
us as carbon, discarded
scattered on the floors
of silent seas, reflecting
only false gems of what
we once thought
ourselves to have been.

Should I get a Smart Meter?

27/2/2020

Here’s the question. Now, some of my oldest friends will say that I have an opinion on everything, and I get where they’re coming from, even though in these days of everyone shouting very loudly, I can barely venture below the line, have left twitter and shun Facebook. In the world of keyboard warriors, it turns out I’m a pacifist. Still, you would expect me to have an opinion on smart meters, and as a mung-bean knitting, Guardian-reading, do-gooding, bollocks to Brexit, metropolitan pseudo-intellectual, you would expect that I’m all in favour, have several, along with solar panels, and have long since turned my electricity surplus into a revenue stream directed towards good causes.

Yet, I’m not and I haven’t and I probably won’t.

I’ve been bombarded by my provider, Bulb, for weeks now to get one. This makes me not want one. For I am contradictory and resist pushing. “They’re free” they say. “What’s the catch?” I echo. The more they push the more I resist. Always look a gift-horse in the mouth, I say, if you’re so keen on it, what’s your own benefit? Please, they say.

Then I hear an advert, voiced by Maxine Peake, top actor and well-known lefty agitator /class warrior. And I think, ah – you’re aiming at me there are you not? At someone who loves an actor/ lefty agitator/class warrior. And instead of thinking, right-ho, here we go, I think, what are you trying to greenwash?

Which is pretty sad, isn’t it, if the advert was sincere and well-meant. See where we are?

So, I googled. And then wished I hadn’t. The first thing I clicked on was an article in The Daily Telegraph – “Six reasons not have a smart meter.” None of them of any point. Their reasoning seemed to be, this is just the sort of thing that our enemies are in favour of, so let’s be against it. They even managed to put a picture of Ed Mllliband in the middle of the article, as if to say, you know, lefties and Jews, eh?

I didn’t find any cogent reason to install one. What, I might shout at Anne not to use her hair-dryer on Mach 10, or maybe use a saucepan instead of a kettle for that one-cup brew of earth-ending selfishness? That’ll save the world. And 20 pence.

There’s a suggestion, if you can be bothered to click through enough shit, that it allows for efficiencies, not just within our home, but within our overall planning for electricity, but that left me thinking, yes, but that’s not for our benefit, that’s for your profit – why am I helping companies make more money out of me about something I honestly think shouldn’t be run for gain.

So, please, tell me, because I really feel I should want one, why?

April is the Cruellest Month...

9/1/2020

She was born in Spring. We thought we should name her accordingly. Something full of spirit and flight – new and untameable. We settled on April. This despite her being born in March. Forgive us. Always bending stories to suit our needs, it’s a disgusting habit. In retrospect we should have called her May. A terribly cautious, doubting little thing – forever pausing, half in, half out. Seeking permission, never committing.

Optimistic though. I was listening to the racing the other day and the presenter mentioned a horse called Pandora’s Box and, showing erudition beyond anything he ever had hitherto, he explained that Pandora left us with hope – the last thing out of her box of evils, as a kind of dock-leaf to ease the stings. And I thought, that’s not really right, is it, at least not if I remember my Camus, back when existentialism was the way of feet-staring box-room rebels – before Ayn Rand, pornography and Playstation offered something supposedly more. Isn’t it that hope is the last and cruellest evil out of the box; that’s certainly why we never called her Hope.

My point is, you should never start your story by naming someone after a month. And certainly not before you’ve even decided what you’ve given birth to exactly. A heroine? A girl? A story? A kitten? A memory? A wish? Plus, you know, in these days of days, I guess the real question is, should we be breeding at all?

I’m writing this in my conservatory on an early morning in September (also a terrible name – in fact, here’s a note to all authors and parents – just don’t name your child after a month and, whilst we’re here, after a day of the week). On the table in front of me is a large vase of lilacs. They remind me of some lines by that dreary cat-lover and Jew-hater (or as he would have had it, jew-hater), TS Eliot, which if I remember rightly, goes:

“Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers whilst she talks….”

Such desperate courtliness and yearning and hopelessness and perhaps I’m getting too old for such things, for when I was young, I deemed this passage out of the ground brilliant. Whereas now I find myself cleaving ever closer to Karin’s dictum that the only good poet is a dead poet.

