The boy stood on the burning deck — did he really? Good Lord. Was he poet? A creative? Well!

As some of you who return here every now and then might know, I’m ploughing on with my Hemingway project and still keeping my head above water. The end, if not yet in sight, is now closer than the beginning. Ironically, I don’t like Hemingway’s writing, I think his writing was too inconsistent, technically some of his stories just don’t stand up, there was bugger all ‘modernist’ about him, his characters are two-dimensional, he has little imagination and — well, that should do.

But I mention that because my reason for starting — and, crucially, eventually concluding — the project was, in no particular order’ to ‘learn to write’ and ‘to learn discipline’ and to learn how to complete an undertaking’. So it could have been anything about anyone. And I feel so far it has been successful.

My point about ‘learning to write’ needs explication: ‘writing’ can mean many different things. We can write a shopping list, a letter, a news story, a feature, a piece of verse, a short story, a novel, an essay, a thesis or dissertation, and all those and much more that we can ‘write’ have different demands and require different skills and abilities.

NB I prefer talking about ‘verse’ rather than ‘poetry’ as I have no idea what ‘poetry’ might be, and, for me, talking about ‘poetry’ leaves rather to much room for spouting vacuous bull and pretentiousness than I am comfortable with. That last point might well have more to do with my own hang-ups and status as a recovering inferiority complex sufferer, but be that as it may.

Once, when I was still living in Cardiff (between 1986 and 1990 working as a sub-editor for the South Wales Echo), I screwed up my courage and went along to a poetry group due to meet ‘upstairs’ at to some pub or other (probably in Cathays, though I couldn’t tell you why I suggest that). I was feeling rather shy and self-conscious (which is why I had to screw up my courage) and when I got there at about 7p, I had no idea who was who.

Sitting downstairs with a drink and waiting for whatever time the group was due to meet to come around, a middle-aged woman on the table next to me suddenly lent over and asked: ‘Are you a poet?’

Well, it’s a straightforward question, of course, and writing this now I can’t think why I disliked and dislike it, only to say that oddly — and I shall repeat my point about my own hang-ups and still lingering inferiority complex possibly coming into play — thinking of oneself as ‘a poet’ strikes me as a tad self-regarding. I feel the same when (usually on Radio 4) folk call themselves ‘a creative’. Yes, I know what they mean, but . . .

I shall never refer to myself as ‘a creative’, although I can’t deny that I wouldn’t at all be displeased if someone else did.

Although I have written one or two poems since (and now have a fair idea of what I am trying to do, which is pretty straightforward) and you can read them here and a few more here. I hadn’t then written anything, and I don’t doubt my verse would have been shite if I had. But several people had — there were about seven or eight of us and as often happens I can still see the scene in my mind’s eye — but I remember only two pieces, though not in detail.

The first was a long, rambling piece by some artistic herbert or other who would undoubtedly have referred to himself as ‘a poet’ and ‘a creative’, and it was distressing and dull me, me, me self-indulgent bollocks. The second piece of verse I remember was from a black African, quite possibly a post-grad student at Cardiff University, and I distinctly remember thinking ‘well, this is interesting’. It certainly wasn’t at all me, me, me, but about his country and its people.

But most of all I remember the rather stunned silence which greeted it after he had finished and the distinct impression I got from the other — white — ‘poets’ in our circle. Their attitude to it — as I say a piece of verse which stood out was and please forgive me, I don’t mean to be offensive, but I can only put it this way — was ‘Good Lord, the black sambo can write bloody well’. Sorry, but that was the impression I got, and the rather offensive term I use is pertinent. But that’s all by the by. Back to more mainstream bollocks.

. . . 

What I mean about ‘learning to write’ (and I’m sure my good mate Pete, who I think still reads this blog now and then will understand) is making damn sure ‘what is written’ ‘hangs together’. And to achieve that, thought is involved. So when I say ‘learning to write’, I also mean ‘learning to think’: ‘thought’ usually comes before ‘writing’, even if it’s just a shopping list. If you find you can’t ‘write’, the reason is almost always that you haven’t actually thought through what you want to write.

