Want a successful career (and not just on a newspaper)? Just say Yes

This picture (below) appears on page 27 of the Daily Mail on Monday, August 30, 2010. When a similar picture was lying around the picture desk here at the Mail several years ago, I was tempted to stick it on one of the columns here in the office and add a particular caption. Wisely, I thought better of it. Although many individuals at the Mail have a very good sense of humour, there comes a point where that sense of humour tends to fail, and given the caption I planned to add to the picture, such a failure was a racing certainty. (In fact, more than a racing certainty, because many such ‘certainties’ in racing are nothing of the kind.)

When the picture below appeared this morning, the opportunity is proving to great to miss given that I can publish it here in my blog where the chances of discovery and a consequent sense of humour failure in Northcliffe House are pretty low.



'Yes, Paul'
My caption will be rather obscure to many, but my sense of self-preservation obliges me not to elucidate, even though few, if any, read this blog. For greater impact, the reader would be best advised to substitute the name of his or her boss.

I should add that I hold a minority view of the chap in question. Those higher up the food chain are often subjected by him to frequent and profane invective, whereas I am of such sheer insignificance here in Northcliffe House that such bollockings blow right over my head. On such occasions it is reassuring to belong to the rank and file.

Understandably, senior and junior execs are inclined to be less than charitable about their boss, and no one can be quite as bitchy as male journalist. On the other hand, I think this guy, who is a tall chap, is essentiallty rather shy, and very private who does not like the limelight. Furthermore, I suspect that he is a very good and loyal friend to those he regards as his true friends. And from where I sit - i.e. as someone not exactly in the loop - there doesn't seem to be any side to him, which, for a newspaperman is nigh-on unique. If, on occasion, he stamps his foot - once quite literally - to get things as he wants, it has to be said that his insistence on getting things spot on in the way he thinks is spot on most certainly plays a significant role in the Mail's undoubted success.)

There’s one born every minute (more or less)

