. . . so the dogs bark and the caravan moves on

The other day I posted that I had finally completed all the work on a book I’m calling The Hemingway Enigma and that it is available to be bought on Amazon worldwide (and if the country you are in doesn’t have its own dedicated Amazon website, but you still want a copy, I should try Amazon in a nearby country. Mind, you have probably thought of that already).

I’m glad I’ve finally finished the work, but the book is certainly not identical to the website I have been plugging in this blog for what seems like that past 350 years. (You didn’t know the internet was up and running in the 1670s, did you? No, nor did I until I made up that ‘fact’).

I have to say, and I hope none of you see this as boasting, that a lot of work went into getting that book published (courtesy of Amazon KDP’s service so don’t set to much store by the word ‘published’ – ‘printed’ would be a far closer description) and I am proud of it.

The Hemingway Enigma website was launched on – I’ve just checked the date – November 3, 202o, but by then I had been beavering away writing the blog entries for some time.

At some point I decided to have it printed in book form, and a little later I realised that I would have to re-write the website copy substantially as there was a great deal of repetition overall on the website pages: the nature of the web means that you might hit upon a random page and it is every unlikely that will be on the ‘first’ page.

So what was written on each page needed a certain context so that the punter had a reasonable chance of knowing what the hell was going on. But as a book is almost always read from start – the first page – to end – the last page, such repetitions would look silly, so I had to get rid of them.

I also realised on re-reading it that some of the ‘thought’ (I like to think there is a little in it) could, perhaps, be expressed more clearly. So once the website was out of the way, I set about re-writing the copy.

Then came designing and formatting the book, but I enjoy that kind of work. I used Indesign to do it all, the software we used on the Mail feature subs’ desk, and it is very, very useful

I have to say, I was increasingly conscientious about the work, latterly – pretty much the past year or so – sitting down and writing for at least four to five hours a day. And it was not a chore, as I enjoy writing. But therein lies the problem: I’ve done it and, in a sense, now have nothing more to write.

. . .

My usual routine was to be downstairs by about 10am – I am now retired and see little point in getting up early – and then more or less piss about doing fuck-all for the next two to three hours: a bit of this, a bit of that, Wordle, reading the newspapers online, watching a YouTube video or ten – you know what I mean because we have all been there – and then, around 1pm getting stuck into ‘work’.

Well, frankly, it wasn’t ‘work’ at all because, as I say, I enjoyed and enjoy it. I think it only becomes ‘work’ when you don’t enjoy doing it and it becomes a chore. One of the few pieces of advice I’ve given my son is when I come to ‘finding a job/work’, don’t chase money, find something you like doing.

(NB Other advice I have given him and my daughter is to make sure they realise ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’. That last can be taken as you want – there are several interpretations – but the way I understand it, and the way I hoped they would understand it, is that when push comes to shove every ‘favour’ has to be paid for, so beware of ‘favours’. That’s worth knowing as when we are young and have less life experience we might not realise quite how tricky some favours can become.)

After I had finished re-writing all my copy and had produced and Indesign manuscript, I had a proof copy printed up, read through it all again, found and corrected quite a few literals, then went through it again on screen.

All that took a few weeks, but finally I thought the time had come to bite the bullet and get the fucker printed. I don’t doubt there are still little literals still lurking here and there, silly little things such as ‘their’ when it should in context be ‘there’ etc, but I suspected I was putting off finalising it all. A lot of the tiny errors are down to slightly tweaking a sentence and thereby introducing another tiny error – what was correctly ‘is’ should now be ‘are’ because of the bloody tweak I made, that kind of thing.

Well, enough was enough – as they say in all the hooey Hollywood films about newspapers ‘publish and be damned’.

That is not the tack taken these days, and I suspect never was: when the paper’s balls are truly on the line, the whole story has been through several briefs with a fine tooth comb to spot anything before the word goes out to print. But, ssshh, don’t tell your friends, as a rule we prefer the romantic bullshit fiction to the prosaic fact.

. . .

So what is this entry all about? Well, for the past year or so, I have woken up and known what I would be doing that day: writing My Hemingway Bollocks (and I have had one or two identical copies printed with just that title to give away to friends with a few spoof plugs – I’ve never been able to resist a cheap joke, it’s what will ensure I never win the Nobel Prize).

And I did, as I say conscientiously. But now . . .

Now I’m at a loose end. Yes, I do have things planned, but it’s one thing to spend a great deal of time on a project that has already started and is underway, quite another actually to start a project.

I shan’t say what it is, but I’ve been thinking about it and – sort of – planning it in tandem for many, many months.

But now is the time to put my money where my mouth is and, er, I’m a bit (as we used to say at school) windy. I have no doubt at all that I can do it, none at all, none whatsoever, not question! (But I’m a bit, er, windy. Did I tell you that?)

