Benjamin Evans - Author

Movie Writing

2012-01-01T15:51:00.002Z

Happy New Year all

Yep, I've made the resolution you've all been dreading - WRITE MORE.

So with this in mind here is my sell-out to Hollywood, the movie adaptation of Liquid Girl of Berlin. Have a look. Its something of a homage to this dynamic and exciting city which I think anyone alive in the 20th Century needs to go to at some point.
Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

Liquid Girl of Berlin - The Movie

2012-01-01T15:49:00.001Z

THE LIQUID GIRL OF BERLIN

Cast:

Raymond Phelps – A famous American model

Liquid Girl – A Berlin research doctor

Sophia Monfis – A beautiful news presenter

Old Man working on a barge

Woman in TV Tower

Crowd outside awards ceremony

Paparazzi

INT. TOP OF BERLIN TV TOWER.

We look at the city through the lens of a tourist telescope. It is early evening and it is getting dark. The sight focuses on the old East - apartment blocks, factories - then looks around and zooms back on the modernised West - the Potsdamer Platz, the Hauptbahnhof, the Reichstag. It continues to move slowly around and then focuses in again, this time on the old scar of the wall, working its way along until it reaches the River Spree where it flows through the divide.

There is tiny dot moving down the side of the river.

The telescope goes black.

EXT. BANK OF THE SPREE. TWILIGHT.

An OLD MAN is untying the rope of his rusted barge. He is a traditional, unfashionable, East Berlin type, grumbling to himself as he alights onto the river.

His barge engine fires loudly casts off and floats through a group of swans.

Over the other side of the bank a figure is running - a silhouetted female holding books. The camera follows until she turns off into the woods.

The barge continues down the river before the trees dwindle and glittering display of lights and flashes appears.

It putters and then stops.

FADE TO

EXT. CINEMA. AWARDS CEREMONY.

Through a crowd around the red carpet presenter SOPHIA MONFIS finds Hollywood model RAYMOND PHELPS. There are flashbulbs going off and microphones being thrust in his face.

SOPHIA

Raymond, Raymond! Hey Raymond, come on. Thirty seconds for fashion news?

Raymond nods to her and smiles

SOPHIA

Raymond, tell us. You are the most famous model in the world. You appear in adverts, TV series, movies and even your own reality show. What does it feel like to be you?

RAYMOND

It feels, great yeah.

SOPHIA

And now you are to be presented with the award for Most Eligible Bachelor on the Planet.

RAYMOND

Yeah, yeah I guess I am.

He nods and gives a forced toothy grin

SOPHIA

You look fantastic tonight. Are you trying to catch anyone’s eye?

RAYMOND

No. No. I dont think so. We’ll...’

He looks away at something in the distance, to a figure walking briskly over the other side of the road.

RAYMOND

...It depends. What are you up to later Sophia?’

EXT/INT. LIQUID GIRL’S APARTMENT.

LIQUID GIRL rushes down an empty pavement and turns to enter her apartment. Its dark and we still don’t really see her features.

Inside she places the books on a cluttered pile and sits down at her desk. The computer screen lights up. We view her from behind the screen as if she is a computerised image. Words flow in front of her face. She types furiously.

An email flashes up on screen. We read it in the reflection of her glasses, her eyes still visible behind.

Thank you for your research paper but we are no longer interested in the particle reformation project.

US Central Intelligence.

The screen flickers and so does our view of Liquid Girl. Her fuzzy form stands up and walks out of the door.

INT. SOPHIA MONFIS’ APARTMENT

Sophia leads Raymond up the stairs to the bedroom of her apartment. She kisses him and rips off his suit and shirt. They pass a huge poster of Raymond as she pushes him towards the bedroom.

She opens the door and throws him on the bed, removing her shirt and leaping on top. The light is left on.

SOPHIA

I want to see you. I want to see your face.

She takes off his trousers and places his hands onto her legs. Raymond lies silent and expressionless.

SOPHIA

Oh God Raymond.

She removes her underwear.

SOPHIA

Raymond. Raymond.

Then begins to gyrate slowly on top of him

SOPHIA

Raymond Raymond, Raymond I just...have...to look at you

Your mouth.

Your chest.

Your hands.

Your eyes.

With eyes like that you can have anything.

Raymond lies lifeless beneath. After a few moments Sophia stops.

SOPHIA

I want you Raymond. I want to make you happy.

CU on Raymond’s face. He looks the other way, out of the window.

SOPHIA

Don’t you want me to make you happy?

EXT. BERLIN FREIDERICHSTRASSE.

Raymond is walking down an upper class shopping street. We view him from the side passing shop after shop - Gap, Burberry, Calvin Klein.

Mannequins turn and look at him, signs flash at him, pictures of his face stare from all around.

A crowd forms on the pavement and he has to dodge people as they stop and turn to look. He tries to push through, then stumbles.

A camera flash lights up the screen. Then another. Then another. The film changes to a stop-frame series of pictures of Raymond, with the sound of Paparazzi echoing in the background.

PAPARAZZI

Raymond!

Raymond covers his face

PAPARAZZI

Raymond!

Raymond lights a cigarette

PAPARAZZI

Raymond!

Raymond dives into an alley

CUT TO

EXT. ALLEYWAY.

Raymond is stood against the wall breathing heavily. Smoke rises around him and the sounds of the street begin to subside. His breathing slows and after a few seconds he looks around, one way then the other.

Cautiously he steps out and starts to walk down the alley. All seems okay. Then through the smoke he looks up and sees the TV Tower looking down at him. A camera flashes from it.

He turns the other way, but then sees the high rise buildings of the Potsdamer Platz in the other direction. Another camera flashes.

He turns back to the entrance to the alleyway. In the entrance to the alleyway there is a man with a camera. Another flash.

Raymond turns and runs back down the alley, chased by the flashes. He throws his cigarette aside and almost disappears into the smoke. But then he stops. There is a wall in front of him.

PAPARAZZI

Raymond!

Look at us.

Smile!

Let us see your face.

He looks around and then dives into the darkness.

FADE TO

EXT. A BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER SPREE. NIGHT.

The bridge is empty and silent. A residue of light shines from behind trees on the bank of the river. Only the water moves.

A swan flies down from the sky and lands with a graceful splash. It floats up on the current towards cathedrals and old museums in the distance.

Liquid Girl appears on the side of the bridge like a ghost. She stands and stares out to the river.

On the surface of the water a pale purple light. It shimmers in the light. It is vaguely human, but not at the same time.

Liquid Girl leans down to get a closer look and the camera leans with her as if to dive in the water.

A hiss from the swan interrupts. It flaps its wings violently and flies into the night.

Through Liquid Girl’s hazy form we see a figure running across the bridge. Behind him there is an explosion of light shining upwards.

He reaches the side of the bridge alongside her and stops to catch his breath. He does not seem to see her next to him.

LIQUID GIRL

It’s a nice night to be by the river

RAYMOND (panting)

Yeah. It is. Good and quiet

Raymond stares out, not acknowledging Liquid Girl’s presence.

RAYMOND

Dark an’ all. The darkest damn river that I ever saw.

The rivers ripples in a gust of wind.

LIQUID GIRL

It’s the only place where I feel alive.

It’s the only place where I can feel...real.

Out there in the world all they do is talk:

Blah blah blah

Chatter chatter chatter

Me me me.

This is it. This is the way it is.

Raymond is stood beside, touching his face as he listens to her voice.

LIQUID GIRL

I can’t be like that. I know they are wrong. But when you know this and no-one wants to listen, then what are you but words, being sucked into a deep black void?

There is a sound of the water ebbing against the bridge

LIQUID GIRL

But here, here in Berlin, on the river, there is always something, a place to ripple and flow, and go on to something new.

She takes hold of his hand

LIQUID GIRL

Come on. Come on, look. Let me show you what I mean.

Do you see?

Her reflection is seen as light shimmering on the waves.

LIQUID GIRL

There I am. Me. A million atoms dancing in the river.

The water ripples.

LIQIUD GIRL

And there is go again, into something else. A new form, with a new life and a new place in the world.

She turns to face Raymond.

LIQUID GIRL

It’s fun to be liquid. You never know what form you are going to take.

Here. Why don’t you look?

Raymond looks at the water. His reflection is opaque, with defined, chiselled features. Little pockets of light dance around it and get brighter and more dominant. The background changes into the awards ceremony from the earlier scene.

CROWD

Raymond

Raymond we love you

Come here

Look at us

Smile.

PAPARAZZI

Come on Raymond

Let’s have a smile

Just here Raymond

No here

Here

Look this way

Give us your face

Raymond

Raymond.

Cameras flash all around and then we move to an extreme CU of Raymond’s face. He is smiling in pose, as in the earlier scene and in bed with Sophia Monfis. We then fade back to the river with the reflection rippling in the water.

A swan alongside and lands on the river, washing his reflection into a blur.

Raymond staggers back and immediately convulses onto the pavement.

LIQUID GIRL

What do you see when you look down there?

Raymond looks up in pain.

LIQUID GIRL

What do you see Raymond?

RAYMOND (panicking)

I see me, I see lights, then...and then I see nothing. Nothing at all

LIQUID GIRL

Blackness?

RAYMOND

Yeah, but blackness there – ughh, ugghhh – and blackness here, and there, and inside here.

He points to his chest.

RAYMOND

Deep in here.

LIQUID GIRL

Don’t be afraid Raymond. You need to see the void and feel yourself slowly sinking into it. Then you can understand and you can know what it is to be liquid.

Raymond scowls and turns back to the water.

LIQUID GIRL

Don’t be scared Raymond

Ramyond stares and then staggers back again.

RAYMOND

What the fuck? What is that? What are you trying to do to me?

Liquid Girl sits up on the side on the bridge beside him.

LIQUID GIRL

Join me. Join me in the water. Let yourself fall and we can be free together.

Raymond back away. He is shaking and sweating

RAYMOND

What’s going on? How are you making me feel this way?

LIQUID GIRL

It’s not me Raymond. It’s you. The emptiness is in your soul, not mine.

(Pause)

RAYMOND

I ain’t empty. I’m Raymond Phelps. Look at me. People love this face.

LIQUID GIRL

Do people love YOU Raymond?

RAYMOND

Hell yeah. I’m the best looking guy in the word, ain’t I.

Liquid girl leaps down from the wall and guides Raymond’s shaking body to the edge of the bridge.

LIQUID GIRL

Don’t be scared Raymond. It isn’t so bad in there. You’re scared because you can’t see what’s at the bottom. You don’t know what will happen at the end.

RAYMOND

I do know what will happen. I’ll fall, I’ll sink and I'll drown. That’s what happens to people who leap off’a bridges.

LIQUID GIRL

Be liquid with me Raymond.

RAYMOND

I can’t!

He tries to push her away but his hands fall through a wall of light

CUT TO

INT. BERLIN TV TOWER. NIGHT.

Mirroring their pose on the bridge Liquid Girl and Raymond stare out at the city below. They look to the West where thousands of lights flicker and glow

LIQUID GIRL

What do you see when you look out there Raymond?

RAYMOND

I see lights...and walls. I see my face in the lights and on the walls.

LIQUID GIRL

That’s all a beautiful man sees?

(Pause)

RAYMOND

That’s all I can see.

She puts her arm around him.

LIQUID GIRL

Walls and lights.

The camera looks around the city and then focuses down to the waters of the River Spree.

LIQUID GIRL

There is more than that Raymond

CUT TO

EXT. BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER SPREE.

LIQUID GIRL

I won’t let you be like this Raymond. I won’t let you be trapped by walls or blinded by lights.

RAYMOND

I don’t want to be trapped

LIQUID GIRL

There is more to you that this.

RAYMOND

I want to be someone else.

LIQUID GIRL

You can always change.

RAYMOND

I want to be free.

LIQUID GIRL

You are liquid. You can flow.

She takes his hand and they step to the edge of the bridge. The sound of water rushes under their feet. Two swans fly over them towards the city.

LIQUID GIRL

You can flow anywhere.

They jump together into the water

EXT. BANK OF THE RIVER SPREE. CENTRAL BERLIN. DAWN.

An Old Man is working on his boat. It is the same man from the first scene – traditional East Berliner. He scowls as two swans prance by and he shoos them away into the water.

Behind him a railway rattles with an approaching train.

The swans splash into the water.

The rattle of the railway tracks gets louder.

Old Man continues working but then notices something in the ripples from the swans’ wake. It is the clothes and possibly the body of a woman – possibly Liquid Girl.

CUT TO

EXT. THE OPPOSITE BANK.

Raymond emerges from the water, walking up some steps to the bank. He is calm and moves as if nothing has happened. His eyes look straight ahead. He walks along the bank towards the city.

CUT TO

EXT. WOODS.

A fox runs.

CUT TO

EXT. TREES.

A bird flies to its nest, with a small branch in its beak

CUT TO

EXT. BANK OF RIVER SPREE.

A drunk is slumped against the wall of a disused factory. It is decorated with colourful graffiti.

CUT TO

EXT. OPPOSITE BANK OF RIVER SPREE

Raymond walks along the bank and under a railway bridge

CUT TO

INT. BERLIN HAUPTBAHNHOF.

Raymond walks into the station and checks his watch. The floor is bust with early-morning commuters. They turn and stare as he walks ahead.

The shot changes to the view from a security camera above

The camera looks one way, then the other, then focuses on Raymond. He is walking through the station as if he is meeting someone at a certain time. Around him hundreds of commuters stand frozen, staring. Raymond does not seem to notice.

EXT. BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ.

Raymond walks through the main square of the Alexanderplatz. As before people stand and stare. Couples in coffee houses put down their drinks. He ignores them, passes through, then turns and walks to the entrance of the TV Tower.

INT. TOP OF TV TOWER

Lift doors open and Raymond steps out through a crowd. They whisper behind him. He strides confidently around the viewing area, looking out at each window. He stops at one. We look down at the city and the old Brandenburg Gate where people, cars and trains seems to move in a harmony. There is no focus on any particular landmark – it is a living, organic city.

Raymond continues to walk around and at the last window there is a woman stood staring out. She has same physique and hair as Liquid Girl. He walks up slowly then stops.

(Pause)

He taps her on the back.

RAYMOND

Hey, how you doin...?

She spins around. It is a different woman.

RAYMOND

...Sorry. Sorry, my mistake.

Raymond walks around the viewing area again, ignoring the crowds. Then he stops and looks out of another window. The city is still in motion.

The shot focuses down onto the River Spree where a boat is moored on the bank. It is the boat from the first scene. Old Man is pointing at the water, at a body floating along slowly.

Cut back to Raymond’s POV.

He stares out emotionless.

A WOMAN walks up behind him.

WOMAN

Excuse me...are you Raymond Phelps?

Raymond turns around and thinks.

RAYMOND

Sorry...no. I...I...no. I’m someone else completely.

Woman looks sceptically then walks away.

Raymond stares back out the window, then turns and walks to the lift. He stops for a moment to think, then moves forward inside. The doors start to close.

At the same time Liquid Girl walks out of the adjacent lift. She has different hair, clothes and expression but it is unmistakeably her. She pauses as the other lift closes. Raymond does not see her. She walks to the same window Raymond has left and looks down to the city. The camera stays on her face. She smiles and touches her chin. Then she turns and walks away.

The camera stays looking at the city. Time speeds up – people move around, lights come on, buildings rise and fall. The river flows.

The End

The Reunion - A short story

2011-12-13T12:41:00.002Z

Hi all. Sorry about the brief interlude. Have been engaged in the all the non-writing business of writing - bothering agents, not winnning competition, sending pieces to magazines that no-one reads - but back now, and hopefully with some new-exciting site additons. However, until then here's another little piece.

The Reunion

Many people have told me that running focuses the mind. It has something to do with the balancing of the brain, where fatigue and effort are countered by a rush of endorphins, and it gives everything a bright, newly painted clarity. You wake in the morning a shivering mess of neurosis and stride-stride-stride your way into a pre-breakfast enlightenment, whole, happy and rounded with the brush of Raphael.
I wonder then, what to make of the events of last Wednesday morning when I went my first run since my girlfriend had died a year before.

It all started in the normal way. I woke up, cleaned my teeth, drank a cup of strong coffee, looked in the mirror, ignored the three faces sobbing and laughing and then ran out of the door.
The rhythm took a long time to build. The pavement sent vibrations through my bones and my insides began to churn and boil like an acid tank. The morning fog froze as I inhaled, crackling through my lungs before I coughed it out with explosion of pain.
Help me.
Help me.
Help me.
Then, as I turned off the road, passed the field of miniature ponies, and into the nature reserve, I felt my mind start to clear. Here it was. A rush of soothing atoms. Syrup through the arid brain.
Suddenly the grass turned an oily green and the trees and lush leafy auburn. Mud became the pastel of an artist’s easel and the sun expanded into a mirror of heaven.
Light.
Light.
All is light and clear.
A heard of cows formed in a line in front of a trough of apricots and bananas. They lapped at the sugary mush, covering their snouts with ambrosial trifle, and started to talk with colloquial moos.
‘Moo-moo-moo mooooo.
Moo.
Moo moo.
Looks like a nice day.
Any plans for the weekend?’
My legs strode along the footpath, light as the fog as it evaporated in the sunlight, and floated through a gate to the river that flowed to the city.
The water gushed with morning effervescence, steaming with sweat as it dashed towards the finish. I ran with it – gush, gush, gush, ripple-ripple-ripple. Soon we became one person, a moving expression of nature, focused on our goal.
Then, as my legs meandered around a bend, I saw a hundred fish leaping from the water. They had great big eyes, like platters of diamond, and jaws as sharp as the assassin’s dagger.
Snap.
Snap, snap, snap.
Blood and spittle dripped from their tongues and their scales gleamed with silver armour. They had killed.
Snap.
And they could kill me.
Snap.
Running.
Ha!
Running.
Ha!
Snap.
Snap, snap, snap.
Pssshhhh.
One at a time they melted into the air and then disappeared.
Snap-snap.
Snap-snap.
Snap.
Sn.
Sssss.
Sssss.
Sssss…
The fog cleared and I kept on running.
Then something truly unexpected happened. I ran to the end of the river and onto the road and I saw her, stood by the front gate, waiting for me. Her eyes glinted in the light and her teeth curved into a smile, the same smile from years of white sheets and happiness.
‘Hey,’ she said, opening her arms. ‘Where have you been all this time?’
I looked at her eyes, blue and clear as the sky over the ocean.
‘I’ve been out for a run,’ I said.
‘You were gone for a while.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I’m back now.’
Her arms wrapped around my back, warmed by the blood flowing from my heart.
‘Don’t leave me again.’
Then we turned and went back into the house, arm in arm.

Was this clarity? Had the endorphins balanced my brain? Was this the real world?
I didn’t care.

The Liquid Girl of Berlin

2011-11-02T16:47:00.002Z

Okay, so here is the final piece after a few weeks of creative writing tutoring. Please see included added 'dramatic tension' and 'contrast.' I ahve also included my commentary on the piece due to popular demand. I'll let you know how it goes.

The Liquid Girl of Berlin

Raymond Phelps could have been God as far as the world was concerned. He was the highest paid model in Hollywood, regularly feted as the world’s most eligible bachelor, and at a ceremony that evening in Berlin had been crowned ‘Man of the 21st Century.’ On the wall of Sonya Monfis, the French actress, there was even an enlarged print of his face.
‘It’s your eyes,’ she said, stroking the paper with her fingernails. ‘With eyes like that you can have anything.’
But Raymond Phelps didn’t want to look at another picture. He didn’t want to look at anything at all.
As the beautiful French actress tore off his clothes he felt his limbs start to grow cold, and as her body curved and squeezed around him his breath begin to choke. He focused on the perfect undulations of her legs and stomach and the measured tip of her nipples as her breasts rubbed gently over his groin, but then he froze completely.
‘Come on Raymond. I want to feel you. I want your body in me.’
With every move Raymond’s body shivered.
‘Your mouth.
‘Your chest.
Shake, cold, ache. More and more.
‘All of you.’
‘Your beautiful face.’
Numb.
He closed his eyes, then kicked the beautiful actress onto the carpet and ran away.

A thousand faces stared as Raymond walked through the city. Couples pointed out of cafe windows, tramps wandered through the Tiergarten, tourists gazed from the TV tower. ‘Look,’ said their pouting lips. ‘The shoulders. The mole on his chin. That beautiful olive skin. It’s him!’
Raymond lit a cigarette, forming a cloud to sting the eyes of the watching audience, and then ducked into an empty square of plush white blocks.
‘All they do is look. All they see is him.’
Above the glass dome of the Reichstag revolved.
‘Look.
‘Look.
‘There he is!’
Tiny heads spun to look.
‘Here! Here!
‘Look here!’
He reached for a cigarette.
‘Look at me Raymond.’
But it was too late.
‘Her.
‘Him.
‘Them.
‘Look.
‘Look at us.’
A million light bulbs flashed.
‘Look here.
‘Here.
‘Here!’
The sky exploded with light. A galaxy of telescopes pointed at him, and the TV Tower, the Reichstag and the Wall gripped onto his neck. Raymond looked one way and then the other and, unable to breathe, dived into the darkness.

