Love Love Love

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Last night I dreamt Woody Allen was trying to break into my house and shampoo me. Leaning out of my window, I shouted down to him, he bathed in the moonlight nestling a crowbar, ‘could you tell me the truth about love?’


‘No,’ he replied, ‘but if you give me the opening chords, perhaps I could dance it for you?’


My boyfriend and I have decided not to give each other Valentine’s Cards this year. Instead we are enrolling in night school classes. I am doing, “Despair: For beginners’.” He is taking the advanced option.


(Actually he said, “If you’ve got to walk to Sainsbury’s then don’t bother. Just come round and dangle your willy in my face.” I agreed.)


Idea for a love story: two people meet and they fall in love.


I like the theme but feel it needs padding. Will I write it myself or shall I sell it to Starbucks as a kind of novelty coffee? They could serve it in a heart-shaped mug with a business card for a good divorce lawyer on the side.


I’m not a romantic person. Show me anything heart-shaped and I break out into a cold sweat. “Face your fear,” my psychologist would say, if I had one. And so I have been running a 50 Word Love Story competition over on my Facebook group and have been duly rewarded with lovely romantic stories of…


…drowning, car crashes, internet porn, lost love, and so on.


Thanks to everyone who entered. Once again it was really hard to pick a winner but here they are…

Winner: drum roll, round of applause, naked running in a public place.


Li Bai and the Moon by Sean McNulty


When the story of my life is told, I hope they describe the happiness of that night with the moon, and refer to my last moments not as the misfortune of a drunk falling into the river and drowning, but as a man hugging the moon in delighted quixotic love.


And my nine favourite other ones, in no particular order:


Saville


14/02/09: submerged in a world of transient satisfaction, his each lonely click pushes forth a different permutation of over-tanned, over-tired, overdosed figures, unnaturally posed and pretending to enjoy one another in that secret gladiators’ arena for millions. A never ending tap of bored flesh that only his conscience will run dry.


June Anne Welsh


You want to impress, so over-identify. Take a chance, show off a bit. He mentions his Spanish class. You see your chance, extract the few words of Spanish you know from your box of tricks… He comes back with a long and complex letter – in perfect Spanish! You freeze.


Armanda Baruti


Eight out of ten times she drives past his apartment, she still looks up. The other two times she manages to look at the road ahead, the only goddamned road from Toffen to Bern.
She looks for him wherever she goes. She will find him. One day but not today.


Return Address by William Jones


Nothing… for seventeen years, then a picture in the mail. She’s sitting on the grass in a sun dress. The back says, “Do you remember?” Yes; like he walked her home yesterday. And all that matters about the last seventeen years was that she wasn’t in them.


Tania Hershman


She thought it was love; he was wondering about engine oil. She designed white dresses, he imagined the carburetta running smoothly. She had her hands all over him while he raced off in dreams to distant horizons. One morning, alone, she discovered it wasn’t. He, she realised, already knew.


Peter Lawson


I wanted to love her: it pained me to receive but not to give back. She was everything I could ever want, but the ache persisted. If love is only a chemical imbalance in the brain, I would gladly medicine myself, but we all know drugs are not the answer.


Frances Gapper


They all advised against it, all thought it would be a bad idea. Catwoman, Soapbox, the Australian. All said it’s too soon, and too long ago. For good reason it didn’t work last time. So you ignored my emails and let the thing die. How wise of you, I guess.


Hazel McSporran


That moment, seduction, energy of dodging waves surrendered to sublime liberation, of wet feet. Salt ring marks of one who has jumped in with both feet, risking the pull-plunge of waves. In the home-coming warmth of later on, the wide awake taste of salt spray on the lips.


Fall in by Eric Karl Anderson


We’re friends sharing a bed. We are tense with twisting turning trying not to touch before silence. The night is long. Sleep and wakefulness blur.


Did he?
Dare I…?
….
And then we…
Concealed in darkness, there is a language to touch. By sunrise we lovingly embrace with no ambiguity.

Darlene Longo

Roses are red
that’s what he said
and she believed him
a fool would know better, instead
she stood by the door
ear pitched for the phone
He’d gone for sure
left all alone

They’d never argued, not one fight
but the car he was in,
hit another that night.


