Maisie

Maisie knows. Whenever I settle down with a book she is already there, fussing and purring, insinuating herself between my eyes and the page with soft determination. While I try to change position to accommodate her, she slaloms around my arms, expertly remaining central and obscuring my view.
It is as if she can anticipate every move and calmly prevent it with sinuous and practised ease. She always succeeds.
Even before I think of reading, Maisie knows.

The Muse

L’égérie (The Muse) it said

On a plastic plaque beside the work.

I looked at it (a long time)

But felt no echo in my mind, 

No similarity with mine.

How could this angular thing inspire?

This flat, red multiple thing

With extra heads, but lacking arms

(and charms). I could not see.

Perhaps sculptors need a driving force

More pointed (or with razor's edge)

To guide their hands, their hammers,

Or their welding torches.

We of the words need gentler touch

(I feel). 

My Dad

(Rescued from some old files.)

We looked alike, my Dad and me; but I shouldn’t be surprised because the whole family were really similar. Dad’s three brothers and their father. Like peas in a pod they were. Considering they weren’t close they could never deny each other. They were too much alike for that. The whole family was a bit fragmented. Only got together on high days and holidays and then, as the years went by, just weddings and funerals. And lately it was just funerals.

I was only young when my grandad died and I don’t remember much about his funeral.  He was still a relatively young man but he’d had a tough life and it had taken its toll. He lied about his age to get into the army in time for the first world war and got gassed for his trouble.  Not to mention the eye that he lost when a bit of tree flew off near his face as result of a sniper bullet. But it got him out of the war and back home into a reserved occupation. Spent the rest of his working life on the railways like his sons after him. Except my Dad.

There wasn’t much that my Dad took from his family except a love of gardening and a general care for the world around him.  He left home just as soon as he could, almost like his father, he joined up as soon as he was old enough and went off to be a sailor at the end of world war two. He never saw action because he scared everyone that Britain was fighting against, at least that’s what he said.  He reckoned that as soon as anyone found out that he was on his way to fight they gave in. First the Germans then the Japs.  He arrived in Tokyo just in time for the party to celebrate the end of hostilities and sailed into the harbour to the sound of “Land of Hope and Glory” ringing in his ears.  He used to talk about that a lot.

He never really left the navy because almost as soon as he was out he was recruited back to do something I never understood and he didn’t talk about. Something secret. Not that he was a spy or anything, though the kids at school whose dads were just butchers and car mechanics used to think he was, he just wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Something to do with the Cold War.  My Dad must have been at some sort of war for most of his life.

We were always close, my Dad and me. Whatever I was doing he wanted to know and showed an interest and often came with me, fossil hunting or finding animal tracks in the mud or identifying leaves or touring round burial mounds and standing stones. Yes, we were always close and he always said that he enjoyed my education much more than his own and learned a lot more too.

We had the usual troubles as I grew up. The kind of “you’re not wearing a skirt that short” and “can’t you bring home a smarter young man than that” type of stuff but it was always well meant. It was never harsh or cruel, unlike my mother’s criticisms, but constructive and always said with a kind voice.

His voice was always kind, and easy to listen to. He taught me to read by sitting with me and telling me what the words meant in his favourite books. After I went to school and started reading what teachers had given me he would sit at breakfast and ask me about them.  “What are you reading at the moment?  Who is it by?  Are you enjoying it? Why?” I could never avoid his questions.  I was expected to tell him the story so far, in my own words, to show that I had read and understood what I had seen.  If I got it wrong he used to say so and suggest I went back to read it again. I thought he had read every book in the world. He hadn’t, of course. He was just reading the same book after I went to bed so that he was a few pages ahead of me by morning.

It was the same thing every day. “What are you reading? Who is it by? Are you enjoying it?  Why?” So I had to get it right and I quickly developed a talent for being able to read and remember clearly anything in a book.  A useful skill, and one I have never lost. We could always share books as a result.  He could read something and just hand it to me and say “you’ll enjoy that” and he was never wrong. So many of my favourites were first given to me by my Dad.

I can still remember the day that I went home from school and said I’d found this wonderful book and it was about these animals, a mole and a rat and the mole had been spring cleaning and got fed up so he went for a walk and he met the rat and they went up the river for a picnic and there was a boat and sandwiches.  The smile was the only clue that the book was different. “Who is it by? What is it called? Are you enjoying it? Why?” It was the Wind in the Willows of course and destined to become one of my all time favourites; the same as it was one of his.  One of hundreds of good reads that we shared over the years.

So how do I commemorate this wonderful gift that my father gave to me: this love of reading, this need for books? Well, I currently own around two thousand novels and text books, many of which I inherited when he died, several of which I had bought as gifts for him and then received back when he no longer needed them. Poetry, short stories, art, history and tall tales are all included, as is a small part of my Dad, whenever I pick one of them up off the shelf and start to read.

More creative writing

I was set a task to write a short piece with 3 facts and 1 fiction in it.  Can you tell what's what?

The parish church of St Martin stands, unusually, almost at the edge of the village of Edwick. Nobody is quite sure why it isn't central, but there have been many explanations put forward over the years. Perhaps the most picturesque is that it moved miraculously when the Devil once tried to get in the door. 


Closer to the village centre is the old school, now a youth club, which stands directly opposite the black and white Edwick Arms, where many of the club members drink their first sneaky sips of underage alcohol. That's if they can't get away with buying it from the nearby mini-market. 

Not NaNo14 November 12

The first office I worked in at Lincoln was what I call a proper old fashioned newsroom. It was small, and dark. There were no windows and we spent all day in artificial light, unless we had to go out on a story. That was when journalists still went out on stories and didn’t spend all day at a computer screen emailing, phoning and rewriting press releases.  There were six reporters, or thereabouts. I’ve been trying to picture the exact layout of the office to determine how many of us there were.

We all sat round a large table that was divided into ‘personal space’ by means of very low battens fixed to the surface.  They weren’t high enough to stop anything drifting over from your neighbour’s space and there were frequent squabbles over people who didn’t keep control of their paperwork.
Everything was on paper back then, especially the stories we wrote, so there was a great deal of scruffiness going on. Life was quite hectic on the days running up to the deadline. The Chronicle – or The Chron as everyone called it – was a weekly paper, so it went to press every seven days. For a couple of days after that we were reasonably quiet, but the pace picked up as the week went along and the day before deadline was busy. Far too busy to let anyone tidy up.

We sat around the table, two down each side and one at each end, with a typewriter in front of us and surrounded by bits of paper. There were phones on the desk, of course, so we could contact the outside world if we needed to, and there were low-slung lights hanging from the ceiling, with cone shaped shades so they cast all their light downwards towards our work area.

If you needed space to work by hand, such as when you made a phone call and were taking shorthand notes of the conversation, you tipped your computer up onto its back and pushed it towards the centre of the table to make room. Consequently the space between the typewriters, at the centre of the literal ‘newsdesk’ became stuffed with crumpled sheets of paper from a huge variety of sources.