I’ve just been reading that ‘a star with two Saturn-sized planets’ has been spotted by the US planet-hunting’ Kepler telescope and that scientists are seeing whether there might be a third ‘earth-sized’ planet also in orbit. (The Kepler telescope, incidentally, was named after the Southend-on-Sea turf accountant (‘bookie’) Jeremy Kepler, who put up most of the money for its development, and not, as you might have thought Johannes Kepler, the 16th-century German mathematician and astronomer, an account of whose life you will find here.)
Fair enough. As a lad now in his late 90s who was brought up on Dan Dare and the Mekons, the mere mention of extraterrestial life is enough to get my pulse racing. But it also reminds me of several oddities which always occur when we discuss ‘intelligent life elsewhere in the universe’. But before I launch into tonight’s diatribe (or this morning’s if, like Olly, you live in New Zealand), I must confess that I find it inconceivable that life, in some form or another, has not also evolved elsewhere in the universe.
This afternoon, on Radio 4’s Material World in a piece about black holes and magnetic stars, I heard that there are something like 100 million stars in every galaxy (with most stars having about it several planets) and that there are several billion galaxies in the universe. Well, do the maths and tell me that ‘life on Earth is unique’. If it is, then in 1966 I was the only teenage alive who thought that existence was shit and unfair, and that all I wanted to do with my life was to make fun of it so that it retreated into its cave red-faced, defeated and full of shame. Such was the scorn of my anger.
When there is talk of ‘intelligent life elsewhere in the universe’ — and future generations will fervently hope that whatever ‘life’ they do come across is ‘intelligent’, because there will otherwise be precious little opportunity to engage in trade with ‘unintelligent’ algae or what an Alpha Censorius takes the place of algae — we always seem to make the same assumptions. On the one hand that we assume that when extraterrestrials do finally spot Earth and decide it might be worth a stopover, they will always ‘come in peace’ (‘We come in peace’). And if peace is rather further from their minds than is laid down by some UN charter or other, that they are always unbelievably ferocious bastards who merely want to rape our women, steal our cattle and then destroy what’s left of Earth’s ‘civilisation’.
Now why do why think either must be the case? Why do we think that the ‘aliens’, the ‘extraterrestrials’, who make it to Earth — and who have presumably survived the vicious interrogation all aliens are subjected to by US Immigration when they arrive — are the sole representatives of their civilisations? When, finally, the US and, a little later, Russia, land four or five of their chaps on Mars (and sorry, girls, but you know as well as I do that it will initially be chaps), did they really consult Sri Lank and Venezuela and Canada and Georgia and Mongolia and Namibia before launch as to what the best approach might be if and when ‘natives’ are encountered? And what exactly will the US’s/Russia’s Mars visitors do if and when they are regarded by that planet’s suspicious natives as invaders and treated accordingly? Will they loudly proclaim in one voice and with renewed vigour repeat the declaration that ‘we come in peace’? Or will they shoot back when they are attacked? For if it is the US rather than Russia which first gets to set its foot on alien soil and which, subsequently, is the first to be made aware that it is not quite as welcome as it thought it might be, will it treat the indigenous populations of Mars and the other distant planets it visits as it treated the indigenous population if America when it first set its dainty foot on the sands of Cape Cod? Most recent reckonings estimate and accept that more than two million Native Americans succumbed as the ‘white man’ who ‘came in peace’ chose to impose his authority on ‘the savage’ in the 200 years which followed his arrival.
And why do we assume that ‘alien’ civilisations aren’t equally as riven by rivalries and paralysed by bureaucracies as the Earth’s ‘civilisation’ is? Why do we assume that the spacecraft which has recently arrived on Earth from Alpha Zeta Beta Phito II (and if it has arrived on British soil, preferably not on a weekend) speaks with one voice for the peoples of Alpha Zeta Beta Phito II? And if the ‘civilisation’ which lands its fleet of UFOs at Cape Cod at some point in the future does speak with one voice, it would be safe to assume that that one voice speaks uniquely for an authoritarian system which will brook no dissent. And thus it is unlikely ‘to come in peace’. Earlier today I read an account of the problem India and China face over deciding on the line of their mutual frontier (although they both might not regard it as a ‘problem’ but, at best, more as an ‘irritation’.) That rather puts our future concerns of how to treat visiting aliens into perspective. Will, it be: ‘OK, your Zorgon bastards, you can have Solihull and Kings Heath, but that’s it, OK, understand? You step one foot — one foot! — north of Mosley and it’s curtains. Savvy?’ I think it was something like that the Patuxet told the Pilgrim Fathers in 1622. Something like that. For all the good it did them.
Alien invasion? Bring it on! We’ll show the bastards.

Hate mail in the shires or why it’s wisest to take nothing for granted, not even good manners among the self-regarding middle-class great and good

