On the Rails or Should that be the Road?

I am in deep depression. Not of the form that I have described before whereby it creeps over me unbeknown, but in a shape that I can identify while it gathers.

I have to go to court today to hear the joyless news that I will be kicked out of my flat/appartment.

It is, needless to say, my own fault as I have got behind with my rent.

However, I am in a position to pay off my arrears and, because I now have a regular income, will be able to maintain payments for the foreseeable future.

I have lived here for ten years. The longest I have lived anywhere in my life. It means nothing. The fact I can pay my back rent means nothing. I as an individual am nothing. My worth is defined purely by numbers on a balance sheet.

My personal problem is nothing compared to those faced by millions across the globe. I try to keep it in context.

That said, my problem is similar insofar as it is symptomatic of an attitude that reduces people purely to an arbitrary paper value. The only transcendental worth today is money, a social construct of material exchange that now measures every step of every individual on the planet as though we were all machines incapable of emotion or fault.

The true wonder of humanity, to me, is its capability of making mistakes. Of being wrong. If it were not so, if we had lost our endless curiosity, and hence our fallibility, we would never have progressed. We would certainly not be worthy of love. We say we love this or that machine, but do we? Do you really love your computer? Your car? Your washing-up machine?

Love is not born out of the perfection of the person, but the imperfections. It gives us our point of contact. We can understand the other because we can identify the faults that we recognise in ourselves. Or we believe we can. It makes the other human, like ourselves. It makes the other endearing. It makes us endearing. Capable of being understood. Capable of love.

I will let you know how it goes. I will also, as promised, blog about the wonderful holiday I had at Stuart and Gabrielle's heaven in France.

The Stork Has Landed!

Slightly post the event, I have to announce the early arrival (by ten days) of my second granddaughter, Katie.

She was born at 4.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 4th June 2008, weighing 7lb 7oz – I think.

So, much love and congratulations to Emily, Danny and sister Amy.

(The reason for the delay is that I have been away on holiday in France, of which more later.)

A Thousand Groans of Unrequited Love

I was in love when I was five. Or I may have been slightly younger. I can't remember precisely when I first met her. Her name was Marie-Clare. She was one day older than me.

Of course I wouldn't have called it love then. I didn't know what the word love meant. But she felt like an extension of myself. I was a part of her, she a part of me. So it was love.

Her father, like mine, was in the army. Hers was a lancer, mine an infantry officer in the East Surrey Regiment. We were in Malaya as it was then know, or Malaysia today. It was the time of the so-called troubles. So-called, I believe, because to have called it anything more accurate, like a war as in the war in Vietnam that was to follow, would have called into being treaty obligations that Britain couldn't face or probably couldn't afford at the time. It was in the early fifties and this country was still recovering from World War II.

My father had volunteered for the war and stayed on as a regular after. It was brave of him to return to Malaysia. Brave beyond belief. He had been captured at the fall of Singapore and spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war on the infamous Burma-Siam railway. A situation made all the more painful by the fact he had grown up in Rangoon. His grandmother was Burmese, making him a quarter Burmese. Making me an eighth Burmese. My left arm is Burmese. Burma had held happy memories for him till he had to work on that railway.

My father should never have gone to war. He had a stone in his kidney, which, I believe, is one of the most painful conditions possible. It was so painful even the Japanese gave him pain killers. Or so I am told. Perhaps it is a piece of family mythology. The stone in his kidney wasn't. I saw the scar.

Marie-Clare. We breathed the same air. I don't think adults understand the intensity of feeling, the purity of passion, that small children experience. At that age emotion cannot be rationalised. It is experienced as concretely as a No 25 bus. There is no self-reflection, no analysis, no gnawing doubts. It just is.

I used to go to Marie-Clare's home everyday. She and her younger sister, Henrietta, had a governess, Miss Black. So I would join them for 'classes'. I cannot remember a single detail concerning Miss Black. Neither her age, height, the colour of her hair, nor how she dressed. Nothing. I just remember this warm snuggly feeling. A glow. An envelope. Somewhere safe. Someone who allowed us to be happy, who responded to us as children and encouraged us to be children. Not small adults.

I recall once making ice-creams out of the cone shaped receptacle of some flower for the fairies in the garden. This was Malaya, remember, so the vegetation was very exotic. Still is no doubt. As was the wild life.

Another incident I remember is of us children shrieking with delight and terror and jumping onto the girls' bunk beds because a snake had been found in the house. Snakes were commonplace. And also very dangerous, the most common being kraits, or bungarus, relatives of the cobra.

My mother tried to warn me of the dangers.

"Davey," she said, "if you ever see a snake you must run away as fast as you can."

"I can kill it easy," I replied, a macho four year old at the time.

It was not the response she wanted to hear. Sigh. However, I am still here.

Marie-Clare, one day older than me, and I were engaged. I can't remember when or where we agreed to get married. But we did. I vaguely recollect being with her under some building - lots of the older buildings were raised above the ground because of termites, snakes, etc. I am sure we were discussing our nuptials at the time. If I remember correctly there was a tiny but perfectly formed hornets' nest housing huge and perfectly lethal hornets dangling from the underside of the building. We didn't stay long.

And we never got married.

One day Marie-Clare told me she was going to Hong Kong. I had never heard of Hong Kong. It sounded like the noise of a cowbell to me. I didn't take her seriously.

But one day she was gone. To Hong Kong. Suddenly it shed its musical ring to sound more like a knell.

