And another thing

Travels

2011-11-26T14:33:00.003Z

Illuminated fish parade in Durham

No blogging for a while because we’ve been travelling. When Lois was a student at St Andrews, she did a trip around Scotland on a bike and envied people in campervans. So, we did the trip in our new van. We also took in the Lumiére in Durham on the way.

The Lumiére was fascinating, I hesitate to say illuminating, because most of the time I had no idea what was going on or why. For example, a parade of children walks through the streets each child holding illuminated fish, made of paper maché. The fish are about 2 or 3 feet long and on sticks so they appear to float above the crowd. An enormous Heron, similarly illuminated, leads them. Why would fish be led by a Heron? Don’t Herons eat fish? Or has someone just discovered that Herons are now into fish farming? Anyway, it filled the street with a massive crowd all saying oooh and aaah. If you get enough kids from enough schools taking part, I guess you are guaranteed a big crowd of parents, aunties, uncles and other associates. I loved the huge perspex bubble over the statue. Filled with polystyrene balls and fans it made a snowstorm, like those little models you turn upside down.

One thing I did notice was the body mass of the people in the crowd. Mostly they look thin and fit. Durham centre is largely pedestrianised and full of steep hills that everyone must walk up and down to get anywhere at all. Have they solved the obesity crisis by getting everyone to take more exercise? It ought to be possible to compare obesity in hilly towns with flat ones. Someone should get onto it.

Throughout the town there are fixed displays, often exploiting reflections from the river that winds through Durham. Other features light up ancient buildings in novel ways, sometimes telling stories, sometimes just making ancient beauty visible. I found it hard to take good pictures because there were so many people milling around that it was very difficult to get a clear view of anything.

After Durham, we set off north, hoping to find a service station to park at overnight. Unfortunately, we missed the last one on the A1 because the car park signs were confusing and we rapidly found ourselves in a position where there was no way back. A 23foot motorhome is not an HGV, not a coach and not a car or a caravan, so sometimes, particularly in the dark, it can be hard to guess where they want you to park.

Lois doing her own breakfast

Further north we found the road closed, with diversion signs. Very diverting, in that we spent the next hour in low gears winding and zig-zagging around parts of Northumberland, gradually running low on fuel and wondering what sort of maze we had stumbled into. We eventually emerged onto the A68 and found a lay bye with a sign that implied that there would be a snack truck during the daytime. We took that as an indication that it might be OK to park for the night slept. In due course, I had breakfast served by Sally who provides meals to truckers every day from 7am until 2pm. Such roadside meals are awash with gluten, so Lois ate in the van.

Sunrise on the A68

The truckers told us there was a fuel station a few miles south, so we went back that way. Unfortunately, the crucial sign giving directions was almost invisible behind a mass of foliage and we ended up on the A69 going east. As luck would have it, we had enough fuel to get into Newcastle, so filled up and spent the morning at the Sage centre and the Baltic Gallery.

The Baltic had an exhibition of the Turner Prize contestants. I’ve looked at many Turner exhibits over the years but this one did the least for me that I can remember. OK so it’s good to give one’s scoffing muscles a work out from time to time, but fortunately, there were another exhibits in the Baltic, and they were more fun, as was the graffiti on the walls outside.

The most northerly surf beach on mainland UK

From Newcastle, we went to Aviemore, too soon for snow, but a good chance to check things out. The next day we headed on north until we could get no further.

Along the way we started getting messages that there had been progress on the house selling front so headed home rather than on around the north and west of Scotland.

We came down through the Great Glen, not seeing any monsters on Loch Ness, went through Glen Coe, around Loch Lomond through the traffic in Glasgow and down the M6.

Reflections on the Michael Jackson case

2011-11-10T09:09:00.000Z

I'm not surprised that the jury found Micheal Jackson's doctor guilty. Using a drug that is pretty much a general anaesthetic, as a sleeping aid, always seemed unwise. The pity of the whole thing is that there has been little exploration of the deeper issues. I suspect that if the doctor had refused to use this drug, or something similar, then he would simply have been fired. Very rich people, who live in a bubble to protect them selves from the downside of their celebrity, have an inevitable tendency to surround themselves with yes men. There are probably yes women involved as well; I don't want my use of the cliché to be sexist.

This is not just true of pop stars or tycoons in general; politicians suffer the same problem. When you are in a position of power, it is most important to surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth, whether or not it is uncomfortable. The Jackson trial at least does all the underdogs in that situation a favour. We can at least imagine a conversation where the next Dr Murray says, "No I won't give you that drug. Look at it this way, if I do, I might get four years, but you will be dead. Your choice."