There is still a lot of thinking to be done, but I also find – I have found in the past and it’s true of the tracks I record (there are two below) that, oddly, in the process much takes a shape and comes together. It’s naturally stupid to rely on that to happen. But it is equally silly to ignore serendipity.

Getting all that down on paper is helping. In fact, writing this entry is already helping. I haven’t written many regular blog entries for some time, and one plan is to write a short entry every morning (or every day to get back in the swing of doing some kind of writing which isn’t sodding Hemingway).

Ironically, doing exactly that is what first gave me the idea for ‘keeping a diary’ and which was not really ‘a diary’ at all. For 15 years, from about 1980 on, I ‘kept a diary’ in hard-back A4 lined ledgers after I had read in the preface to East Of Eden by John Steinbeck (and a remember exactly nothing about the novel) that Steinbeck confessed to his editor that he had writer’s block.

Simple, said the editor, I’ll send you a ledger and you can start the day by writing any old shite on the left-hand page just to get your juices flowing and once they are flowing, start writing whatever fiction you have in mind.

I have about ten of those A4 ledgers now (and they will never be written because no cunt, least of all me, can read my sodding handwriting) and only stopped writing in it when I got married and thought it more diplomatic not to record my private thoughts. These, when discovered by a snooping person, possibly a wife, can be hugely misinterpreted.

That did happen to me once: I was going out with one Sian V. (who I think might have dodged a bullet when it all ended – I might in the past have written about it) and was living with her in Birmingham, when on a visit to my parents in Henley-on-Thames for not reason at all I wondered what had happened to an old girlfriend, Annette B.

When I knew her, she was working the warehouse in Henley of the publisher Routledge, and Kegan Paul, and on spec I rang up: ‘Is Annette B. there?’

Well yes, she was, and we met up in her lunch break. And my visit was just in time: now married and expecting here first child she was leaving the following week.

I recorded all this in my ‘diary’, Sian read it and was upset. Don’t blame her.

So I stopped writing that ‘diary’ when I married in 1995, and this blog was its continuation when I started it on February 6, 2009. Or rather – if you read that day’s entry – I had started it a week or two earlier, but committed some kind of technical boo-boo and had to start again.

. . .

In short: just to get back in the swing (and do at least some writing every day) I shall try to post an entry every day from now on. The first will probably be tomorrow as I am off to France again to see my elderly aunt in Illats on Thursday (train to London tomorrow, flight to Bordeaux from Gatwick on Thursday.

Pip, pip.

By the way, I have also printed up a revised copy of Love: A Fiction. I’ve plugged it so many times here with zero response that I’m giving up. Oh well, maybe check it out. Remember the wise advice: never judge a book by its cover.

Six In The Morning

They Want My Money
(And Soon They'll Want My Soul)

You’re Dying Of Love

If you like those, there are more here.

Now published and available on Amazon

The book I’ve been slaving away on for the past few years, The Hemingway enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame? is now published and available to buy.

I have in the past linked to my website of the same name, but I found that converting the text of the website into a book was not as straightforward as it might seem.

For one thing the website consists of 46 different webpages and a random visitor will land on any of them.

For that reason each page, to a certain extent, needed some context, and so there is overall quite a lot of repetition in those 46 pages.

It is also unlikely that a visitor would start at ‘Page one’, the Preface, and read the following pages in sequence.

Thus for the book I pretty much had to re-write the lot, to mainly to get rid of repetition but also to streamline my thoughts a little more.

I printed it using Amazon’s very good KDP service and as part of that – free – service it is listed on Amazon sites globally. Here are some of them: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Sweden.

If you think you might be interested, why not buy a copy?

A schlepp and a half to a wedding in Hamburg, one which some might take in their stride. Me, I’d rather not too often, thank you very much. Too many early mornings

It was off to Germany last Wednesday, for my youngest nephew’s wedding, and here are a few of the piccies I took. The journey was a tad tortuous: after waking at 1.30am and not sleeping any more till I got up, it was off to Newquay – ‘Cornwall’ Airport’ and I don’t know why I’m sneering so forgive me please, Cornwall, but it is tiny, tiny, tiny – for a flight to Manchester – bigger by a factor of about 1,000 if not more – then a three-hour wait, before catching a plane to Amsterdam in The Netherlands – bigger by a factor of about 10,000 if not more.

Then after queueing for well over an hour to get through passport control – thanks, Brexit – caught a train for a three and a half hour journey to the Dutch-German border where my sister lives. Arrived at just for 11pm knackered (a good old British expression which intends to convey ‘totally fucked’).