Once in a while we would have a sort out and throw some of it away, but mostly it was a tip. I can’t imagine how anyone would get away with it these days because we all smoked back then. It was common for a work place to be shrouded in a thick fug of smoke. No going outside for a ciggie back then. Ashtrays overflowed into the paper pile at the centre and it’s a miracle that no-one went up in flames.  In fact the only time I ever saw an actual fire was when somebody decided to empty an ashtray into a waste paper basket.  It was a metal one, and some quick-thinking person threw the remains of a cold cup of tea over it and doused the conflagration.

There was another pretty serious hazard in the old days too. Everyone had a lethal piece of kit on their part of the desk called a ‘spike’, because that’s precisely what it was. It consisted of a long, thick wire, sharpened at one end and set into something heavy at the other end. The sophisticated ones could be unscrewed from their base so that you could reach the blunt end easily but others were just set into something heavy, like a lump of lead. The purpose of this ridiculous item was to serve as a filing system. If you had a sheet of paper such as a press release that had important details on it, like how to contact someone, or figures that you’d used in a story, you would slam the paper down onto the spike so it could be stored on your desk.

Sensible people bent the top of their spike over so they had to ease filed papers onto it gently, rather than risk putting the wire through their hands. It also meant that if anyone tripped over something and landed on the desk (not as unlikely as it sounds – we were quite unruly people!) they didn’t end up with a sharp needle through the chest! Everyone’s spike was personal. You wouldn’t dream of filing something you’d used on someone else’s spike, and you wouldn’t dream of looking through the old papers on anyone else’s spike without their permission.  I used to fold papers up before I spiked them and put them on carefully so they didn’t take up much space. Others just spiked them flat, so the surface area of desk they took up was about A4 by A4. To make matters worse we still had a few people using foolscap back then for officialdom, so an occasional piece stuck out even further.

But I folded mine and left them neatly arranged parallel with each other. It meant  that I could find information easily and didn’t have to take anything off the spike to get at what I wanted to know. Letter heads would have addresses and phone numbers and even logos neatly in the  top right corner, so I could sift quickly through the folded bits to get to what I needed.  Of course once in a while you had to get at the rest of the information on the page – especially if it was a letter or a press release. That was when the scruffies had the advantage because they could ease the upper items away from the paper and read across, ignoring the wire through the middle. With my scheme I had to take the paper off the spike and unfold it.

That was where the unscrewable base came in handy, because you took off the base and slid all the papers down the  wire and off the bottom until you got to the piece you needed. (Or you slid them upwards if it was a more recent paper.) But at least with a removable base you had a choice.  If you were really in a hurry you’d just rip the thing away, remembering to ‘keep the place’ by creating a gap where the old thing was. And if you were sensible you put it back when you were done, because you never knew when you’d need that information again!

When you wrote a story back then it was put onto small pieces of paper. They were about two thirds the size of modern A5 and they were used landscape, not portrait. That was to make it easy to fit onto the printer’s compositor machines.  The ‘comps’ as we called them, had clips on their machines to fix the paper at eye level and copy type into the mechanism.  Their keyboards were a mystical arrangement based on the old drawers of loose type from centuries ago when type was first invented. The commonest letters “ETOIN SHRDLU” were closest to the bottom of the keyboard, just as they were in a drawer of type, and the less common ones like Q, X and Z were around the edges.

A modern ‘Qwerty’ keyboard uses a similar system, except the arrangement includes a mechanical dodge to prevent the typewriter from jamming. The keys are arranged so that the commonest are close to the centre, but they are also set up so that the mechanical arms were less likely to get in each other’s way.  So S and H, for example, are on opposite sides of the keyboard so you use opposite hands and they have time to return to their proper places whenever you type ‘sh’, which happens more than you’d think.  None of this is relevant in a modern computer keyboard, but the existing qwerty layout is a throw back to mechanical typewriter days.

So, when you wrote a news story it was set out in a special way to help everyone who handled it after you. If you look at a newspaper you might find that the first word in a story is in all capital letters. If it’s a main story on the page you might also find that the first one or two paragraphs are in a larger type face.  (Font size. That’s another hangover from the old days. A ‘font’ was what they called the complete set of letters in the drawer of type. It’s also why they call it upper and lower case. Because the capital letters, which weren’t used as often, were placed above the little letters. Imagine a type setter having to reach out for each individual letter to set out a line. The ones that were most used were near the front. The lesser used capitals were further up. To save on the arm movement.  This bracket should really have been a footnote because it’s a lot longer than I planned!)

In order for the typesetter to know which font size to use he had to have instructions written on the bit of paper with the text on. It was the sub-editor’s job to plan pages and work out the layout. An upper page or lead story was probably in a larger font than lower down the page. Often the first two paragraphs were in a different, larger size than the rest of the story.  The sub would write on the paper an instruction that said something like “first par 14 point first word all caps” Par 2 12 point”.
The journalist would never put more than two paragraphs on the first piece of paper so the sub had room to write and the comp had clear instructions.  Paragraph three and beyond went on to another piece of paper.

There were two other things that needed to be traceable along the line through the print system. One was who wrote the story, the second was which paragraphs went together, in which order. Your name (in full so that they knew how to spell it if you got a byline!) went  in the top left hand corner. In the top right hand corner you put a single word that summed up what the story was about.  For example, if I was doing it with what I’m currently writing I might use Lincoln.  So, the first sheet was labelled Lincoln 1, the second sheet was Lincoln 2 and so on.  You had to choose a word that wasn’t being used elsewhere, so a four page pull out about the city of Lincoln would get very confusing if everyone used that. So I might use layout, or newsroom, or something like that. If it was desperate I could use Lincoln newsroom, but two word catchlines were frowned upon.

The phrase was set with the text by the compositor and continued the journey until the pages were laid out close to the end of the process. In theory the setter removed them all once the type was in place, but sometimes they were missed. And that’s when you realised why they drummed into you from the very beginning not to use anyting comical, offensive or potentially defamatory. Because you could be sure it would be the one time it got left in and was seen by the thousands of readers.

Not NaNo 10 November 11

I’m way behind with my writing this week because I’ve been really busy at work and sometimes after you’ve spent hours editing a 14 page document that grew to 28 pages over the space of three days you just don’t feel like anything other than a large gin and tonic when you get home.  Actually it was a grappa or three, but let’s not quibble over alcohol.

A writer’s job is to imbibe. Bck in teh Victorian and earlier times the best writers would all partake of various semi-poisonous substances that inspired visions and feelings of elation. It’s not a new idea for writers to enjoy their recreational drugs. My drug of choice happens to be alcohol. I was a hevy smoker once upon a time and could quite easily type like a mad thing with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of my mouth. You had to develop a kind of squint to stop the smoke getting into the eye above the fag end so you could always recognise other journos in the pub because they all had a sort of lopsided expression and half closed eye.

Actually in your local pub you were almost certain to recognise other journos because you either worked with them or they worked for a rival publication, and you had to know who they are to see what they were up to. Chances are you had already met them in the press gallery at the local court or bench at the local council and you almost always ended up in the pub with them afterwards anyway.  But once in a while you spotted someone with teh giveaway ciggy scowl who you didn’t know and you assumed it was one of the Fleet Street hacks looking for a follow up on something big, juicy and newsy that had happened recently.