And finally one by me:


Blind Date

We met on a blind date. She was supposed to have a rolled-up copy of The Times under her left arm. Instead she had tightly packed the complete works of James Joyce into a small trolley case. She pulled it romantically behind us as we walked along the moonlit path.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.

Much love

Drewx

Join the 50 Word Short Story group here

Unhappy Funny People

I’ll be quick today. I’ve got to be off soon to the daily grind and I’ve got to feed my ex-cat on the way.


Actually first something that made me chuckle at work. A domestic incident – ‘BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND ARGUE OVER BOYFRIENDS ATTITUDE.’


Well, perhaps you would be upset if your boyfriend was buying a magazine for gay men. Or perhaps she wanted to read it and he wanted it first? Who knows?


I’ve had almost a week off from writing and have been instead watching BBC4’s season of programmes about unhappy funny people. First off was ‘Steptoe and Son’.


‘Steptoe and Son’ is a memory from my early childhood. I didn’t know that Harry H Corbett wanted to be a serious actor, or Wilfred Bramble was a repressed homosexual. I didn’t know that they hated each other, and the show, and their lives.


It was all pretty grim.


I thought about my life. If they made it into a tv show would it be equally grim? Is my life tragic because I go to work in an office doing a job I don’t particularly like? And I have something that I’m passionate about, can escape to. (The writing. I don’t own a caravan in Skegness if you were wondering…)


What about the people who don’t have this thing that they do? Are they more tragic than Corbett and Bramble?


They must have good times I thought. This was upheld by the Mark Lawson interview with Galton and Simpson, the writers of Steptoe (and Hancock’s Half Hour). Of Hancock, ‘He wasn’t depressed when he worked with us’. They talked about how happy Corbett and Bramble were to do the Steptoe series.


And they talked how happy they were to get their first letter from the BBC. In their late 70s they still had a big smile on their face. Two weeks ago I got my first call from the BBC. I can understand that.


Sellers in ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’ seemed to be unhappy in a different way. He was equally trapped, by the Clouseau role, but his belief in himself seemed to allow him to treat everyone around him badly. You don’t have to be nice when you are powerful.


I can appreciate that. The things I quietly seethe about now I would stand on rooftops and shout about if I had more than two half-pennies to rub together. Which is why it is a good thing that I will always be a complete failure. It keeps me nice.


I also read some good books this week. Finished ‘Submarine’, which was great. Then ‘Boy A’ which is a good companion piece to ‘Submarine’. I read a collection of brilliant short stories, ‘Caravan Thieves’ and started to read also the history of Penguin books, ‘Penguin Special’.


Yesterday I started writing again. A new short story. Or it might be a long one.

Currently reading – Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris


Currently listening to – Beginning of the Twist – Futureheads

Geoffrey Rush as Sellers:</B

Anal Sex

In an interview I read this week with AL Kennedy she said her writing was rather like anal sex. “If that’s what I want to do and you’re not into it then go away because that’s what will keep happening.”


I am currently reading her latest book Day and I am rather enjoying it. Perhaps that’s just me after all I…


Kennedy has a reputation (in the press, whatever that means) of being difficult. Day is hilarious so far. I don’t know that it’s difficult but it does take place in the eponymous Day (Alfie Day)’s head.


For me this gives it a great economy. Kennedy can flit from scene to scene without all the dull bits. It opens with Day in Germany after the war. He has returned to the place where he was formerly a prisoner to be an extra in a prisoner of war film. He is on an excursion with one of the other cast members, Vasyl, a Ukranian. They are going out to the woods so Vasyl can piss on Himmler’s unmarked grave. Then there is an incident with a Luger and some Germans.


If that’s not plot I don’t know what is. Because that’s what people say about ‘literary’ fiction, isn’t it?


(Ironically my iTunes has just jumped from Pink Floyd to Robyn. Dark Side of the Moon to Konichiwa Blues.)


That it doesn’t have a plot.