Of course Dr Murray may have factored all that into his calculation, maybe he figured he would be fired before he accidentally killed Micheal Jackson. Maybe he figured that if he got four years, probably out in two for good behaviour, then he was still being paid pretty well on average, plus of course he will have plenty of time in prison to write the book and that will bring in a dollar or two.

OK I am lapsing into cynicism, it seems that Dr Murray is actually being foolish enough to spend some of his hard earned money on appealing. If he is not careful the lawyers will have all his money before he even gets the book written. It would be better to blame Jackson and announce to the world that he is sorry that he succumbed to the pressure of the money, the celebrity and everything else. Substantial parts of the media still call Micheal Jackson, "Wacko Jacko". There must be an argument for Murray along the lines of, "you have no idea how crazy it was, I regret that I was sucked into it all, I should have been stronger, I cared for him a great deal, I thought that if I quit then he would just hire someone less competent who would be persuaded to take even bigger risks, I'm sadder and wiser now." Something along those lines would probably get him back on the medical register. Maybe he should retrain as a psychiatrist.

Despite that, Dr Murray does deserve a lot of what has befallen him, because one way or another he brought some of this on himself. It doesn't matter exactly what happened. I remember the professor of anaesthetics saying to us "Once you give patients these drugs you have taken over responsibility for keeping them alive." Murray either never had that lecture, or he forgot. Whether Jackson in a semi comatose condition took some extra drug, or whether Murray gave too much, does not matter. Anyone using a drug that powerful, takes on a responsibility to make sure that nothing goes wrong. That means continuously monitoring what happens. Murray’s defence was futile; by admitting that he was not in the room, he had effectively admitted guilt. If the right level of observation had been in place then Jackson could not have given himself more of the drug. Equally, if proper monitoring had been in place someone would have seen that Jackson had stopped breathing and done something about it.

The trial had to focus on what happened and who was to blame, but trials can sometimes ask the wrong question. If we ask instead "What would it have taken for this not to happen?" we get a very different answer. I am paraphrasing that question from something that was said to me by a man who investigated airplane crashes. I think it is a very powerful question because it tends to focus on learning and solutions rather than blame.

What would it have taken? It needed a doctor who could stand up to Michael Jackson's foolish demands. Someone who would not use a general anaesthetic as a sleeping pill. Of course if he had had such a doctor Jackson might well have fired him. It would take someone who not only stood up to Jackson, but also managed to do so in such a way that he wasn’t fired.

It is tough for an individual doctor in such circumstances, do you quit, or get fired, knowing that your patient may well take even bigger risks with a new doctor; or do you soldier on trying to walk the line between safe practice and not getting fired. This is only really a problem in private practice. In an institution, like the NHS, or a large hospital, an individual doctor could appeal to higher authority, to someone not connected with the individual case, who could impart wisdom and insist on sensible practice. This sort of system is called clinical governance, and that was what was lacking in Dr Murray’s case. He was accountable to no one, and supervised by no one, until the court case.

Politicians and the media often rail against medical institutions and make it seem as though an individual private doctor is the top of the range as far as care goes. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but unless you are sure you can tell the difference, no matter how rich you are, you are safer with a system or an institution.

Snuff, Terry Pratchett and literature

2011-10-21T18:51:00.000+01:00

My blogging has been curtailed this last two weeks because, first Lois, and then me, have been struck by a virus that likes to camp out in your sinuses and generally make life miserable. If that wasn’t enough, we have also had the decorator in. The combination of inflamed nasal passages and assault by strange paint fumes definitely subdues the creative urge.

To the rescue comes Terry Pratchett in the form a new novel, “Snuff”. As it happens I accidentally ordered the audio book rather than the hardback, or possibly Amazon accidentally sent me that version. Either way it is something of a godsend because reading with your sinuses blocked and your eyes streaming is no fun.

I can’t as yet make any sort of proper critical assessment of the story, because the disadvantage of the audio book is that it is easy to fall asleep while it is playing, especially if you have your eyes closed. No one has yet made the Iphone app that stops the playback when the listener starts snoring. How hard can it be? This means that despite listening to ‘Snuff ‘on and off for four or five days I have still not heard it from end to end in sequence.

Whilst this is unusual, it has some advantages. Losing the plot makes one notice the actual writing, the turns of phrase, gems of description and so on. This should come as no surprise I guess, because every creative writing class I’ve attended always dealt with extracts of books when discussing technique and style. It is all too easy to dismiss Terry Pratchett as a rather successful comedy fantasy writer who has been very prolific and generated many fans, but because the books are full of Trolls, Dwarfs, Dragons, and in this case Goblins, they are somehow not literature.