Funny how we always referred to it as Fleet Street even after most of the nationals moved to Wapping. The Grauniad was never at Fleet Street anyway, and it didn’t move. Everyone else moved out East and newspapers were never really the same again. It was a sad demise, and it’s gone even further since the heady days of national strikes.  The internet has killed local journalism because nobody wants to wait overnight for their news any more. Where’s the point in waiting for a piece of paper that leaves dark marks on your hands if you can scroll through your phone in front of Strictly It Takes Two and get everything you want to know.

You don’t get the garden parties and the 100^th birthdays any more, of course, but I never thought people actually read them anyway. Even if I enjoyed writing about my little old guy who lived to about 106 in the end and insisted on a birthday kiss every year! Deaf as a post but lovely and still had an eye for the ladies.

Whatever, I was in the middle of talking about Sheffield and learning how to be a journalist before I got side tracked. I get side tracked very easily. You might have noticed by now, but I think it’s a symptom of Nano that every word counts, even if it’s junk and completely off topic!

I slowly got to know Sheffield after that first lonely, cold, rainy night at teh bus station and I gradually made a few friends. We were an odd bunch. There were only about 20 of us doing the pre-entry course and we were tagged onto the end of a secretarial college. (Which in itself was part of a technical college) So we weren’t exactly like the other students. We were all under 20 at the start of the course, but I was the oldest in the group. A couple of other had done some sort of gap year but no-one else had messed up a totally different course and worked for a year. So I had a bit more experience of the world than most did.

I remember one lescture where Gerry came in and said: “Right I want you all to imagine you’ve been sent to a cocktail reception to meet a bigwig. What are you going to order?” Most of the group looked blank but I thought for a moment about a bar I used to work in and tentatively said: “Can I have a Manhattan?”

“Sure you can,” came the reply. And Gerry started making mixing motions with his hands before passing me my imaginary glass. “Do you have any idea what’s in it?”

“Not a clue,” I said. and took an imaginary sip.

“Well don’t have too many,” he replied before going on: “Anyone else?”

Of course some clever sausage said: “Can I just have a gin and tonic, please?” which rather took the gilt off my gingerbread, but there you go.

There were other topics I knew nothing about, however, and the locals were much better prepared than I was when it came to finding out about them. This was all taking place in 1975/6 which was a time of great employment upheaval.  There were strikes in many places and the government  was doing its best to destroy the unions.  Some of the biggest arguments were in the mines and steelworks. And it was clear that some of my colleagues would end up working on newspapers in the local areas that had mines and works.  Those in charge of the course were determined to give us as wide an experience of life as possible.

I can remember one of the lecturers telling us: “We don’t want you to be faced with an angry miner who tells you that you can’t possibly understand his plight because you don’t know what it’s like down the pit.  We want you to be able to turn round and say yes you do know because you’ve been down and crawled along the coal face. ”

So that’s what they did. They arranged for us to visit Kiveton Park Colliery near Rotherham, where we met miners and travelled down in the cage with them to the working galleries where we could experience the dark for ourselves. Except it wasn’t dark. Mines are very well lit places, at least near the entrance they are. They took us on a sort of train that carried us deeper underground until we reached the ‘sharp end’ and they showed us quite how narrow some channels were.

You don’t waste time digging out rock if the only bit you want is the seam of coal running through it. So your tunnel is as tall as the seam you’re mining. And they still did mine by hand for the smallest seams back then. Yes, you can send a machine through, but then you waste time and effort sorting out the black gold from the duff rock.  A man – and they were always men – can choose which bits to hew and which to leave behind.

The tunnel we crawled through was about three feet high; apparently not one of the narrowest.  We were led through by one of the miners, who pointed out that he was going first so that we wouldn’t be in his way if anything bad happened!. “I’ll be faster that you in an emergency, that’s a fact, and I’m not going to get trapped down here because you lot can’t crawl quickly!” Thanks pal!

Janet was claustrophobic and really didn’t want to do it. She’d been incredibly brave even to get that far. It was very oppressive to think about the tons and tons of rock above your head. But, bless her, she did it. She asked to be at the back so she could determine how fast she moved, and not be in anyone’s way if she panicked. And she crawled along the face. That’s guts! 

I’d already faced my own challenge in the cage on the way down. I hate lifts, and ones you can see out of so you can watch the walls going up past you are particularly scary to me. Not to mention that the way they prevent everyone suffocating down there is to pull air up through a ventilation shaft so that fresh air goes through the network way below ground. f course all that carbon dioxide has to go somewhere  and it leaves by means of a narrow channel that comes out near the top of the lift shaft. If you breathe it at the wrong moment you don’t get fresh air, you get stale, heavy air that’s laden with old breaths of hard working men. You feel like you’re drowning. We had been warned not to breathe in at that point, but of course I mistimed it and got a lung full of nothing.  

 As you crawl along the face you realise how horribly dark and restricting the place could be if the mechanisms designed to keep you alive broke down for any reason. The lights, for example, don’t penetrate far into a three feet high tube. You have a light on your helmet, of course, so you’re never in the dark entirely, but the view you get when you look up is of the backside of the person in front of you. So you don’t look.  You crawl, facing down, watching your hands reach out one after the other and you are deeply grateful that you don’t have to work down there.  But at least you can say to a striking miner that you do know what his work conditions are like.

Kiveton Park was also a fairly dry mine. Not all of them were. Imagine adding an inch or two of mucky water to crawl through and you really know that you are lucky not to have had to be a miner. And you appreciate every piece of coal you ever burn afterwards.  These days most of the coal in the UK has been mined in Russia or similar places, by machine, and it’s not such a good quality as the shiny black stuff that used to be hewn by hand in Britain. It’s rarely used to heat houses directly, these days. It’s used in power stations to make electricity. It means fewer of us have asthma and similar lung diseases, not to mention the poor sods who wrecked their insides by digging it up for us in the first place!

Not NaNo5 November 6

And so we continue with the story of my writing life. I’m currently a day behind with Nano. I’ve done four pieces but we’ve had five days. I wrote two yesterday, so I am slowly catching up.  Maybe I can write more than the regulation 1667 words tonight, which would help build up my total. I’m not good enough at maths to be able to work out how many words a day I have to do this week to catch up by the weekend.  Let me see. Five days till the weekend (counting tonight ) and an extra 1667 to make up. It’s not, of course, because I’ve over written slightly every day so far but let’s say it is for the sake of arguing.  If we divide 1667 by 5 we get  five into 16 is 3 and one left over, five into sixteen again is another 3 and one left over ad that leaves five into 17 which is another three and a bit.  So that’s 333 extra words a day, making nought on the end, carry 1, six plus four is another zero, oh I think it makes 2,000 words a day till Friday.  OK. There’s a challenge.

Of course I probably wrote a couple of thousand words at work today. I’m working on an awards submission that’s a thousand words and  200 word summary to go with it. Then there’s a couple of letters as well so yeah, I have taken all day to write as many words as I hope to do tonight.  Silly, but there you go.