The girl leant over a bridge and looked down at the River Spree as it drifted into the east of the city. Her light summer dress rippled in the wind, emitting a purple glow like phosphorus out at sea and her skin hovered over the water like dragonfly wings.
‘Hey,’ she said, without turning around.
Raymond’s legs drew him towards her. ‘Hey, he said
‘It’s a nice evening to be by the river,’ she said, whistling into the breeze
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is.’
Below them the water rippled and caressed the bank.
‘Would you like to look?’ she said.
On the river Raymond saw her reflection.There were dashes of flotsam on her face - blue on her eyes, white on her skin - and a steamy halo on her head. It seemed to jump and dance like seagulls over the fisherman’s net. He followed the current, washing and rippling around, dragging his body under.
‘No…no!’ he coughed, losing his balance on the cold stone wall. ‘Ahem, no its okay. I…’
He tried to stand but his legs had frozen in the water.
‘Come,’ she said, stroking her hand up the nape of his back. ‘Come and look. Don’t worry.’
Raymond blinked and peered over the bridge. On the surface of the Spree a new form took shape - dark close hair, light skin glazed in toffee brown, eyes like the sky over the arctic tundra - and around it a hundred lights swirled - cameras, crystal glasses, television screens, diamonds, screaming voices gurgling into the vortex
‘Raymond! We love you.
‘Look at us.
‘Come and to us.
‘Ushhh.
‘Usshhh.
‘Shhhhh.
‘Shhhhh’
The face they so desired floated precariously on the waves, and on the bridge Raymond staggered in the storm.
Plop.
A drop of rain lobotomised his forehead.
Splsshhh.
The wind contorted his sculpted cheeks
Ripple.
He sank under the current of a passing sawn.
‘It’s you,’ the strange girl’s reflection said. ‘And then it’s not you. It’s something else floating in the water.’
The girl’s hand gripped on his shoulder and turned him to her.
‘What are you doing to me?’ Raymond cried.
Her eyes glinted like sun on a cobweb. ‘Here’s you, Raymond Phelps,’ she said. ‘The one they all want. And then in the water there you are as well...until you go, and come back again.’
He tried look away but his neck had become limp.
‘No,’ he said.
‘The one they all want.’
‘Stop it.’
‘The one they all want.’
‘Get off me.’
‘Then nothing at all.’
‘Leave me alone!’
Her liquid glow enveloped Raymond. It was warm and luscious, embracing him into a lightness of being. Her hair waved around like golden reeds and her eyes dipped him into blue pools. Then she whispered, inside his ear:
‘Raymond. My name is Sophie. I am the liquid girl of Berlin. I think I will jump into the river. Would you like to jump with me?’
Reeds rustling around his head.
‘Come on. It will be nice. It’s fun to be liquid in Berlin. You never know what form you’ll take.
I don’t want to drown.
You won’t.
What makes you so sure?
I think you are drowning now, wouldn’t you say?
I’m still breathing. My heart beats.
Is that what it means to be alive?
People still love me.’
She took him to a platform above the bridge and they looked out to the city. Streetlights melted into an ethereal glow, blocks of apartments exploded into expanses of yellow and green, towers shot up like fountain jets and concrete walls flopped around like jelly.
‘What do you see when you look out there Raymond?’
‘Walls.
‘Walls and lights. Flashing lights.’
‘That’s all a beautiful man sees?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that what love is?’
The platform expanded into a giant golden cloud and in the centre stood Sophie opening her arms.
‘In Berlin we will not let you be like this. We will not be trapped by walls or blinded by lights.’
They walked to the edge, hands held together.
‘We see a future that is free, where can flow into whatever form we choose.’
Then they jumped into the Spree - the liquid girl and the beautiful man.

Raymond looked around, right and left, up and down, but all he could see was a dark mass of water. It grew heavier above him. Slowly he started to sink, deeper and deeper, into indigo, navy and then black. Black void.
‘Where am I?’
His voice was flat, like he was shut in a box.
‘What’s this pla...’
‘Wha...
‘Wh
‘W.’
A solid wall which even words could not breach.
‘Help me...’
‘Sophie...!’
‘Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom.’
A heart began to beat.
‘Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom.’
And Raymond saw something through the darkness.
‘Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom.’

On the bank of the Spree a hundred bodies sat slumped on deckchairs. A muscular figure hoisted himself out of the river, wiped the water from his olive skin and walked towards them. Beers dropped to the floor, ice creams melted and sunglasses steamed.
Then he turned towards the city. Cars skidded to a stop and cyclists slammed their feet to the floor. In cafes and bars men and women put down their drinks. Offices turned to morgues and computer screens winked off.
A million eyes stopped and looked.
Raymond Phelps didn’t notice. The beautiful man slipped by without a glance. He didn’t feel their eyes burn into his skull and he didn’t hear their voices scream at his face.
Raymond didn’t notice because he was looking for someone.

‘Hey!’
‘Hey you, over there!’
In a square of perfect green grass sat a girl. She wore a small yellow dress and glinted like the sun on a snowy peak.
‘Hey!’
She put down a book and waved at Raymond, her hands dancing up and down like ballerina. He stopped, looked back at the cars, the offices and the shops, and then he ran over to her.
Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom.
‘Hey,’ she said, brushing golden strands of hair from her face.
‘Hey,’ Raymond panted.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve been distracted.’
‘You know, you should really give up smoking,’ she said, folding her arms like a teacher.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I have.’
‘It’s very bad for your skin.’
She rubbed her arms up and down her side and laughed, a yellow halo forming around her.
‘Come for a walk through the city.’
He took her hand and clasped it tight into his. It was warm and soft like a child’s.
‘Where shall we go?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Commentary

The initial idea for my story came from an episode of Horizon on the BBC about parallel universes, and the idea there may be one type of ‘you’ existing in one place, and another different ‘you’ in a completely separate universe. I had written this down in my notebook as an interesting concept for a piece, but it was only on a visit to Berlin that I saw a way I could develop it in a narrative. Here I found an entire city forming a new identity, from division to liberal progress and felt this could be an evocative environment to set a story. I revisited the thoughts I had noted down, researched the quantum theory behind it and then had the idea of representing a particle change, from solid to liquid, in a human tale. To me it seemed to represent of the change in Berlin - from two defined states to a malleable form - and also the journey of my character, from a staid world of appearance to an epiphany of emotion.

I first wrote as two separate narratives colliding at the liminal centre of the river, however, I found that the lack of interaction between the two characters was of detriment to the story’s dramatic focus. I considered the techniques built in Activity 2.6 in the Workbook and rewrote from the perspective of only the male model, building the tension first through his confrontation with the physical world and then from his fear of embracing the ‘liquid’ world of emotions. I wanted to concentrate on the motifs of light and water, taking inspiration from a reading of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, but the story became overly abstract so I rewrote again giving the ‘liquid girl’ a more human role.

It was important to me to try and create and reflect the consciousness of the city, however I didn’t want to convey a mere series of landmarks. I formed a cluster to gather my images of the city and asked some local people I had met to do the same and used these to create an authentic sense of place in the piece – liquid as well as solid.

Solid and Liquid

2011-10-08T11:52:00.001+01:00

Solid and Liquid

Raymond Phelps could have been God as far as the world was concerned. He was the highest paid model in Hollywood, regularly voted as the best looking person on the planet and this evening he had been to a ceremony in Berlin crowning him ‘Man of the 21^st Century.’

His advert for Calvin Klein was even on the wall of Sonya Monfis, the French actress, who had seduced him that evening.

‘It’s your eyes,’ she said, stroking the paper with her fingernails. ‘With eyes like that you can have anything you want.’

But Raymond Phelps didn’t feel like being seduced. Ever since he had been in Berlin he’d had something on his mind.

‘Don’t you want me?’ she’d said, leaning over him and letting her breasts rub slowly over his chest. ‘Don’t you want me to make you happy?’

Raymond traced his eyes over her, the perfect undulations of her back and legs, the measured tip of her nipples as they rubbed gently towards his groin.

‘Come on Raymond. Let us be happy together.’

He had wanted her, but now she seemed pathetic like a child crying in the supermarket.

‘Come on Raymond. Let me feel you.’

Under the hotel duvet he sweated and shook, then writhed his legs loose of her body and finally threw the beautiful actress onto the Kashmir carpet. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I...this isn’t what I want.’

A thousand eyes stared at Raymond as he walked through the city. Couples in cafes interlocked limbs, politicians stormed through doors, tramps looked up from under bridges. Berlin was a line of dummies in a shop-window

‘Why?’ their faces said. ‘Why don’t you want her? What are you doing?’

Raymond drew out a cigarette. The smoke rose around the cold evening air and formed a cloud over his head. He dragged again and again, letting the cloud build and stinging the dummies’ eyes. Then he ducked down a side street into the political quarter, through lines of plush white blocks and speaking translucent windows, and crept under the spinning dome of the Reichstag.

Above he could feel bodies start to turn and lips utter whispers of recognition, and before he had time to light another cigarette it was too late.

‘Here! Here!’ they said.

Look here!

Here.

Not there.

Here.

Over here Raymond.

Come this way.

Come here.

Look at him.

Me.

Her.

Them.

Look.

Look at us.’

The eyes multiplied into a million lightbulbs all illuminated at once.

‘Here.

Look here.

No here.

Here.’

Concrete walls sprouted - left and right, up and down. The dome of the Reichstag circled and started to suck out pieces of his flesh into its glass vacuum.

Raymond lit a cigarette, exhaled with as much force as he could and ran into the darkness.

The girl leant over a bridge and looked down at the River Spree as it slowly meandered into the east of the city. She wore a light dress emitting a purple glow like phosphrous out at sea.

Raymond’s legs drew him to her through the dark streets.

‘Hey,’ she said, without turning around.

‘Hey, said Raymond, now next to her on the bridge.

‘It’s a nice evening to be by the river.’ Her skin was like a strange cream that hovered in the air. Raymond wanted to reach in and touch it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is.’

She opened her mouth and smiled, turning the liquid into a solid mass and kindness. ‘Hey,’ she said again, letting her hand rub and down the nape of his back. ‘I know. It can get pretty horrible out there, don’t worry.’ She continued to stare down at the river. Raymond noticed her reflection rippling on the surface of the water.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Come and see yourself.’

Raymond blinked and looked down. On the surface of the Spree he saw a form beginning to take shape - closely shaven hair, dark tan skin, light blue eyes like the arctic sky – the construction that received so much attention – women, money, fame, envy, hate – and that he could do nothing to disguise. For a moment it lay there, looking back at him, before being washed over by the current of a passing swan.

‘It’s you,’ the strange girl’s reflection said. ‘And then it’s not you. It’s someone else, floating amongst water and the sky. No-one really at all.’ The girl’s hand gripped on his shoulder and turned him towards him. Her skin had changed again, glinting like sun on a cobweb. ‘Here’s you, Raymond Phelps. The one they all want. And then in the water there you are as well...until you go, and come back again.’ Her eyes looked through him, at the thoughts behind the skin and the bones and the eyes.

Raymond felt the walls melting into milky syrup.

‘The one they all want.

The one they all want.

The one they all want.’

Her liquid glow moved around and Raymond found himself enveloped inside. It was warm, luscious and luminescent, releasing him from prison into a lightness of being. Her blond hair waved around like the wind and her eyes swallowed him into blue pools. Then she whispered, inside his ear. ‘Raymond. My name is Sophie. I am the smartest girl in Berlin.’

Whisper.

‘They used to write about me in the papers. I worked at the University down the road, doing research into Neuroscience - Quantum self-representation, movement between physical realities – and now I don’t know what to do.

Liquid girl, they called me.

I think I will jump into the river. Would you like to jump with me?

I don’t know.

Come on. It will be nice. It’s fun to be liquid for a while.

Will we die?

I don’t think so.

What makes you so sure?

I don’t know. I feel...like we are drowning right now and that there in the water we will be okay.

And float around.

Yes.

And become something else.

I guess. A new solid form.

I don’t want to die, you know Sophie.

You won’t, I promise.’

She took him further inside, to a revolving world of yellows and white.

‘You are the most beautiful man in the world yes Raymond? That is what everyone says. Am I right?

I guess.

You can have anyone you want, do anything you like.

Yes.

But in your mind what do you find? What do you see when you walk down the street?

Walls.

Walls and lights. Blinking lights.

Yes.

That’s all a beautiful man sees?

Yes.’

The yellow and white expanded into a great halo and in the centre of the ova sat and Sophie, a blond solid form, folding her arms around a book.

‘All a clever girl sees is water. She floats and floats and never finds anywhere to land.’

Splash.

They jumped into the Spree together, the clever girl and the beautiful man.

An ovum burst and Raymond was expelled into a giant ocean

‘Why don’t you leave the walls? Why don’t you come and find me?’

Raymond looked around, right and left, up and down, but he could see only blue and feel only water growing heavier and darker around. Slowly he started to sink, deeper and deeper, into indigo, navy, brown then black. Black. Black void.

‘Where am I?’

His voice was flat, like he was shut in a box.

‘What’s this pla...’

‘Wha...

W.’

A black solid mass where even words could not find a sound.

‘Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom.’

A heart began to beat.

‘Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom.’

And Raymond could see something through the darkness.

‘Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom. Ba-dom.’

Raymond Phelps sat on the side of the Spree. Over the bank a hundred faces looked back - dumbfounded. He stood up, rubbed the water out of his hair and began to walk.

The faces from the deckchairs didn’t move.

He turned off the path and walked towards the city. Cars stopped in the middle of the road and cyclists slammed their feet to the floor. In cafes and bars men and women put down their drinks and in shops everyone stopped looking at clothes and CDs. Office meetings were put on hold and computer screens turned to black.

A million eyes stopped and stared at the figure walking down the street.

Raymond Phelps didn’t look back. He didn’t feel their eyes burn into his skull, he didn’t hear them crowd around and grab at his face.

No walls or lights. Raymond saw a different world now.

‘Hey!’

‘Hey you, over there! Come and talk to me.’

In the centre of a perfect square of grass sat a girl. She was had been reading a book but had put in down and was now waving at Raymond, her hands dancing up and down like ballerina. She wore a small yellow dress and glinted like the sun on a snowy peak.

Raymond stopped, looked around at the cars and the offices, the shops and the restaurants, at the staring faces, and then ran over to her.

His heart beat over and over.

‘Hey,’ she said, brushing her hair from her face.

‘Hey,’ Raymond panted.

‘You know, you should really give up smoking’ she said, folding her arms like a teacher.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I have.’

‘Sweating is very bad for your skin,’ she told him.

‘Do you know everything?’

She rubbed her arms up and down her side and jumped up on the spot, a yellow halo forming as she did.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I know anything at all.’

Raymond took her hand and clasped it tight into his. It was warm and soft like a child’s.

‘Where shall we go now?’ he said.

Creative Writing Course - The Final Product

2011-08-05T17:01:00.004+01:00

Well, here it is folks. My final piece for the Creative Writing course with the Open University, which has received a 'Distinction' from the Board of Examiners. It must be good!

The Action Hero

I am pedalling towards a village. It’s a small village, with a few stone houses gathered around a shop selling statues, a church with a graveyard, and not much else.
Beside me on the road there is a man walking. He has a tiny dog and is talking to it like it’s his wife.
‘You always do that, don’t you Lily. Every Saturday. Hurrummph. Ev-er-y Saturday.’
I wonder what has happened to his wife. I wonder if she died. I always think about this when I see a man with a dog.

I keep pedalling and come to the centre of the village. It is a bit bigger than I thought - there is a pub and a green and a stream that rushes towards a waterwheel - and it smells funny, like our back garden on the day Grandma comes round for tea. I like that smell.
I have seen a hundred villages like this in the weeks that I have been pedalling and I don’t like them. You can’t hide in a village, even if you are pedalling on a bike. The man talking to his dog, the farmer holding a gun, the little girl making a chain out of weeds - they all stare and want to know who you are and what you are doing. They all want to stop for a chat.
I really want to keep pedalling but they are not going to let me. From the moment I saw the man and his dog, I knew this would be the village where I would have to stop. As I eat my ice cream I can see them hiding behind curtains and hear them rustling in the bushes, loading their guns and laying traps in case I try to escape. No more pedalling for me. No more journey. I have to stay in the village forever.

It makes me laugh when I think about it, because fifty days ago I didn’t want to leave the village at all. As I pedalled away from the school gates, past the weeping willow and the lawnmower shop, I felt sick and wanted to start crying.
‘Why do I have to leave? Why me? It wasn’t my fault, I didn’t mean it. She’ll forgive me, I know she will.’
But then I heard the voices again, like knives being sharpened for dinner, and I remembered I didn’t have a choice. I had to pedal, no matter where it took me. I had to leave the village as quickly as I could.

I crossed the bridge over the lake and pedalled hard, not looking back until I reached the chapel on top of the hill. They hadn’t seen me. They weren’t chasing anymore. I could sit and eat a jam sandwich and no one would bother me.
‘The village looks much smaller from up here,’ I thought as I ate. ‘It’s like one of those toys we have at home, where you can build something, then break it down and build something different instead. The church with the bent steeple, the school, the headmaster with the ruler, the policeman with the belt, the kids who throw mud, Vanessa with the big come-on - I could smash them all down, flatten them on the ground and build something better. It would be easy.’
I finished my sandwich, made a fist and aimed it at the village. Then I started pedalling. Someday I would come back and knock them down for good.

After a bit more pedalling I started crying. The fields were funny colours and the houses strange shapes, and the road big and full of growling cars that tried to bite you. There wasn’t anything I knew and there was no-one I could stop to ask for help. Even the grass on the verge wanted to wrap around me and cut my throat.
I sobbed and sobbed.
‘Why? Why can’t I go back? Why do you all hate me?’ Then I thought about Vanessa, about how she had choked on the water in the lake and spat it in my face, and I started pedalling again. I was an adventurer, and adventurers didn’t need help. They liked strange colours and shapes.

I kept on crying like this, over and over, and thought that maybe I should go back to the village and tell them I was sorry. Then I ate a jam sandwich.
‘If I go back to the village I’ll never be allowed out again. The strange fields and the cars with the teeth - have become my friends. I still don’t like it when it gets dark or when a hundred roads come at me in a big circle, but I’m not scared anymore. Nothing awful is going to happen. It’s loud out here and it smells a bit funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s dangerous like they said. It’s just different, and different is good. Different means I’m not going to be locked in the ‘bad’ room. Different means they won’t shout or hit me in the face with a ruler. Different is safe. Everything will be okay as long as I keep pedalling.
‘I never wanted to hurt anyone.’
Soon the villages stopped completely and the green and yellows combined to form a great orange ocean. Houses were lined up in rows as far as I could see, and flats in blocks stretched up as high as the sky. I felt sick as I pedalled into it.
‘What if they are like them? What if they stare and shout, and hit me all at once? I don’t want to go back to the village but I don’t want to be here either.
‘I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.’

I pedalled faster and stayed in the middle of the road. It felt safe there. It was like the grey sky on a stormy night - trucks thundering, lights flashing - bang, crash and roar. I liked nights like this. They made me feel excited when I lay in bed. I wanted to be in the sky. I wanted to be where the action was.
Then as I pedalled on, the night became even more exciting. From the shadows colours jumped out at me - greens and yellows and pinks - then danced and spun like performers in a circus; cars crowded together and lined up in formation, a parade at the centre of the party; music boomed and thumped with the sound of a thousand falling bombs; and people were gathered everywhere, more people than I had ever seen, shouting in words I didn’t understand, in packs like legions of troops going to battle, dressed in pink and purple armour that showed off their flesh, all beautiful and muscley, all ready to exchange blows. I had pedalled into a different world and there was a war and a party going on all at once. I should have been scared. I should have turned round. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was like escaping from a dream and I couldn’t wake up.
Around me people spread and gushed in cascades of movement and action and I stared as I pedalled through. None of them stared back or shouted. They all had better things to look at.
With each mile it became more like one of those films I’d watch at home, where the guns are firing and the bombs are falling and the hero runs in slow motion. I was that hero. I was the hero running through the battle who no-one can hurt. The action hero. Pedal pedal. Pedal pedal. Action! Boom!

I lay on a bench that night and I felt stronger and more important than ever before. My arms were big and muscley, the scars on my back were tough and the ideas in my head were clever and important. When I thought about the people in the village – the headmaster who shouted, my mother who threw me into the yard and the kids who threw bricks and called me a queer - I didn’t feel anything. They had never been to the city, they hadn’t seen what I had and they would never be heroes like me.
Then, as more explosions flashed in the sky, I thought about Vanessa. I thought about pulling her body from the lake - limp and slippery like a fish; I thought about her skin - white and cold and oiled with blood; and her lips - red and bloody and giving me the come-on. I thought about her face floating up to mine, kissing me and smiling and telling me that we could stay together forever. If only she was here now we could be safe. In the city they would leave us alone. No-one would stop to look or shout.