Thought need not be particularly detailed. It could, for example, be ‘thinking about what kind of tone you want to strike’, ‘what impression you want to give’.

A second facet (for me) of ‘learning to write’ is to ensure that — at least in what I want to do — what is written ‘follows on’, is ‘of a piece’. That’s especially true in this Hemingway bollocks, though practising keeping on top of what you write will, I hope, pay off in the future (which is why I’m doing it. Fuck Hemingway, the self-important, conceited toad). That’s why I re-write so much, because going over what I have written, I realise ‘this doesn’t quite follow that’.

Naturally, there are no rules in writing, except those you set f0r yourself. In fact, as far as I am concerned, there are no rules, either at all when you paint, play an instrument, sculpt, compose — you can do just what he hell you want. It is one of our last freedoms.

However, when finally you present ‘your work’, what you have created’, to the outside world, you might find that not as many are engaged by your 1,000-word ‘poem’ which consists of the word ‘it’ written 999 times and the word ‘was’ as you hoped. You might also find that not too many folk are engaged by your four by four canvas of nothing but black paint with a single red circle in the top left corner, however much you talk it up in the exhibition catalogue. (‘Patrick Powell’s “Black with red circle” wittily sums up and succinctly explicates the dilemma of a self isolated in a non-existent community of bleak absence’). Remember, we might like the smell of our own farts, but others are usually not quite as delighted.

I suppose it comes down to why we are ‘creating’. If you wan to ‘make a name for yourself’, ‘earn you living from your work’ etc, fair enough. Many might do it ‘for themselves’. To be honest, I have reached that point in that, at 71 (sob, sob, but there’s no getting away from it) I am simply writing because I enjoy it and to prove to myself that I’m not quite the bullshitter I have long feared I was. And that is another reason for actually eventually concluding this Hemingway project. And not just concluding it, but doing it as best I can.

I am learning along the way. And I have to say: thank the bloody Lord for word processing apps, such as Word and Bean, the two I use. They make re-rewriting (and I do a lot of re-writing) a doddle. The more I used Word, the more respect I get for all those bods who wrote longhand with pen/quill and paper. Think of bloody Middlemarch: it is a big book and I’m sure Eliot did re-write parts of it. But to save herself too much re-writing she thought before she put pen to paper (or quill — I have no idea when nibbed pens and inkwells came in). Still.

. . .

Manchester United against Manchester City is on in a minute and if you think there is any sort of contest between going upstairs to watch the game or blethering one here . . .

Urging you all to take a look and another few bits and bobs

I’ve just posted the latest entry on my Hemingway project website. Getting there if you’re interested, though sadly few are: I keep an eye on the stats as to visits and there are some though my Hemingway site (and what I have to say doesn’t seem likely to set the world alight for another few hundred years. But for what it’s worth, take a look. 

Apart from that, what’s new? Not a lot. Like everyone else, I’m now getting a little ticked off ‘the lockdown’, although as someone suggested it might be as much the cold and miserable weather we are having and will have now for at least another 11 weeks. Not for us Brits the glories of vistas of pristine snow and mountains, with lovable St Bernard dogs dispensing brandy from cute little barrels hanging from their necks. (And where did that one start? Probably in some addled advertising agency copywriters brain).

As for covid there’s only one point I’d like to make: the Thirty Years War lasted — you’ve way ahead of me — 30 years. I’m not saying it’s all doom, doom, doom. What I’m saying is: take nothing for granted. And I say that because we do, all of us, even smug ol’ me writing this. We assume ‘it will all work out’. Well, it doesn’t always, does it? Here in Britain the government is being cheerily upbeat and repeating ‘well, we’ve got a vaccine now, two in fact’, but were it that simple.