So what were we going to talk about today? I did primary school yesterday, and a thing about Glastonbury that was mostly waffle but there you go. I’m currently running at nearly 300 words of waffle tonight too. I’m getting good at that. It would make sense if I went onto what happened to me at secondary school to follow that, wouldn’t it?   I started secondary school early because I had spent a lot of time in hospital and mostly I read books and learned tings. It didn’t take long for me to get ahead of my school friends. I’d already been pushed by my teachers, as I wrote a couple of posts ago. It was clear at the time that I had more hospital time to come, so mother pushed for me to take my eleven plus early. I didn’t think much about it at the time because I’d been pushed to be a swot for as long as I could remember. I had to be top of the class in everything. That was ow I’d been brought up. So I didn’t question it when the school put me forward for the 11 plus. I knew I’d pass it too. There was no doubt in my mind. I knew  i was as good as anyone else at school.

I wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of bullying that happened when I passed.  Another girl who was the right age to take the 11 plus (der – 11!) didn’t pass. My pride at getting through was knocked back by the barrage of accusations that I had robbed her of her ticket to high school.  I took her place, apparently. All my class knew it. And I suddenly became very unpopular. As usual when life gave me lemons, I read. Books and books and books. I’d had an operation the year before and someone bought me a copy of The Hobbit to pass the time while I was in hospital. But I never read it. I couldn’t get into it because I was quite distracted and I needed to read things I already knew. I couldn’t handle a completely new species off on an adventure in a mythical land.

However, when I found myself alone after the 11 plus, when the entire street blamed me for the fact that the girl from number 3 wasn’t clever enough to pass her exam, I turned to The Hobbit. I read it more or less in one sitting when I finally got into it. About seven years later I did the same thing with Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing in the space of 24 hours with only a short break to eat dinner. I’ve digressed again.

When I started secondary school I went from being top f the class, goody goody swot to just one of the cream. Not top any more. I always ended up in the top half of the class. I was about twelfth in a class of 28 or so. Good, upper middle class stuff, but nowhere near the crème de la crème! It was a disappointment for my mother, and quite a disappointment for me. I was used to being top and getting praise from my teachers but it didn’t transfer to high school. I was just an also ran. My reading habits changed by force as I was given te classics to study. Shakespeare and Dickens and the bloody awful Bronte sisters. Not to mention Jane austen who had an unhealthy fixation with who married whom. Yes I know it was important to her and her kind and her class because women needed to make good marriages if they were to have comfortable lives. At my level of society the best you could hope for was not being beaten up or dying of exhaustion after having a dozen or so children. That’s probably why Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility never appealed.

Eventually, when I started getting interested in social history I began to read Dickens for what I could learn about poor Victorian people but I still never took to the upper class twits and Misters Darcey however good looking they were in wet shirts. That was a long time after though.  I remember one of the first books we were given to read was about a Greek boy called Theras and the first chapter was called Theras in the Agora, which means market place in Greek.  One of the first things we had to do with the book was cover it in brown paper to protect it. We were expected to cover all of our books in brown paper. We actually hd to take them home and do it. Can you imagine today if you sent kids hoe from school with a pile of books and the instruction to make dust covers for all of them? Oh yes parent, you’re paying for the paper and the sellotape. You’d have a riot on your hands. You can’t even tell them off if they rip the covers off these days.  Not that kids want books any more. They want electronic everything. But I’ve digressed again. So Theras was my first experience of reading t secondary school and let me tell you it was enough to have put me off for life if it hadn’t been for my settled love of books that Dad had instilled in me.

I think we also had A Midsummer Night’s Dream that year too. Not the best  of Shakespeare’s plays. I think it’s hard for young people to get the comedy out of The Bard just by reading him. You need to get used to the language and it’s a lot easier to get sense out of it if you hear him spoken out loud, rather than translating him in your head. Either way it was about four years before I had experience of a Shakespeare play that I enjoyed when we did Julius Caesar. I quite liked that one.
At the same tme as this I was also being asked to write, but the sort of stuff they wanted wasn’t my whimsical, creative writing. I was expected to do a thing called comprehension. Read something then answer questions about it. Not complete the story the way you tink it should go, like I was used to. But actually answer questions about what the text means and what te author intended. My English teacher was called Mrs Cross, and she and I never seemed to agree about what the text meant n a comprehension exercise.  I never had good marks from Mrs Cross, which is odd really because many years later when I took the JMB Use of English exam and got a grade 2 she apparently told someone she was disappointed because I should have got a grade 1. Bless her.

She was also our librarian and, when we reached sixth form and were given a list of classics we ‘should have read’ by now she was extremely understanding after I said I really didn’t want to. I asked for recommendations for things I might prefer and, after a conversation that rather reminded me of the things Dad and I discussed, she came up with Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White. She was right. I loved it.  But my writing didn’t impress her.

Some time after Theras I studied Wuthering Heights for O level and was taught by a Miss Addinall. Just as an aside here she was actually a very good teacher and was one of the people who inspired me to read poetry. She awoke my senses to the music of words – the poetry. Before her I’d really only taken in the story of poems. Mr Wilson with Lochinvar and how the knight rescued his lady love; Hiawatha and Nocomis; The Highwayman and so on. Although I could appreciate the rhythm of poems I still didn’t really get the music. I can remember learning about Hiawatha rhythm: By the sores of Gitchee Goomi, By the shining big sea water etc. Every line of Longfellow went dardy dardy dardy dardy. So I could pick out the rhythm. I could pick out rhyme schemes. Which lines rhymed with which, and why. But still no real beauty. Then along came Miss Addinall and that lovely onomatopoeic line about the skaters: all shod with steel we hissed across the polished ice. I must look that up.
So she was an excellent teacher. She never tried to teach through fear or embarrassment like others did. \It wasn’t her fault that when she came in one day and wrote on the blackboard ‘gambolling’ I blushed like a tomato! As soon as she wrote it I realised it was my mistake. I had, of course, meant ‘gambling’. The essay was about Heathcliffe winning the house by playing dice against one of the Lintons. He didn’t, as Miss Addinall was kind enough to joke, skip joyfully across the moors like a spring lamb. I’ve never made that mistake since!

So secondary school almost killed my writing bug. I always wanted to be a science writer. I had dreams f joining the staff at New Scientist or Scientific American, but my forward thinking, blue stocking school wanted me to be a scientist first and a writer second. I was taught by women who mostly had sacrificed a marriage and family for the sake of their career and who felt we should do the same. (It was a girls’ grammar school) Science was a respectable way to challenge male supremacy but I didn’t really want to do it. I took science A levels but my best result was in general studies, where I was expected to write something creative.  (It was an essay about ‘natural’ countryside and humankind’s effects on the world. All about how the so-called natural world was actually the result of millennia of crafting by farmers, industrialists and gardeners. Hedgerows, fields, ponds, ditches, all created for some purpose to make life easier for humans. Not natural in any way since prehistoric man cut down the virgin forest to create fields for his new activity of agriculture. )

So my best exam result, when it counted, was for creative writing. That’s why, when I messed up my post school science course I redesigned my career and trained to be a journalist. Because I could do it. I wanted to do it, and I realised it would help me start my dream career as a writer.