The sun rose and I woke to the sound of running feet and shouting voices. It was exciting but quite scary and I got back on the bike and pedalled away.
After a while the roads became thin again and the lights stopped flashing and the colours turned back to yellow and green. The city had gone, the country was back and it made me feel bad. I wanted to be an action hero all the time, and even though I was pedalling and moving through fields it was different here. They’d be watching me. When the trees dangled over the road they would wrap their branches around my neck. The birds would shout every time I pedalled past:
‘Chirp, chirp chirp. He’s here, he’s here. Chirp - look out! Stop! Don’t let him get away.’
And the wind, it tried to blow me into the bushes and the rivers, so they could swallow me up.
‘Whoossshh - chase him down. Whoossshh - tie him up. Throw him in the river. Let him drown.’
And the villages made me cry now, worse than ever. I would stop and eat an ice cream and my tears would drip and melt white mess onto my shoes. I would see women in the shops look at me and whisper, and men on the farms put down their tools and load their guns. Then in the lakes I would see her, floating on the water, her white body bruised from where I had hit her and her legs spread out from where I had ripped them open. I had to keep pedalling. I couldn’t stop for ice cream anymore.
I didn’t mean to hurt her.

I pedalled and pedalled and pedalled until finally twinkling lights appeared in the distance. A warm feeling came into my stomach and I stopped being scared. Storm clouds gathered in the sky, bombs started to fall and I rode into town like the hero returning to save the day. I was still the strong man. I was still the action hero, and I wanted to stay like him forever.
I think that was why I had to kill the dog. I had to show them how strong I was, make them stop whispering and reaching for their guns, be the action hero and keep him inside me.

It was after lunch in a village on the forty-fifth day when it attacked. The afternoon was quiet and sunny, I was happily pedalling causing no problems to anyone, and the village was much like the others I pedalled through - it had a shop, a pub, a pond and a road, and people who stared.
‘Sssshhhh,’ hissed the trees, waving their branches. ‘Ssshhhh. Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.’
‘Thunk,’ clattered a fence, blowing in the wind. ‘Thunk. You. Get off. Get off me you brute!’
I pedalled hard to get away.
‘Thud-thud-thud,’ the dog pounded. ‘Thud-thud-thud.’
‘Stop. You’re hurting me, stop!’
Then I saw it running beside my feet, white fur like an angel and red eyes like the devil.
‘Bark! Bark-bark!’
It leapt at my legs.
‘Bark! Bark-bark!’
I pedalled harder.
‘Bark!’
But couldn’t get away.
‘Bark.
‘You killed me.’
‘Bark.
‘You put your hands around my neck.’
‘Bark.’
‘Then you squeezed tighter and tighter
‘Bark.’
‘Until I couldn’t breathe.’
‘Bark.’
‘And threw me in the lake.’
‘Bark.’
‘And left me alone, naked, to die.’
‘Bark!’
Cold bone clamped onto my leg and bloodied fangs pierced the flesh in my thigh. Streams of blood flowed onto the road.
‘It!’
Kick.
‘Wasn’t!’
Kick!
‘My!’
Kick, kick!
‘Fault!’
I stopped the bike, picked up the dog by its neck and throttled it as hard as I could. Then I put it down and stamped on its head.
‘It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault! I didn’t mean to hurt her! It wasn’t my fault.’
Then I started to pedal again.

I didn’t stop until I reached another city and was able to breathe. Around me bombs were exploding and guns were firing and soldiers were running, and everyone ignored me. I rode through now with her alongside me, holding onto me as I pedalled, kissing my neck and saying that she loved me. I was the action hero and I wanted to stay here forever.
But the action hero had to keep moving. If he stopped it would not be long before he found himself back in the village getting kicked and laughed at and thrown in the lake.
‘Ha. Ha ha! Look at the freak, the freak can’t swim.’
‘Ignore them,’ she’d say as we walked back to school. ‘Just be yourself.’
She was right. I was myself. I was the action man and she was beside me.
As we left the city and rode into the villages I heard more dogs barking and people barking too:
‘Bark. Bark bark bark!’
But it didn’t matter. I just ignored them and talked to her instead.

They wouldn’t let the action man keep going though. Even after he’d been pedalling for fifty days, and had found the person he wanted to be and the girl that he loved, they forced him to stop. The city, the lights, the excitement - all of it was to be taken away so he could go back to a shop, a church, a pond and a cell.
It’s funny because as I sit here now, licking my ice cream and watching the children on the village green, it feels a bit like the city again. All around they are moving - loading their guns and laying their traps and preparing for the explosions - and in the centre of the action is me, with the girl alongside. I am the hero.
I finish off my ice cream, stand up from the bench and start pedalling again, and that’s when the shouting begins.
‘Bark. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark!’
‘That’s enough. We have you surrounded. Step away from the bike and stay where you are. Don’t make this more difficult than you have to.’
They won’t let me move. They won’t let me be the action hero. They won’t let be myself or be with her. And I don’t like it.

The Midnight Sun Marathon

2011-07-10T08:40:00.003+01:00

Sorry about the lack of input recently, but fear not, a bevy of exciting tales will be heading to these pages shortly. In the meantime, here's a short piece about running in the arctic:

The Midnight Sun Marathon

I have been dropped off at the edge of the world. A pair of trainers, a course map, a box of pasta, and the knowledge that I am about to run the most northerly marathon in the world. It is ten at night, the sun is still up and the lodge-house has gone out to get drunk. Welcome to Tromso in the Arctic Circle. Why am I here?

The waters of the fjord shimmer in the light. My body desires sleep but my eyes are hypnotised. A yellow haze, that isn’t day or night - a lucid interval, where people walk in slow motion and wooden houses stand in rows of white. Am I awake?

Bang!

It’s too peaceful to run a race. Too simple. A thousand runners thunder across the island like blots of ink on a landscape painting, while seagulls sit waiting for fishing boats to return with their catch.

‘Run, run, run. 26 miles to go. Run, run, run.’

A second midnight approaches and Tromso continues. There is sun, and then there is dark. Nothing grows. Few animals survive.

‘Breathe, breathe, breathe. Run, run, run.’

They do what we need to survive, nothing more.

‘Keep going, keep going. One...more...mile.’

Fish, hunt and ready for eternal night. Life in the arctic.

‘I am there. I am there. I have finished.’

I want to be like them. That is why I have come here. I want things to be hard so I can survive. I have survived.

Now I need to sleep.

Poetic Enlightenment

2011-03-11T21:54:00.003Z

Hi all

Its been a long break, which I have spent mainly running through mud and writing poetry. For more on the former I will soon post my new book entitled The Road Runner, but in the meantime here's some verse, recognised as 'very good' in my Creative Writing course.

Paths to Enlightenment

The Bus Stop

Beneath the tors and moors of England
I sit and wait for the bus to come.
A stoic worship in a pagan shrine
Amongst mags, rags and stench of humankind.

Rains fall, plants sprout and stone becomes moss.
My thoughts meander to a timeless flow.

Then one day I hear a mechanic roar
And a garrulous cascade thunder off the tor.
A torrent of screams urging me aboard:
'Get on, we're late! Come on, open the door!'

I withdraw inside the empty shelter
To shield my soul in its dark embrace

The Sign

A rusting pendulum rocks on the breeze
Creaking and squeaking like old man's knees.
'The centre of the financial world,' it screams
Over a desert of discarded dreams.

Relics of offices built to scrape the sky
Lie crushed in rock - fossilised.
The great explosion of wealth and greed
Smoulders in the ash of forgotten fires.

I turn aghast and begin to choke
Gagging on a cloud of burning notes.
The Queen, Charles Darwin, ten pounds sterling;
Poison gas to higher learning

The Tower

Above the town on a throne of power
It looks over like a smiling Buddha,
Laughing at our dry chaffed lips
That long for the taste of its blessed water

In shops and malls and coffee houses
We submerge our lusts in whirling seas.
But still the endless thirst remains
And we stay lost in our material maze

The doors open into a cavern of mirrors
Where are reflections are barren and bare.
One by one they crack and shatter
To reveal the real, the Dhamma and the tower.

Through your laughing mouth the waters flow
A pure clear light flooding the world below.

The Single Vicars Club

2011-01-20T18:16:00.001Z

This the short story that I submitted for my open university course, which has been described by my tutor as a 'magical and quirky' and 'reminiscent of the Witches of Eastwick.'

Here it is anyway:

The Single Vicars Club

For ten years of my life I was an angel. You know - a proper angel with blond hair, perfect white skin and pink virginal lips, sent by God to do His work on earth. I don’t know why God chose me in particular. I know He works in ways we don’t understand. Maybe it was because I spent a lot of time alone. Maybe it was because my mother was dead and my father barely noticed I was alive. Maybe it was because I was smart and I would know what he wanted me to do. Or maybe it was because I was fifteen years old, had slept with over a hundred men and had never felt anything for any of them. Yes, yes I think that’s probably what it was. Why do I think this? Because the work that God wanted me to do didn’t require his usual recruits, like charity workers or clean cut families. No, for this task he needed someone to fuck.
Let me tell you about my meeting with God. It was the bathroom of my mother’s old house, on my fifteenth birthday. I was in front of the mirror applying make-up, trying to cover up spots and make my nose look less crooked, when a cloud of steam rushed into the room. ‘I bless you,’ a voice said as I spun around.
‘I bless you with the Holy Spirit.’
For a moment the world turned white and I couldn’t see or smell, but then just as quickly the steam cleared, and back in the mirror I saw the most perfect face I could ever have imagined. Waves of blond hair, gleaming white teeth, eyes brighter than gold and skin as soft as a cloud – it was the face of angel. And written next to it in the steam was a message. It said:
To love is to be human.
Clare Tempest - show my disciples how to love.
It took me another ten years to work out how exactly I needed to do this.
The first one to join the Single Vicars club was Michael Adams, a wiry waif of a clergyman who I had known since my days in the seminary. Back then he had been shy and nervous, but had come into his own when orating the word of God. However since he had been given his own congregation to preach to, his abilities had worn off.
‘I...I j-j-j-just don’t feel like they understand what I’m saying,’ he said, picking the rosemary off a lamb steak. ‘It’s like I am preaching down to them, r-r-r-r-rather than spreading God’s teachings.’
I gulped my stew like a snake eating a mouse.
‘I can see them yawning and whispering to each other. They don’t care what I have to say and...and to be honest C-C-C-Clare, I’m not sure I do either.’
‘You were always so passionate Michael,’ I said, wiping my forehead with a napkin.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But, b-b-b-but I’m not sure I believe in it anymore.’
He looked down at the table and discarded his plate with a shrug.
‘I don’t think I believe in anything.’
I studied his grey hair, his pale skin and his skeletal physique and saw a cold cadaver. He was dying. They were all dying. They needed my help, and in the only way someone as beautiful as me could.
‘Well then,’ I said, tempting his hand into mine. ‘What are we going to do to make you believe again?’
Let me tell you again, sex meant nothing to me. When I took Vicar Michael back to my apartment that night I was simply trying to help someone in need like any other good Christian would; and when he leaped on me like a starved animal, lapping at my neck and slobbering over my body, I knew that this a desperate man who had nowhere else to turn.
If there is someone drowning in the river, and you happen to be the strongest swimmer in the world, what are you going to do? What would anyone do?

After our encounter Vicar Michael was a man transformed. His masses were delivered with such enthusiasm and belief that his congregation doubled within a month. People wanted someone like him. They wanted to be as happy and as honest as he seemed to be.
You must remember he was only a man, and a man with a beautiful woman is twice the man without.
Soon I received calls from Father Raymond of Gloucester, Reverend Talbot of Tewkesbury and even the Bishop of Marlow, all enquiring into my services. These were men on the edge, who were about to quit the Church for good, or possibly even worse. They didn’t need counselling or a trip to Rome. They just needed a reminder of who God was and what incredible gifts he had blessed us with.
You probably think I’m being overdramatic don’t you? You probably think I’m a deluded whore who sleeps with superior men to keep my ego satisfied. You don’t think there’s anything wrong with my partners at all.
Well, you’re wrong. You have no idea what it was like. You have no idea what pressures these men are under, giving their love to God, and only God. I have seen what they went through to try and prevent their desires from escaping; the first priest I worked with smashing his fists into the mirror every morning and shouting:
‘It’s you. It’s you. No-one else!’
Until one day the mirror smashed and he picked up some shrapnel and used it to slit his throat. Then when his replacement refused to look at me and spent hours each night running his fingers through a rosary, sweating with a fever.
Okay, they didn’t have to be celibate, but that’s the way the Church taught it. Abstinence was the true way. Temptation lead to sin, and austerity showed commitment to God. I wanted to help these men. I wanted to show them how to desire and how to bring love back into their lives. ‘Uhhnnnggg!’ groaned the Bishop of Bath in ecstasy.
‘Oh God!’ boomed the Vicar of Wakefield.
‘You’re so beautiful, so beautiful,’ wept Father Dawson of Chester.
Night after night I met them and wore through their cages of morality, and at the end they were happier individuals for the experience. I was Mary Magdalene and Mother Theresa rolled into one. The healer, the angel of God. The word made flesh.
Church attendances soon began to thrive and a wave of happiness spread through the clergy. At the annual conference of Bishops a few weeks later there was a new item on the agenda:
‘Love.
Love of life.
Love of humanity.
Love of the world.’
In the audience a hundred priests and vicars nudged each other in the stomach, all thinking the same thing:
‘Clare Tempest, the Vicar of Barneswick. The most beautiful woman in the world.’

Three months after this I was summoned to a meeting with the Archbishop of York at Bishopthorpe Palace. I paced through the grand corridors nervously, admiring the fine art, the golden ornaments and the statues carved out of marble, and realized that what I was doing was right, that amongst all this beauty and art lay a foundation of lust and desire. This was God’s gift to us and in order to be happy we had to express it in the world.
‘Clare,' the Archbishop said, rising from a golden throne. 'Clare Tempest. My, I have heard about you, but you really are quite the angel aren’t you?'
He grinned like a politician and gestured for me to shake his hand. It was solid and with fingers like icicles.
'Thank you Archbishop,' I said. 'I have only what God has given me.'
His eyes critiqued every inch of my body like it was a yearly balance sheet.
'Yes,' he said. ‘I suppose we all do. Now Clare, tell me what has been happening to you over these last few months. Tell me about how you have been affecting what happens in our church.’
His eyebrows flickered and his fingers rubbed a ring on his index finger.
‘Well,’ I said, releasing a glimpse of gleaming teeth. ‘Ten years ago I had a visit from God…’ I related everything in the most honest way I could, about why I was an angel and how this angel was bringing the Church into the light.
‘So you have reminded us how to love,’ said the Archbishop flicking his eyebrows again.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I think that maybe I have succeeded.
‘I think maybe you have,’ he said.
He shuffled in his seat.
‘You know what is happening now don’t you?’ he said. ‘You know what some people are saying.’ ‘Yes. ‘
‘They call you a whore and a harlot, nothing but a blond bimbo who is sleeping her way to the top.’
‘Yes,’ I sighed.
‘It is a sad truth in our world that that is what happens to women like you,’ said the Archbishop. ‘They are labeled and persecuted by those who do not understand.’
A light reflected from his gold ring into my eyes.
'Do you...do you feel that they do not understand?'
Then he smiled and opened out his arms.
‘I think you have done a great service for the Church Clare. I think that to our parishioners we can appear superior, and that our message can seem false when preached by these austere men. None of us are above desire Clare. All of us ate from the tree of knowledge. We accepted the offering of the apple and we have no choice but to live with this.’
He leaned forward and placed a warm palm onto my shoulder.
‘But now is the time for you to stop Clare. Now is the time for you to return to your own life. Let the single vicars find their own way now. I think they will be fine.’
He sat back in his chair and smiled. ‘Remember this Clare Tempest. Celibacy can do strange things to a man or a woman. But promiscuity can be just as dangerous.’

For the next few months I should have been a vicar bursting with pride. I had completed God’s task. I’d had the Archbishop of York, the second highest minister in the land, congratulate me for my work. I had provided joy and happiness to hundreds of clergymen and thousands of Christians all over England, who could now feel God in themselves and see him all over the world.
But I didn’t feel like that at all. If anything I felt like all those vicars who had come to me for help.
When I stood alone at the pulpit preaching happiness and understanding I felt an empty void inside me, and as a human being I became redundant, a wallflower stood at the side while the happy couples joined for the last dance. I still looked like an angel and I still could have any man I wanted, but that wasn’t the point. I didn’t need sexual gratification – I needed to be special. I wanted people to need me, not just to listen and feel happy.
Maybe you were right. Maybe I was just a whore, desperate all along.
I began to go to single nights and strip clubs to find men with the same desperation that the celibate vicars had, but it wasn’t the same. They wanted me and I would let them have me. They didn’t have to stop themselves.
One morning I was at the mirror looking at my perfect olive skin and golden eyes and the great cross on my cassock, and I realised that there was nothing left. I had served my purpose. I still couldn’t feel love or desire, and nothing had changed. I would be miserable forever.
Then I looked closer and saw something. It was small blemish on my forehead, a little mark about the size of a pin. A spot. A red spot on my perfect face.
There was something else. In the middle of my nose was a little lump. It was the same lump that I had when I was a teenager, which all the other girls had laughed at, and even though I applied mascara and concealer it wouldn’t go away. In fact if anything the lump got bigger. Then I saw that the spots had spread and I could smell sweat under my arms. Even in my mouth there was a new bitter taste where the enamel had eroded on my teeth.
With each blemish, each lump and each odour, a warm feeling spread through my body. I felt my heart beat, my throat gasp and a strange sickness form in my stomach. Love. I needed love.
The ten years were over. God’s work was complete and the angel had flown back to heaven. It was my life to lead now, and I knew what I needed to do.

An Alliterative Alternative

2011-01-14T20:09:00.004Z

Yes, that was the exercise. A poem with alliteration on every line written about love for an object. Very trying, but it did mean that I got to let out some more confessions about the concerning relationship between my bike and I.

Love on Two Wheels - A Poem

Clunk clunk clunk

Shifts will shank and slip

Click click click

Barings bounce and break

Squeaal. Squeaaal.

Pads rasp on rim

Scratch, scratch.

Saddle scrapes my crotch

Handles hammer hands

Wheelarch rakes the thigh

Pedals pummel my shin

You’re unreliable as a rat

Painful as a piercing

You hurt and harangue me,

You make my stomach sick

Yet my bike, my beau I love you

For all the hurt and the pain

When we pedal the peaks,

We speed and fly on the freeway

You make me live and laugh;

Clamour and acclaim.

We journey, one organ, one person.

We join together, cycle and soul

We are welded

Amalgamated

A bond unbreakable

That’s why you are more

Than a painting or a pot

You are fixed to my frame

Forever.

A body;

Agape

Clunk clunk

My pulse pumps

Click click

My muscles moan

Squeaal. Squeaal.

Says our body, in motion.

A man on a bike

A Poetic Interlude

2011-01-11T22:05:00.003Z

Hello all

Its poetry time on the Creative Writing Course. I am dothing my beret and will go and sit in the nearest field, just when it stops raining and/or being freezing. So far it has proved a mixed bag. I have written a poem while listening to music (exercise 12.3) which went well, and i have written a poem about a cow (exercise 12.5), which was awful. I will share the former if you don't mind.

The Lake

The plain of your stomach
Still and serene as a mountain lake
I kiss the top of the water
A ripple up your body

A breath of air sounds above me
Leaves rustle in recognition
The waters lap against my face
Warm and soft like the womb

I want to dive in
Submerge myself in blue syrup
Fill my pores with your touch
Mix my body with you

You urge me down deeper
Until i can see or feel no other
The world is blue, is you
I am blue. I am the water.

So that was written while listening to Tender by Blur interestingly enough.

Okay its not perfect, but its a start. Next assignment - a poem with alliteration in every sentence. I predict probably pathetic proceedings.

Adieu

The Action Man - a Short Story

2010-12-09T20:10:00.001Z

The Action Man

I am pedaling towards a village. It is a small village with a church, a pub and a pond, and not much else. It is like a hundred other villages I have passed through in the fifty days I have been pedaling, like the thousands of villages that exist in this country, that I could pass through if I could keep pedaling. This is the last village I am going to see however, because after fifty days and fifty nights I am going to have to stop. I don’t want to. I love pedaling on my bicycle. But I am not going to have a choice. I can see them already, waiting for me. They are waiting and they are not going to let me leave. They want me to stay in the village forever.

When I started fifty days ago I didn’t want to leave the village. I was a scared little boy. I didn’t think I would survive out there. As I pedaled I could see the corner shop where I used to steal sweets, the playing fields where I had mud kicked at my face, the lake where I had capsized Vanessa Angel’s boat, and the local pub where I had enjoyed a final pint before the landlord kicked me out – what a cunt.

This was my home, I couldn’t leave. I was a man of the village.

I cried for a few minutes as I pedaled out. The fields were strange colors, the roads loud and crowded and trees leaned over to strangle me and stop me from going on. Everything was new and uncertain. I wasn’t going to survive. Why did leave? Why couldn’t I go back? But then after the first day and first night I began to feel good. There was more to me than just a shop and a green and a school and a prison. I was a traveler, an adventurer. I was a free spirit.

I passed another town and another village, with another shop and another church, and I felt nothing. I wasn’t scared and I wasn’t curious. I’d been to villages sand they weren’t new anymore. I wanted to keep riding.

I didn’t want to hurt anyone and no-one could hurt me.