Besides, the thing that Eliot seems to have overlooked, and rather unforgivably at that for a poet, even a dead one, is that lilacs stink. Purple, huge, dramatic but smelling like someone’s tried to hide the smell of a decomposing mouse, by spraying cheap air freshener around the room. So, I’ve just moved the lilacs and put them on the landing. This act disturbed my wife who asked me what I was doing. I said, I’m sorry, these lilacs, they are properly making me ill. She laughed and said – seems so, considering they’re lilies. Not lilacs. That’s how it is. I’m always mixing things up.

Dr Paul Evans, possibly...

15/9/2019

In 1983ish or thereabouts, Jonathan Raban and Paul Theroux, then old (and much-distanced friends), met each other for a few tortuous hours in Brighton. I know this because they both wrote about it afterwards, in two brilliant travel books about Thatcher’s Britain, Theroux’s the Kingdom by the Sea and Raban’s (superior) Coasting.

Judging by their accounts it’s not a meeting that goes well, both of them circling each other competitively (why do writers indulge in this nonsense?) and instead of enjoying each other’s company, honing passages in their heads, right there on the fly. At one stage (reports Raban) Theroux even makes a little note in his pad.

Why do I mention this? Because today, on the lower reaches of Brown Clee, Anne and I ran into a grand old chap, whilst we were walking up and he was walking down. He was carrying a supermarket bag. Anne, of course, stopped and asked him what was in it. Mushrooms. Many mushrooms. And over the next fifteen minutes we discussed all the varieties and their habitat, and this and very much that. I say we, but of course I mean he and Anne.

I wasn’t absent though. Instead, I was thinking to myself – “that’s Paul Evans, isn’t it? Is it? Dr Paul Evans, of the Guardian Country Diary, the man described in One Dog and His Man as the greatest living writer in England today. Or Shropshire, at least. The man, whom I even sent a copy of said book to, and who sent me back a lovely little card of thanks with a note to say, he agreed, Ida Gandy is indeed a much under-rated writer, and make sure you read Andrew Fusek Peters’ book on wild swimming in Shropshire.

I was just about to ask him if he was him, when he said he’d just rescued a fawn from a hedge, but didn’t know what type of deer it was, “not being very good on animals.” Oh, I thought to myself, that certainly can’t be right. There must be another bloke who looks a bit like I imagine Paul Evans to look like, wandering around the countryside, collecting ceps and chanterelles.

So, unlike that fateful day in Brighton, repeating down the years, set down for future generations, preserved for posterity, this wasn’t a chance encounter between surely the two pre-eminent Shropshire writers of the moment (disregarding Fusek-Peters and James Hannah and Jonathan Coe, and anyone else who can string a sentence together and has stumbled into the county). Which is a shame, for I’ve always thought a wander through the hills of Shropshire with Paul pointing out everything I miss, (and need to read his diary to explain), would be a rather wonderful way to spend a Sunday.

Still, just in case it was, and just in case his next diary entry is about the day he met a chatty couple up on Brown Clee whilst he was foraging for mushrooms, and spent most of the time wondering if this could be THE Gary Twynam, of One Dog and His Man fame, not forgetting Anne and Bobby, I thought I’d best file this report first, and hope I come out as the Jonathan Raban of the piece.

Ash Thursday

20/8/2019

Because I do not care to read it again
Because I do not care to read it
Because I do not care to read
Because I do not care to
Because I do not care

The Bear Necessities

4/1/2019

I caught Disney’s 1967 musical adaptation of The Jungle Book over the seasonal holidays and it’s still brilliant (and extraordinarily psychedelic).

I must have seen it at the cinema when I was five and I’ve carried it with me ever since. In particular, Baloo must have been my first ever hero, and remains my number one role model. The Bear Necessities is as close to a philosophy of life as I’ve managed, and I often cite these lyrics as my touchstone:

Now if you pick a paw, or a prickly pear
And you prick a raw paw, next time beware.
Don’t pick the prickly pear by the paw,
When you pick a pear try to use the claw
But you don’t need to use the claw
When you pick a pear of the big paw paw.

Have I given you a clue?
(Gee golly, thanks, Baloo).

The song was actually played at Karin’s funeral. I think the idea was we would all break free from our chains and dance with childlike abandon around the chapel and, being in the front row, I had the perfect opportunity to locate my inner Baloo and lead the way. To my constant regret, I’m sad to say that all the glass darkly stuff had taken hold, and timidity, embarrassment and decorum held me back.