By the Time I Receive My Passport, I will be Out of Date

I am sitting here waiting… and waiting… I have no option other than to sit here and wait… and wait… because Secure Mail Services are delivering my new passport sometime today. That is sometime between 9.00 a.m. and 5.00 p.m.

They can't be more specific than that because they actually don't give a fig that I and everyone else they deliver to have to sit around all day waiting… and waiting…

It would be impossible, of course, with present day communication technology being as primitive as it is, for them to be any more specific.

On the other hand, if you have something delivered by Amazon you can track its passage from start to finish. Obviously this is an aberration.

The BBC recently tracked an Osprey migrating from South Africa to its breeding nest in Cumbria every inch of the way. This too is an aberration.

But Secure Mail Services know you have no option other than to wait as they are delivering a document of fundamental importance.

Their slogan should be "Let them eat cake. Let them they wait…" (And the government wonders why the nation is becoming increasingly obese when it's all down to the Passport Office and their courier of choice.)

On a more positive note, my writing progresses. Admittedly at the same pace as Secure Mail Services, nonetheless, it progresses. However, the paradox is the more I write, the less I seem to accomplish. My book is shrinking!

I shall explain.

This may sound tangental but I read on Caroline Smaile's blog that she gave a writer's workshop last Saturday where she discussed how she writes. She gives an example of an item that inspired a whole scene, a photograph, and talks of memory recall being colour coded.

My book, the one I have been working on longest, started off as a huge blob of clay that I bought one day. I started to play with it having no real object in mind, pulling it, extruding it, generally exploring what was possible. I left it. Came back to it and decided I didn't like the overall shape but there were a few details I could work on. And so it continued. Eventually I could see, in a myopic manner, some sort of definitive shape appearing.

Unlike my old career as an advertising copywriter where one spends half one's life trying to distract yourself or a process of thought to look at the problem from a new perspective, writing has to be methodical. Routine and discipline, as I have mentioned before, are of the essence.

It is within this process that I discover the creative spark is generated. I find that as I am writing, I will type a line that expresses some thought that has arrived unbidden. Though often unwelcome, it seem, on reflection, necessary, even inevitable.

It is unwelcome in the sense that the new thought has consequences that takes the scene in different direction from the one to which you had initially imagined it was heading. And as one scene changes, even marginally, it will invariably affect those preceding and succeeding. The last time this happened I actually laughed out loud as I just knew I could not pretend it hadn't happened but would have to deal with it.

Consequently much of what I have already written will have to be consigned to the recycling bin. Hence my book appears to be shrinking. (However, I did say the recycling bin; much of the material can be rescued with more work.)

I fear I can hear the tutting of more experienced writers as they shake their collective heads at my hopeless methodology. My only excuse is that it is my first book and I wrote my MA dissertation in much the same fashion and I got a distinction. So there!

Snail Mail Image (with slight amendment) copyright of Gregg & Tracy Spender

Mr Smug Bites Off More Than He Can Chew

I have just been flicking through the blogs of other members of the Novel Racers, though I am not sure I am still an official member, when I looked in on JJ's blog. She is, to quote, a 'British woman in Bangkok: living, writing, drinking tea.'

She recently returned to England for a break during the course of which she met up with fourteen other Novel Racers. What courage! I would feel totally inadequate in such a gathering. I feel faint just thinking about it.

It is a peculiar calling to write. In many respects it is nothing more than a childlike desire to show off. A desire to hear the oohs and ahhs, the sighs, gasps and laughter at all the right places. Above all, it is the desire to hear unalloyed praise and prolonged applause.

The last thing you need is someone else hogging the spotlight. And the last, last thing you need is to meet fourteen others all harbouring the same desires yet neurotically trying to disguise the fact.

I would dribble. I would become hopelessly drunk. I would behave completely inappropriately. They would have to replace the carpet.

JJ nobly claims she was astonished at the generosity of published writers.

Think the worst of me, but if I were a published writer I too would be generous to the unpublished. I would be lavishly extravagant with my generosity. With the aid of a crane and bucket, I would ladle out massive portions. People would stagger away and die of my generosity.

I, for my part, would return home to swell up and explode from a surfeit of smugness - having uttered one single, fatal, wafer-thin, patronising comment too many.

Return To Sender

This is an error. I was learning how to post YouTube stuff and found I had posted Mr Creosote (see above) twice. Now I find I cannot delete this post but have to fill the space with drivel.

Then I remembered I had done a doodle that seemed singularly appropriate for the post that follows. Et voila!
While on the subject of posts that have been misdirected, does anyone have any idea how you delete a post you don't want or have created in error?

Amy's Story Illustrated

I thought I would post the final, well final all bar a bit of fiddling, versions of two of my illustrations for Amy's book.

They took me all Sunday to complete but I hope, now that I know the effect I want to create and how to achieve it, the others won't take me so long.

However, as most of the story takes places under the sea, I can foresee further challenges.

As a postscript, I was discussing the disappearing view of the sea at work with a colleague, a new building that is being erected has finally obliterated the only patch of blue visible from our offices, when he made some comment that has given me the plot for my next Amy book.

This is important as Danny, Amy's father didn't feature in Amy Book One, a weakness of which I was always aware and slightly embarrassed. I don't mind teasing him occasionally, okay, all the time, but excluding him altogether was unfortunate.

But now I have a plot in which he can star with the young Amy so the balance should be restored in the Danny/David relationship. (Well, until Manchester United beat Chelsea in the Champions League Final as I support the former and he the latter.)