The villages spread into towns and the towns spread into cities. There were rows and rows of little shops and little pubs of little houses all around. I pedaled down roads the size of the sky before a storm and saw more faces than I’d ever seen in my life, and the noise! It was like the loudest storm I had ever heard. Everywhere there was something happening. Each mile was like one of those war films, where the guns are firing and the bombs are falling and the hero is running in slow motion. I was that hero. I was the hero riding into the fight.

When I slept at night I thought back to the village and thought about all the faces that I used to know. I thought about the landlord at the pub and the older children shouting at me, and I thought about Vanessa - the boat and the lake – and how white she looked when she fell. I thought about how simple it was, and how small everything that had happened there had been. In the city then no-one would have cared. It would have been like stepping on an ant or shouting at someone in the street. No-one would have noticed. No-one would have looked any different.

I kept on pedaling and soon I was back out in the country again. It wasn’t as good and I started to feel bad again. The fields were okay, and the dark lanes with trees, and I particularly liked it when it was almost dark, and you could hear all the birds and see the lights in the distance, but it wasn’t good when I had to stop. I didn’t like the little shop and the village green and the church. It made me start crying when I left and I didn’t want to cry anymore. I wasn’t a boy. I was a man - an action hero.

I think that was why I killed the dog when it ran for me after I’d finished my lunch. Now I was free and an action hero I didn’t want any other people taking me back or standing in my way, but suddenly, when it ran behind the bike, barking and trying to bite my bags, I felt like I couldn’t move. It was the same as being trapped back in the village again, locked up and tied to my bed. I could hear her barking at me. I could hear them all barking.

I told the dog:

‘Get away! Get away!’

But it wouldn’t stop. It kept running around the bicycle, barking and making me stop.

‘Get away and leave me alone!’ I shouted, but it still wouldn’t stop. If I wanted to keep going I was going to have to make it stop.

After this I pedalled as fast as I could until I reached the next city. Then I could breathe again. Only then could I pedal around and be free; me and all the guns and the bombs and the soldiers running around. I was where no-one could hurt me.

The thing was that I had to keep moving, and this meant I had to leave the city again, and go back to the fields and the meadows - and to the village. And then there were more dogs and more barking, and there were people barking this time to.

I didn’t understand it. I was an action hero and a free man, and yet all these people would look at me and bark. What was wrong with them?

I wanted it to always be like the city. I wanted to stay there and be ignored forever, but I couldn’t stop. If I stopped then I would back at home again, and people would make fun out of me, and kick my face on the field, and I would have to kick them back and throw them into the lake. I had found myself and it was a self that moved. A man of action. An action man.

They don’t want the action man to keep going though. Fifty days. Cities, trees, fields. Village after village. I have kept going, but now they will not let me go any further. After all this time I have found myself and now they want to take it away – take me back to the little shop, and the church and the lake.

It’s funny because as I sit here now, on my bike next to the village green, it’s a bit like being in the city. There are people everywhere – men shouting, lights flashing – there are even guns being pointed around, and I am in the centre, I am the hero. But I am not an action hero. I can’t move. And they are all looking at me. And I don’t like it.

Creative Writing - an update

2010-11-11T21:52:00.007Z

Okay, so Creative Writing Assignment One is back. The idea was to use your skills in err...creativity, to put together a piece from one of a few prompts:

- The house opposite
- Driving alone
- The smells of home
- A beach in winter
- Things that make the heart beat faster

Naturally i chose the latter, and considered the idea of a man trapped in routine and regulation, who is obsessed with time and lives by the ticking of his watch. Then he meets a woman and the pace and rhythm of his life suddenly is taken beyond his control. Here's the main piece:

Running Out of Time

There are fifty minutes until its nine o’clock. That means there are fifteen hours and fifty minutes left in the day. In forty-one days, fifteen hours and fifty minutes I will be thirty-five years old. After that I will probably have another forty years left to live. The clock is ticking. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

The tube train is late. A platform sighs and the temperature rises. It is late on average five times a month. How much time is that a year?

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

Its ten o’clock now, which means there are three hours left until lunch. My stomach gurgles in complaint, and I can taste the acid as the last calories are digested. I let it build and then force the feeling elsewhere. Hunger. That’s all it is.

Around me a choir of conversations sing and keyboards steadily patter out a rhythm. I like the sound. It’s structured and organised. There is a system:

‘Ring. Answer. Yes? How long? Okay. I’ll note that down. Speak to you soon. Regards. Goodbye. Tap, tap, tap, tap.’

Eleven o’clock. I can eat now. I need a hundred calories for every hour that I am awake. Saliva dances on my tongue.

It’s her. Of course, it’s always her on a Friday. My heart begins to beat faster. She has yellow and white eyes that beam from beneath her black fringe, and I cannot look at them. Once you look you cannot see anything else. It’s like staring at the sun for too long.

As I pay for my sandwich a cough leaps out of my mouth. She smiles. Oh God.

‘Hey Martin,’ she says. ‘Hey. This might sound strange, but would you like to go out after work?’

My heart rate increases and a stream of sweat pours down my shirt.

‘It would be nice to get to know you better.’

Escape. Run away.

‘I think I’m going for a run tonight,’ I tell her. ‘Sorry.’

‘Oh, I love running’ she says, brushing back her fringe. ‘Mind if I join you?’

Six forty five. She is waiting for me at the traffic island. The lights are flashing red.

‘Are you ready to go?’ she asks

My heart thunders like the wake of a thousand waterfalls. She is a goddess – an ivory visage of skin and curves under a dark, silk canopy.

‘I always start now,’ I tell her. ‘So we better get going.’

As soon as we begin to run I feel strange. My breaths come short and my stride is awkward. When she turns and smiles my legs buckle and I almost fall over. What is happening?

‘You run past me every evening Martin,’ she tells me. ‘I used to wave but you never saw me.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘No I didn’t.’

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

We run for half an hour and I feel better. There is a rhythm to our pace, our strides match and we breathe together. I don’t have to look in her eyes. I can look at the sign to Hammersmith that points the wrong way instead, or the dog that’s always tied to the same lamppost.

‘Time’s up,’ I say, as we return to the office. ‘Thirty-eight minutes. That’s worked off all the calories we need.’

‘Yeah?’ she says. ‘Well how about we work off a bit more?’

Her hand clasps mine.

‘Race me,’ she says. ‘Two minutes, to the end of the road.’

She runs off and I run after her. I don’t think. This isn’t part of the plan, but I do it anyway. I run and run and run.

The thing is, is that she won’t stop. She keeps on running and I keep following. The dark road changes into a river of blackness, houses melt into syrupy blancmange and an ivory light blazes ahead of me. I look at my watch and start to panic. It’s late. My heart is pummelling, but I cannot stop running.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

Soon we don’t even have to run. Her body floats off the road and up into the air and then mine does as well. It is movement, but not in the physical world – momentum, friction or gravity do not apply. Her light has lifted us somewhere else.

As we float higher she turns and looks at me, yellow orbs shining out of the blackness. We kiss long and ecstatically. The world turns white, then yellow, then gold. Light. Lightness all around.

‘What time is it?’ she says, looking at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

Whistle while you Work

2010-11-06T22:38:00.004Z

Whistle, cough, yawn, sniff

A-hem, ahem, ahem, ahem ahem!

Nice weather,

At least it’s Friday

I’ve got Shepherd’s Pie for dinner

Whisper, whisper

Love you. Love you.

Would you like a bite of this?

Ring ring, ring, ring, ring ring, ring ring

Please hold. Please call back later.

Waa! Waa! Waa! Waaeeeeaaaa!

Its different when you have kids

Beep. Oi oi. Yes mate, yes mate.

How was you. In'it.

Yeah you?

Click, click. Tap tap.

Pat pat. Scratch scratch.

Yawwwnn. Oh dear! Oh my God.

Save the children! Big Issue?

Ten for a pound. Have a nice day!

Humm Humm. Doo de doo.

Whistle whistle whistle whistle.

Is it because we don't talk

That we make so much noise?

Okay okay, nothing to be taken too seriously here – I’m not taking poetry writing until next year, but I think it does beg a few questions nonetheless. Why, in a world where we have such a wealth of sounds and images to distract us, do we persist in indulging in inane activities such as whistling, or talking to ourselves. Are our minds not already satisfied enough by the other multitude of distractions on offer, and if not why not? Is there are reason why these activities still permeate our everyday expressions? And if there is, is it good enough to counterbalance the potential irritation they cause to other people?

Let me begin, if I can, with one trait very particular to me. Whistling. From the times in my childhood when my father insisted on engaging in producing these persistently piercing noises from his lips it has irritated and bemused me in equal measure. Why? Why does he have to make such an awful sound? What is the point? Is it heightening his enjoyment of the song, if it is even a song? Is it for enjoyment that he is doing it? If it isn’t, then why? And doesn’t he realise that no-one wants to listen?

I am not going to deal with the ethical implications of this as yet, but I do want to explore a little the reasons for making such a seemingly pointless noise in the first place.

Whistling is way to deal with uncomfortable situation. We started it as a child – in a situation where we scared or uncertain, we were taught to sing a happy song, or whistle to ourselves - and, as adults, we continue to do this. I notice it most when other men come into a public toilet or walk alone in an unfamiliar place.

Its simplicity is its keys – it prevents the mind forming complex thoughts about a potentially uncomfortable situation. The breathing is regulated, the heart rate maintained and the whistler can proceed without concern. To me it indicates a pathetic inability to deal with internal issues in an adult way, but I suppose it does work, temporarily at least. One must rationalize to solve a problem completely, but in England we don’t do that. Maybe that is why it’s a particular trait to us – the stiff upper lip mentality.

Unbelievably, I think some people also still whistle when they are bored. They want attention of some sort, and finding that they will not receive this automatically by sitting in silence, and lacking the social skills to engage with nearby others, they repeat a simple song in their heads, and display a skill in being able to replay it out loud. They feel please with themselves and expect others to feel the same. Whistling is happy isn't it?

Finally, people whistle because it helps them to concentrate. Again, this seems unbelievably infantile to me - akin to sucking your thumb or licking your lips when trying to write, but I still see people doing it when looking at a screen of numbers or squinting at a book.

But why whistling? Why haven’t we evolved beyond this? Surely the process of replicating a song in our heads as a multitude of far superior synthetic equivalents in the modern day?

Yes, this may be true, but the simple fact is that these other, modern external sources do not work in the same way. The Walkman, the I-Pod, Spotify, TV, etc do not to regulate our minds, rather than overstimulate it.

We do not watch 3d football matches, or put on the latest Lady Gaga tune to help us concentrate on our Sudoku puzzle or to piss in the urinal. We do it to be distracted. Okay, it may replace the boredom we feel in some circumstances, but at the same time it makes us more bored in other situations. This is the reason why the plague of unnecessary noises is most prevalent at work. Minds that are so used to being distracted need to find an outlet for their fix – there is no Come Dine with Me, or Facebook or Champions League Live here , so they must do something. Work environments are notoriously mind-numbing, with many people sitting, waiting for the hours to end pretending to do work, and we are spoilt with distractions outside of work, so find it difficult to transfer to the hardships of blank desks and screens of meaningless databases. We desperately want more, but cannot have, and so again, we regulate our minds with other things – tap tap tap, scratch scratch, whistle, whistle. Our skills at self-amusement are not good without the tools we need to do this – Nintendos, laptops, I Phones et al.

Now the key to evolving out of the unnecessary noise quagmire is to be able to deal with our inadequacies, or boredom, or capacity to concentrate internally. To be able to think to ourselves - to consider, wonder and rationalise. Indeed one might suggest that this would make us far superior human beings to the thoughtless consumers we are at the moment, but...well, this wouldn't be much good for the world we live in now would it? If we could solve all our problems without the need for beer, coffee, clothes, cakes - then we wouldn't be much use to the markets that govern our world now would we?

It’s a clever system. The duller jobs become the more desperate we are to consume, and because of the jobs we do - software engineer, IT support, mobile phone salesman - the more available and efficient the items have become. And let’s face it, there’s only so much a good session of whistling can do, particularly to a thoughtless consumer of goods. At the end we are being like the baby in the pushchair, annoying everyone in the supermarket isle.

‘I want my DS. I want my X-Men 3. Waa. Waaa.’

It has reached the point where we are scared of silence, of not having at least some modicum of stimulation, and whistling is a good outlet for this - it takes us instantly back to a song - probably a catchy pop song - and this inexorably to the culture we know and love and feel comfortable in.

The more stupid we are, the less creative we are in distracting our minds and the louder the noise becomes.

There are similar reasons for why we make other banal noises - such as the completely asinine conversation - 'I'm having fish fingers for dinner tonight. What are you having?'

Is this it? Is this the best thing you have to talk about?

In a self-obsessed world you would have thought simple suggestion would be that we be desperate to communicate all the details of our amazingly interesting selves to all and sundry, but in my experience this is not the case. If anything our regression into online profiles and e-communication has meant that we find it very hard to talk about anything interesting or true in our everyday lives. Our jobs are fundamentally meaningless, relationships are something of a passé embarrassment and our leisure time is all about developing ourselves - picking up that girl, having the greatest night out, or getting to a new section of that incredible game - and either way it is very unlikely that we will share a common interest with our fellow man, nor would we want to - we'd hardly be special if we did and we all think we're special, don’t we? For this reason then, we only deign ourselves to communicate with the lesser others in the most rudimentary way possible - what are you having for dinner tonight? What are you up to this weekend? How’s the weather where you are? - We don’t care about the answer, but you know - we're bored. We can't whistle for the whole afternoon. It’s the same with inane jokes or football - we get to converse without really talking about anything and we keep our special selves under wraps. Again, the lesser the intellect, the more this conversation prevails. The smarter the individual, the greater the ego, the greater the self-obsession, the lesser the necessity to communicate, but also the greater ability to make talking about nothing seem important.

Conversation has become one big game to talk without talking about each other as much as possible. We find silence difficult because we are not used to internal thoughts, so we want to talk about something, but we cannot talk about much of what we do and we want to remain special. Hence the inanity of it all.

The problem also exists with couples. They now only seem to be able to communicate with each other in childish platitudes and whispers, so incapable are they of expressing their emotions in a confident, adult manner. Love isn’t an acceptable subject to discuss in public once you have passed the latter teenage years, and so we feel we must regress into pre-adolescence so it can never be taken too seriously. Work, progress, success. That is what being an adult is all about, and this is how relationships must be viewed as well. They must be suitable, they must work.

The battle for overstimulation, and the removal of ‘pointless’ emotion and thought, mans that the clamour of noise is only going to increase. Outside our boring, frustrating work environments there are a million different parties, desperate to attend to the senses that are ready to be stimulated of a few hours of desk-tapping and whistling nausea, and the harder they have to work to reach us, the louder they will shout. From the High Street stores, to the fruit and veg salesmen, to the big issue vendor, to the beggar by the cash point – it is one great metropolis of attention seeking. No wonder we cannot think – no wonder it is so difficult to internalise. No wonder I cannot piss without humming the new Beyonce Knowles track.

Maybe this is why I despise unnecessary noise so much. It is ostensibly pointless, yes, it is annoying and selfish, granted, it displays an incredible level of inner emptiness, sure, but it tells me that you have succumbed to the world, and that the market has won, that you have lost the ability to think and to reason and to wonder and to yearn and to love. It’s okay – yawn, piss, kiss your partner – you’ll be far less bored and frustrate if you do. And maybe then you’ll stop bloody whistling.

Creative Writing

2010-10-27T20:53:00.003+01:00

Hello All

I am currently embarking on a course in Creative Writing with the Open University. 'About time!' you say.

Well I thought I'd post my asignments up here to give you an idea of what these kind of courses involve, and what they do to the so-far innocent amateur writer.

So first we have been taught a method of creating ideas called 'freewriting' where you let ideas flow out of your head on a particular prompt or theme, and write them down on paper. This apparently is a good way to get an idea for a more focused piece, and to be honest it works pretty well i think. Then you can add other important things, such as sensations and ideas from your own experience to give some quality to your writing and some character attributes. The point at the moment is to harness your creative consciousness, but also think about what you see. A lot of this is through simple exercises, such as thinking of a person you know and then placing them in a completely different scenario, or spending time studying a place you like to sit or walk, and think about what is there. Now I'm good on character, but crap on description so found the following pretty handy.

Close your eyes and think of a familiar room or place around you. Write down things you would use to describe this place. Then open your eyes and write a paragraph to describe the place using none of the things you have thought of.

Try it. Its gives you a good perception of the unfamiliar.

Anyway, I'll be back with my first piece using these techniques and we'll see what happens to the writing, and whether creative writing courses are all they are cracked up to be.

John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos

2010-09-20T19:44:00.002+01:00

A classic science fiction novel from the best of the science fiction writers, Wyndham spins a highly intelligent, beautifully concise tale of alien invasion in pastoral England. The brilliance here is in the relentless normality of the prose. The basis of good science fiction is in its credulity. It is all very well thinking up a scenario, but if it does not strike the writer as something that could happen, something that could turn up tomorrow or could be happening right now, then there is no effect, no sense of tension or interest. Good writing makes us think about the world and about ourselves and this is what Wyndham has achieved.

The fictional situation is that over the space of one day, all the village of Miswich is placed in a mysterious trance. No-one can enter, no-one can leave and all inside are paralysed. After the 24 hours are up, all the occupants return to normal and it is as if nothing has happened - aside from one thing - all the women of the village are pregnant. So far, so sci-fi. But the way this occurs, the reaction of the villagers and that of the army, is so domestic. It is not the event that is important, rather our reaction, as humans, to the situation - the human world is the only world we have after all and Wyndham is too good a writer to simply take us away from this. Again, the reaction is overwhelmingly normal.

The mothers are stressed, hungry and concerned about their attachment to the being growing inside of them. The men feel redundant. It is overwhelmingly normal. The children are born and raised and very little that seems out of the ordinary We are trapped into the Midwich domestic world and its parade of rural caricatures. The fact that 'The Children' have golden eyes, seems an oddity, rather than anything more sinister. That the mothers are soon unable to travel within six miles of the village is a plausible circumstance.

Even when we discover that they are able to learn vicariously through each other, that they exist as one collective being, it seems that this as prosaic as the milkman wearing a new pair of trousers or the post office opening for lunch.
What this enables Wyndham to do is make us rationally consider the situation he has placed before us.
Through his mouthpiece Dr Zellaby - he provides with an intelligent, balanced consideration of this 'what if' scenario, one that we are very much now drawn into from the characters involved, but one that we are now able to consider carefully for ourselves what the reaction will, or should be. The idea of a race that can move together as one, think the same and learn the same to achieve higher goals, it is a not- exactly-subtle allusion to the communist regimes of the age, but the set up is so simple, and so effective, that at no point to feel we are being preached to, and feel like the politics are being forced upon us. The underlying humor adds to this, keeping the story plausible and entertainingly English throughout, never swaying our opinion by overdramatizing the situation and avoiding the clichés that usually pre this genre.

The Midwich Cuckoos contains all of this, but ultimately enables us to consider our fallibility as a race - that we are but human and not the superior individuals we are to view ourselves as - and that in one moment we may have to change our view of who we are in the world, rather than consider it as our own static property to live and act as we choose.

Bloody hell, how prevalent this still remains in our time, and how so many books and films could learn from the way Wyndham treats the subject - reasonably, succinctly and with a healthy topping of amusement on the way.

Cycling a Mountain Pass

2010-09-18T10:08:00.003+01:00

For the last couple of weeks I have been cycling up and down the Alps in Switzerland. It was an incredible experience as you can imagine, but in particular because of the sheer size of the climbs that you encounter. Here I try to describe what it feels like cycling a 9000 feet mountain pass.

‘Has it started? Is this it? I’m sure the last sign said 20km to go. It can’t have started already?’

Change down. 2^nd Front Cog, Gear 3.

‘I’m not changing down to the 1^st Cog yet. I have energy. I must stay in a higher gear as possible. It will make it seem easier when it gets harder later.’

A throb of fatigue hits the thighs, like they have been struck with an iron mallet.

‘I’m getting warmed up. That’s all that is, just warming up.’

I change down to cog 1, then up to gear 4 to compensate. The gasps for breath get deeper and longer.

‘There we go, that’s it. Keep the toil going. Just relax, and keep pushing. That’s all you need to do.’

I stand up on the bike for a few seconds, and the pedalling becomes slightly easier. I see my speed dropping by a mph, so I sit back down. And then I really begin to climb.

A long, slow incline; a stream laughing alongside; snow-capped peaks far above; a village disappearing behind; climbing, climbing, climbing.

I take a first slug of water. There’s only room on my bike for one bottle, so I make sure I don’t have too much. Make it last, don’t waste. Save it for when things becomes really hard.

The village below looks tiny now. I am high up, so high already.

‘I am going to do this easily.’

I change up to the 2^nd cog and then immediately think better of it.

‘Take your time, take it easy. There is no hurry up here.’

I slow to under 5 mph – my low speed threshold – but then decide that I can do better than this. 5.5 mph. I don’t need to, but I do. Do it while you still can.

For the next few kilometres I have no clue as to how far I’ve gone or how far there is to go. I have entered the benevolent stage of the mountain pass, where I am climbing through trees and flowers, streams and grassy banks, with the sounds of birds and insects and the occasional breath of wind for company.