Not NaNo 3 November 5

I’ve missed a couple fo days beause we’ve been away so I have some making up to do. I’m not going to lie and say that I did this on the right day. I admit I’m a couple of days late but at this stage I have the rest of the month to make up. I probably won’t till next weekend, because I’m not sure what time I’ll be home every day. I took my laptop to work to do stuff at lunchtime on Friday but it didn’t happen. Oddly I felt insecure about doing it. I intended to spend an hour doing my own thing but it didn’t seem to work. Maybe I’ll try again this week. I just need to find somewhere that I can sit on my own without anyone to interrupt me, but I have no idea where that could be. I thought about the car, but it seems rude somehow.

Anyhow, I have some writing to do to keep up to date – or more accurately to catch up with where I should be.  I guess I’ll have to start somewhere. I was going to talk about my childhood and how I got into this word smith thing in the first place.

I was very young when my parents first decided to teach me to read. I must have been about three because it was a long time before I started school. My Dad thought that reading was important. He read every day. His job was sedentary and most of the time he didn’t actually do much. He had to be at his post in case something happened, but for huge parts of his eight hour shifts it didn’.t. So he read. Sometimes it was a novel. Sometimes he read things he’d read before. Captain Blood was a favourite and he probably read it twenty or thirty times that I knew of, not to mention others before I was born. It was one of his favourite films too, with Errol Flynn in the title role.

He was fond of historic navel stuff too, but he also read classics. He felt he’d missed out at school. He was forced to leave at 14 and went to work on te land. His family weren’t too bothered about learning an were more bothered about earning a living and making sure everyone was fed. Probably to do with their backgrounds. No-one in my history has been rich. I guess I don’t fully understand the need to earn all the time. I’ve always had a reasonable amount of money in the bank. We had to watch what we were spending from time to time but we were never really poor. We always ate well, if not excessively. (Even though we’ve all quite big!) We went places, we did things, and we were surrounded by books.

There was a monthly magazine called Argosy that we had delivered regularly. It had short stories by well known and lesser known authors. It was paperback so nobody was too worried about damaging it, and piles of them were kept on the side of the bath where mother could read them while she soaked for hours on end, avoiding the films that Dad used to watch. Captain Blood wasn’t one of her favourites. Of course, just because books were all around me didn’t mean that I could read them instinctively. I was taught to read, ot with children’s books, but with what was around me. For example, my parents were avid crossworders. Some of my earliest memories are of Dad reading the clues: “Is it made straight for the hive? Seven letters, ends in e.”  It’s beeline, of course, and I can remember early on asking why the answers were what my parents wrote in to the grid.

I  can remember sitting with my dad while he read out each clue, running his finger below the words as I watched. Eventually he started asking me to read the words to him. It was a faltering start but I made progress.  So I learned some very strange words very early on. I mean, have you read crossword clues?  They make no sense in a conventional way. So I had to be able to work out the actual words. There are no hints within a crossword clue about what the next word will be.

For very long words Dad taught me how to break down each one into smaller components so I could say them out loud. I probably had no idea what the words meant. Such as convalescence, for example. I could break it down into con val es cence and say it to me Dad and he’d tell me I had it right. And then he’d explain to me what the word meant. But mother would work out the answer to the clue and then we’d go through why it was so.

That’s how I had such a huge vocabulary by the time I started school. I can remember the first day, being asked to read a list of words to my teacher. Far from Janet and John, I had lots of very long words at my fingertips. Did I know what any of them meant? No. But I could read them and pronounce them, so it was decided that I had a reading age of about 10. And by the time I left primary school at the ripe old age of 10 they said it was 16 (which was as far as the measurements go. That just meant ‘grown up’.

I’ve gone off track a bit here. I’m supposed to be talking about my childhood writing, it’s just that reading came first. I had two primary schools, and I don’t remember much about the first one. I can picture it and I know where I had to walk to get there, but there’s not much about my life there that’s stuck i my mind. The second one, though, that’s different. I had some corking teachers who decided to support my skills, rather than just record them.

We were taught all kinds of complicated things under simple headings. Under the guise of ‘how things began’ my vocabulary grew even further as words like Ordovician and trilobite were added to it. As part of ‘seashore life’ I learned Laminaria saccharina and Patella vulgata. (That’s a sort of seaweed, and the common limpet, if you want to know.)  It soon became obvious to my teachers that I had skills in English, both reading and writing. A wonderful, inspiring teacher called Mr Childs encouraged us to take part in writing contests and I can remember one that was run by the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury. I wrote a story about a chocolate bar that didn’t want to be eaten, so it ran away. It had a very bad time of things as a result and ended up cold, wet and miserable after being swept through a storm drain. In the process its wrapper fell off and it was depressed and lonely when a dog came along and ate it, so it realised its true destiny.

Of course I’ve learned since then that the dog would have been very ill as a result, but I didn’t know that when I was a kid. It seemed like a good tale, and the Cadbury judges must have agreed because I won a first prize certificate and a huge tin of chocolate things. I was told I was imaginative. These days they call it creative, but I’m not sure what to call it. I suspect I just like iving in a world where everything eventually works out for the best.  I’ve always thought my version of the world is better than the real one.  In fact I still have an active fantasy life. I sometimes see people walking past me and create whole back stories for them to suit what they’re wearing, how they walk, what they are carrying. I imagine where they are going and what they plan to do. I create whole stories in my head about their lives and what they do. The worse I feel the more creative I am about their stories. It’s amazingly cheering.

Then there was Mister Wilson.  He was the headmaster and he was a great believer in expanding children’s horizons. He had a theory that, if you’d learned to walk, talk, interact with people and generally live by the time you’ve five why should you slow down the rate of learning? So he felt that kids should hear the classics, and try to understand what they were about and try to understand where the story was going. If you hear the start of a story you should be able to predict where the tale is going. Or alternatively you can create a whole new direction for it and make something totally different happen. So he would read us the first half of something then make us write our own ending for it, in the right style, even if it was poetry.

I remember one day he read us the first half of the poem Lochinvar. “Oh young Lochinvar is come out of the west, through all the wide nation his steed was the best” or something like that. The tale is a proper story of romance and heroism in which Lochinvar eventually rescues his love from an imminent marriage to the wrong man. Sure enough, I wrote the correct ending because, like I said, I always want the world to have a happy ending!  So Lochinvar gets to ride away on his fine steed with his lady love.

So my creative writing was encouraged early. My teachers wanted us to be imaginative and to write as often as possible. And I was happy to take part in it. By the age of 10 (which is when I moved on to secondary school ) I was recognised as being ahead of my school pals in writing, spelling, reading, using words. I was already a writer and already wanting to do it for a living when I grew up.  At the age of 10 that was how life seemed to be going. I knew that words were my friends and I already felt that they would do what I wanted if I asked them.  

Prompt 25

As it explains - this was created in response to a writing prompt.

So I decided to spruce up my write life by looking for some prompts online and I came across a list of 25 on Pinterest. Seemed like a good number to start with; I mean there were some lists with fifty or a hundred on but I didn't want to commit to that many.

I've never been the best at following orders and going with the herd so I figured accepting someone else's prompts was a big enough sop to normality and started reading the list from the bottom. Serves me right. The suggestion was: "Write about the first thing that happened yesterday morning."

Oh come on!  I can't even remember what I had for lunch let alone first thing yesterday morning. So I need to think.  It was Tuesday. Nothing specially different about that, except I go swimming, and I go early, but not first thing.