For one thing we, as has every other country, have our gangs or morons who are all insisting ‘covid is all just a hoax to take away our civil liberties’, although as far as I know no one has yet even tried to explain just why ‘they’ are so keen to take away our civil liberties and to what end. I mean, if they are, surely there’s some ‘plan’? But I shan’t be trying to find out: long ago I learned the truth of the useful advice ‘never get into a debate with a moron’. I mean would you really bother to try to set straight some bod who insisted that ‘the Moon is mad of cheese’? If so, you deserve all the grief you will get.

. . . 

Might as well fill you in on some news. My stepmother died at the end of last July, and I inherited her cottage. There then followed a laborious three or four weeks as I cleared the house of all the shite that has been accumulating over the years. Every room also needed a new lick of paint, so my wife got down to business. That was not to help me, mind, or save me money, but because I offered to allow my daughter and husband and child to live there rent-free so they can save up for a home of their own.

I was going to put the extra money I would have had as income towards doing a bit of travelling — I’ve always wanted to spend a month or two mooching around the US as so much of our culture comes from there — but that is now all on hold. And what with covid, which I suspect will be around in one way or another for pretty much the rest of 2021, not having the spare moolah for jaunts around the world is not such a pain.

That’s about it, really. Not a lot of news. I’m now keen to get this Hemingway bollocks out of the way and I am getting there, so I can get on with other things. So all I’ll do now is to wish you all a happy New Year and hope this virus crap ends sooner rather than later.

Pip, pip.

Bah humbug (or something). And if you aren't happy with that, let me instead wish your all a Merry Christmas and a trouble-free and happy New Year

Before I get on to the main bit of this post, here’s an ad for those intent on Old Blighty ‘seizing its destiny’ — I think that was the phrase — and who are now deciding how best each week to spend the £350 million promised them each by assorted destiny seizers and other charlatans.

Well, it’s Christmas again, and again I reflect how much more I liked the German Christmases of my childhood, both in England when I was younger and later, and in Berlin when we lived there. I mentioned this to my son (who is 21) yesterday and he said that we all look back on our childhood with nostalgia, but it isn’t that.

Although ethnically I am half-English and half-German, different aspects of me tend to the one side of my ethnicity more than the other. There are some aspects to German life I like less than others — it is true that they prefer, largely, doing things in organised groups (call it ‘being regimented’ if you like, though I would hate here to stray into Cliche Country) whereas the Brits, generally rather dislike being so organised. In that respect I am more British. I hate being organised by someone else. If there is any organising of me to be done, I’ll do it myself, thank you very much.

Certainly, the Teuton approach has its advantages in that things do tend to work like clockwork and thus some aspects of life are less of a hassle. The downside is — and don’t take this too literally but more as a suggestive observation — the Germans often lack imagination: if things gum up and the routine is disrupted, they find themselves at a loss. The Brits on the other hand are rather adept at ‘making do and mending’, coming up with ingenious solutions to whatever problem comes along, although that approach falls down when rather than regard such solutions as temporary, the Brits stick with them for far too long until the tried and tested solution becomes a problem.

I don’t know whether this is relevant or not, but what the above brings to mind is a comparison between Germany’s federal make-up and Britain’s — there’s no other phrase for it — current higgledy-piggledy constitutional arrangement. Germany has its federal system of 16 Länder which (I believe) have a certain amount of autonomy and sovereignty, but which all are loyal constituents of the Federal Republic. Each Land is equal to each other land and has the same constitutional make-up although its own state constitution. And it works.

Britain meanwhile, in 2020, is made up of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and consists of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each — except England — has its own ‘parliament’ or ‘assembly’ but the powers of each assembly are not equal. Scotland has tax-raising power, Wales and Northern Ireland do not. And as I’ve already pointed out, England doesn’t even have it’s own parliament. Why not?

Well, that’s how the whole silly system evolved. And bringing this piece back to what I was originally writing about the evolution of the system as it now stands began when the government led by Tony Blair — yes, that Blair, Tony ‘Boo Hiss’ Blair who took Britain to war with Iraq for no good reason I can see — became alarmed by the, almost sudden, rise in popularity of the Scottish Nationalist Party which hitherto had been regarded as a gang of no-hopers and nationalist deadbeats. Blair’s solution was to try kill off the nationalist sentiment by granting Scotland limited autonomy. He called it ‘devolution’ as in ‘devolving various powers’ to Scotland.