‘I wonder how long it is. I wonder how far there is to go. Maybe I am halfway already?’

I look up to the mountain tops, still far above.

‘It certainly won’t be all the way up there.’

The time is about one o’clock in the afternoon and it is getting hot. I can feel the sweat trickling down my forehead and onto my top, which is already saturated and caked with dried salt. The sweat is good – it means I am working, but it hints to a more and more pressing concern.

‘Need more water. I don’t have enough water.’

I take a large gulp and feel it pore straight out through my sweat glands.

‘Oh God, I need more food and more water. Must keep going, must keep toiling. I will stop in a bit. It isn’t hard enough yet.’

Half a kilometre later and I stop for a quick rest.

‘Its beautiful. It really is beautiful here.’

The mountains inspire, the trees protect, the stream makes me feel human. The fatigued rider gets back on his bike suitably refreshed.

‘Easy. It’s easy again. I feel fine.’

I change up a gear. The hill steepens and I quickly change down. The toil. Must keep pushing. There is no hurry up here.

Cog 1, gear 3. The endurance level.

Another village and then the trees start to diminish. I can hear the stream somewhere far below, but I can no longer see it. There is a shop, a church and a gas station. I should stop and buy some water and some chocolate, but it is too soon. I have just had a break. The more I stop the harder it becomes.

Out of the village and I hit the first switchback. A long lug of water – only a third of the bottle left now. it is getting steep. We must be near the top now.

Through the first turn – 31 degrees - then another even tighter. Everything is moving slowly up here – caravans, motorcycles, cars.

I can feel the air cold and a mist forming above. Mountain peaks rise like a crown above my head.

A new routine begins on the switchbacks. As my energy lessens, each turn becomes new stage, a new challenge that I take on one at a time.

Up, turn, up the gears – climb, lower the gears, toil – turn – then up again.

That’s all you can do.

‘Back, back and forth, check out my back and forth.’

‘Yes we turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn.’

‘I get around – round, round, round – I get around.’

Five gone and I have got nowhere. I complete one, and another three appear above me. As I look up I can see a car at what seems like another mile up. That can’t be the road, surely that can’t be the road!’

The next corner finds me sat on the grass, staring at the road. I know. Deep inside I know it still so far to go. I’ve been riding for an hour and a half, but still it’s so far. I don’t tell myself that though. I accept where I am and what I have to do – get back and climb.

At the next (and last) gas station I do buy myself some water and some chocolate. I don’t eat or drink any yet though. Not yet. Not until I really need it.

I change up and then change back down again.

‘Thank God it’s beautiful. Thank God my bike works. Thank God for riding.’

This why I keep going and this is why I don’t mind the toil. We are all the same – we all have reasons why we keep going.

Five more switchbacks and I have accepted it – the road goes all the way to the top. It’s at least another 45 minutes. 5km maybe? 10? It keeps getting steeper, the air colder, the landscape more barren. The top is there though, I can see it.

I stand up on the pedals to stretch my legs, then sit back down. It hasn’t got any easier. I have t change down again to 1:2, lower than I will ever go, except in emergencies. This isn’t an emergency, but it’s all I can do.

‘How can it be this far? How can any hill be this long?’

A couple of racing bikes pass by, their riders shaking their heads in disbelief. It is hard for all. None of us were quite prepared for this, because if we knew we wouldn’t be here in the first place. It is not reason that takes us to these heights, and it is not reason that makes us appreciate it. Why do we do it? Because at this point there is no why. There is just experience.

‘15km to go’ is chalked onto the road. 15km! Is that true?

I don’t think about it. I look up the road and pedal to the next switchback.

Repeat.

The environment is no longer meant for people or roads. It is rocky precipices and mounds of barren grass. The corners are so tight that cars can barely get round. It is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is so desolate.

Suddenly I HAVE to stop. It has all become too much. Two hours of climbing and I can do no more. I can see the top and it is covered in snow. I don’t want to go up there – it is too far, too high. My gears don’t go low enough. I can’t look at the road. I can’t look at the top. I can’t even sing.

3 minutes, a Snickers and a sit down. Another rider passes me, then stops and collapses to his knees. It isn’t just me. It is too far for all of us.

No more excuses. I have energy – stop being a wimp. Not much water left, but the Snickers has produced some saliva, and that will do. Go, go, go go!

5.5 miles an hour. Keep it there. Keep this going and I will be done in...an hour, an hour and a half. I’m not sure. My brain’s stopped working. Toil, toil, toil, toil.

10km to go

2 more switchbacks, then another rest.

A lug of water.

2 more switchbacks.

The road is so tight that trucks and cars pass within an inch of my wheel, almost forcing me plummeting to my death. I don’t care. I am so close to death in other ways.

Half an hour later and 5km to go. It is cold and it still looks a long way. Switchback, switchback, climb, climb.

‘Back, back and forth, check out my back and forth.’

‘You’re a cold as ice, you’re willing to sacrifice.’

On the rock is a shrine to a dead rider – Francesco Moretti, 30 years old.

‘Keep going. Keep going or you will die.’

5km, 4km, 3km to go. I don’t stop anymore. Cold sweat drips off my chin, my eyes are glazing over and the altitude is making me faint, but...but I am almost there. I can see the top. 5.5mph. 5.9mph. Switchback, switchback, just one more switchback...

1km to go. I stop, turn and look at the vastness below me. 2900m up. I am going to do this. I am going to make it. Thank you God. Thank you bike.

When I finally reach the top there is no elation. I don’t punch the air, jump up and down or pass out on the ground. I just enjoy the moment in my head, while body walks like it had got here any other way. The toiling is over – the only way is down, the experience of going up is already in the past, but it will stay with me forever.

The England Football Team and their Absent Super-Egos

2010-09-16T18:15:00.006+01:00

In my suitable after-the-event way, I am posting today with my thoughts on the England football team, why they brushed aside Bulgaria and (watch out tabloids) ROLLED over the Swiss, but yet when they come up against the might of Albania and the USA in major tournaments, drop out with barely a whimper.
I really wasn't going to write this, but have to hear so much guff written and said about football every day, that I feel someone had to make an effort.

So what reasons do we have so far to explain England failure?

They don’t care about playing for their country.
They don’t play as a team
They don’t have the talent
They don’t want to play for the manager.

And so on and so on. All of these may have some element of truth, but all of them miss the key elements of the problem. Yes, when they went down against Germany they didn’t seem to care; yes, there seemed to be a reaction against the manager’s disciplinary regime; and yes, they seemed to be playing as individuals rather than a team – but why is this? Why did they start the Albania game playing like headless chickens? Why do these players, so talented, play like completely different people when they put on an England shirt?

A simple explanation is that they are spoilt, passionless, selfish idiots, but come on – really? Do you really believe that these players, who work hard every day for their clubs, who mostly have performed at the peak of the game, season in, season out, put on an England shirt and decide that they don’t care, that they don’t want to play as well as they can?

It’s got to be more complicated than that. It is. You could see it in the Albania game – they all went off like greyhounds of the traps. They wanted to well – all of them. But at the same time, this showed exactly what the problem was. They are scared.

A footballer who plays for England is going to have an ego. We all do. The ego is the way the mind organizes all our simple, rudimentary drives – it is our personality, our ‘self.’ Without it we would be nothing but an eating, drinking and shagging beings with no complex emotions or long term perspective. I know what you might think, but these are professional footballers - they would not have got to where they were without a lot of hard work and drive – and remember, the ego is still about hunger and sex – it just puts these desires into a liveable framework.
However, above the mere ego is another attribute in all humans – the super-ego. This balances out our natural lusts and desires, by telling us what is appropriate and what isn’t, what’s right and what’s wrong, what we should feel guilty about, how we need to adapt in different circumstances and occasions. It is our conscience, in short term, acting in opposition to our more lascivious needs. It regulates our ego. It is this, I suggest, that is missing from the England footballer of today.

An Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney or John Terry does not have a super-ego, in the way a normal man does. They cannot regulate their ID, their desires and their need to gratify them. They have no conscience to answer to, no sense of regulation or decorum. In their indigenous environments – as John Terry at Chelsea or Steven Gerrard at Liverpool - they are treated like Gods , and their actions are not susceptible to the realistic expectations of the normal man. They can do what they want, sleep who they want to sleep with, live how they want to live, because only their club is there to regulate them and in their club they are God. Their egos have been created from this environment, to the point where they might reasonably assert – ‘I am John terry - I am God’ - and it would be hard to disagree. However, this presents serious difficulties when it comes to transferring their skills to a different environment. Because their egos have not been subject to real-world limitations, it becomes a lot harder to deal with a situation where they are not the be-all and end-all. Hey, it’s not that they don’t want it - they want to be the best players in the world - but their egos mean they can’t see the ways they need to act to achieve this. Their desires and their wants become so used to being satisfied, they find it very difficult to utilize their super-egos.

Maintaining a godly ego is difficult - it is a very fragile thing. We all know this - we have well-developed super-egos - but England footballers do not. They have not had the chance because they have been able to stay sucking the teat of their perfect club lives for a long time. However, international football is different to this, particularly at a tournament level. The pressures become greater, expectations rise and the standard is at the highest level. The super-ego knows that it won’t be easy, that there will be problems and that you will have to adapt. It also knows that you shouldn’t expected to be the best every game, that not everything relies on you and that you might have to develop new ways of playing to fit in with those around you. Life may be different for a few weeks, difficulty and new, and you need to be prepared for this, you’ll need to compromise what you usually find easy.

‘But hold on. I am a god. I know exactly what works for me, how to play, how to prepare, what environment I should be in. I have to stay like this, otherwise I won’t be God anymore.

The public are desperate. The press have built me up. I have to be me – Wayne Rooney, John Terry – now is not the time to be someone else, now is not for someone telling me what else to do.

I step on the field. It’s the first match. I want to pass – give me the ball. Frank goes somewhere else. Gerrard goes left. It goes off for a throw. I don’t like it – I don’t like the way we’re playing. I don’t know if I can play like this.

It is not working and it is clear something different has to be done. They should be playing differently. It should be me – it’s all about me.
I try a shot from thirty yards and it doesn’t work. I’ve hit it too hard. I never hit it like that for Man Utd or Chelsea or Liverpool.
The mangers shouting, the fans are booing. Idiots. What do they know? They haven’t got a clue what this is like. I can’t do everything on my own.’

Each of the players wants to do as well as they can, but they cannot do it. They are playing how they know, but it is not working. Their ego is being questioned and they have no answer for it, which means it must be someone or something else’s fault. It cannot be them. They don’t want to pass, don’t want to shoot, because they cannot be certain what will happen.

The reality is that they are scared. They have been questioned for the first time and they do not like it. With egos like these, with no super-ego to placate it, they exhibit almost manic levels of behavior. Normally they can be God, but if it not going their way, they are the opposite – a normal, a nobody – and hence they get defensive, try too hard and lash out when they fail. Rooney shouts at the fans. Lampard gets defensive. Terry starts a revolt. What else can they do?

That, in short is the problem. There is nothing else they can do. The England footballer is not equipped for playing in an England team, not with the way they are hyped and praised and pampered and leant upon. They simply are not equipped psychology. Yes, they are spoilt, but it is not just this – it is the extent to which they are covered, like gods, like supermen, that makes them who they are. It isn’t their fault.

The question is, how do we change this? Well, the answer is not in Capello’s disciplinary method. If someone who is outwardly super-confident and self-important, who is told how great he is every day, then you are not going to rid him of his inner fears by barking orders at him or banning him from having a drink at the end of the day. If anything, the players are going to become more defensive, and play even more like a headless chicken trying to prove a point. Nor can you just let them manage themselves. They need some synthetic framework around them, otherwise the basic ego will take over completely. No, what the England footballer needs a new identity – they need to be treated like human beings, whatever their foilings and failures. We need to encourage the super-ego, to create realism – that if they do not succeed, they can adapt and do better in a different way. Playing for England needs to be await a way of playing, a team and then the individual therein, but it needs to be clear what it is and explained in a way that doesn’t treat the players like idiots.

In a sense, a World Cup failure could be the perfect tonic. It can give us realism, a sense of what works and what doesn’t – but only if the right failures are recognized and acted upon. We don’t need someone ‘to motivate’ because our players are lazy or apathetic. They are neither. We do not need someone to ‘kick them into line’ or conversely an English manager ‘to be their friend.’ We need someone who can show them what is wrong and what needs fixing, without turning them on the defensive. They need treating like the flawed individual they are, like we all are, but that there is way to act together, that means they can become something great. If they are willing to accept this, and try and do this, then we should do all we can – and if not, then get the John Terry out of there.

A Writers Motivation

2010-09-14T21:35:00.006+01:00

I have recently taken up the lifestyle of the professional runner. I get up each morning, run for 40 minutes, then go to work, come home, run for another hour and a half, eat, read, sleep and go to bed, over and over, seven days a week. Each time I get better at it and soon I will run a big race when I will do pretty well. Running is great like this. Everyone thinks I’m amazing. I get medals and applause. People aspire to do what I do.

For five years now I have spent hours and hours of every day writing. Each I’d do a little more and each day I’d think that I’d done a little better. Then I’d go to bed, happy with myself and think I’d added to what was certain to be a masterpiece, when finished, which I’d be delighted with and which everyone would love.

Then I’d finish the work, after years and years of effort. No-one would care. People would read the first chapter and then not continue. They’d be too busy, find it all a bit weird. Then I’d read it again and decide that I didn’t like it anymore. I’d end up putting it to one side, telling myself I’d look at it again in a few months and then begin work on something else, another work that would be great and that everyone would love to read. Then the same thing would happen again.

Why? What is the point? Why do I do it? What is the point of writing? Why do I work at it, why do I struggle? Why don’t I just stick with running – collect my medals, enjoy the acclamation, smile when my friends and family look on and cheer? It’s so much easier than writing a book, let me tell you. It also makes me happy, relieves stress and you never know, one day might give me a place in the history books. It is everything I write for but in a much more accessible form.

Yet here I am, at the end of another 15 mile day, and all I want to do is write. What Is wrong with me?

The answer lies in the power of creativity.

While running gives me pleasure no doubt about it, and being successful gives me a sense of achievement and purpose, it is nothing compared to the possibility of getting something you have written placed into the canon of literature.

What is a simple truth about the world and our civilization, is that it all comes from creative ideas. Things haven’t just existed, haven’t come from nowhere – all of it, everything we do, has stemmed from an idea.
Of course we all have ideas every day, but most of them float into a cloud of memories and then disappear into an ethereal haze. Ideas do not exist until they have been placed somewhere tangible – a piece of paper, a canvas, a computer screen, wherever – but when they are there, they have the potential to be anything. They just need to find the correct form If you want to write an idea it needs to be done in a way that people will want to read and understand. You cannot present something in a scrawl on a wall, or a note on your facebook page. For ideas to have power, the form must enable them to stay in the consciousness - music, a film, graffiti, a blog or a novel. I choose the latter because I feel it provides the best canvas, where you can express your ideas most coherently and comprehensively.

The rewards for creating a work of art are thus different to running in a race, or making lots of money or inventing a hoover. You are adding to the fabric of our culture, to what it means to be human. This is something that money can never do - the artist is aiming to greater heights.

Human civilization is a constantly evolving entity, but it does exist - it is what we ARE, it is what we have achieved as a race. If aliens were to invade tomorrow we would present it to them as a scrapbook of it - an opera by Wagner, a painting by Van Gogh, a play by Shakespeare, and maybe, just maybe, in a tiny way, a piece of work by Benjamin Evans. That is the reward for the artist - an etching on that great slate of cultural history - and it is something that other pursuits cannot even dream to aspire. Scientific theories come and go - they are right, then they are wrong, they elicit more and more hypotheses as they go – but they don’t stay with us like Dickens or Milton. Technology can be all the rage one day but then the next it will be out of date. However the artist, the great artist, will never be torn up and discarded into the void of history or the haze of memory, because the artist deals with what it is to be human, and this something that will never be anachronistic, that can never be out of date or right or wrong.

We write or paint because we think we have something to say to the world - we are able to abstract the human condition in a way that we think is original, or different, or important. This is why I strive to be good, or at least a better writer, because maybe one day people will listen to what I say, read on until the end, tell their friends, let them read as well, think about what I have to say and perhaps change what they think and how they see the world. In turn maybe this will change how we, the human consciousness, culture, view ourselves, thus leaving my writing as a part of the great cultural entity that will exist into as long as the human race prevails.

It is not easy. It takes a lot of hard work. It is very likely that I will fail, but the motivation will never leave me – but the rewards are too great not to have a go. I'll keep running as well, but this will never mean as much to me as writing. For all the sense of achievement, for all the congratulations and slaps on the back, it is nothing compared to the chance of immortality.

A.S Byatt - The Childrens Book, and the historical novel

2010-09-14T18:13:00.003+01:00

Byatt is a writer who considers so called universal themes - love, growing up, childbirth - in the backdrop of historical change. For her it our emotions and our choices are drawn from the influences around us - political and ideological - and her characters react as such. This seems very typical of a writer from a background in literary study - always expertly constructing around a social context, deconstructing the world through her characters and their predicaments. This has never been more obviously so than in The Children’s Book – half an ensemble family drama, half a social history of the end of the Victorian age through to the Great War.

Initially we see this as a book of escapism – a family living away in the woods of the Kent countryside, beautifully depicted as a rural idyll of downs, marshes and cycling inhabitants. They are seen through the eyes of Philip, a young boy from the working classes, who is taken by this Fabian group and thrust into the frivolities of midsummer parties. This is an ideal that permeates through the book – the dream of cultural blossoming amongst the beauty of nature – reflecting the flourishing intellectualism of the Edwardian age. The children play and learn within the environment, and develop their own ambitions of the world they can view objectively, and decide who they want to be – Dorothy - a doctor, Gerald – a banker, and Tom - who wants to stay and live in the woods. They are given free reign under the auspices of their mother Olive Welwood, the writer of the eponymous book, who details each of their lives through individual fairytales which develop and mature with their subjects.

Olive is the creator-figure of this world, blending fiction and reality in a pastoral haze and at first she seems to hold it all in a wonderful fluid of control and harmony. This is only until the children remain children however – the creative life may be able to paint whatever picture it likes, but it cannot affect the inexorable influence of reality.

This is drawn to a peak in a visit to the Paris exhibition at the turn of the century – a culmination of childhood dreams and the ambitions of the age of industry. Here is a display of light and electricity, of huge art and sculpture, where Oscar Wilde and Renoir converse in corners, and where the children begin to be awakened into the world. Wilde is ill. The artistic displays dark and nightmarish, the social gathering permeated by booze and whores. The childish dreams are beginning to be tainted. They begin to learn of the infidelities of their father. Tom disappears into the woods for days on end. Benedict Fludd, the ceramic artist in chief, commits suicide. The Boer War is creating rifts in Europe. Dorothy and Griselda go in a search for their true father. Elsie falls pregnant illegitimately.

Only Philip, alone with his pots, maintains his dream. Civilization is becoming complex.
Sexual interaction takes over the children. Once kept in a cupboard in Fludd’s workshop, it is now out in the open. An Edwardian rule has began and there is an openness and a flourishing of expression and understanding within Britain, and on the continent new theories in psychology are permeating the unconscious.

Desires though, can leave creativity at a dead end and while most of the stories are left as childhood interests, Tom is left with Olive to continue her project. His story is the most vivid, but how much is this to the detriment of his own personality? How much of a self is left after the fictional process drains from the world?

A new seriousness is growing around Europe and Byatt reminds us of the how this is mirrored literary canon – Potter and Kipling have been replaced by auspicious fiction – war-mongering, anti Germanic – anti-cultural. Similar parallels are again drawn in the fictional world of Byatt’s characters. Olive’s play of Tom’s ‘book’ is a resounding success, helped by her German puppeteers and designers – yet the results prove more tragic than any reward art can provide. Is this the final outcome of the creative act? The death of the artist foretold perhaps – certainly a telling lesson of the neglect that art can give to what is real.

The First World War arrives and the narrative changes with a shocking thump. Deaths come quickly and characters are offered no dramatic build up, reflecting the tragic emptiness of the war itself. It feels very much like an epilogue to the tale, but one very necessary to reflect the final outcome of the dreams of the society and the family that Olive has raised. Humans are unable to interact in a world without restrictions. We need to find a place for our selves and must try and hold on to it as best we can. We cannot simply exist as players in an adult game – there is too much independence, too much personality, too much difference, too much changing in our lives – too much that is REAL.

In order to create a new world, we must be willing to accept the death of another. This is what Olive realizes she has done and cannot accept, and this is what the outcome of all the political revolution of the books age – a new world at the neglect of others – an inevitable confrontation.
For all the time we see the simplicities of the beginning of the novel – the city there, the country here – we feel the urban sprawl closing in. Finally the war takes over and fields and villages are flooded and dug into trenches. Some of the children prevail, but it is forever scarred by their experiences.

This is a novel of huge scope and one which I feel may have too much to fully engage a reader. Many of the characters bring the age fantastically to life – Dorothy, Philip, Julian, Tom – but there is a vast amount going on, and the drama suffers from it. The novel still remains a wonderful exploration of incredible change that took place over a short period and the multifarious cocktail of personality and ideas that came with it. Perhaps its problems are indicative of that world itself, and maybe that is what Byatt is trying to tell us. Or is that too much, even for her?