The following is a true story. I don’t know whether it’s funny or sad, and I hope it doesn’t embarrass the chap involved. I work with him, and although I don’t know him well — he is an acquaintance from work rather than a friend — he is a nice, decent guy, the sort you (or, at least, I) always wish well rather than not.
This chap, Mark, is unusual among national newspaper journalists because although he is a freelance, he works in several executive capacities on different newspapers, and he does so on the Mail, where I got to know him. Most ‘freelancers’ are writers who are in the loop and can make a reasonably good living from their work. Other ‘freelancers’ are, like me, casuals who (in my view) only call themselves ‘freelancers’ because they think it might impress others a little. In fact, they are, like me, ‘hacks’ in the truest sense of the word, i.e. subs or writers hired by the day, journeymen. But Mark is in a rather more rarefied league, that of the true freelancers. I believe there is family money in the background, and I’m pretty certain he was educated privately. That family money might account for the fact that although he lives in London, he also owns a weekend cottage in Wiltshire. On the other hand, and knowing the range of his work and where it pops up, it is perfectly possible that Mark makes a very, very good living from his freelance journalism and that it is his sole income.
As I say, I know him from the Mail, but a month or two ago when I was staying with my aunt in Bordeaux, I came across a copy of The Spectator in which Mark had written a piece. The Spectator (‘The Speccy’ to those who like to indicate that they are somehow in the know) is not a magazine I ever buy and not one I read at all regularly. Ann, my aunt, a retired university teacher, gets it from a friend and former colleague who passes it on once she has read it. For me the trouble with The Specator is that it is eternally preaching to the converted, it always seems to be bemoaning ‘modern life’, it’s politics are always wholly predictable, and it has about it a rather stand-offish air which says ‘if you’re not one of us, you’re not worth bothering with’. (On the other hand, that might be my hang-up. Discuss.)
However, one evening, I picked up a recent copy and, flicking through it, came across a piece by a ‘Mark Palmer’. ‘Is that the same Mark Palmer I know,’ I wondered. The piece was headlined Social Pariah In The Shires and you can read the piece here, but briefly it is about how he and his family bought a weekend cottage in Wiltshire and where he hoped lead a pleasant weekend existence and build up a circle of friends, but for some reason was never accepted. He was invited to early evening drinks where he was introduced to the rest of that village’s great and good, where, a friend later assured him, he will have been given the once over but that village’s leading lights. Appartently, he didn’t pass muster, because no more invitations followed.
It is a readable, amusing and entertaining piece, though rather wistful. But after I read it, I did think to myself that Mark was making of himself something of a hostage to fortune by publicising the goings on, or rather lack of them, in that Wiltshire village.
Once back at work and when I was in (he only works at the Mail for three days a week, and our working weeks only coincide on Wednesdays), I asked him whether he was the same Mark Palmer. He said he was. So I told him what I have recorded above, that surely he was making of himself a hostage to fortune and that given their rather unwelcoming nature, some in the village would have been none to pleased to see it publicised in the oh-so-middle-class ‘Speccy’ which, even if they don’t actually read it, many in the village will have lying around the living room hoping friends and visitors will notice it and be impressed. What had been the reaction? I asked him. Oh, he said, they weren’t very pleased at all. In fact, he added, he had even had hate mail.
I started this piece by stating that I didn’t know whether the conclusion to this anecdote was funny or sad. I now know: it is not in the slightest bit funny, and it is more than sad. I am certain that the authors of that hate mail would be the first to lecture others on courtesy, manners, the ‘kind of thing one doesn’t do’ and generally how a well-brought up chap should behave. So not only are they pretentious, they are also nauseatingly hypocritical.
It makes me think that the plots of Midsomer Murders aren’t quite as far-fetched as I thought.