Another book I read this week is Donjong Heights. This is a novel written in verse. I wrote a review and that turned out to be almost in verse too:

To the party come Tyrone, his neighbour, and ‘one man, all-night Dub Selecta’, Hylie ‘the fair-skinned Rasta-Queen’ (used to be known as Kylie), Lord Byron ‘governed by his Johnson’, his brother Chester, a pro-wrestler, John J a sozzled former academic and finally Tony, the tailor.
It may all end in disaster.
Oh yes, and don’t forget the omniscient narrator. With a lisp.
‘We find him in the blacketht thtate
Tith truly foul and unpropitioth’



I found myself reading it out loud in bed. If you read last week’s blog you’ll know this is getting to be a regular thing. Luckily this time there were no neighbours up ladders. Nor did I roll down the stairs.


For those of you who care about these things, my welfare, I’m back to work tomorrow. Paid work that is. I haven’t had a day off from writing for months now. I’m on the third edit of The Penguin Variations, two chapters from the end.


In the same article Kennedy said she will edit her novels up to 175 times. So I’ve a fair way to go. Or perhaps it’s because her novels are more like anal sex than mine. If you don’t get it exactly right it can be painful.


Or perhaps it’s just that I’ve had more practice.


(Joke!)

Currently reading – Day by AL Kennedy (keep up!)


Currently listening to – Seventh Tree by Goldfrapp

Kennedy talking about Day

Don Quixote

It would be difficult to write an amusing blog about mass suicide so I won’t even try. Here lies my review of Don Quixote.


I remember Sir Edward Hillary’s words when asked why he wanted to climb Everest naked, “Because it’s there.” I won’t patronise you with the same excuse and, after all, look what happened to him. Who wants to die of a ripe old age? No sir.


No doubt Don Quixote is long. It’s like Harry Potter grew old and got loquacious. And good. And funny.


Nick Hornby in The Polysyllabic Spree pointed out that reviews often hide how we read. I read a lot but Quixote took me a long time. My reading time is first thing in the morning in bed with a cup of tea, or last thing at night after a glass of wine, or during my breaks at work (45 minutes – iPod in, book out).


Long gone are the summers when I would lie in the garden day after day eating books. I read Anna Karenina and The Lord of the Rings in a week (although not the same one). I don’t read as much as I used to. These days when I am up and about the computer is on and I am working on my own writing, surfing the net, drinking tea and coffee, just having a quick look….


And so on.


But I wanted to read Don Quixote, it was my dad’s favourite book and I saw rave reviews of a new translation so I bought in.


I thought it would be a bit of a struggle. After all Don Quixote, comprised of two novels, was written about 400 years ago. This was the time of Shakespeare although Cervantes wouldn’t have heard of him.


Cervantes own life was this – in 1571 he fought with the Spanish against the Turks where his hand was crippled. He spent years at sea, then was captured by Barbary pirates and spent years in captivity. He was ransomed by his family, sent back to Madrid where he found himself in debtors prison. He started to write Don Quixote.


Don Quixote is a funny book. I mean laugh out loud funny. Sometimes at work I would unplug my iPod and read out a scene. Admittedly Drew does Quixote wasn’t that funny. It is funny ironic, funny slapstick, funny base, funny absurd.


I love it when they go to see the hermit and find that he is out. The hermit’s assistant is there.


It also has the two greatest characters – Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote is mad, everyone knows that. But he is only mad when it comes to chivalry. About everything else he is wise and kind and sweet. Sancho is the most loyal squire you could wish to have.


At one point in the second novel Sancho becomes governor of an insula. I just wanted him to get back with Quixote. When he falls down a pit, through a tunnel, and ends up in a hole under where Quixote is practising jousting I almost clapped my hands.


Don Quixote is also described as the first modern novel. It is.
Part two of Don Quixote’s adventures were written ten years after the first. Cervantes had become aware that someone had written a false Quixote book. He wanted to set the record straight.


In part two nearly everyone Quixote meets has read part one of his adventures. After all he is a knight and it is right to him that his deeds have been recorded. The book is written by an Arab who was purchased fragments of his adventures and then pieced them together writing in Arabic. The book itself is narrated by the translator, who is the authorial voice, commenting on the translation as he writes it.


Don Quixote then comes across the false book about himself and deliberately tries to have different adventures to prove that it isn’t true. At one point he even meets someone who states he knows well the fictional knight of the fake Quixote and the real Quixote makes him go to a judge to swear that he is the real one.


Although of course he is a character in a book.


It’s good. Read it.