The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway, the Lost Generation and the Modern World

2010-07-08T12:17:00.001+01:00

Hemingway’s first novel, set in Paris and Pamplona in the 1920s, is the archetypal novel of The Lost Generation, the group of artists and authors exiled together in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson. F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were its more famous residents and Hemingway their chief scribe. In it he depicts the listless parties and fiestas, drinking and loving and search for identity in an amoral world, where experience and enjoyment are the only pursuits worth having and direction and goals are forgotten in a society broken by war and death.

Our main character is Jake, an ex soldier turned journalist who has been injured during the conflict, an injury that has left him impotent, a condition touched on in moments but never specifically discussed. This is a world where the physical damage of half a decade of violence is brushed under a carpet of bright lights and social whirl:

‘Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.’

The lifestyle of decadence and hedonism is the only way the young survivors are able to deal with the new world that has been forced upon them. Life is short and at any time a similar event could be forced upon them, what have they go to but enjoy themselves while they can? In this respect all else is fleeting and unimportant. Jake’s impotence is a metaphor for this, the promise of a rounded, traditional life has been ripped away from him and so he lives not for the goals of family or future, but rather for the now and for who is there with him, just as all his contemporaries are. In Paris this has reached the point where it is the drinking and the parties that all that matters, superceding the individual and the self:

‘Did you hear that Henry. Mr Barnes intruded hi fiancée as Mademoiselle LeBlanc, and her name is actually Hebin.’

Reality is not important, identity is not important, it is disposable just like life itself when the future is uncertain. As long as the party id goof and the consumables of good quality, then the world is okay. Immediate experience is all that counts – a fine wine, a good joke and kiss by the Seine at night. As the Count, one of Jake’s acquired friends says to him with assurance:

‘You see Mr Barnes, it is only because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well. Don’t you find it like that?’

While in the modern world we may strive to find more from life, the experiences of war have left Hemingway’s contemporaries feeling they have had their fill and are now able to appreciate was is good without conditions.
It is a romantic image, and a familiar notion from so much writing of the time – Fitzgerald and Gatsby most obviously springing to mind – and one still pertinent to a generation now, whose relative affluence and lack of meaning have left to similar levels of enforced revelry.
Much more than Fitzgerald is Hemingway’s consistent allusion to the violence that has been the catalyst for his character’s situation. The book as a whole begins with a description of the lamentable Robert Cohn as a boxer, who we then learn is now trying to become a writer, and continues to refer to this sport, alongside the bullfights of the Fiesta in Pamplona, throughout the novel.
‘Look how he knows to use his horns,’ I said. ‘He’s got a left and a right just like a boxer.’
It feels that while the war is over, the characters motivation for movement and action is still motivated entirely by the witnessing of violence as they seek to understand their lives. Jake has great understanding of the latter, perhaps showing that a war veteran he is more rounded and self-aware when it comes to these issues while the others still have an exuberant appreciation of the spectacle.
‘That’s an extraordinary business,’ Brett said.
‘The bulls were fine,’ Cohn said.
Cohn is less than impressed by the bloodthirstiness of it all, suggesting that he is still unable to cope with the pain and death that has affected them. Indeed, he is till holding onto some confrontational nature, while this is sanitised and removed among the rest. He is still fighting the acceptance of the nihilism of the world that Jake, Brett, Mike and Bill are comfortably able to deal with.
They key is though, that violence still causes the characters to react and understand it through their new existences. A steer is gored by a bull in full sight of all concerned, and Mike is able to joke about it afterwards:
‘I would have thought you’d love being a steer Robert.’
It’s the same as how Jake can laugh at his injury and Brett at her attitude towards the opposite sex. They know that they are being cruel and cold, but how else are they supposed to understand what is happening but if not through humour and mocking? And it is this journey that the Sun Also Rises is essentially about, how we come to understand what has put us in a situation which is entirely based on trying not to think about how we got there in the first place. Jake still thinks of himself in love with Brett. He starts the novel by hiring a prostitute. All the characters drink until they cannot see. Brett has an affair with a young matador, whose manly attributes are not questioned.
Cohn, the boxer turned writer, finds this through an act of violence. Mike through the reality of his wife-to-bes infidelity and Jake, by sobering up after the Fiesta.
‘I feel like hell,’ I said.
‘Drink that,’ said Bill. ‘Drink it slow.’
It was beginning to get dark. The fiesta was going on. I began to feel drunk but I did not feel any better.
Bill sees the Fiesta as ‘wonderful nightmare,’ an apt oxymoronic reflection of the existences the characters are in. However, the most vivid understanding of this is presented through Brett, whose journey if understanding permeates the whole book. She is Jake’s motivation for continuing his illusory existence and he hers, for still believing in an illusion of love that no longer exists in her soul, and it is at the climax of the fiesta that she bares this out.
‘I’m a goner’ she confesses. ‘I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.
‘I’ve got to do something I really want to do. I’ve lost my self-respect.’
‘I can’t just stay tight all the time.’
Brett has understood that she is acting out of a need for lust and constant satisfaction, and this is all that ‘love’ has now become for her. She expunges this is Hemingway’s trademark laconic style. It is only when we can express ourselves in simple, succinct terms that we can truly understand who we are.
Now the party is over, each party is developing this realisation, rather than living for the party itself, not the beautiful, talented individual they may have thought, and not the world of bright lights are long gulps of Pernod. Reality is more akin to the fishing trip that Jake and Bill take midway through the novel, a lucid intervals amongst the Paris parties and Pamplona fiesta, where the world is soft and tactile, the violence very much of the natural order, where only the fish are in danger, and the alcohol an irrelevant addition. It is only through the chaos of the human condition that we misunderstand the simplicity of the world and delude ourselves it is anything more.
I wonder if the modern world has learned anything from this?

Music and Silence - Rose Tremain

2010-06-10T08:51:00.000+01:00

Modern writing is still alive! Here is a book by a contemporary author that isn’t smart-arse, self-conscious or written for people who shop in Tescos. Unfortunately it happens to be set in the 17th Century Danish Court and be written by a novelist who’s pen is inspired by the worlds of rural Norfolk, but hey, at least its good, and for more real than the other genre fiction cluttering the shelves of Waterstones.

The reason this is good is because it doesn’t read like a historical book. In a sense it doesn’t read of a book trapped in a time or a setting, because its characterisation is so good and its themes so universal. Ostensibly it is a love story between the lutenist of King Christian IV and the companion of Kirsten, the King’s estranged wife. However, this is by far the lease interesting part of the book, and one that you seem that Tremain has included to shape her historical and lyrical flourishes around. Romantic fiction this is not.

Peter Claire is our lutenist, who takes residence with the King at a crucial moment of his reign, where his initial hopes of creating a new Denmark, expertly crafted and with a distinct lack of shoddiness, are falling apart at the seams. After the fireworks of his early years and dreamlike marriage to the beautiful Kirsten, reality is retuning with a vengeance. Our king’s last bastion of hope lies with his orchestra, and his ‘angel’ Claire, the only place where he is able to feel the music of the soul that he so wanted the rest of the country to reflect.
His nemesis is Kirsten, ex wife and harlot, who dreams of a life of riches and constant coital satisfaction with her new lover, Count Otto Ludwig of Salm. Sat between these two narratives is the state of Denmark, falling with a population who seeks Kirsten’s instant desire, rather than a King’s transcendental world. And due to the realities of economics, neither can be answered,
While the King’s struggles to deal with the realities of power are delivered with the perfect mix of empathy and sardony, and Kirsten extravagances constantly hilarious and foul, Tremain presents us with some even more memorable side characters to the recipe.

Earl O’Fingal – a father, who wakes up in the middle of a dream where he had heard the perfect melody ever composed, and embarks on an obsessive quest to find it again the corporeal world.
Marcus Tilson – the young brother of our heroine Emilia, who is locked away by his parents and left to forge a life with plants and insects, such is the foulness of the human species that he sees before him.
Magdalena – a fleshy, buxom whore of a woman, conveyed through a constant focus on her great, flabby arse and huge sagging breasts. Hers are the sins of the flesh – adultery, paedophilia, incest . We feel drowned in the horribleness of her body the sucks in all around her

The combination of these, a sweet story of love amongst the charicatures of a royal court and a setting where you can feel the crisp Scandinavian snow, taste the lush, creamy puddings of the palace and float around in the futile dreams of a ruler with the true ambition of the Renaissance, gives a story that stays long in the memory. In its treatment of timeless themes in a world of false beliefs and moral nihilism, it also says more about the modern world than the rest of the ‘contemporary fiction’ I have read this year put together.

Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger - The Death of English Literature

2010-06-01T13:30:00.002+01:00

A doctor answers a call from a local stately home, Hundreds Hall, where the young maid has been taken ill. However, on examination it appears there is nothing wrong with her, apart from an uneasy feeling about her new employment, in this house that ‘gives her the creeps’ in which she thinks she ‘will die of fright sometimes.’ Our rational doctor is sympathetic and prescribes some simple stomach mixture, but is taken in by the grand mansion in which he finds himself, and its occupants, the surly Roderick, his pragmatic sister Caroline and their rather glamorous mother Mrs Ayres. Soon he starts to treat the former for an war-injury to his leg. However, there appears to be something sinister happening to the family, particularly to Roderick, as he straggles with the upkeep of a stately home going to the dogs, at the same time beginning to have nightmarish visions at night. One by one these visions intensify and pass to each member of the family, with increasingly tragic results. Can our cynical doctor find the reason behind all these goings on, or does the house itself have a secret that it is not quite applicable to the scientific mind of a man of medicine.

Have I missed something? This book has been nominated for the Booker Prize, the highest literary accolade in Britain. Okay, the wiring in very competent, the historical details is impeccable and there are some cleverly tense moments, but that is it. Nothing else here stands it much above the classic English ghost story. Everything reminds me of something I have read before. The rational doctor, sceptical to the end, forms an awkward romance with our heroine, the plain-Jane Caroline, providing an excellent prosaic foreground to heighten the shocks that lie behind. The dissipating Roderick, shipped off to a mental home early on, the mother locked in a romantic past and a grand house with dirty secrets hidden in its decadence – pick up a hundred books written since Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and you will find all of this and more, over and over again.
This is why English Literature in this country has an endemic problem. This stuff sells, brilliantly. Ghosts in stately homes, post-war social comment, doomed romances – housewives read this on the garden on a Sunday afternoon, pass it round at the Book Club on a Tuesday and then each go about trying to write something similar themselves. It’s almost a literary movement – novels locked in a world that only exists in the minds of people with National Trust memberships who watch Richard and Judy and have too much time to do anything else. Okay, there not all bad books, but award winning exciting literature? Do me a favour.
Kafka, Rushdie, McEwan this is not. What has happened to the novel? Why has it become so pitifully middle-class and dull. Where are the books about counter-culture, rebellion, ideas? Thats the point of a novel, to give us something new, not to take us to a world so familiar they are almost beyond cliché.
It’s the way the novel is marketed. The Hay Festival, Waterstones, Richard and Judy, thanks to this – the act of reading has been transformed into this idyllic, relaxing pursuit, where people sit in fields and gardens with nice cups of tea, happily smug about how intelligent they are and engage in the occasional police conversation about some cod-philosophy they don’t really care about because they are pretty happy where they are thank you very much. Novels are sold to this image, and are lauded as such. It is like modernism never happened.
No wonder kids don’t give a shit about reading, because the publishers don’t give a shit about them either. All they get sold is another re-issue of The Catcher in the Rye, or some comedic tripe written by a music journalist pertaining to be cool. None of them want to pick up a pen and think of something new, something different, or express the worlds that they live in that adults don’t understand, and you can hardly blame them. Does Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel, Alice Sebold, Audrey Niffenegger touch their souls?

I’m not saying that Sarah Waters book is particularly bad. It isn’t. Its clever and has moments of true tension. But fundamentally this is a book about the decline of traditional values and British pomp and artistry. Fine. But the day I see this a ‘literary’ awards ceremony is the day when writing in, and about this country truly dies.

Nick Clegg is a Whore – Discuss

2010-05-28T17:29:00.001+01:00

‘Nick Clegg is a whore – and the Conservatives were the only party who would pay for a whore.’

It’s been a depressing few weeks for all those who believe in the principles of politics. From standing on opposite ends of the Television podium and apparently seeming to represent complete polarities in most of the political spectrum, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have somehow jumped into bed together to form a united front against the evil that was New Labour and Gordon Brown. They have formed a fellowship of previously warring factions, Cameron the would-be-king Aragorn and Clegg as his archer-in-chief Legolas, against the despotic Brown, who has been looking over them all with his great ego and his...evil eye.
Okay, so the combination may not entirely work, but it is working to the right ends, to help all us back to fiscal harmony, where hard times will lead us one day into a new, brighter world. Or perhaps the ring has tempted all of them – Cameron a wide eyed hobbit and Clegg most certainly a lascivious Gollum.
The question is, what has politics become? How can it be possible for two parties with such contracting manifestos and principles to just suddenly ditch it all for what they would describe as the ‘good of the country.’ How can this make sense? How can this happen in a democratic world?

The first point to consider if how we, the public, decide who to vote for. If we vote practically, by what we think would be the best way the country to operate, or indeed what we think we can get out if it, then can we really complain about a coalition government. After all we are doing just what the Tories and the Liberals are doing, amending our thoughts and actions based on what looks good to us at that moment. Politics isn’t based on principle, it is based on practicality. Nick Clegg would have woken up, saw a situation he was in, looked through proposals from the Tories and the Labour party and went for which he decided he thought was best. He didn’t consider ideologies, he went for pragmatic action. The Tories apparently gave him and his party a better deal, so he went for it. Principles weren’t important. He had to make this decision, so he made it. Many people vote in the same way – what are we being offered, what works for us, let’s take the best offer. For Clegg that is enough apparently. That logic is okay. He is acting for the best interests of his party and he had to take a deal. Is that right? Is that how politics should work. Is that what we think when we get to the polls?
It depends. In depends who we are and how we think. It depends if we are guided by self-interest or if we are guided by ideals, by principles.
Some might say that not having principles is precisely what the Lib Dems are all about, and this is the kind of voter that they support. After all, in a debate of ideas, the liberal is surely the one whose principle is precisely to sit on the fence – all should be allowed to express their views and all should be considered equally. Rightness or wrongness is not the liberals point, as long as they view can be expressed – and it is not professing ‘harm’ to others, then there is no problem, then the liberal has won. Essentially then, the liberals would see the way in which we a government has been formed out of dogmatic opposition as exactly the type of freedom it supports, a freedom to come to a logical conclusion without the chains of ideologies and rhetoric. This election has been a victory for the liberal way of thinking, rather than the aggressive bluster of right versus left.
If politics is about practicalities then this makes perfect sense. But being a political party is about more than that, is about the ideas and ideals – about a way of viewing the world and of finding a real way of applying this view to a community of people. The liberals have a belief in a society where we are free to act for ourselves, while the Tories have their views and Labour have theirs. Nick Clegg may like the idea of free political decision making, but he still has back to a world where this applies to the individual. This is also what his electorate voted for after all.

The question is then, if we are okay to accept Clegg and Cameron’s joint ‘vision,’ is whether it is possible for Clegg to maintain the ideals of his party whilst working with a Conservative government. If he is, then fine, Clegg is acting in the best of interest of those who have voted liberal, but if is not, then he is nothing more than a self-interested whore, selling his votes for the best price on offer.

In order to answer this we need to clarify the ideologies of the two parties, to see if they are related and interchangeable, and also consider the third party in all this, Gordon Brown’s Labour, who the Liberals so promptly rejected.

To define the difference I have always thought of three politicians walking passed a tramp lying by the side of the pavement.
The conservative tells him to get off his arse and get a job.
The Labour gives him a quid, which he then spends on more beer to get more drunk
And the Liberal supports his right to be tramp and tried to find him a bigger box.

Hmmm, it seems here that all three political parties have very different perspectives. How could they look at the Labour point of view and the Conservative point of view, and decide which one to follow, when both have very different concerns, then the tramp’s right to have a box in the first place. How did they decide to go with the Tories rather than the Labour party?
Let’s think about the Conservative’s policies, and see what that tells us.
Under David Cameron’s the Tories into a new centre right position in the political scales. They are trying to renew their previous reputation as the government of economic prudence by advocating a reduction in government spending and a resultant cut in direct taxation, although now granting that the top level of tax will have to stay at its relative high levels. They are highly eurosceptical, probably due to painful memories of Black Wednesday and against any unnecessary ‘cooperation’ with Brussels. They have maintained their position as the party of liberal economics, minimizing state intervention for business and the individual and relying on promoting social values to encourage success and rewarding it is as such.
The current Liberal Democrat party believe in basic liberal freedoms, where the state has minimal intervention with the individual, separating themselves from the more the New Labour dominated thought of social liberalism and the third way, where the government ‘encourages’ freedoms through its intervention, creating markets within government bodies, like the NHS or local councils. This is not necessarily their definitive view, but what they think at the moment. Individuals should be left free to make life for themselves, rather than be assisted by a government that defines these freedoms through policy. From this then, they believe in lower taxation and cuts in public spending.
And while we’re at it, let’s look at the other incumbents, the Labour party, operating from the centre-left, and differing from both the Tories and the Conservatives in their belief in government investment to encourage economic growth. They don’t believe in socialism these days of course, but they still support an ethic of working together, even though we are also competing. It is probably summed up best in the re-wording of their infamous Clause 4, which now reads:
"The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect”
I like to think of it like England football team on a training camp, playing some small games of five-a-side. They are still competing on the day, but are thinking of much greater goal at the end of it, so although they want to win, they want to help the team improve more than anything else.
So all this seems to suggest that the Liberals would be quite right to be taken in by the fluttering of David Cameron’s eyebrows.

However, this is where the courtship starts to hit the buffers. In order for the Conservatives to remain conservative and liberals to remain liberal, they must withhold some belief in cultural and social difference. While the current centre-right position of the conservatives allows for a more liberal view of society, in relation to for instance gay marriage or abortion, this is a position that is coming from a further right position and will always maintain it. Long has it criticized the Labour policy on positive multiculturalism for instance, and it also exists very much in a sceptical position on Europe, for which the Liberal Democrats exists on completely the opposite scale with overwhelming support for the Lisbon treaty.
Okay, they are not exactly the same time. There will be some differences. This does not mean that a coalition is unworkable.

No it doesn’t. But let break this down a bit further. The Conservative, in order to maintain his or her identity as a Conservative, will always have a strong sense of the ‘right’ way to live – the family, marriage, a certain level of Christian morality – rather than supporting the autonomy of choice.

Liberal and Tories share many beliefs in fiscal matters, but the tenets of their parties are almost polar opposites. If we vote for simple, what’s in it for us, then okay, principles no longer matters, but if we vote with any kind of integrity, then this election result – of a coalition Tory and Liberal government - is something of a fraud. Here’s why.

Liberal and Labour share a similar beliefs in what humans are – blank canvases who are trying to figure who to be and what to do – and while one may believe that we need to guide them on this path and one believes that we should let them figure this out as long as they don’t harm others, but both sides are coming from the same starting point. However, the Conservative view is somewhat different. Their starting point is the ‘right’ way to live. What they will then do is give as much autonomy for those who want to live this way, but this way will always be what they think should be followed. In this respect they will support ‘the family,’ ‘the homeowner’ and the entrepreneur. What the Tories will also always reject is those who simply do not want to act in the ‘right’ way. Their form of governing is exclusive – here’s the club rules, join in if you want. For Labour and for liberals there is no such club, and herein lies a crucial similarity. Okay, the Lib Dems may feel that Labour’s policy of supporting the many does restrict the freedom of the individual by the intervention of the state, but fundamentally they still think the same individual freedom should exist. The Tories do not.

It is a question of human nature - Tories believe that there are innately correct ways to be, Lib Dems feel we should be allowed to choose our own ways as long as we don’t cause harm and Labour think we should all be able to hemp one another as a community. Two of these views are interchangeable, but one is not. One says that human existence is different to the other two, and everything they believe comes from this. How then, can a party join up with one who has a different view on what it is to be a human being, and tells us how we should live as a result?
The Liberal Democrats can negotiate on policy with Labour and Conservatives. They can collaborate on most issues, but they cannot work alongside a party who has different intrinsic view on humanity

There can be no negotiation on this because this is who the parties are and this is still how the majority of the population will vote, with who they feel they agree with, fundamentally rather than pragmatically. This may or may not be right, but this is how a democracy works – it is humans voting, rather than analytical machines, and the starting point for a human will always be their own identity and what they believe as a result. Some of us look passed this, but most of us don’t. And to all those people who have voted in this way, Nick Clegg has let them all down. He has forgotten what it means to be human, what it means to have an identity, principles and beliefs. How do we know this? Because he has forgotten his own. If he had he would have understood that he could never form a government with the Conservatives, because they are intrinsically, ideologically different. In order to do that he would have to deny what it is to be Liberal, what it is to be a Liberal human being, and selling himself to the highest bidder or his own ends.
Forgetting what it is to be human? Selling yourself?
Precisely the actions of a whore.