This is nonsense and most probably a temporary position in the long evolution of the subject. No one suggests that Gulliver's Travels is some sort of silly fantasy novel, not to be taken seriously. Gulliver visited imaginary lands with imaginary species, not quite the disc world, but not a lot different. Orwell's Animal Farm sets the book on what is presumed to be Earth, but the animals talk and behave in ways that we know animals do not. Again, this is not widely regarded as a trivial book. Alice in Wonderland and its sequel are sometimes thought of as children's books, but never dismissed as trivial.

What do these authors do? They set up an invented world in order to focus on the relationships and scenarios between the key players. The dialogue and management of situations is used to get the messages across. What does Pratchett do? He sets his books on an imaginary world where the play of situations and characters makes the point. On top of that, he manages to produce endearing characters with whom vast audiences have an emotional attachment and hence has created a market for sequel after sequel. In his books, he tackles issues such as class prejudice, racism, misuse of power, foolish management, and many others. He addresses the human condition, both individually and as human societies. On top of that, he writes astonishingly well, and he is funny; maybe that's a crime to the literati, though that accusation is not levelled at Swift or Carroll.

Pratchett is often very economical in his use of words, capturing the essence of a scene simply by triggering the imagination of the reader. "Miss Beadle led the way into a room in which chintz played a major part." Do you need an elaborate description of the room in order to have a picture of the room in your mind?

Here is Pratchett, through a character, being tongue in cheek about the writing craft, "one day I thought, how hard can it be? After all most of the words are going to be and, the and I and it, and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has already been done for you."

In Snuff, he develops the Goblins as characters, using them to explore a number of aspects of racial prejudice. Much of the language used by the oppressors could be taken straight from the concept of manifest destiny that was used to exterminate the Red Indians, or the sort of things that were said about Aboriginals in Australia or used to defend Apartheid. Pratchett goes further, the goblins say little, but when they do speak, he gives their speech a unique cadence, so that not only do you know when a goblin is speaking, but you have to concentrate. Too much of this would be a bore, so it is used very sparingly, and hence is even more effective. How many writers can say that you can tell which of their characters is talking, simply from the way the words work.

"Wonderful is good," said the goblin girl, as though tasting every word. "Gentle is good, the mushroom is good. Tears are soft. I am tears of the mushroom, this much is now said." The character comes straight off the page.

Of course he can make the language funny too "She's got me marked down for balls, dance, dinners and, oh yes soirées,' he finished, in the tones of a man genetically programmed to distrust any word with an acute accent in it." Again, it is economic, but there is no doubt, along with the laugh, that you know the man.

I appreciate that I may be in an abnormal suggestible and emotional state, in that this ‘Snuff’ has rescued me from three days of feeling miserable and bored and unable to breathe properly, but I'm still pretty sure that this book, like so many other Pratchett novels could just as easily be classified as literary fiction as fantasy. Surely, it is time to wake up and realise that Pratchett is very much a political, and managerial satirist – a commentator on modern life, using an important literary tradition of an imaginary world as the vehicle.

Of course, in that tradition, Pratchett has gone too far, writing more than fifty books, and producing endearing characters that people want to hear more of, hardly 1984. Alice did at least have a sequel, but there does not seem to be have been much demand for the further adventures on Animal Farm or Gulliver’s next voyage. On the other hand, I suppose that if word got around that Pratchett, despite his knighthood, is not a pillar of society, but is in fact a subversive political satirist putting forward an egalitarian liberal philosophy, he’d probably never sell another book.

Coffee on the move

2011-10-03T11:21:00.002+01:00

Among the many things involved in buying and breaking in a new motorhome is the question of espresso. Although these mini palaces on wheels come with beds, air conditioning, a shower and loo, fridge freezer, TV aerial point, gas, electricity in multiple voltages, and a gas cooker, it is a sad fact that espresso is not built in.

We have discovered the solution, or at least a solution. The little machine in the picture makes a single cup of the right stuff. The thing is ingenuity itself, but understanding the way it works leads one to wonder what the prototypes were like.

It operates as follows; first, you pump up pressure, watching a gauge to ensure that you have it exactly right. You lock in the pressure, pour in a measured amour of hot water, add coffee in a small device that fits inside, screw on the cover, turn it upside down over the cup and release the pressure. Water is forced through the coffee and out drips a genuine espresso (for a video see this link). You can get a version that uses coffee pods or you can put your own grounds into little capsule filter devices that fit inside. I use the grounds because I usually mix my own blend.

Our machine is covered in elegant black plastic to add style.

So, what we have is a bicycle pump with a sieve in a box, to which is added boiling water. Trying to imagine the process through which this was invented opens up all sorts of possibilities. I picture some enterprising boy scout, or possibly an intrepid cyclist sitting by a campfire idly playing with his bicycle pump while a kettle boils.