Currently reading – When the Nines Roll Over, David Benioff


Currently listening to – Goldfrapp – A&E

Darren Hayes singing ‘Casey’ live.

National Year of Reading 2008

This year is the National Year of Reading. (That’s reading as in reading books, not Reading as in the town outside London.


My dad lived in Reading once. He had been living in France and had just worked for several months grape picking. Because my father spoke French the vintner wouldn’t believe my father was English. He asked him a series of questions:


1. What is the capital of England?

2. Which town is Shakespeare from?

3. Who is the prime minister?


When my father got all three questions right the vintner broke into a big smile. “Ah, so you are English!”


After the grape picking season finished my dad headed south to Spain. He thought he would find work in Madrid. But as soon as he got off the train at the station he was deceived by a gang of street urchins who made off with his bag and all the money he had just made.


He lived rough on the streets for a few days, getting food from soup kitchens and then through the British Embassy got in touch with his brother who lived in Reading who wired him the money to come home. Having nowhere else to go my dad went to Reading. My uncle owned a pub and my dad worked there.


I went to visit and my grandfather and grandmother were there too. It was only one of two or three times I had met them. My dad had never got on with his dad. After the pub shut we put on some music and my grandfather and grandmother did some elaborate ballroom dancing around the empty tables and then, breathless, my grandmother came over to the bar where I was sitting.


Quite secretly she slipped a ten pound note into my hand.


“Don’t tell your grandfather,” she said.


I was eighteen. My grandfather is dead now – Alzheimer’s. As is my father – cancer. Nancy, my grandmother, is still alive I believe and lives near Hull. She wears a wig.


I remember that night someone said to her, “Isn’t your hair lovely.”


My dad said, “It’s a wig.”


He was drunk and thought he was being charming. He loved his mother. I didn’t mind, it was at least something I knew about her. And my father had no hair so he couldn’t talk, not since he was twenty-one. He always said he had lost it in an accident with some bleach.


He was a fantastic swimmer, my father, but not so good at running. When he would go training with his friend, Colin (the friend) would always wear massive boots and layers of clothes to weigh him down so they would keep pace.


My dad and his friends all went to either Oxford or Cambridge. Dad said he was one of the first people from a poorer family to go there. He was from Middlesborough and he said that when he went there he still said ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and was criticised.


Colin went mad and on the run. We would get oblique post cards from all over the world. He thought people were after him. Who, we didn’t know. He established a kind of code. Other times there would be phone calls, late at night. We always knew it was him.


Eventually he ended up in Australia. He killed an Aborigine in a car accident. That’s the last I heard of him.


Another of dad’s friends went to Australia too, Corky. He came to visit once. I was seven. And it was like he had come from the moon. I remember how wonderful it was. Wow. A boomerang. Wow. A koala teddy. Australia seemed so far away then. We were living in Scarborough.


I loved it there. I can remember waking up early one morning. It must have been summer because it was light. But looking out of the window I could still see all the stars. How could that have been? I don’t know. But it’s a happy memory.


Dad never really knew what he wanted to do. Others went to Australia, or mad. Another friend owned an armaments factory and made a mint. Dad didn’t approve of all that money.


“Never get a mortgage,” he said. “Never fit in.”


Which is why he ended up, perhaps, for a time in Reading.)


The National Year of Reading 2008’s aim is to get more people to read. My dad loved reading and it’s something he passed on to me.

Currently reading Don Quixote


Currently listening to Kate Bush – The Red Shoes

Prime Minister Launches National Year of Reading

As if!

There was a quote at the end of the Start the Week podcast. Q. “Why are you not unhappy?” A. “The time I have left is to precious for that?”


Spot on. I have become a year older this week. 37. How did that happen?


Actually it was the Start the Year podcast it being the beginning of January and all. I was listening to the podcast as I was doing my shopping. I am up to speed now on the problems of the year ahead – China, America, the credit crunch, Hilary Clinton, Obama, world flu pandemic and so on.


Podcasts were a new thing for me last year.


And already, for this year, the BBC have launched the iPlayer. You can watch and download BBC programmes onto your computer. As I was working over Christmas this is a good thing. I sat here, where I am now, and watched Dr Who and Extras.
And I write here, email manuscripts and stories, work through corrections, listen to the radio, watch the snooker. I might never actually have to speak to anyone again.