The Body Beautiful

2010-05-26T13:27:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I was sat in the pub with my friends. It was the first really hot day of the year and because of this all the babes and the hunks were able to shed their winter cloaks and get their shapely, toned bodies out on display. Here was where all those hours down the gym would pay off, where they would get the return for sweating out the merest ripple of fat on their arses or hammering out those biceps until they were ready to burst. Here is where a stranger’s eyes would divert lustily towards them, affirming of all the hard work they had put in over the winter months. They were attractive! People fancied them. They had a power over the opposite sex and, more than likely, they would get a shag at the end of the night. They had succeeded in the one thing that is most important to all of us, whether we realize it or not.

Over the same dark, winter months, I have been running. Six days a week, fifty-sixty miles, rain, wind or shine. Okay, so these guys or girls had been down the gym for a few hours during this period, but compared to me their efforts were positively lethargic. I have been working almost every muscle in my body over and over, I have kept going to the point of being sick and I have kept going some more I have run a 10k, a half-marathon, a cross-country and a full marathon, stretching my body to its absolute limits, to points where very few human being have reached. I am comfortably fitter than any of the gorgeous physical specimens that surround me in the pub, and yet when I take my short off and sit proudly in my tight white vest no-one, not one person, takes a second look. I am one of the fittest men in the country, seriously, but does this make any difference? Does that girl walking passed raise her eyebrows, put her cheeks and eye my buff torso up and down? No she doesn’t. Neither does her ugly friend. Neither does anyone. They look straight towards the new doorman, smoking a cigarette by the gate.
Why do they do this? Because even though I exercise harder and longer than anyone else here, I am a runner. I don’t life weights, do chin-ups or go to water aerobics. I run. And no-one looks twice at a runner.

There is simple reasons for this. Running does not give you a beautiful body. Yes, it is the best form of exercise to lose weight, but once the weight has gone, that’s it. There’s nothing else – all the fuel has been spent pumping the blood around your legs; the rest of you – your arms, your chest, your arse – is left scrawny, skeletal and generally un-alluring. When I watched Baywatch I didn’t see any nine-stone men, and the women had bulges in places other than their calf muscles. No, running will not cause the opposite sex to flock your way and quicker when they see your tight quads. Not at all.

So as the next girl walks passed me and heads towards the bouncer with his tight t-shirt, a warm feeling flushes through my veins. I am not one of them. I do not make all this daily effort for the sole purpose of making myself look good when I step into the club. I am more interesting, it takes more to satisfy me than a good fuck with the town hotty. My goals are deeper than that.

Yes Mr Freud, I know, it probably is all about sex at the end of the day, but maybe my understanding of sexuality is different. I want people to fancy me because I have achieved things, because I have commitment, stamina, guts and enthusiasm, not because my body bulges out of a tight pair of jeans. By being a runner I am rejecting the traditional sexual mores, even though I am indulging in a similar practice as those in pursuit of the body-beautiful; I am like the anonymous artist, the rock star wearing a mask, the beautiful actor who will only play roles which make him ugly. Running doesn’t make me better looking, but I still like to think it makes me an attractive person, like the artist and the actor and the rock star, and those that can’t see this are not the kind of people I want to be with I don’t think.

When I look at the bouncer, standing by the door with a beautiful girl on his arm, I consider what it took for him to become this way. He has spent hours and hours pumping the muscles in his arms and his chest until he can do no more, until his brain switches off, and then pumping them some more anyway. This is anaerobic fitness. That’s how it works. If you do it right and do it well, then you shouldn’t be able to think – you should be exerting yourself to the point where that is all you are and all you are doing, where the rest of the world is shut off. Its exercise for amoebas.
As a long distance runner my way is different. Reaching optimum pace over optimum time engenders another feeling altogether – a Zen state, where rather than closing off your mind down to one simple thought, you open it in ways that you have never previously been able to. You become at one with the world around you. Your legs are moving, you are making effort, but you don’t notice. You are in a hyper-sensory state, and to achieve your best pace, you need to stay there as long as possible. Bodybuilders are doing something similar, but they can never open the door long enough to see what the runner can – the weights will always have to be dropped to the floor before their consciousness can catch up.

As a runner I may not be beautiful, you probably won’t look twice when you walk passed me on the street, but trust me, I have inner beauty like most other people can only dream of. Look long enough and you will see it.

Reasons not to Run

2010-05-24T13:25:00.001+01:00

How wonderful it is to be a runner. How fabulous we feel breathing in the fresh air on a sunny Sunday morning, working our taught legs, expanding our capacious lungs, feeling fit and happy with the world. What pleasure we attain. How blessed we are to follow this path.

This is why we do it and this is when we wonder why everyone else doesn’t do it too. Running makes you feel fantastic, who could not want to take it up right now?
And yet I hardly know anyone who runs. In fact, almost no-one I know does. So why? If running is such an innate human capability and so ultimately pleasure-inducing, why doesn’t everyone do it? Why was it only me, a seventy year old man with a beard and a chubby Chinese woman with headphones who were out in the park this morning?

Reason 1: Lethargy

The human body operate on momentum. Left to its own devices it will happily sit on the couch doing nothing and to convince it towards physical exertion is not an easy thing to do. At first it will resemble a stubborn old carthorse, shaking its mane and stamping its hooves at any unnecessary levels of work:
‘Why?’ it groans. ‘What are you doing? Stop it, stop it now! Let me rest – I have to rest.’
The muscles tense up and send defamatory messages to the pain receptors in the brain. Mucus forms over the throat. Carbon dioxide builds in the stomach. Lactic acid stings the joints. It is torture. Running feels dreadful.
It is not long before you sit back on the sofa, turn the TV on and relax again.
‘Fuck that,’ you think. ‘It’s not worth it.’
And you never go running again. While it may get easier the next time you do it, this first time is enough. The body is much happier to stay in its lethargic cocoon and stay there.

Reason 2: Embarrassment

In your heart of hearts you know that running is good for you. You know it will make you look better, feel better and every morning you look outside and think about doing it, but then something stops you, something says that maybe it would be better to stay inside and think about starting another day.
‘I’ll look stupid,’ it says.
‘People will laugh at me.’
‘I’ll be so slow.’
‘My kit doesn’t fit me.’
‘Everyone will stop and stare.’
‘Someone I know might be there!’
Running is a very individual pursuit. This is fantastic in many ways, but is not helpful when it comes to starting in the first place. No one can tell you to run. You can’t go and have run-about with your mates. If you want to run you have to do it on your own, with only you self-consciousness for company, and we don’t tend to like things that make us feel like this.
The simple facts are that running is not particularly cool, you certainly do not look good when you are doing it and the idea of the general public eyeing your sweaty red body lolloping around the park is a pretty excruciating concept to deal with alone. Essentially you are shouting to the world:
‘Look at me! Look at how unfit I am. Look how hard I need to try to work off this fat. What a pathetic hopeless loser.’
It is much better to stay indoors and not run at all.

Reason 3: Boredom

It’s a hard sell to a non-runner:
‘I’m off for a run. I’m going ten times round the park for about two hours, I’m hoping the rain stops and the frost thaws out a bit.’
Why? Why on earth would anyone do this out of choice? It doesn’t matter how fit it might make you – on a Sunday morning, you are not lying on the sofa watching Hollyoaks, you are running over and over again in a circle for two hours while the rain pelts down. Why?
The simple fact is that taken in its own, running is very boring. One foot after another, over and over, round and round, legs getting more tired and the road getting longer and longer. There is no ball to catch, no net to shoot into, no tackle to make – it is dull, barren, simple.
To the mind of the modern man this is an unpalatable concept. We don’t like being bored. In a multimedia world we don’t have to be. If there is a TV in the room, we can turn it on. Don’t sit in silence! You don’t need to. However, this is exactly the situation we are placing ourselves into when we run. We are choosing to be alone with our thoughts, and these thoughts are mainly concerned with how much we hate what we are doing. It doesn’t make sense, particularly when there are so many more interesting things out there. What time does Holby City start?

Reason 4: Runners are self-satisfied pricks

Oh God. Oh God look at them. Look at their tanned legs, their Lycra tops, the smug smiles over their chiselled faces. What are they so happy about? How can they be that pleased with themselves?
No-one wants to turn into these people. Any of us who retain a shred of integrity and self-worth do not see those robots as figures to aspire to. We may not have their gorgeous bodies and great tans but at least we can talk about more than how great we are. When we go down the pub we can have a laugh, instead of sipping on lemonade, going home at ten and making everyone else feel guilty about not doing so.
This is a problem with sport, and with running in particular. It starts in school, when the athletes tend to be brainless jerks, moves on to university, where they are viewed as antisocial freaks, and then adult life, where they appear far too self-content to be likeable. Footballers may be dumb, but they are popular, rugby players are loud and boorish, buy a great laugh down the pub and body builders can at least be a good help in a late night dust-up. However, runners are none of these things. They are either smug and fit, or weird and socially inept and are therefore not the kind of people you want to be or come from a world in which you want to live. If they were, you suspect they would not have become runners in the first place.
No, running turns you into a sexless, personality-less automaton – Barbie or Ken – with a brain pumped full of endorphins and not much else, and for that reason I’ll stay on a Sunday morning thanks very much.

So there it is. Four damn good reasons why a considerable majority of the population chooses not to adopt the wonderful pursuit of long distance running. It’s hard, it’s shameful, its dull and it turns you into a pretty risible human being.

However, when you consider for running for what it truly is, none of this is true. Yes, I may not always enjoy going out for a ten mile hill session on a Sunday morning, but each time it gets easier, each time it hurts less and each time I realise that I am improving that little bit. Yes, I run laps around the park, but I am doing it for a reason, to get quicker, to make that six-minute mile pace, to sprint the whole of the big hill at the end, to win that half-marathon at the end of the month, so I can celebrate with all my friends from the club who aren’t the self-important twats I thought they might be. That is when the pain becomes worthwhile. That is when I am quite the opposite of shy and embarrassed. That is when you enjoy a good night out, knowing that you have achieved something.
Keep thinking ahead. You will always reach the end and at the end there is glory. As long as you keep running.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty - A Review

2010-05-19T17:35:00.000+01:00

A rather wistful tale by Zadie Smith, literary wunderkind of the chattering classes, as she tells the story of Howard Belsey, an English academic, and hi African-American wife Kiki, as they deal with adult affairs, teenage romances, intellectual rivalries and most importantly, trying to forge an identity amongst the traditional, middle class milieu of Ivy league American North East.

The story is predominantly concerned with the actions of Howard as the details of an affair with a fellow teacher begin to unravel around him. At the same time he has to deal with the highly strung opinions of his talented daughter Zora, as the joins his class and the class of his previous mistress, and the temptations of a stunning new student in his class, who also happens to be the daughter of his rival, the right wing moral mouthpiece Monty Kipps.

This is something of an ensemble piece for Smith, a mix of clear and clever characters who interact in amusing and believable ways as the scandal erupts around our central character and the patience of his wide reaches breaking point. Howard is not the pantomime villain, he is a disillusioned man who has found no bright lights at the end of a potentially brilliant and is finding something to blame and a reason for the increasingly pathetic actions he takes to try and maintain his ego and his existence. The exotic allure of his wife has faded and he has taken full solace in intellectualism. Howard is an expert on Rembrandt - the master of depicting human nature in its barest realties – and as such is unable to live in a world where these are consistently being shovelled under a carpet of decorum. From this his existence is being reduced into a merely reactionary one – anti-moral, anti-conventional, anti all but the truths that lie beneath all that we are and all that we do. However at the same time this has removed all sensibility in his contact with his family, his colleagues and even his wife, pushing them away until he is alone with himself and its superior thoughts.
The class he teaches on Rembrandt is attended by his daughter, a determined student and the only member of the family who is indigenous to their academic surroundings. She is hard working, committed and opinionated, but noticeably lacking in creative thought. She is trapped in the establishment, has chosen to be so and has the certificates on her wall to prove it. Her ‘beauty’ diminishes throughout the book, as she reacts to her father’s idealism and illegitimate relationships. She is a strong libertarian, however it feels as though this has reached the point where she holds no separate self away from her work – the only really essence we get of her as a human being is her relationship with the too good-to-be-true Carl and this is doomed to failure. One cannot accept the simplicities of talent and beauty if one is to truly further oneself. In a way she represents the younger Howard, and the antithesis of his current simple lustings.
The feeling is the Zora has sold herself to the white American machine, something her final split form Carl represents. On the opposite ends of the scale is her brother Levi, who is rather an idiot, but an important one in terms of how the rest of the family are seeking to find their identities. He sees himself in the cliché of the modern black American male – from the streets, a hustler, a lyricist – and identifies with this world as a way of reacting against the mixed race complexities of his family. Levi is a tourist of the urban poor, a militant fool and while this provides something of a comment on the ridiculous romanticising of ‘street’ culture, it doesn’t feel like Smith’s strongest ground. Levi may be trying to conform to a cliché, but the level of his apparent simplicity seems suspect given the minds of the rest of his family. He is a character to make a point, rather than the person who would really exist in this situation, although it is fair to concede, his comedic value does add much to the book. His attempt at friendship with the bland-but-beautiful Carl is a neat take on the irony of his attitude; in particular his disappointment to discover the latter’s unwillingness to exist within the ‘black’ economy that the former’s manner and appearance represent.
Synthesizing all of this into a whole is Kiki, the catalyst for all the events that occur before and in the novel and the driving force behind their respective resolutions. In one voluptuous body represents all the polarities of belief and identity held in her children and husband, which she sucks in and dominates through sheer strength of character. Her appearance means she cannot share the same ideals of desire, white academia and faux poverty. She is who she is – a woman, a wife and a mother. All else is transient: sparks in teenage eyes, flashes over a husband’s grasp of reality.

This is a book about identity - racial, sexual and intellectual - but none of these dominate and the narrative feels authentic and amusing as a result, and this is very much Smith’s point. Her book may be about a mixed race family in a very unlikely situation, but at the end their problems and the same as the rest of ours - diminishing sexuality, searches for meaning and trying to find our own lives and trying to live with each other at the same time.

A Small Victory

2010-05-17T17:41:00.000+01:00

This is why we do it right? This is why I run every evening over and over, day after day, rain wind of shine. This is what it all builds up to – to be the fastest, the strongest, the toughest...the winner.
Victory is the answer to all the questions I have been asking of myself over the last few months, and to which I haven’t been certain of finding until now. I’ve done it. I’ve done what I set out to do. This Saturday morning I am the best.

This is the way that victory makes you feel. The fact that you have beaten ‘him’ or ‘her’ is of no matter, but the fact that you have beaten your doubts, your uncertainties, the constant wonder as to the point of it all, is.
There are numerous facets to running that make you feel good – the relaxation, the sense of achievement, the endorphins – and all are good enough reasons to do it on their own, but none of them give you the same sense of definitive, unequivocal justification as winning.
There is something innate in running that causes you to test yourself every time you do it – to go that bit further, to do each mile that bit quicker, to run just that one more lap – and victory is the culmination of all of this. It makes you remember that there is a point to it all, it justifies all that came before. The strange is, that as a feeling in itself, there isn’t much to winning – its embarrassing, its contrived and the rewards are minimal – but the implications of it are huge. I try to think of it as a bit like getting married – it doesn’t make you feel many different, its not a patch on the feelings that put you there in the first place, but somehow it justifies it all in your mind, making love something tangible and something real.
Thats what I felt when I crossed the line that Saturday, a sense that maybe now everyone would understand what I have known all along – this is it; this is why I do what I do – do you see now?
Its all very well knowing something, but it means nothing if you cannot express it to the world, and to other people in the world. Try as I might, expressing the notion that running 16 miles on a freezing Sunday morning is a wonderful thing to those that do not run, is almost impossible. Only in winning can I show what it means to them, it empirically expresses everything that running means. I am a runner. Running has meaning to the world, rather than the whimsical act of a madman. In the same way you cannot define yourself as a writer until you publish a book, you cannot define yourself as a runner until you win a race.
So is this why i run? No. In the same way as most writers don’t write to become published authors, a musician doesn’t write music to become a popstar – I don’t run to win. I like running. I want to become as good at it as I can. I enjoy going out on a rainy Sunday morning and running 16 miles faster than I ever have before. Then I want to race, because in races i can run even faster, and if I win, then great. It’s a nice feeling and I’m not going to complain about it, but its extraneous to what I am doing. Think of it like Christmas Day. I don’t ask for it, I don’t base the other 364 days of the year around it, but it’s a nice day all the same – an expression of humans being nice to each other.

As humans we need to simplify things to understand each other, it’s the only way we can live together in a community. Okay running isn’t about winning, but how else can we celebrate what it is, how can the rest of the world appreciate what it is? And for this reason I am going to enjoy the moment. I like being a runner. I like running and what it means to me, and if the world is willing to accept this now I’ve won a race, then that’s good enough for me.

A Village Run

2010-05-17T17:37:00.000+01:00

Its May bank holiday. It’s 10 o’clock in the morning. It’s raining torrentially.

Being England, the majority of the population are still in bed, hangover, watching TV or in church. They are certainly not standing in the centre of a park wearing shorts and a vest, stretching their calves against the side of a tree. No, there must be something very, very strange about these people.
However, as I look around at the competitors huddled together on what we assume to be the start line, one thing crosses my mind. These people are all so normal.

In proper, serious running races everyone is a familiar breed – lean, muscly individuals wearing club outfits, all looking very serious sand focused on what is ahead of them for the next 45 minutes. These are not normal people. These are elite athletes. There is something strange about them. But in the race today – the Randolph Featherwood memorial 10 mile – these athletes are conscious by their absence. It is a much more…human affair.

The field is comprised of the fat and the thin, the old and the young, the fit and the not-so-fit. There is a team from the local gym and a team from the local kebab house, there is a six year old kid running with his dog and an eighty year old man running with his stick. Most of them would rather in bed watching TV, or hungover, or even in church. None of us want to be out in the rain. None of us what to run 10 miles.

Today the man to bear is Vincent Fairbrass. He has won this race for the last five years and is string favourite again this time. No-one has ever come close, and I think even if I could beat him I wouldn’t want to. It just wouldn’t be the right thing to do. There are crowds of people chanting his name as the town crier walks over to announce the start of the race. Vincent doesn’t look particularly fit and I have never heard his name mentioned at any other race in the country, but at the village he is always there and always brilliant, and herein lies the difference between the village run and anything else.

None of these people, not even Vincent, are engaging in the same activity as we in the city and the suburbs do. They look different, they sound different, and they wear different expressions on their faces. As we prepare for the start I feel an absence of intensity or focus, there is no nervous shuffling of feet or readjusting of stopwatches and when the town crier says go we will go, simple as that. No-one is prepared and so no-one is stressed or tense, we are here to run, simple as that.
The race begins, immediately turns up a steep hill out of the village and then diverts into a muddy track through the woods. After a few minutes of impossible slog I stop my stopwatch in disgust and then notice that everyone else seems to be overtaking me. A man passes me whilst adjusting the wedding dress he wears over his spikes, a teenager breezes ahead whilst dancing to music on his headphones and an old man scuttles up whilst his dog chases enthusiastically behind No-one seems to care about the time or the gradient or the minutes per mile, but yet...yet they are all running very, very fast. I had thought that as the only seasoned city racer in the field, wearing my trail flats and Lycra top, I’d be streaming ahead at the front, but the complete opposite was happening. In their relative relaxed and individual ways, the indigenous athletes were overtaking over and over and I had no response.
For a while this made me very frustrated:
‘How can they be so quick?’
‘Look at their awful techniques!’
‘What a stupid course.’
‘I’ll bet they make it like this so outsiders can’t win.’
Which made me tense up even more, made the hills harder and made my pace even slower.

Then as we emerged from out of the trees, the contest became even more incredulous.
Ten of the runners who had overtaken me were stopped at a table on the side of the course, helping themselves to halfway pints of beer that were being served by the local brewery. Yes, beer – that cardinal sin of the super-healthy modern athlete – being downed by runners who so far had appeared to have considerably more stamina than me.
‘Here it is,’ I thought to myself. ‘Here’s my chance. There’s no way they’ll be able to stay ahead of me now.’
I sprinted passed a bemused bartender and up to second place, with the curly black if Vincent Fairbrass in my sights. There was 3 miles to go. Soon the city, the civilised world, the serious runner, would show this village idiot how to win.
The course headed back into the woods and the mud, and through gasping and gagging I somehow managed to stay on Vincent’s tail. Surely his energy couldn’t hold? Surely the beer was going to slow him down?
Then I became aware of a noise behind me, the sound of bounding, running feet juxtaposed with an incongruously jovial conversation. The voices were familiar – I had heard then only minutes earlier – and then seconds later the physical forms revisited my sense once again. A wedding dress, a large pair of headphones, a wrinkly neck and a chubby behind all bypass in a leisurely gallop as if I wasn’t there.
‘...and then she nudged me in the side,’ on was saying. ‘And told me I’d find my trousers in the marrow patch!’
‘Ha, ha!’
‘I guess there is plenty of room to spare down there.’
Then they were gone, leaving my flailing, helpless body behind.