God, no more, no less. Though there's rather less here than you might expect

I live around ten miles from St Endellion church (I don’t think there is a village) which, for the past 30 years or so has held two music festivals a year, one at Easter and on at the end of July and beginning of August. For the past few years I have attended many concerts and enjoyed all of them. The standard is very high indeed and the musicians and singers who take part are all professionals who perform unpaid for the sheer pleasure of taking part. (Or that, at least, is the official line, though I have no reason to doubt it.) The whole event, from the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of chairs to the long queues which form during the intervals outside the portable loos, one for men, one for women, is, as you’ll have no difficulty at all in accepting, irredeemably middle-class. Of the concert-goers, as opposed to the performers, none is obviously under 40 and the majority are at least over 60. Everyone dressess badly, or if not badly, then dowdily in the way the English middle-class has made its own. Many of the men turn up in cream-coloured trousers and a navy-blue top of some kind - a blazer, Guernsey sweater or shirt - and are more often than not white-haired. If they are not white-haired, they are bald. Other men will appear in a variety of tweedy materials and old pullovers, but however shabby they are, they are usually better dressed than the women who have apparently all given some thought to what outfit they will wear. (I enjoy the music, but it is always something of a downer to find myself in the company of other ageing middle-class folk and be reminded that I, too, have white hair and will never in a million years dress elegantly.)
Over the years I have heard the St Matthew Passion, a piece by Ravel which I liked so much that I immediately bought it on CD, Walton, Vivaldi, Vaughan-Williams — in fact all the composers whose work usually features on such occasions. Composers such as Stravinsky, Barber, Rachmaninov and Scriabin, for example, would not have a snowball’s chance in hell of being performed. At the end of the festival, there is always a mass celebrated by a variety of clergy led by the Bishop of Truro and it is as high church as it is possible to be without being arrested. (I was brought up an RC, and until that gang began holding their services in English, this was the kind of service I attended: loads of incense.) There is always a liberal abundance of female clergy (and the joke is intended), and the whole affair has about it that air of cosiness which I abhor. I have attended the end-of-festival mass twice, last year and again yesterday morning, and I shan’t be doing so again. On both occasions I went for ‘the music’ and on both occasions ‘the music’ was nothing special at all. As for the ‘worship’, well yesterday I realised yet again that it is as much a load of mumbo-jumbo as any voodoo ceremony in Haiti. But having said that, I shall say something unexpected: as far as I can tell, it is mumbo-jumbo which is very necessary to a great many people.
Despite all the pious seriousness and never-ending series of clerical intonations, there is no denying that those who took part in the ceremony and the very many who took communion are completely sincere. And it reminded me again that it is not what is believed which is vital, but the believing itself.
Beliefs vary widely. Christians believe that their saviour, Jesus Christ is divine and was born of a virgin. I think that both beliefs are complete cobblers. Shi-ite Muslims, or, at least, a vast majority of them, believe that the 12th Imam didn’t die, but is still alive (which would make the chap more than 1,000 years old) and on Judgment Day (their capitals, not mine) will reappear rather as Christians believe Christ will reappear. I think that, too, is cobblers. Yet if someone were to ask me the simple question: do you believe in God, I would answer immediately and truthfully ‘yes, I do’. But I would leave it at that. I would avoid all and every attempt to get me to elucidate and do my best to change the subject. I believe with David Hume that ‘man created God in his own image’, and I am reminded of that every time some bloody sky-pilot begins a sentence with ‘God wants us to . . .’
The God I believe in — and to give you some idea of the complexity of my belief, I think it is outright nonsense even to debate ‘the existence of God’ — has more to do with what I believe is humanism than any religion I know of, and the Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Uncle Tom Cobley and all would have none of that. Furthermore, I suspect belief, faith, call it what you like, is more a psychological facet of humankind than it is intellectual. I suspect we need to believe just as much as we need to eat and drink, although a lack of belief will not actually kill you. There are those, who ironically regard themselves as atheist, who have an all-consuming belief, a faith even, in some ideology. To me they don't seem very different to the 'believers' they decry.
The Anglican Church and the Roman Church are, I believe, going through their death throes, tearing themselves apart over, for the Anglicans, the wholly irrelevant question of whether or not women should be consecrated as bishops, for the Romans exactly what was going on when for years and years and years the activities of various paedophile priests was simply ignored as the the most convenient way of ‘solving the problem’. But those are institutional issues, difficulties facing those churches as bureaucratic entities. They have nothing to do with the 'faith' those churches have nominated themselves to purvey.
I suspect that in 200, 500 and 1,000 time people will ‘believe in God’, have ‘faith’ and ‘worship’, for the very simple reason that they need to. When we are suffering we like to hope that at some point it will end and we ‘pray’ that it will end. As far as I can see, that does not imply a ‘loving God’, a God who has ordained that women should not be/should be priests or bishops. Every Sunday morning, driving either to Exeter station or all the way to work in London, I tune in to a Radio 4 programme called Sunday. And usually there will be some cleric pronoucning that ‘God would want us to do this’, ‘God would want us to do that’, ‘God says this’, ‘God says that’, and each time I think: how the bloody hell do you know?
Yes, I ‘believe in God’, but what do I think ‘God is’? I think it is all the good things around us, the kindnesses people show each other, I think it is hope, altruism, co-operation. It (note not ‘he’ or ‘she’) is selflessness, modesty, consideration for others — you get the drift. Incidentally, I am always utterly bemused by the zealotry of some ‘atheists’ who will not rest until they have proved ‘a believer’ wrong. Surely if God doesn’t exist, they are simply wasting their time? As Oscar Wilde once said, although admittedly in a different context: ‘Violent antipathy betrays secret affinity.’