As this has been the year of Facebook this might be true.


I wrote the last line to ‘The Penguin Variations’ on my birthday and immediately I wasn’t happy with it. You would hope it would be a good feeling to get to the end of something but it isn’t. All you do is somehow feel it is not good enough.


So already I have gone back to rewriting. Over the past two days I have been working on chapter one. I read the first page of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Slow Man’ to help me. That starts with a bike accident. There is an accident at the end of chapter one of ‘The Penguin Variations’.


Coetzee is a fabulous writer. That’s what I’d like to be like. To write so simply but so well. I think that’s why finishing something makes you sad. Because you realise you’ll never be that good.


I hope Me and Mickie James does well. I’d like to be able to write more. Although, in fact, I do write every day. I mean write more in terms of go to work less.


I don’t want to be adorned with diamonds but I would like to have handfuls of pencils and the time to sharpen them.


I had an idea for a new book this week. It will be called ‘The Submariners Artificial Banquet’. But it’s quite sad so I don’t know that I’ll write it. Perhaps someone could write it for me if I tell you what it’s about?


There’s a new story too this week, called the ‘Bwindi Impenetrable Forest’. It’s a real place and really does have gorillas in it.


And I believe there are still places up for grabs at the Writing Industries Conference where you can meet writing people, make contacts, speak to agents and so on. I shall be there talking on a panel about commercial fiction.


Perhaps next week I should go back to writing about something in these blogs. I just seem to meander….

Currently reading – Don Quixote. (I’m now on book 2. It gets better and better.)


Currently listening to – Control Soundtrack album

Nik Kershaw performing Don Quixote

A Christmas Message

I was at friend’s house the other day and he informed me that some of his friends had recently purchased themselves an oil-less deep fat fryer for Christmas.


“You put in a speck of olive oil, then the chipped potatoes, close the lid and hey presto! They emerge fully fried.”


I wondered to myself if the same oil-less technology could be used in motor vehicles. I seem to, in my head, have solved one of the twenty-first century’s great problems. The end of oil!


In the festive spirit I dashed off a letter to all the major British motor manufacturers; Rover, Leyland, Austin, Morgan! I wait in anticipation for a reply.


You see I don’t want money. I have had a good year.


I repeated at work yesterday something I had heard not long ago on the radio. ‘Man is on this planet for on average less than 1000 months.’


“It’s short, isn’t it?” I said. “Makes you realise that you should use your time wisely. We will all die soon.”


I noticed the glum faces around me.


“Lucky then that this year I’ve written a novel. And am having another one published next year. My life is going great!”


What an inspiration I am!


That I was moved this year from the firearms department was the only blip. What did they mean, ‘for your own safety…’?


I arrived home tonight to even more joy. In my letterbox were two magazines. The latest edition of McSweeney’s has arrived. I can’t say how good this is. If you like short stories then subscribe to it.


The other magazine is Irk. I am in this one and a very lovely thing it is. It’s a handmade mini-mag in a bag featuring original art and cartoons. This month, it being Christmas, there is also some modelling clay and some festive stamps. It would make a very lovely late Christmas present.


(And another late Christmas present could be my book, ‘Me and Mickie James’ released July 3rd 2008 but available for pre-order from Amazon (or anywhere else) now! You don’t have to pay a thing until it’s dispatched!


It would make my Christmas.


You see I am working Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and my birthday (2nd Jan) all to serve my local community.


(And I don’t even have a Christmas tree!


I went to Aldi (where I always shop) to get one and they had a picture of one in the window – £7.99 for 12 feet of tree – but in the store they were nowhere to be found. I did get a bag of sprouts for 29p so it wasn’t a total disaster but still.


Where was I?)


(Oh yes…))


Happy Christmas!

Currently listening to Led Zeppelin Mothership (It’s an airship!)


Currently reading ABCTales magazine

A clip from Muppet Christmas Carol

The Writer is in…

The writer is in.


Do you remember those scenes from Charlie Brown? Lucy is the dr, she has a wooden booth, and Charlie Brown goes to visit her.


“I don’t know,” he says. “I feel so alone.”


Or the relationship between Snoopy and Woodstock? Or my favourite, Lucy’s relationship with the school. She used to go and speak to the school building.