On the hill back down to the finish the cheers below told me Vincent had already won and it was at this point that I finally accepted it. This race was different. The runners weren’t like those I encountered back home; the course was nothing like the city parks and streets I normally ran through; but most of all the running itself was different here.
Running is a challenge. It is a way to better yourself, to focus your mind, to escape from the pressures of the world, to attain oneness with yourself, to be healthy, fitter and to be a winner.
Not here it wasn’t. In the village running was only one thing. It was fun. There was no complications – goals, targets or times – it was just fun. The village race was fun - Vincent Fairbrass won and everyone else enjoyed themselves. That was it. That was all the race was and all running was for.
It was when I approached the finish line that this hit me. My shoulders relaxed, my arms lightened, my legs flew over the ground and I could feel my pace increase without me trying. It didn’t matter. I just needed to enjoy it. Running was good and running was fun. Running could make me smile.

I ran that last quicker than I have ever run a mile before, all because I wasn’t I trying. That’s the secret of the village run. Don t try and be something else, don’t keep striving to be better. Run because you enjoy it. It’s amazing how much better you will become.

Writing to enlightnment

2010-05-17T17:35:00.000+01:00

The more perceptive readers amongst you may have noticed that there is a constant theme running through pretty much everything I write. Characters reach dead ends when following the promises of capitalism, traumatised individuals realise the limitations of relying on a permanence of ‘self,’ cyclists muse spiritually about the transcendent nature of riding up a hill, yep, this is all very much born out of the ideals of the Buddhist religion. However, I’d like to make myself perfectly clear – writing came first. I’m not here to sermonise. It was only recently that I came to these ideas, which I thought were fantastic and original, and realised that a portly man under a tree had thought of them thousands of years ago.

Rather than feeling aghast at my lack of originality, I took great solace in knowing that so many others had the same feelings about the world as I did. There were certain questions that had been playing on my mind almost every day and which i had previously thought that I was the only one in sunny suburbia who thought this way.
‘Why does everyone care about a career so much? When did money and status become so important?’
‘I don’t believe in God anymore. In fact, I don’t believe in anything, because nothing is ‘true’ in the way I had previously thought.’
‘Who is that person in the mirror? Why do I feel like I don’t recognise him anymore?’
I thought there was something wrong with having these thoughts. I thought that I was insecure, unambitious, depressed or psychotic, whatever, in this world this was not the right way to think; it made me a failure, it made me a lesser person to those who didn’t have such doubts.
So in my mind these concerns grew and grew. Every day I’d walk to work and hate myself for who I was and each evening I’d walk home and have no idea who I was, to the point where I’d be scared to speak because I didn’t know what my mind would tell me to say. I became paranoid. I started to panic. I thought that everyone I met could see who I was and how I felt. Little did I know it was probably how they felt too.
With no outlet for these thoughts, I started to write. I may not have been able to define myself in a world of confident, successful individuals, but I was able to put a pen to paper and create something tangible and something that I thought was true – a world where the doubts in my mind made sense. It became a way of removing all that troubled me and putting it in a place where I could look at it objectively, and rationalise what it meant rather than letting it bottle up inside me like a neurotic tumour.
After a good period of writing I’d feel an intense calm, a great understanding about who I was and what the world was, a wonderful feeling of emptiness where I could pick things up and consider them without the trappings of self-conception and ego. All I was, was a creative entity, who opened up his mind and let his ideas flow onto the page.
It was at this point that I happened to pick up a Beginners Guide to Buddhism and was able to give my new perception a name.

Buddhists would describe my experience of existential dread as an emptying of the mind and my solace in writing as an excellent form of meditation, enabling me to begin to understand the ‘Dharma’ – the way things truly are. My sense that there was something wrong with a world where everyone strived for riches and success was absolutely right. The first act the Buddha had taken was to leave all these behind – his palace, his clothes and his luxuries – and walk away so these would burden him no longer. In trying to create a perfect ‘self’ based on possessions and achievements would never lead to happiness – nothing in the world is permanent and no matter what we did we would always be left wanting more. Buddhists know this as ‘Samsara’ – the immediate, sensory world, and an understanding of its impermanence and futility is one of the of the founding principle goals in reaching the ultimate goal of Nirvana.

I don’t think it is any coincidence that the periods where Buddhism has thrived most, were also the ones in which art and culture experiences their greatest levels of creativity. As a religion it encourages us to open up to a world away from the one that lies immediately in front of us in the Western world and think outside of the comforts of possessions to something more positive instead – for me this was writing. Consider this from a Tibetan Buddhist:

‘Since all things are naked, clear
And free from obscurations, there
Is nothing to attain or realise.
The everyday practice is simply to
Develop a complete acceptance
And openness to all situations and emotions
And to all people – experiencing
Everything totally without reservations and
Blockages so that one never withdraws or centralises into oneself.’

The self then, a very Western Christian idea, is to be set free from its traditional definitions. I should never restrict my experience by what it is to be ‘Ben’ because such a thing does not exist – I only place this moniker upon me to maintain arrogance and ego and escape my doubts and insecurities. However, if I can recognise this, by looking into the emotions that define me and taking them out and placing them onto a page, then I can reach the emptiness that will lead me towards enlightenment. Indeed, I have found that it is when I ‘lose myself’ in writing that my mind becomes most creative and expressionate, and haven’t we all felt something similar when deeply engrossed in a film or a book. This is when feelings are most pure, untainted by the self the artwork has taken us from.

Herein lies the reason why the Buddhist mindset permeates my writing. Our lives, and the lives of my characters, are all about trying to understand the complications and frustrations of who we are and who we think others to be and how so much of the time this is just an illusion that prevents us from understanding what is true of what is real. The quest to find this is, I think, the most important thing to all of us but so much of the time the answer doesn’t seem to be there – the material world seems wrong, God seems wrong – so what else is there? Well I like to think the answer is nothing. We are here, we are thinking things – we think therefore we are – but what we think isn’t WHO we are, because there isn’t a who. It is not an easy concept to grasp but once you have the word can become a much freer and happier place.
So, if you please, feel free to lose yourself in Substance Abuse or The Serpent’s Tongue and once you’ve finished, consider if there ever was a self to lose in the first place. I am hoping you may be slightly more enlightened for the experience.

Injury

2010-05-10T12:37:00.000+01:00

As a runner I have a funny conception of pain. While a normal human being will understand it in a sane, rational way, e.g:

‘If I cut my hand with a knife it will hurt.
Because it hurts I will stop cutting my hand.
I will try not to cut my hand with a knife again.’

A runner welcomes it.

‘If I run really fast it will hurt.
I want to run really fast to get quicker.
I want to run so it hurts.’

Pain is there to be felt, it is the yardstick by which we judge our improvement, it is not something to be avoided, but overcome.
However, every so often there are come a point where we are reminded what pain is like for everyone else. It is when injury strikes.

The regular supply of endorphins mean that runners have a general feeling of invincibility about them, but ironically it is this that can make them weak. Run too much too quickly too hard, feel too invincible and the muscles will start to become as fragile as a new born baby’s skull. Run again and they will break.

‘Ow.’
‘Ow.’
‘Ow...shit, ow.’

And so begins the first stage of injury – denial.

‘What? What’s wrong with you? Come on, keep going, it will disappear in a minute. You’ll run it off.’

But it doesn’t, and the denial level must increase accordingly.

‘Come on! Jesus, you’re a wimp. Go, away! It’s all in the mind. Let it go, it’s all in the mind.’

But still it stays. Then it gets worse and worse, and worse.

‘I can’t. I can’t keep going. I’ve got to...I’ve got to stop.’

Then it hits you.

‘I’m injured. I’m actually bloody injured.’

And you feel very, very human again.

It is then that you reach the next stage of injury. Blame.

‘That crack in the pavement;
These bloody trainers;
A lack of glucose in my diet;
A change in the weather;
God, looking down and cursing me!’

How could it happen to you? How could you – decent, hard working, diligent runner – get injured? What did you do to deserve it?

You get angry because it is not your fault. This has been caused by something outside of your control and, unless you have been assaulted with a spanner, it is something that you are going to be unable to vindicate. You just have to resign yourself to it:
‘I’m injured and I’m pathetic. I’m pathetic and I cannot run.’

Then comes the third stage. Melodrama.

Most runners are very strict in themselves. They have a specific training scheme that they have to keep to no matter what, and the create reasons why this must be so:

‘If I don’t do at least ten miles on Wednesday, I will lose ten minutes on my time.’
‘I have worked so hard to get to this point. One week off and I will lose everything.’
‘If I stop running I will become depressed, fat and want to kill myself. I must keep training.’

But now you don’t have a choice, you cannot run. The nightmare has come true.

‘That’s it, my running career is over.’
‘I’ll never want to run again.’
‘I don’t want to eat, sleep or do anything. Life has no meaning anymore.’

One day into getting injured I started to compare myself to those who had moved on after sport – Kerouac, the footballer turned writer; Borg, the tennis layer turned underwear designer. So much had I put myself on a running pedestal I had convinced myself that I had fallen off for good.

This feeling eventually passes and the runner reaches the final stage – convalescence. After a day or two of welling in depression and anger, you come to a realisation. Injuries heal. Sitting and doing nothing helps. Your body can make itself better.
Like slicing your hand with a knife, this might seem an obvious outcome to the normal person, but to a runner this is quite the epiphany. For them the body is like a blank canvas, and the act of running the paintbrush.
‘I run. I make my body fitter. Then I run again.’
But without running, your body has improved. Your leg starts to feel stronger; it has returned and has returned as a better leg. This goes against everything you have convinced yourself to be true, but not-running has actually done it good. Rest works. Injuries heal. You can run again, sometimes you can run quicker, and once again you are invincible:

‘My leg is fine.
My body has healed itself.
I can beat injury.
I can beat any injury in the world!’

Then it begins to hurt again and you need another week to recover, but that’s okay now. You will get better, being injured is not the end, pain has been overcome.

Rhys Thomas - The Suicide Club

2010-05-10T12:27:00.003+01:00

Rhys Thomas’s book slips neatly into the angsty affluent youth genre that has been milked to so much success on Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, and shares some of that books success and much of its failings.
Our protagonist Richie is a typical teenager, concerned with girls, his reputation and his parents and they constantly seek to complicate his life which had only previously been troubled by the late delivery of the new My Chemical Romance album. However he has a deeper side as well, witnessed in the first few pages of the book, where he visualises ‘Worst Case Scenarios’ for those he knows, putting seemingly meaningless actions into a frame of dramatic awfulness. This has come from a mysterious past of manic and violent actions, that may or may not return.
At the same time an effervescent new student ‘Freddie’ has started at school, and after saving a depressed loner from suicide becomes something of a cult leader to Richie and his peers.
After sermonising on the emptiness of adult life and the romanticism of youth Freddie convinces Rich to assist him in the kidnap and murder of the school mascot – a bird called Bertie – with the implications leading to a fall out of suicide pacts, bullying and bloodshed. Unfortunately, after a promising start of very readable narrative, clever asides and teenage cultural references, this is where the book loses its way.

As an account of the trials of adolescent life Thomas’s book is written with some style and his characters are suitably melodramatic, insecure and amusing in equal measure, but as suicidal fundamentalists they are simply not believable. The catalogue of events – killing a bird, trouble with headmasters and trauma at the Christmas disco – just do not fit with the macabre events that surround it. I know that this is the point to an extent – that teenagers overact, that they are idealistic and do stupid things – but at no point do we feel that this is a book about characters who want to die, and the more this takes over the narrative, the less we care. The fact is that this is too big a theme to just be a force in the narrative – the characters must react to it instead of keeping it as an inner fantasy – it must take over the narrative rather than just be implicit within it. Its a bit like writing a story about a pizza delivery boy in New York, and oh yes and it happens to be 9/11/2001 but that’s not really important. Either this is a book about teenage relationships or teenage suicide, but it cannot be both separately at the same time.

The reason Donna Tartt’s book works is because the conceit behind the suicide pact – the Greek Tragedy club – was original and very well contrived, and so could flit in and out of the novel as it pleased, but here the pact is an add-on – it is mentioned and die keep reading because we think we might find out more, but these characters, the catalyst for all that happens, just does not return in the same way. Why does one feel that more modern novels are featuring the climax in the very first act, and if they are going to treat their readers like the impatient individuals with no attention spans, then surely they should have characters who act in the same way? The Secret History and The Suicide Club are both books about young adults in the technological age, and while the Tartt takes great pains to tell us that hers are a group of aloof freaks, Thomas’s gang seem the same as any other teenager. The thought then, that they should let their actions be dominated by the musings of one young man on one drunken night who decides not to mention anything again for another few weeks and then disappears for ages, seems unlikely to say the least. Haven’t they got the new My Chemical Romance album to look forward to?

A Marathon Watch

2010-05-07T13:51:00.000+01:00

‘So why are you standing out here today?’ a man in an anorak asks me. ‘Do you know someone who is running?’
‘No’ I say.
‘Are you supporting one of the leaders?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Are you working for one of the charities?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ my inquisitor shrugs. ‘So why are you down here today then?’
‘I just like it,’ I tell him. ‘I just like watching.’

I’ve been coming to watch the marathon for five years now. I did it first on a whim, in the same way one catches a last minute flight or buys a new top, and now I won’t miss it for the world.
I’m not really a running fan or anything. I don’t know who any of the leaders are, unless it’s Paula of course, and I don’t know how fast they are or what a good time is. Only twice have I known people who are running in it, and neither time did I actually see them go past, or even look for them if I’m honest about it. That’s not why I’m here.

I watch the marathon because I like the way it makes me feel. The world is a pretty miserable place 364 days a year, and London in particular can be a very depressing place to be. We all live in our own little worlds, going to our own crappy jobs to warn money to spend on ourselves, to try and make us feel happy, sat at home in our flats watching TV. We are lazy, selfish and spiteful, because that is what the world is like; that is, until marathon day when it all stops.

The change begins with the runners - a hundred thousand people all gearing up to do something harder than anything they have one before - all scared and unprepared. I can feel any self-importance evaporating in a steam of deep heat and sweat. On a free psychological playing field all begin on the same level, there is no preconception or dominance, because no-one can be entirely happy when there is a 26 mile road ahead of them to run, or indeed happy at all.

This is what I sense when walking down to the Victoria Embankment this Sunday morning, a collective sense of equality where all of London has forgotten that they are man or woman, black or white, lawyer or dustman, and for a few hours is embarking on one great adventure together. All the same sites are here – Big Ben, Canary Wharf, Tower of London – but they are nothing now but landmarks on the way – trees blown by the wind of exertion.

Beside me sit charity workers, policemen, schoolchildren, families, all out to support and urge the runners on. I like to watch them just as much as the runners themselves, as they look for their loved ones or celebrities and cheer everyone on as they pass – whether they need it or not.

But it is the runners who really make this happen. 26 miles, no matter who you are, is an incredible physical demand, and even as the elite runners pass us the pain and the determination on their faces is evident. There is no pride here, no arrogance – these runners are not here for the show. It is their bodies that get me – all skin, bone and muscle – like a medical wall chart – the bare essentials of a human being. I think that why they look so natural when they run – graceful, like a horse or a cheetah – they are doing something that humans are built to do, and doing it in a perfect way.

After a while I head into Trafalgar Square to eat a spot of lunch, less I be overcome by the running Gods I have just been viewing. All around I see groups of people heading towards St James Park, those late on the scene – the students with cases of beer, leisure runners at the end of a morning jog, shoppers caught up in the aurora of goodness forming from the Thames – all of them talking, laughing, ambling and although it is crowded like the Tube at rush hour there is not a face of irritation amongst them. In this show of commitment of pain and endurance somehow are small gripes seem irrelevant and rather embarrassing. Seeing all these runners – athletes and non-athletes, makes us helplessly aware of our fallibility as humans, and humbles us into good-humour and altruism. We feel we must take part, even if it involves sitting on the grass, getting drunk and raising the occasional clap – at least we are doing something.
People are nice. We don’t like be told to do it, or forced to do it, but if we can throw in the lifebelt of our accord, then we will.

As I rejoin the runners on the Embankment this is what I notice – the lack of cynicism anywhere. London is a city of sceptics, but here they clap with all the rest of them.

‘Come on Elvis!’ we cheer.
‘Come on Dave,’ we yell.
‘Keep going Fred Flintstone!’

Yes its funny, yes the sight of a grizzled man in a tutu walking with tears in his eyes is a wonderful thing, but at the same time we are laughing to encourage not to sneer. The honesty in the runners’ faces is too much for anything else:

‘It hurts.
Oh God it hurts.
I can’t carry on.’

From serious club runners to the village idiots that is the same. None of these people are asking us to look at them, at their great cause and what great people they are; they just want to get to the finish no matter what happens.
This is why we support them, and enjoy doing it – because they need it, because it makes a difference, because as humans we want to, because we are good. This is why the human race will always prevail, will never self-destruct, because inside us all, removed of the modern world’s cloak, is a need to help each other through adversity, to get to the finish line.
For years living in London I hadn’t believed this was true, but this was before I saw the marathon, the runners stretched to the limit, the crowds devoid of cynicism and humanity stripped to its bare essentials – survival and community.

As I sit in the park, watching as the runners meet up with their families, brandishing medals, supping on Lucozade, hugging one and all, I realise why this is, why we all feel so good. The marathon reminds us who we are as humans, and because of this it makes us happy. There is no confusion, nothing contrived, nothing forced upon us – we are just us, and at the end of it all of us are the same.
In a few weeks time, as the barriers are folded up, the tents taken down, the police back to walking the beat, the children back on school, all of this will be forgotten. We will all go back to ignoring each other, standing in queues, clenching our fists as the man in front takes the last place on the tube, but somewhere, deep in the back of my brain I will know that the marathon will come back soon, and people will be happy once again.

A Club Meeting

2010-05-04T08:55:00.000+01:00

It’s the first meet of the season and things are not looking good. Darren, our sole hope for the 100m, 200m, 400m long jump, triple jump, hurdles and pole vault, is out injured.
‘I don’t know how it happened,’ he tells us, hobbling up the finishing straight. ‘I jogged trough the park to warm up and something just went. It’s never happened before.’
In the three years I had been with our club this had never happened. According to legend Darren hadn’t missed a meet since his twenty-fifth birthday, two decades previously and running without him just didn’t seem possible. I did the 5k and the 1500, Tim did the 800, Aaron did the high jump, Mike did the discus and shot put and James did the steeplechase and Darren did everything else. We didn’t always show up – I ran marathons and Mike was frequently in jail - but we knew he would cover for us. He was always there. Always.
James immediately saw that we had a problem. As an ex international 400m runner his day – for The Falkland islands – he tended to assume the position of captain if such a thing was ever required, Darren being usually too busy, and he bought us together in a team huddle.
‘Right chaps. You can see what’s happened here and don’t worry. We had a similar situation to this back in the Commonwealths in 74.’
He pulled out a pair of running shoes from inside a carrier bag and began to place small strips of paper inside it.
‘And this is how we solved it.’
He stepped back and presented the shoe to Mike.
‘What, lots?’ asked the twenty stone former bodyguard.
‘Yep,’ said James. ‘It didn’t do us any harm. I reached the final of the pole vault in Edmonton that year.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Mike, reaching into the shoe. ‘That wasn’t even an event back in...oh fuck, hurdles. You got to having a laugh.’
‘We need the points,’ James advised. ‘I dint care if you take twenty minutes, if you cross that line we get a point. And need I remind you that last year we escaped relegation by just...’
‘ONE POINT,’ we chorused.
Our club has been in division two of the Surrey league since 1963 and last year was the closest we’d ever come to being relegated to division 3. We were officially the worst ever team in our history and were very proud of our achievement.
‘And what is Surrey athletics all about?’ continued James.
‘COMPETING,’ we said.
‘Exactly.’
This was the only way athletics at this level could survive. In fact sometimes I was amazed it did at all. The Surrey league was one of the top competitions in the country, where the likes of Martin Rooney, Jason Livingstone and Gary Staines had plied their trade in recent years, and yet the track meets, of which there were only five a season, felt more like boozy pub cricket matches on the village green. Teams gathered under sun awnings, families sat munching sandwiches, children played in the long jump pit and once every few minutes a race took place. There would normally be two or three athletes who were streaks ahead of the rest, a big bunch in the middle doing their best and some very old, very young or very overweight stragglers. No-one quite understood how the scoring worked, no-one trusted the stopwatches of the race officials and sometimes no-one noticed some of the events at all. We turned up, sat around chatting for a while, did our event and then went home.
But yet the league continues, and next year will celebrate its 113th birthday. How does it work? How does it keep going?
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mike, gasping for air after running a creditable 24 second hurdles for 8th, and last, place. ‘I ain’t been running from black guys that big since Strangeways in 85. Jesus Christ, what are you trying to do me you...’
It continues because of people like Mike, people like James and particularly people like Darren – competitors, athletes, every last one of them.
‘If that leg isn’t better by next week, I’m going to buy you one down at Blackbush market,’ Mike continued.
Darren looked back at him and then hobbled down the straight with grimace.
‘I’m going to see if I can stretch it to the relay,’ he yelled. ‘It might have cleared up by then.’

After the first meet of the season, my club are sitting in second to last place in the league, after Blackheath’s minibus broke down on the way to the venue. A proud history is set to continue.