It worked for a while, but now, post Brexit, is no longer really working: the beast Scotland, which voted for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union, doesn’t just want more meat, it wants the whole carcass. Well done, Tony.

That is all by way of trying to illuminate who the Brits often half-arsed way of dealing with problems usually backfires in the long run. But back to Christmas, and how the bloody hell did I manage to stray so far away?

My mother was a Roman Catholic and my father a convert (though I suspect his was the kind of romantic conversion undertaken by many young men and women in the mid-20th century because in my recollection he was never a regular attender of mass (and not the lower-case ‘m’, I’m not about to play the stupid RC game of given it a capital ‘M’. But more on that for another time).

So our family Christmases, apart from following the German tradition of Heiligabend and celebrated on Christmas Eve, also had a religious dimension. I’m not saying it is that I miss, though, but a rather more festive approach to it all: over the course of Christmas Eve everything worked up to the Bescherung. This started with a family meal, then lighting the Christmas candles on the tree (and bloody dangerous it must have been, too) and then handing out of presents.

Finally, we all buggered off to midnight mass which saw in Christmas Day proper. But the British Christmas on the other hand . . . I could and still can not get used to it. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’m just repeating that we all have a greater fondness for what we are accustomed to. But the sad thing is that I’ll probably never again be able to celebrate such a ‘German’ Christmas. Oh, well.

. . .

As I’ve said before, I’m very conscious that my regular posting of entries in this blog has tailed off. It’s not that I’ve lost interest, though. For one thing I want to get this bloody Hemingway project out of the way (more here), so when I write, it’s getting stuck into writing that. And as the whole bloody point of undertaking it in the first place was to ‘do something and try to do it as best I could and, most important, bloody finish it’, it would be wholly daft to throw in the towel and turning to writing all those fabulous novels I have longe planned to write.

Ironically, no one but no one would know. Only I would know that I didn’t have the wherewithal to complete it. But ‘I’ am the important one in this: only ‘I’ would know. There will certainly be no street demos in Kuala Lumpur or Stockholm or New York because I didn’t finish it. But none would be needed: I would know I hadn’t finished it and that would be bad enough. Ergo: finish it. It doesn’t help that I have allowed the project to grow over the past few years, but — well, take the rough with the smooth.

And on the note I’ll end because I’ve been asked to clear the kitchen table so my wife can lay it for our Christmas meal.

And finally, a parting thought.

Happy Christmas to you all. xxx

Well, hello there. Yes, I’m still around. Getting worried?

One reason why I haven’t been posting here of late is that us that I’m trying to complete this Hemingway project sooner rather than later. Most recently I have been posting ‘essays’ and bits and pieces I already more or less completed on the website I’ve created for it. If anyone wants to take a look, it’s slowly coming together.

I’ve got loads more to post on the site, but it all needs to be read again and re-written as I do repeat myself a lot, and much of that repetition is not very relevant to the particular topic of the ‘essay’. Suggestions of any kind are very welcome, though that’s a tad forlorn request as such request are always ignored. Why I can’t think. Time

and again I’ve plugged, plugged, plugged the only novel I have written so far (and don’t be out off by the cover, left, — that’s part of it and it isn’t quite as straightforward as it might seem) and a book of short stories (below left) but has anyone bothered to buy a copy (and all you pay is the production cost, for Lord’s sake)? Have they hell.

As it happens I’m not at all put out because at my late age (it was my birthday yesterday, and I’ll not see 30 again) I expected nothing more form people. As someone once pointed out ‘the great thing about being terminally cynical is that you are never disappointed’.

But I do want to get this Hemingway bollocks out of the way, simply because I want to get on with something else and it hangs over me to such and extent that if I spend part of the day not reading or writing about the old fraud, I feel vaguely guilty, the sort of guilt you feel when you take a sickie and just can’t enjoy the buckshee time off. Well, I couldn’t anyway.