Canongate are releasing all the Peanuts books, right from the beginning up until the end. Schultz always felt himself a failure, even to the end when he was so famous.


I loved Snoopy.


Reading Don Quixote, as I am, I am realising how much it is like Winnie the Pooh. Harold Bloom missed that in his introduction. That’s the problem with literary criticism these days. They can’t see the wood for the trees.


Winnie the Pooh is Don Quixote. Piglet is Sancho Panza. Read the one in which Pooh and Piglet go in search of the Heffalump, or to find the North Pole.


Don Quixote is so funny, and sad. I love it. I thought I would struggle through it. But I keep picking it up, wanting to read the next paragraph.


I wrote eight 200 word stories about arse licking this week. Then I wrote a sad nostalgic piece about the place I grew up in being pulled down. And about other stuff. The arse licking ones are funny things, about a football team who kind of get addicted one by one. The sad one made me cry.


I imagined performing them on a stage. Back to back. The former is a result of the latter you would see. It would be a great exposition. There would be applause, I thought, as I strutted around the front room with a bottle of beer.


Only it wasn’t a bottle of beer. It was champagne. Presented to me for being so wonderful.


Or a fool.


I am pleased at least that Leon won X Factor. I knew the writing was on the wall when Don Quixote was more appealing than Rhyddion. Actually I had the snooker on too, on my computer. O’Sullivan got a 147.


I went to see Terry Griffiths play Cliff Thorburn in 1979. That was the year Terry Griffiths was World Champion. We got told off by the referee for eating crisps. I was 8.


For those who are counting The Penguin Variations is going well. I’ve edited up to page 101 now out of 128. I go over the plot in my head over and over. I don’t know if it’s any good but I like it. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked at anything.


And I’ve started writing a new short story. It’s about a man whose wife is sawn in two. The man goes in search of the magician who did it via his father who is a ventriloquist with a talking penis.


It’s about the breakdown of a relationship.


The writer is in.

Currently reading – Don Quixote (alright already)


Currently listening to – Kate Bush, Lyra

Charlie Brown’s Christmas

Shock! Horror! Plot in Crisis!

John Richardson was interviewed on Front Row this week. For the past 30 years he has been writing the biography of Picasso. This month years 1917 – 1932 are published. Richardson still has 41 years to go. Picasso died in 1973. Richardson is 84.


Richardson’s final words of the interview were, “I’m beginning to see to some extent how his mind works.”


After 30 years! I should hope so.


What would life be without an obsession?


I know mine too well.


I went to Picasso’s house once in Antibes. I say house but in was a chateau in the true castle sense of the word. I remember being truly amazed by the work on display there – sketch after sketch after sketch, rooms of them. My father was living in Antibes then. He had been working on the beach until threatened by the local heavies and wound up as a grill chef at a little bar facing the beach.


In a strange conjunction of resonances this week I bought the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote. The cover is sand-coloured and in the bottom right-hand corner is a pen and ink drawing of a knight on a horse. It is fabulous. Looking on the back I found the drawing is by Picasso. Don Quixote was just about my father’s favourite book. Of course though, he read it in Spanish.


My only other meeting with Picasso was in New Orleans. I was practically penniless, hot, killing time and I nipped into gallery, lulled by the air conditioning. I picked up the brochure on offer there and was skimming through it when swooped upon by an all-toothed American.


“You are looking for something in particular, sir?” she said.


I narrowed my eyes. “My mother, she collects art.” In fact, just the previous year we had cut out some Gaugain pictures from a book we had stolen from the local Oxfam and slipped them into clip-frames. They looked grand on the walls of our council house.


“Well, we have some Picassos in the back. Would you like to view them?”


“Ok,” I said.


What I remember most of the viewing is my footwear. I was wearing the shoes I always wore that year, espadrilles. The upper was cotton and I could see quite clearly my big toe sticking through.


Picasso, no doubt, would have approved.


(For those of you who think this is all too High Art let me set the scene. It is Saturday night. I am on my fourth beer. I have watched x factor, both the contest and then the results. Because of x factor I went onto YouTube and watched the Beatles performing ‘The Long and Winding Road’ (Leon had sung it on x factor), then I went to Amazon and decided I wanted The White Album and Rubber Soul, then I went to iTunes and looked at Michael Bublé (Leon apparently sounds like him), then I went back to YouTube and watched a clip from the movie ‘Help!’)