Alfred Duggan, Evelyn Waugh and Bohemond, and why I should, perhaps, keep my mouth shut: a meditation on wisdom and stupidity

I came across a claim today that in mid-life our brains undergo some kind of expansion and that is why we are, in our dotage, rather wiser than we were in our salad days. Well, I take that with a pinch of salt, and I advise you to do so, too. I’m not suggesting we are do not become ‘wiser’ — I suspect we do. But I rather feel 'wisdom' is overblown, that in a sense it is sailing under false clours and has done so for quite some time.

As far as I am concerned, ‘wisdom’ is nothing special and we should stop bowing and scraping and worshipping at its altar. ‘Wisdom’ vaguely implies a greater intelligence, better judgment, and to call someone wise is, in some way, to praise them. Well, might I piss on this particular parade and suggest that were we to call each other ‘rather less stupid’ than ‘rather wise’, we are getting a little closer to what wisdom is?

Let me offer some examples of ‘wise’ behaviour: not picking a fight with someone who is stronger than you and, if he — or even
she — were so inclined, could beat the living shit out of you. I’ll put that a little more genteelly for our ‘civilised’ age: not taking someone to court who would be able to hire better lawyers. It would be regarded as ‘wise’ not to spend more money than you actually have, or not to take out a loan you have no chance of paying off. (Pictured: man who has done just that.) It would be regarded as ‘wise’ not to start an affair with a neurotic woman who can’t keep her mouth shut.

But let me put all those another way, and you might see what I am getting at: it would be regarded as ‘downright stupid’ to pick a fight with someone stronger than you, to take to court someone who can afford far better lawyers, to spend money you don’t have and will never have, and to nob the local loudmouth lush. So if I think that, on balance, I am a little wiser at 60 than I was at 20, 30, 40 or even 50, please understand it to mean that I do consciously try to learn from my many mistakes and like to think I’m not quite as bloody stupid as all too often I proved myself to be. (Anyone who doesn’t learn from his or her mistakes deserves all the misery which will undoubtedly come his or her way.)

All that is a rather long-winded preamble to the point of this entry: when a writer is largely regarded as ‘good’, ‘wonderful’, ‘magnificent’, ‘magical’ or ‘inspired’ and is generally showered with any of the many luvvie phrases without which no self-respecting literary discussion can dare be without, it would seem ‘unwise’ — I use the term instead of its synonym ‘stupid’ — to disagree. Well, I am forced to disagree: there are quite a few writers who aren’t what they are cracked up to be. At this point, others are fully entitled to ask ‘and what makes you qualified to make that claim?’ Well, I do make that claim: I think D H Lawrence has his moments, but he eventually went off the boil. And the writer who sparked this particular entry is a chap called Alfred Duggan.

Duggan was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh’s at Oxford and, like Waugh, was something of a waster. Unlike Waugh, his family had money and he could afford to be a waster. He is thought to be one of Waugh’s louche Oxford friends on whom Sebastian Flyte was based. Duggan did very little with his life except spend his wealthy stepfather’s money until there was none left. He then turned to writing and wrote a number of novels based in the medieval era for which he did a lot of background reading and which are thus said to be quite accurate.

I came across Duggan at school when his Knight With Armour about the Crusades was a set text. I remember enjoying it, but apart from remembering that its protagonist died a miserable death long before reaching the Holy Land, nothing at all remains with me. But while on holiday in France recently, I read The First Crusade by Thomas Asbridge. I can wholly recommend that book for its straightforward and clear prose and Asbridge’s gift for explaining complex motivation. Subsequently, I became more interested in the Crusades (of which, I was very surprised to find out, there were nine in total) and googled for more books on the subject. And that is how I came across Duggan’s Count Bohemond, the story of an Italian Norman warlord and a major player in the First Crusade who laid claim to the fortress of Antioch and whose descendants held if for almost another 200 years.