What else is new? The covid stuff is getting a little long in the tooth, about time we had a new crisis. This one has outstayed its welcome, and the public are remarkably fickle about such matters. Sad to say our

crises are like fashion: they go out of date very quickly. Remember Aids and how we ‘were all going to die’ (that memorable headline in the then Daily Mirror which cleverly did not claim we would all ‘die of Aids’, and so was on to a winner — we are all going to die. 

As for covid, it’s really getting impossible to know what to believe. My view is that it is better to be safe than sorry, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the doomsters are all correct in their assessment. Then there’s the mystery about why some groups are more at risk than others: black and Asians (who make up a substantial proportion of our British national health service staff are said to be particularly at risk. Young children on the other hand — are told — are not. Also very confusing is just how much at risk of dying we are if we contract it, why some people who have the virus are asymptomatic, and on and on.

I have been amusing myself arguing the toss with various state-registered idiots in the Daily Telegraph comments section, the vast majority of whom are convinced ‘it’s all a hoax’ and a plot to ‘rob us of our freedoms’. When asked directly just why a government — pretty much all governments around the world — seem to be so keen of ‘robbing us of our freedoms’ answers come none. One idiot I was ‘debating with’ — I was debating, he was slagging me off — insisted it is all just a scam for politicians to ‘make money’. It doesn’t help on that score that, at least here in Britain, public funds have been badly spent on personal protective equipment (PPE).

But anyway, time for the rugby or football. I can’t make up my mind whether to watch France hammer the Scots in the ‘Autumn Nations Cup’ (on now, France already 3-0 up) or watch Leicester and Liverpool try to get the better of each other. Decisions, decisions . . .

Now take a quick look at the Hemingway site and tell me whether it is shite or shite.

Mainly for Anonymous (but others are just as welcome as long as you wipe your feet on the way in and keep your hands off the spoons)

This is appearing on my ‘private’ blog, but I gather it isn’t quite as private as I thought. So what they hell. This entry is specifically for Anonymous who kindly left a comment on August 26 earlier this year.

Thank you for your comment. Things still not brilliant between myself and my wife. Believe it or not one of the main things which bothers me is (a la JC's 'look to the beam in your own eye' etc and though I'm a signed up atheist, it is good advice all-round) is how much I might be two blame. Who knows?

We rarely see ourselves in true focus, either pitching ourselves too high or too low. At the risk of being laughed at (by you) for quoting a song, there's a good one by Leon Russell called Magic Mirror, and about a year ago I set it to images and posted it on YouTube.

It was just by chance that I came across your comment (and thank you for it, it's cheering to know that something you've written has at least been read) so please forgive the delay. These last few days have been a particular piss-off for one reason or another, but it would bore you to go into details. However, I keep reminding myself that in the grand scheme of things, I am better off than many. I won't have to give you examples as I'm sure you can come up with your own.

As for Hemingway, he has gone on the back-burner these past few weeks: my stepmother died in July and I was tied up doing all sorts, registering death etc, organising her funeral. I have inherited her cottage (which might reinforce my admission that I am most certainly not as deep in the shit as many when you think of all those living in crap conditions or who are homeless) and I have spent at least a month clearing it out so that my daughter can move in with her husband and two-year-old - they have been living with his parents for the past four years, not renting as they could to save up for a house of their own. I'm letting her live there for £1 a year, plus paying their own bills.

But I have a lot more written about Hemingway than has so far appeared on the website. In fact if you are interested and wouldn't mind doing me a favour, I can post pdfs of what I have so far written for you to read and comment (and ‘I don’t think this bit works’ or ‘this bit is confusing’ is 1,000 more useful to me than ‘I think this is brilliant!’). If you were interested it would not take long for me to post them as I have so far posted a reviews and commentaries I’ve come across and used. If you are interested, leave another comment or email me.

By the way, what’s your name. It might be ‘Barry’ (a friend who sometimes reads my main blog) or it could be someone entirely different.

Take care, P.