At least I got a day off travelling, except that from the Dutch border we were due in Hamburg for 8.3oam so it was up at 5.30am and yet again I hardly slept. What is it with me and travelling. Following the register office ceremony, I slipped off as soon as I decently could from a small gathering for a glass or ten of Sekt in my nephew’s flat to get to a bed as soon as possible, if not sooner.

The wedding itself was the following afternoon at 2am, though one of those new non-religious ceremonies, followed by more Sekt before we all took off by ferry – Hamburg is, I’m sure you know a port, so ships, boats and ferries are a part of daily life – for the wedding feast. Pretty knackered by this time, I like my Sekt, but at least I had only one glass of wine that night.

As luck would have it, the venue was just a five-minute walk where I and my other nephew and nieces were staying with their families, so I was back in bed by 8.30pm in time for the Ireland v Scotland game.

Slept rather better that night, but it was another early start, up at 6.15am to catch a ferry ride to the nearest S-Bahn station to get to Hamburg Airport, not quite as big but still about 1,000 bigger than Newquay.

From Hamburg it was off to Dublin, got there by 11am, then another five-hour wait for the last leg back to Newquay. Home by 5.30pm, and a good night’s sleep. A hell of a schlepp altogether and not one I want to repeat for some time. Mind, my son (based in Bolivia) is knocking around the Middle East at the moment, but then he is bloody 49 years younger than me.

Oh, and a few photos, the last one taken on Sunday morning while I was waiting for my ferry to town.

Pip, pip.

PS The seven little ones, I suppose they might be called my grand-nephews and grand-nieces (though, frankly, I am not really in the picture) had the time of their lives, running riot everywhere, as children should always do. The oldest is five and the youngest two just two.

Me, the complete bastard (and that is not intended as some kind of ironic joke)

Today, on August 29, 1976, thus 47 years ago, I did one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done and about which to this day I feel ashamed.

I was working in the Lincolnshire Chronicle, based in Lincoln – I mention that because its owners, the then Lincolnshire Standard Group, had several papers in different towns and cities in Lincolnshire, including the Lincolnshire Standard which I think became the Boston Standard, the Louth Chronicle, the Sleaford Standard, the Skegness Standard, the Grantham Journal and the Horncastle News; I might be wrong on these, but none now exist.

I had got to know a young girl of 17 – was then 26 – and I got her pregnant. I can’t remember us ‘going out’ for long or even for more than one date. But I got her pregnant. I remember two things when she told me she was pregant: in more or less one and the same breath she said ‘I’m pregnant’ and ‘I’m going to have an abortion’.

The first thing I remembered was being immensely grateful that she had decided to have an abortion and that, crucially, brave old me would not be called upon to make a decision about anything either way.

Secondly, I became aware of a vague feeling that I wasn’t all that keen on abortion. In a sense I’m still not, but I shall say straight out that on the question of ‘pro-choice/pro-life’ I am firmly in the pro-choice camp. This had nothing to do with being brought up a Roman Catholic or anything of that kind for I had long been ‘lapsed’ (or as I see it no longer in thrall). It was just that I did not feel comfortable with the ending of life.

I’m familiar with the arguments pro and con, and frankly I can find fault with both lines of argument. But for me, at the end of the day, a woman has responsibility for and control over her body and thus it is and must always be her choice as to how to proceed.

Incidentally, I also believe that contraception should be available to all and rather dislike the idea a few women seem to have that they can ignore conventional methods of contraception because, hey, there’s always the get-out of having an abortion. However, here is not the place to debate it all.

At the time I was ‘going out with a girl’ from near Henley-on-Thames where I had grown up and where my parents lived. And her birthday was on August 29. The girl I got pregnant had arranged having the abortion herself.

It was to be in Leamington Spa where the British Pregnancy Advisory Service undertook them (I suppose rather giving the lie to being an ‘advisory service’). The operation was also to be on August 29.

Before she had made the arrangement, Annette and I had agreed that I should travel south from Lincoln to Henley to take her out for her birthday. The girl I had made pregnant – whose name I was once able to remember, but can no longer do so – was due to take a train to Leamington, have the pregnancy terminated, then take a train back to Lincoln.

She asked only one thing: would I meet her at Lincoln station when she came back. I said, no I wouldn’t.

I can’t remember whether or not I told here what my plans for that weekend were and being an unthinking, callous cunt I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. But it must have been awful for her.

And to this day every day since, on August 29, I remember my selfishness and callousness, and shudder.

NB That was in 1976. Ten years later I was working as a sub-editor on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff and doing a lot of photography. Relevant to what I write above is this picture of pro-choice protesters and pro-life arrivees at an anti-abortion meeting.