I bought the book and am now reading it. Before I started reading it, I was encouraged by the forward by no less than Evelyn Waugh himself, a hero of mine, an honour he shares with Ray Davies, of the Kinks, and Homer Simpson. Waugh is hugely taken by the book and wrote that it is ‘lucid and masterly, absolutely free of affectation or ostentation’. That, as far as it goes, is true, but unfortunately it doesn’t go very far. What Waugh doesn’t say is that the novel lacks atmosphere and excitement, and if writing is more than jostling together a series of words grammatically and elegantly — which it undoubtedly is — the novel is simply not very well written.

The reader, or rather this reader, gets absolutely no sense at all of the First Crusade — there were something like 200,000 or more knights, pilgrims, foot soldiers and on or more underway — or the life they led. What Duggan has produced is a series of rather stilted, though informative, conversations between two men, one of whom is always our eponymous hero. And the novel is nothing but a progression from one conversation to the next. Some writers can convey sight, smells and sounds. Duggan can’t. His novel is simply badly written.

So what does this have to do with being wise? That’s quite simple: I have written little and published nothing, and whatever I do write in the future could well turn out to be utter garbage. So wouldn’t is be wiser for me to keep quiet rather than shoot my mouth off? Answers, please, on a postcard or in an email.

Hypochondriac*, nutter or neither? (*Wish someone had told me I'd spelled it wrong the first time round)

I have acquired my own digital blood pressure monitor, and the answer to the question in the title to this blog entry – hypochondriac, nutter or neither? – is ‘neither’. After my experience with statins, I am now trying to do something about avoiding the side effects of a blood-thinning, blood pressure lowering, all-singing and all-dancing drug called Ramipril.
Incidentally, after coming off – taking myself off – statins last September, my body recovered very quickly and quite dramatically. I no longer needed advance warning of having to bend down (and that is only a slight exaggeration), my limbs were no longer weak and I generally stopped feeling like some eightysomething on his death-bed. However, about six weeks ago, my GP (‘doctor’ for American readers) persuaded me that as there was ‘evidence for’ secondary benefits of taking statins, I should try again. I finally agreed only on condition I would be on the lowest possible dose. So he put me on one at 5mg. I later discovered it was a new version and regarded as a super-statin. And anyway, the same happened and my body reacted as it had done before. So I’ve come off them again – it’s been almost two weeks – and feel a lot better.
The purpose of getting a blood pressure monitor is to allow me, perhaps, to come off Ramipril, one of whose side-effects is eternal tiredness. The plan is to monitor my blood pressure for a few weeks by taking it every morning at the same time, then come off the drug and see whether my blood pressure goes up. If it doesn’t, I’ll stay off Ramipril. If it does, well . . . I’ll do the sensible thing and go back on and put up with this bloody tiredness.
The daft thing is, of course, that if I do have a second heart attack and it comes out that I stopped taking the ‘preventative medication’, it will be my fault. But were I to continue to take the medication but still suffer a second heart attack, it would be a case of ‘well, nothing's guaranteed’.

Message to Kate

Hi Kate, I am on a different iBook and don't seem to have your email address with me. I have just got back from London and was trying out a cheap webcam I bought rather than use my camcorder. It works fine except that the software keeps crashing and I am now downloading an alternative. Send me your email address again. Patrick

Well, there's this for those bored enough to like this sort of thing (obviously me, for one), but the trouble is I stumble through the whole process and despite apparently succeeding, I don't have a clue as to how I managed it. I think the true measure, or rather and essential measure of real success is 'repeatability' - if you can't do it again, IT was a fluke and YOU are a bullshitter. NB You have to click the small arrow to get the picture to move. If you only see a still picture of a corner of my kitchen, you're as stupid as I am.