I expect I woke up in bed. That would be a usual Tuesday. I also suspect I didn't like it when the alarm went off. It's a work day, so I assume the alarm went off. But was I already awake?  Can't remember. We have cats, you see, and (don't squirm) we let them wander in and out of the bedroom as they like, so sometimes I wake up early to a demanding meowl that means that one of them is hungry. Or a sweet little chirrup that means the other one is asleep on my pillow and is warning me not to roll over onto her. But whether Tuesday was like that escapes me.

We must have had breakfast, but that wasn't first thing either. I shower before I eat, and dress, and do my hair and other ablutions that I probably shouldn't describe. And clean my teeth. Don't get me started on the clean before or after breakfast argument. I've had it before. With a dentist. There is no easy outcome. Back away from the health advice.

So have I established anything by writing this? Well, I am still capable of responding in the written word to a prompt that I wasn't expecting. I can still waffle on for a few hundred words even if I know nothing about the topic. I'm not promising it'll be interesting though.

Something from 2011 I think

Being fat is not a crime. It's an eating disorder. Yet anyone who's seen as even slightly wider than a moss-covered stick is considered out of control, stupid and a fair target for insults and abuse.

It's still acceptable to say the word 'fat' as an insult, even when people aren't. I've seen plenty of examples recently. I'm increasingly convinced that those who choose to use it are lazy and lacking in imagination because all the other words they might have hurled in the past have been branded politically incorrect.

Call someone by the N word or insult their religion or sexual preferences and the world will condemn you. Call someone fat and everyone laughs. Why?

Let's look at the recent publicity over Amy Winehouse. Poor Amy. She couldn't help herself. The stress of fame and fortune got to her and she started taking drugs and drink so she could cope.
Good job she wasn't a comfort eater then, wasn't it? Otherwise the millions who have been rushing round to offer their sympathies since her death would be calling her a fat bitch.

More than half of the UK's under 30s have considered surgery to 'correct' their bodies.  Most of them think they're fat - even at size 12 (US size 8). Why?

Because it is still acceptable to use the word fat as an insult. It's about the worst thing you can say to someone these days without risking admonition.

If someone in the UK is identified as having one of the 'skinny' eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia the might of the health service turns out to help. Full on psych support, daily guidance, the works. But until recently a fat person was told to eat less, take more exercise and go away. Being fat only increases your risk of other diseases and so you're costing the country money you fat waster.

Stuffing your fingers down your throat, taking overdoses of laxatives, smoking, drinking, popping pills, pushing white powder up your nose, etc. etc. are seen somehow as 'proper' signs of addiction that deserve help. Being addicted to eating is a sign of weakness.

Make no mistake here. Fat people do not enjoy being fat. Most of them don't even enjoy eating. They are addicted to the short-term comfort food offers. And unlike most addictions they have to learn to control it. They can't just go cold turkey.

Telling a fat person to cut down on their food is like suggesting to an alcoholic that they restrict themselves to three measures of whisky a day. It ain't gonna happen!

Everyone (except a lucky few) is addicted to something. Sex, exercise, gambling, smoking, biting fingernails, Facebook, blogging, whatever.

Next time you think about using 'fat' as an insult just consider what your own addiction is - and use that word instead.

Shoppers!

Fat slasher

“Perfect disguise”, Amanda said to her reflection in the cheval mirror. “No-one will recognise you.” The wig made her head look like a coconut and the mouth was a delightful touch. She gnashed her teeth and pulled back her lips, gurning at herself to get a better look. Yellow and crooked: what they call ‘English teeth’ in the US. Then, of course, there was the fat suit.

Amanda knew from bitter, adolescent experience that the best way to stop people from seeing you was to be overweight. She had suffered a long time to learn that lesson. All through her teens she had been the butt of the jokes, left out of invitations and spurned by her peers, just because she had a weight problem. Behind the size she was actually quite attractive but they never knew because they never looked. They deemed her invisible. Talk about the elephant in the room!

But when she reached twenty one she inherited some money and used it to change her image and her identity. Not because she was unhappy with herself, but because she realised by then she would have to play by ‘their’ rules to win their game. And she had won. Her face appeared nightly on TV as a respected anchor-woman on a national news programme. Every one of her old tormentors could see her now. She was relishing her triumph and planned to crown it with a visit to each of them to point out the error of their old ways.

Hence the disguise: the wig, the fake teeth and the fat suit made her look exactly like she did at school. That was the point. She wanted to make sure they knew who was responsible as she murdered them, one by one. It was the perfect disguise for the perfect crime. Only the victims could identify her and they did not live to tell tales. She had even been captured on security cameras a few times and earned herself the nickname of The Fat Slasher but no-one linked the obese image with the svelte news reader. She knew she would never be caught. She just had to remember not to laugh when she reported the latest killing to her eager viewers.

August 2011

Epic fail

Called on geeky Simon last weekend – or Sly as he calls himself. He was always a nerd at school, and he’s no better now, even though he can see thirty coming. He tried quitting home at nineteen but couldn’t maintain his lifestyle, so the hesher was back at his parents’ place before he hit twenty one, living his übergeek ways and missing out on any kind of girl action. He says “LOL. why should I pay to get my laundry done?” You can get that from the way he smells.

Anyhoo. I wanted to reprogram Sly. Thing is, he’s superstitious: avoids green; touches wood; salutes magpies; the whole heap. Worst of all, he’s afraid of thirteens, and especially Fridays with that date. It’s called friggatriskaidekaphobia; he told me. He knows all his phobias personally. 

As he opened the door he said: “What’s up bro?” He talks like that a lot. Like he’s seventeen and living in the ‘hood. Then he noticed the ladder. I’d propped it over the door hoping he’d step outside and walk under it but, no luck.

“Leave it out, bro’. Epic fail. You should not diss my belief system like that.  Show me some respec’.” He gets his street cultures confused at times.

“Belief system?” I spat, ignoring his slang salad.  “That’s no belief system, it’s hooey. The only person round here showing disrespect is you, scruffy n00b. Why don’t you bling yourself up and come down to the pub?”

He looked tempted but something held him back. “We’d have to check out before midnight. I can’t be there on the thirteenth.”

“Whatcha mean, the thirteenth?”

“Tomorrow, Saturday the thirteenth.” He looked at me as if I was vacant, so I decided to throw my best punch.

“Sly. Today’s the thirteenth. You know?”

It wasn’t the thirteenth. I only said it for a joke, but his eyes opened out like searchlights as he muttered, without a hint of his usual attitude, “You mean I went to work on Friday the thirteenth? Oh shit.” Then he sort of belched and his eyes rolled up. He tipped backwards like a felled tree and I heard a crack as his head met the floor.

“Simon. SLY!” I yelled, and knelt down to check him over. He wasn’t breathing.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh HELP!” I hollered, grateful his mother was in the house. Then I started mouth to mouth.

That belch had been a vurp because I tasted vomit as I put my mouth over his. His mother called an ambulance, but I had to stick with the paramedic act and eat his puke till they arrived. It was gross.

Huge relief: he was breathing on his own by the time they got him to hospital. When he came round I admitted I’d been joshing and it backfired. He was OK about it, considering. He recovered with no harm, except for one thing: now he’s afraid of Friday the twelfth too.