So, with that in mind, if I have one resolution for the year, it’s to be less grown-up and more Baloo, though we’d best not tell Anne…

Freedom of Movement

20/12/2018

"World is crazier and more of it than we think.
Incorrigibly plural."

Louis MacNiece - Snow

The thing about Freedom of Movement is it works both ways, and that seems to have been criminally neglected in the arguments for or against Brexit. We've been hi-jacked by a closed-minded, closed-border, closed-window interpretation of a world, one of battening down the hatches - a few tired and scared souls huddling around an imagined past - circling the wagons, keeping out the other.

I've hardly heard anyone say - hang on - what about our own right to freedom of movement? Because, you know, I kinda like it. I emigrated to America in the 80s, but it didn't last long, for many reasons, one of them being that I ended up as an illegal alien for quite a while, despite having an obvious family right to be there. I took it in my stride, I was young, I came home, I moved on. But the experience stuck with me. And subsequently I liked the freedom to go and work as I pleased in the whole of Europe, even if I hardly took advantage of it. It was like a Monopoly Community Card that might come in handy one day, plus passing through customs - man, that was a breeze. And in time we even opened a flipping giant tunnel right under the Channel. That seemed as improbable and wonderful as space exploration, a giant leap for island mankind.

I still feel that way. Because - as Louis MacNiece said - there's things that come between us. But they don't have to be walls, they can be bridges. They don't have to be closed windows, they can be open ones. Plus, you can't actually stop the world leaking in anyway, because it's suddener than you fancy and incorrigibly plural. And, as it turns out, if you try to fence me in, I'm going be mighty pissed about it.

Because, you know, what about my right to freedom of movement? You, those of you who voted to take that away from me, no, I don't feel open towards you. In a singularity of language and purpose that you should understand, I fucking hate you for it. And I won't forgive and I will not forget.

No, I'm fiftyfuckingsix...

8/10/2018

Brighton. Roedean pitch and putt. We are buying tickets.

The girl looks at us. "Are any of you over 65?" she says.

True.

Amy Sackville, poetic sensibilty and suing Albert Camus....

4/10/2018

Tall tales, songs and nursery rhymes – they all gave me a love for words, for the story, and for the joy of rhythm and pleasing word combinations. And so it was, I became a lover of books and a student of literature and a wannabe poet and a sometime writer and eventually even a published novelist.

And I do like a novel. A grand story. But on the whole, I like them clean. Not too grandiose. Genre novels, and yes, by that I mainly mean crime novels, which have rules and parameters and the joy of the great ones is how they find the space to thrive within their limits. Raymond Chandler, Lawrence Block, Patricia Highsmith, James Crumley, Gillian Flynn.

Most literary novels, in contrast, aren’t my bag. Oh sure, there’s plenty of exceptions, but that’s not for now – just to say I’ve never found them the apotheosis of writing, certainly not in the way our culture generally tends towards. Great novels – meh.

Poetry, on the other hand. No-one likes poetry. It’s unfathomable. Or terrible. Maybe, but poetry comes closest to answering the big stuff, for me anyway. At its best, and this is how I like my literature, it’s a glimpse of something out of the corner of one’s eye, which hints at something huge and otherwise unfathomable and, just for a moment of two, tames it, brings it into focus, suggests that the world as we know it, mundane and mediocre, is actually something else.

You don’t have to be a poet, of course, to do this as a writer, but you do need to have something of that sensibility, but with an originality most of us would-be poets lack. So, who does that include, for me, in the pantheon of great writers, as a suggestion for those who sometimes like something more than a good story, well told? Well, obviously, there’s the eponymous heroine of this piece who, in her first two novels, subsumed the vastness of mother earth in the most unrelenting poetic terms that I’ve ever read. Plus…

TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, ee cummings, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson all fairly obvious, but no less rewarding for all that. Dylan, Dylan also does this. But then, also, John Cheever in his journals, DH Lawrence in his travel jottings, Annie Dillard in her short pieces, Dostoevsky in his madder moments, Nietzsche in his saner ones, and Camus, whose teachings one is supposed to grow out of, but who has remained my philosophical touchstone all my life – I should definitely sue Penguin books.

I doubt it’s an accident that most of these, apart from, or because of, their talent, were essentially troubled to the verge of insanity, and often beyond...