Also relevant is a remark made a few months ago on the radio when the US Republican-heavy Supreme Court made is updated ruling on Roe v Wade allowing states to decide for themselves whether abortion should be legal or not:

They won’t be banning abortion, they will only be banning legal abortion.

That sums it up: women in need – or for whatever reason – who have no recourse to a safe abortion will simply be forced to got to a ‘backstreet’ abortionist, with all the dangers that brings

OFFICIAL Private Eye is slowing dying of respectability: a nation mourns. A warning to all – never, but never, become ‘respectable’

WARNING! THIS ENTRY MIGHT DISTRESS READERS WHO
PRIDE THEMSELVES ON ‘BEING ENLIGHTENED’, ‘HAVING
A SENSE OF HUMOUR’ AND FOR WHOM ‘BEING PART OF
THE CROWD’ IS IMPORTANT.

THIS entry might, and most probably will, mean very little to nothing to most readers from outside the United Kingdom. But - well, OK, fair enough. It’s not my probably but yours, frankly.

Anyone interested in what ‘Private Eye’ might is very welcome pull their finger out (as we say in Britain) and do a bit of digging. Hint: it’s not published by the Vatican.

My reason for publishing it on my blog? I’ve published so very little, many of you might be forgetting what a fabulous guy I am. I really can’t think of a better reason.

Anyone agree with me that under Ian Hislop the Eye had become increasingly dreary, unfunny and rather prim and - whisper it - fucking bloody boring? Hislop’s been there now since 1774 and it shows.

The cartoons rarely raise a laugh (unlike one of my favourites from some years ago: picture a young mustachioed German squaddie standing to attention in a WWI trench while his superior officer informs and even high-ranking officer ‘Sir, the corporal here has a great idea for a sequel’).

Now? Well, as I pointed out a few weeks ago one cartoon about a supposed foreign football player coming to the Premier League had been recycled - I suspect inadvertently - from an earlier PE cartoon whose caption then ran: ‘Ebola coming to Europe? Who’s signed him then?’

I wrote to Lord Gnome about it, but there were, it seemed, too many other and better letters that demanded to be published and mine didn’t make the cut. Nor have several letters I’ve written to the good Lord to tell us in his

‘Number Crunching’ feature how much he rakes in every year - PE salary, HIGNFY, BBC TV documentaries and Radio 4 programmes. His lordship is a tad shy about telling us.

OK, there’s no denying the Eye does a lot of reporting on and uncovering skullduggery in government, in our local authorities, in the City etc, but it’s all a little earnest, all a little too worthy, all a little too ‘well done, Hislop! You’ve won the Founder’s Prize for Zeal, Integrity and Hard Work! Keep it up, lad!’

The Street of Shame was once somewhere where you - we - read about the drunken and appalling (and often funny) shenanigans of folk you knew, almost knew, had heard of, or who were known by people you knew - Fleet Street was and - now metaphorically - is quite narrow These days The Street of Shame is all about ‘how awful and hypocritical and horrid our press barons are!’

Fair enough, but being reminded very fortnight that water is wet doesn’t much do it for me. I know it’s wet, as do all other Eye readers - they were told two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, and a fortnight before that.

Ironically, given that a vital member of ‘the Establishment’ is the anti-Establishment figure, the Eye is very much ‘the Establishment’. I told Lord Gnome that in my letter and reminded him that Punch, once the scourge of the nation in 19th-century Britain eventually died of respectability.

Arise, Sir Ian for ‘services to satire’. The trouble is that in cosy Old Blighty ‘satire’ is nothing more dangerous than being rude to folk. The worst Hislop will face is being snubbed in the Groucho. In Russia, China, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Iran and rather too many other countries engaging in satire can cost earn you a decade or more in jail and if you are unlucky lose you your life.

OK, PE was founded but a gang of privileged public school boys but frankly (though I’m sure we all now realise that ‘background’, ‘heritage’, colour, class, religion and to which side you dress have no bearing on you a person *).

And going by the ads at the front and rear of the mag in some ways not much has changed - ‘No Ordinary Reading Light’ - ergonomically designed on the outside, inside it’s one of the most advance reading lights in the world’ And yours for just £249.99 for the HD Table Light or £299.99 for the Floor Light!

What’s wrong with Argos’ Home Morlie Floor Lamp - Matt Black , yours for just £30? Nothing, except it doesn’t impress Jules and Simon next door half as much as telling them you’ve blown £249.99 on an ergonomically designed most advance light.

Now I feel a headache coming on and must go and lie down with a soothing glass of Campari and tonic.

* I shall though, admit, that I am still defeated by the undeniably true statistic that a disproportionately high number of men and women in our ‘top jobs’ were privately educated compared to the number who were not. And there has to be a reason (though it was fuck all use for me, I have to add).