June 2011

Another from the three word Wednesday challenge, The three words are highlighted in bold type. 

When in Rome

There was only one thing on my ‘absolute musts’ list when I went to Rome and I was determined not to go home without experiencing it. I was fitting in the Eternal City around commitments on a business trip. It was hard to make time for the glories that I knew to be around me, although the warm evenings after meetings were more comfortable for sight-seeing than the baking heat of day. As a first timer in the city I had done what I always do: researched as much as I could before setting off so that I could have the best possible time and not waste a minute. I had a notebook full of ideas and addresses and I had bought a map as soon as I arrived at the airport, to help me find my way to the gems I had identified.

It would have been impossible to see everything in just a few days, during snatched hours between report writing and emailing my office, but I had pages of potential sights to ensure that I would always be near something I could enjoy and treasure. I had already found many of the wonders detailed there. In The Pantheon, with its miraculous concrete dome that demonstrates the building skills of the ancients who established the city, I had sat on a wooden seat and craned my head back to see a tiny hole so far above me. The roof thickness tapers towards its top and the mortar is mixed with lighter materials to reduce the burden on the arches beneath, ending in a circular gap where the light passes in a bright column to the floor. The dome forms a perfect half sphere and I was so delighted by its geometry that I forgot where I was, and I had to keep rubbing my neck after I left because it hurt to look around at ground level.

I discovered very little more of Ancient Rome, although I found the towering Trajan’s column as I wandered near the Forum, deciding whether to spend time among the ruined market area or to continue my exploration of the Baroque city. The triumphal pillar commemorates the victories of a pagan conqueror and yet, like so many other structures in Rome, it is now surmounted by the statue of a Christian saint. The stately Piazza Navona owes its shape to the stadium that once stood on the same site. Its elongated oval, now covered by a road, was the race track, and the central section would have held monuments and altars to the gods. A tiny section of the original wall is still visible beneath a church at one end, a pleasant surprise that my study of the city guides had failed to reveal. Today the central section holds delightful fountains and statues and very many souvenir stalls. 

Rome has fountains, hundreds of fountains, and many are world famous. The largest is the Trevi, which even starred in movies and had a song named after it. The sculpture from which the water flows is probably beautiful, but the throng of tourists who gathered there made it impossible to tell. Traditionally, if you want to ensure that you will return to Rome you should throw a coin into this fountain and it is said you are bound to come back. Tradition carries little weight with the officious guards who patrol the area, however. When I attempted to throw a coin I was rounded on and severely reprimanded. I hope that surreptitiously dropping in a coin counts just as well or I have wasted several cents, which might have been better used towards the cost of a flight.

The fame of the Sistine Chapel, with its Michelangelo ceiling, meant a long queue had formed even late in the day, so I eschewed its treasures, but was still brought close to tears by the elegant beauty of St Peter’s Square. I stood transfixed by the sweep of colonnades around me, the patterned paving and the imposing buildings of the Vatican. I managed a quick look inside the Basilica itself, which is huge and ornate and slightly confusing, as if several churches have been thrown together by some sort of earthquake.  With other visitors I stood, pilgrim-like, before the Pieta, the wonderful sculpture of the Madonna weeping over the crucified body of her Son, in awe of the artist who created it, but ashamed that I belong to the same species who have forced it into isolation because they want to damage it. It now stands behind bullet-proof glass to protect it from vandals; separated from the world in a way that neither its creator nor its subject would have wanted.

In the shadow of the brooding Castel Sant’ Angelo I stopped for a cold beer to rest my feet and establish my bearings. The nearby bridge was not on my list but Bernini’s magnificent angels shone with their own almost heavenly light in the evening sun. Each silhouette against the pure blue Roman sky was a work of art in itself. Their perfect marble features were a highlight of my visit and I wonder that they are not mentioned in more guides. But Rome has many such delights to discover and sometimes they are more wonderful than those that we recognise or know in advance.

After a while I mastered the city’s Metro system and the strain on the feet grew less but it was still restful to stop along the way and drink a cool beer or sample a tasty, ice-cold gelato while the well-dressed residents strolled by, or rode past on their ubiquitous little motor scooters. No-one wears crash helmets in Rome because that would ruin the fashionable line of their carefully chosen outfits. Style is a way of life in the city and nothing must be allowed to interfere with anyone’s image. They ride, perfectly poised, on the tiny bikes and never have a hair out of place. I even saw one woman pillion, riding side-saddle so she would not crease her immaculate skirt. On her lap was a small basket, from which peered a tiny dog, its hair tied up in a matching ribbon bow.

The Colosseum, or Flavian Amphitheatre, was another monument I chose not to explore. I went to see it, since it has a Metro station named after it, and felt slightly off balance when I emerged from the dark tunnel and saw it straight ahead. It has such a familiar outline and the image is used in so many ways that it is somehow unreal when it is right in front of you. It is as if it should not actually exist except in the mind or as a concept of Romanness. But there it was, and there I encountered men dressed as gladiators who would happily pose for a photograph for a few Euros. I declined. There is a strange and unpleasant smell around the Colosseum and I chose not to stay.

I had seen all of these marvels but had still not found what I believed to be the one essential thing in a trip to Rome. Throughout my treks I had kept an eye open for a hint of where I might find it, but it was not until my last night when I was lost in the rambling, twisting streets of the Trastevere area that I spotted my goal. There it was, a small, hand-written sign, fixed to a batten on a crumbling brick wall. In front of it were two flimsy tables covered in red and white checked cloths. The paper was pinned up with a rusty thumb tack and many people would have passed it by without a second thought, but I knew I had found my holy grail. A broad smile spread across my face as I read: spaghetti vongole.  I took a seat and enjoyed the best of Rome. 

February 2011

Uncle Bob

Uncle Bob was not my real uncle. He was an old bloke who lived down our street, but all us kids called him Uncle. He was a friendly sort and gave us home made lemonade and biscuits when we played in his garden. He grew masses of bright, flashy flowers and rows of vegetables, but we were all welcome as long as we were careful where we stepped. His pride and joy was his leek bed that boasted tall, fat stems, like baby trees, bursting from its banked-up soil.

A few years ago he offered to teach me to make a garden of my own. Ours was a bit of a wreck, and he said if I came over after school, by myself, he would show me his secrets. So that is how I learned about planting and germination and how seed forms when the male and female flowers get together. How you set up compost by peeing on it; and how you grow the best leeks by starting with a really deep trench and putting a dead animal in the bottom before you plant. For the nutrients.

Bob went away last year, around the time that I dug my own leek bed. No-one knew why. He just put the house up for sale and left. No goodbyes or anything. But I already knew enough to make our garden the best in the street.

I learned a lot from Uncle Bob. I learned to do as I was told, and not to cry out when it hurt and never to tell anyone about ‘our little secret’. I learned how to look out for myself. Oh yes, I learned much more than gardening. And this year my leeks won prizes at the local show.

18/3/2011

Once upon a time 2

Once upon a time, yes we are having another one of those stories. Why? Because that’s how they always start and it is just a way of telling you that you are about to hear a story, so that you settle down and listen.