Watch live video from pfgpowell on Justin.tv

Welcome to Cornwall, home of the gratuitous diatribe by disaffected sixtysomethings

The obscure website to which I subscribe which claims to ‘monitor’ traffic to this blog — and I don’t even begin to understand how it works or why it even exists — tells me that I had a recent visitor who arrived here after following up links to ‘Cornwall’. Well, Lord knows what he or she made of this blog. The most recent entry is merely and unshamed plug for my novel (should that be ‘novel’) which, I am sure, will have fallen on deaf ears, and the entry before that was a bad-tempered outburst about ‘hacks’ and quite how awful they are (for which I make no apology: two days ago, I bought Private Eye. The former Mail news editor who has recently been promoted to assistant editor and now sits on the features desk (and who is otherwise rather a good egg) borrowed it to read. When I got it back, I discovered he had come across a story he wanted the Mail to follow up and had simply ripped out a page. Now call me old-fashioned, but I find that quite a bizarre thing to do. To his credit he replaced my copy with the copy the news editor gets and apologised profusely. But it was a paradigm of the kind of thing which goes on among hacks.
But my visitor, in search of references to all things Cornish will surely have wondered what the bloody hell my diatribe against hacks has to do with Cornwall, Kernow, tin, tourism, obesity, teenage pregnancy, poor housing, retired diplomats, non-Cornish in twee pixie hats trying to flow you tat in the resorts on the south coast, scruffy ‘museums’ claiming to prove that King Arthur’s Camelot was just north of Camelford (motto: ‘never let a chance nominal resemblance go to waste and screw the public for all its worth’, though to be fair there are the remains of a castle — though admittedly not a lot — at Tintagel which is said to have been the home of Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon and where Arthur was born), and generally loads of Brummy, Lancshire and London immigrants trying to cobble together a living.
Cornwall is one of those places which sounds romantic from afar but which turns out to be something quite different once you get here. Newquay, for example, is a hole, full of drunken teens pissing away their welfare payments. Lord, this is turning into yet another diatribe. Must spend the rest of the day pretending I am not over 60.
PS For those who are interested, I am taking Pottery, my stepmother’s 19-year-old cat to the vet’s to have his bandage replaced. He recently had a cyst removed.
Have a nice day.

Hello again, and please buy my novel because no one else is. Pearls before swine? Or just another piece of cack?

Not posted anything here for a while, and I don’t know why not. There’s no particular reason, it’s just that from scribbling here about once a day, I went to writing nothing at all. It’s not that there is nothing to write about, and it’s not that when I was writing I had anything particularly interesting to say. In fact, in an odd sort of way the satisfaction of periodically posting this blog didn’t come from having got something down on paper (so to speak - quaint phrase that, odd to use it here in the digital age) but in the getting it down. I’m not a writer but a talker. It’s that activity which I enjoy, shallow as it might be. To put it another way, there’s less to me than meets the eye. Why all this? Well, I’ve just been watching a film called I’m Not There, a rather unusual biography of Bob Dylan. I haven’t actually finished it yet, because it is over two hours long and I don’t really want a late night. It is one of those films which, for no obvious reason, holds your interest although you cannot make head of tail of it. We often think that ‘the message’ is the thing, but films such as I’m Not There prove us wrong. You cannot fake engagement. You can lie about it to others, but you can’t lie about it to yourself. If you are engaged but you don’t know why, it doesn’t matter: what is important is that you are engaged. When I visit an art gallery, I walk around it quickly, looking at all the paintings on show, and then I walk around it again more slowly and find that some works hold my attention for longer than others. I don’t know why that should be so, and I’m not going to go off at some bullshit tangent speculating as to why that is so. The only important point is that it is so: some works hold my attention for longer than others. So when it comes to writing, I have nothing to say at all. It is the saying I want to make interesting. That is why I am disappointed by the various reactions to Letters Never Sent (latterly retitled Love: A Fiction and available to buy here or alternatively here) because no one, but no one ‘got it’. What I attempted to do, and what I feel I succeeded in doing, was very straightforward. And because it was (is) my first novel and I didn’t really have the confidence of an experienced writer, I larded it with any number of clues as to what was going on hoping that readers would cotton on. But no one, but no one, ‘got it’, so the inescapable conclusion, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that it isn’t as well written as it might have been. Even the new title - Love: A Fiction - which is intended to work on three levels (three rather simple levels at that - I’m not at all trying to be clever-clever) is a giveaway. Oh well.