‘Help!’ was my favourite film as a child. Me and my brother would watch it over and over. They showed it on tv just after John Lennon was shot and killed in New York. That was in 1981 and I was 10 then.


On that day mum and dad came to collect me from school. I knew something was up. They never came to school to collect me.


“John Lennon’s dead,” my dad said.


“Bang bang,” my mum said. She’s a bit of a comedian my mum.


“Who’s John Lennon?” I asked but when we got home it was all over the news.


“He just seemed to be getting back on his feet,” my mum said. “Had his haircut.”


We watched ‘Help!’ I remember feeling sad. I think it was the first time I had ever cared about anything.

***



Coda: When I have an idea what that particular week’s blog is going to be about I write it on a piece of paper next to the computer (a Mac!) This week I had no idea. That is until I was in the shower at the gym this afternoon. John Richardson, I thought. Picasso, I thought.


I was so caught up in my ideas I was totally lost. In the middle of this I looked down at myself and saw that I was naked.


“Fuck!” I thought and jumped. “You’re naked!”


Then I remembered. I was in the shower.


“Drew,” I said. “It’s ok. You’re in the shower.”


Enough.


I’m dull.

Currently reading – Don Quixote, Cervantes


Currently listening to – Sowewhere in London, Marillion





Watch – ‘Help!’ trailer

The Only Way to Rob a Bank is Naked

I’m a big fan of public transport. It’s the people they let on it that bothers me. In the same way I’m a big fan of democracy. It just depends whose hands it’s in.


Brief excerpt of overheard bus conversation:


“And who’s paying for it? Us! The taxpayers. It’s all going on these foreigners. I was staying in the hotel. It was £40 a night. Not cheap. It was like a halfway house. Full of immigrants.”


Sadly, I judge people only on whether they will or will not buy my book. These people probably would not.


Luckily I was on my way to the Phoenix Theatre to see the Joe Orton Project premiere. This was a one man show, two chairs.


On stepping through the door I was a handed a leaflet by a very nice woman (a definite book buyer!).


“Are you aware of the, uh, content of Orton’s work?”


I smiled, “Yes, I am. Do you know where the toilet is?”


This was a joke. It was lost on her. It was partly lost on me.


The foyer was full of book buyers, I could tell. The effete old man who walked with a cane. The tall man with the silver hair. Two men with scarves (scarf wearers are the biggest book-buyers according to Heat magazine.)


I bought a glass of wine and asked for a plastic cup so I could take it into the auditorium. Glasses of wine make or break cultural performances.


For example, the Marillion concert at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall was better than the Marillion concert at Rock City. The former served wine, the latter beer. Both had the edge over Steve Hogarth at the Union Chapel (no alcohol allowed out of the crypt (bar area) and into the concert hall (church).


“This is a church for Christ’s sake!” said the angry bouncer.


Will and I had to relay from the pew, taking it in turns to have a drink.


Jesus!


U2 played the Union Chapel this week. Perhaps Bono will petition the Pope. Have I told you my pope story?


But I’m losing the plot.


This week’s blog was going to be about Art and how great Art is, how it can be the meaning to your life. You see, along with the Joe Orton Project, this week I watched Jindabyne and eXistenz. Jindabyne was a film with proper acting, scenes like Carver (from which it came), eXistenz a film with a proper story that was full of imagination.


(Me and Mickie James was sent to a film agent this week. Fingers crossed!)


I also had three proper days editing The Penguin Variations. I’m halfway through now. I love it when it takes over my whole brain. I spent one night reading the chapter I was working on out loud, over and over again. If you can hear me through the walls neighbours,


“Sorry.”


I said that out loud.


Actually I know they can hear me. They complained about my music about two days after I moved in. They called the landlady, she called me.


“H E L L O,” I shouted down the phone. “S O R R Y, JUST LET ME TURN THE MUSIC DOWN. I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”


And that so is a true story.


Luckily, they are not something I specialise in. Like democracy they so often end up in the wrong hands.





Currently listening to – Werner Herzog talking about Rescue Dawn



Currently reading – The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt

Clip from Orton’s Loot – a naked bank robbery