Once upon a time there was a castle in the middle of a big town where Lord and Lady Avarici lived with their family. They had three daughters, Isabella, Coronella and Cinderella. So you think now you’ve heard the names that you know the story? Well, maybe so, but you’re probably wrong so keep listening.

The three sisters were all of marriageable age, which in the case of this type of story means anything over about twelve, but Isabella and Coronella were twins and they were a year older than Cinderella. That meant that the two older girls were expected to share everything and dress alike but she had lots of new clothes and shoes and jewellery all to herself.  Cinderella was also naturally blonde and rather pretty, which she was quite fond of pointing out to people.

Like everyone who gets things without much effort, Cinderella really did not appreciate what her clothes and finery were worth and she spent a lot of time in the castle kitchens sitting around the fireplace and filthy as well as getting in the way of the staff who all hated her. The exception was a page boy who fancied himself and thought if he sucked up to the boss’s daughter he might make a bit of money out of it.

Well, one day lady Avarici heard that there was going to be a huge party and the Prince was going to be invited. Of course she needed her daughters to meet some eligible bachelors if she was ever going to get them married off. She bought them all lovely new clothes with matching outfits for the twins but Cinderella insisted on something much more elegant and expensive.

On the day of the ball Cinderella was hogging the bathroom when there was a “whoosh” and a very strange woman appeared in the twins’ bedroom. She wore ragged, black clothes and was the hairiest person the girls had ever seen. She even had a beard!

“Who are you?” the twins asked, together, and the woman said: “I’m your Furry Godmother, of course!”

“Erm, shouldn’t you be more sort of, sparkly and wearing posher clothes?” said Coronella.

“That’s PR for you. It’s all image these days isn’t it? Well no, I’m a real magic worker and real magic isn’t pretty and twinkly, it’s hard-working and practical. I am here to grant you each a wish, so what do you want?”

The twins asked for five minutes to think it over. They huddled in a corner and compared notes then came back and announced: ”We would like to meet two nice young men tonight who will love us and make us good husbands.”

“Sounds simple enough,” the Godmother said and waved her stick over their heads. Nothing happened and the girls thought perhaps it was some sort of joke that Cinderella had arranged but they were polite and said thank you and the Godmother went away.

Later, at the party, Cinderella shone and caught the eye of the Prince who danced with her all evening and ended up asking her to marry him and she accepted without a moment’s thought.

The twins, however, spent a lot of time talking to two young lords from a neighbouring city, who were also twins and would one day share their parents’ wealth. They were not particularly handsome but they were kind and funny and fell instantly in love with the girls.

And so the twins got their wish. Within a year they were both married and living in a very large castle in the nearby town and they lived contentedly ever after with husbands who loved them and cherished them and believed them both to be beautiful.

Cinderella got her Prince and went off to live in the Palace in the capital city but it was a cold place and the Prince’s grandfather had gambled away much of the family wealth so there was no money to improve it.

And what did the Prince get? He married a beautiful but spoiled child who became very bitter when she realised he could not afford to buy her fine clothes and shoes and jewellery.  And when she became bitter she was rather ugly. So the Prince took up with the page boy, who, against all the odds, loved him for what he was and not what he owned. 

17/3/2011

(I assume there's a Once Upon a Time 1, somewhere!) - July 2015

E-readers

Hottest topic among readers and writers these days is undoubtedly the e-reader. (Once you get past the never-ending discussion of plot points, agents, self-publish or not, etc.)

It is becoming increasingly clear that the majority of people refer to e-readers as Kindles. But Kindle is like Hoover or Biro. It's a trade name. The Kindle is only one of a number of e-readers on the market and, in spite of its well-known name, it has some serious drawbacks.

For a start, it is tied in directly to Amazon. Although you can pick them up in places like Curry's, Kindles will read only a kind of file that Amazon produces, and pdfs. That means that every other bookshop could be closed to you if you go along that route.

The Kindle comes with all sorts of extras like 3G (so you can use it to browse the web) and an MP3 player, but if you're a purist like me and you just want to read books on it, those things are a bit irrelevant.

It lacks something rather important though - it does not have a touch screen. So you have to navigate around it by pushing buttons. This is not a particularly natural thing for a book reader to do and it can seriously detract from the experience of reading from a machine.

So what did I buy?
I talked to the assistant in my local Waterstone's store. He went through the options on the types they stock and let me play with some demonstration models so I could see what they were like. I've ended up with a Sony PRS350. It's smaller than the original Sony 650 but I find its 5 inch screen perfectly adequate for what I need. There are options on print size so I could boost it up to very large if I needed to and I have a choice of landscape or portrait for the layout.

One of the best bits for me is the touch screen, because you actually 'turn' the pages as you read. You can do it with the little pointy stick that they provide or there are even buttons to press if you insist, but there's nothing quite like the feel of sweeping a finger across the screen and watching it change - just like a real book does.

It's light, fits in my pocket and I can also buy ebooks from almost every bookstore except Amazon. It also has a cute little design point where the case is shaped to look like it has a hardback spine. Neat!

Other models
There's the BeBook. It's around the same price as the others (They all retail for between £110 and 150 ish) and I can see that some people would think it's a good choice. It has an external SD card slot so you can boost its memory to 4GB. That's about equal to a small library so you really don't need it. I thought it looked a bit clunky too, if that sort of thing matters to you.

Asda brought out a very cheap reader earlier this year but it had a back-lit screen, which many people found caused headaches and was difficult to use in bright light.

What do you need to consider?
If you decide to buy an e-reader you might like to ask a few pertinent questions.
What's the battery life like?
I'm told my Sony will let me do 10,000 page turns but it won't. Though I can easily read a couple of novels without a recharge.
What files will it read?
There is a neat little program called Calibre that can be downloaded off the net and used to convert most file types these days, but the bigger the range the easier it will be to use. The conversions aren't always perfect and you will get typos.
What does it cost?
Basically, are you paying for things like 3G and MP3 that you won't need.
What sort of screen does it have?
The word you want to hear is e-ink. It's easy to read in sunlight and shouldn't give you a headache.
Print size zoom options?
Make sure you can see the screen easily.
Memory size?
Frankly, even the smallest available will carry 100-plus books without trouble.
Touch screen?
I'd say it's a must. Kindle users probably disagree.
Does it have anything pre-loaded?
The Sony came with about 300 classics, which will probably last me a very long time!

I would say don't buy anything until you've had chance to play around with a couple of different kinds. If your friends have one, take a look at it and try reading with it. I've not looked back since I bought my Sony

09/08/2011

What's up

I'm not sure what's going on in my head at the moment. It's been weeks now since I felt quite right, quite present. I want to be somewhere else all the time. When I'm at work I want to be at home. When I'm at home I want to be going out. When I'm in the car I want to be anywhere else except dealing with traffic. I want to run away. But I don't know where I want to run to.

I feel as if the world is against me. The whole world. Even people who are supposed to be on my side. and yet people have been nice to me. They've asked if I'm OK and they have been concerned about me. Why do I hate them for it. Why do I want to shove their concern back in their faces. Am I having flashbacks to my childhood. Am I feeling like I used to when people looked on me with pity and muttered 'poor thing' behind my back like they thought I couldn't hear them?

20/2/2015