What if I attached the pump to the spout? The pressure inside would rise and superheated water would result. Did he pour this onto coffee grounds? Or maybe he had one of those vicious little Italian devices where you put the water in and as it boils the steam forces it through a central chamber full of coffee grounds. Those things do make espresso. We used to have one when I was a kid, but we never did find a way of avoiding the boiling water coming up with explosive force. The flavour was hard to judge when you have to lick the coffee off the kitchen walls.

At higher altitude, say if you were on a skiing holiday, the water boils at a lower pressure, so the coffee might be nothing like as good. Perhaps our intrepid cyclist was up a mountain, making unsatisfactory espresso in the Italian style when it crossed his mind that a bicycle pump might just make all the difference. Maybe a tyre valve welded on to the side of a coffee pot; who knows.

Whilst I am fascinated to know how the inspiration came about, the main thing is, it makes good coffee and it is very portable. You don’t even need a kettle, hot water from a thermos will do.

Is this really October?

2011-10-02T15:18:00.003+01:00

We spent the first day of October trying out our new Campervan, except it is so posh it has to be called a Motorhome. It may even be a Recreational Vehicle. We slept last night at a conventional camp site where you can plug in electricity, but first thing this morning we drove down to Widemouth beach and watched the surf roll in.

The sun came up into a hazy blue sky, kicking off what may turn out to be the hottest ever day in October, we won't know that till the weathermen have done their sums, but down here in Cornwall it is near perfect (It did break the record). Add to the sunshine the fact that the surf is clean and up to 3 to 4 feet. The blackboard outside the lifeguard hut sums it up Conditions - Great! Thanks to the skill of the Met Office we knew it was coming and packed our wet suits and surf boards. The only thing wrong with the whole scene is that I am nothing like as fit as I used to be.

We surfed for about half an hour and then tested the next piece of kit in the van. We had hot showers, right there at the beach, changed into dry clothes and strolled off to have lunch in the beach cafe. We could have cooked our own, but we have a long running piece of research going to find the best beach cafe in the world. This one is OK but unlikely to make it into the top ten.

The economy may be in dire straights but it is interesting to see that the car park is full. Plenty of people still have the means to charge down to Cornwall to enjoy the sunshine and fill their shoes with sand. Cameron and Osborne need to lighten up and hit the beaches.

The only thing to diminish a perfect day is that there’s virtually no phone signal. Although I can write this on the Ipad, I can’t upload it until I get home, five hours drive away.
It appears that the temperature record for October was broken, Up to 29.9C. We now can enjoy the joke that the previous record temperature for October happened in March. (March is a place in Cambridgeshire).

Energy

2011-09-20T09:30:00.000+01:00

I rarely talk about politics but a piece on the radio this morning filled me with dismay. The energy secretary plans to make it easier for people to switch power supplies.

This can only mean even more idiots phoning up. We have already made several attempts to register with the system that is supposed to stop cold calling. As far as I can tell this has made no difference at all.

"You get your electricity from ... (Insert the name of one of the big six here)."

"No."

Repeat of the question with caller gradually changing tone of voice to “Oh no, I'm dealing with an idiot” mode.

Eventually I say that we use a company called Good Energy, a supplier of 100% green energy. If you've ever been to North Cornwall, they run those massive windmills near Delabole. By now, if these tariff switching cold callers had any sense, they would be getting off the line. They ought to have realized that they are dealing with a customer who has gone to the trouble of getting their electricity from a company that they have never heard of who run windmills. Warning bells ought to be ringing.

Sadly, they always press on with their pre-rehearsed chat about prices. By now they ought to have tumbled to the notion that I have the Internet skills to be able to compare prices, after all I have managed to find and contract with a company with a rather singular profile. A few clicks of a mouse could get them to Good Energy's web site and they'd be much wiser. They ought to realize that I don't care about the price; I care more about the environment.

Then it gets worse, they start offering me a better price if I have my gas and electricity from the same supplier.

'Oh great I say, how long will it take?'

'Just a few days.'

'Good heavens, that fast to lay two miles of pipeline.'

Once again, I hear the doubt creeping into their voice as they fall into the next trap. We don't have gas because the pipeline doesn't come within two miles of us. You would think it would be simple to mark out those post codes where there are no gas pipes and tell the call centres to lay off. Sadly, they are not that intelligent, or their bosses aren't.

I wonder if the energy secretary even knows that there is no gas in some parts of the UK. We don't have mains sewers either, but at least the water company gives us a discount for that and we run our own treatment plant. Before you start feeling sorry for me in my splendid rural isolation, I should say that we do have piped water; good broadband, and we can get pizza delivered.

I don't really mind the energy secretary trying to keep prices down, but could he do something to make the call centres less stupid; and while he's at it perhaps point out that old farmhouses built before 1850 don't tend to have cavity walls either. That sort of data must be available from planning offices; so another bunch of cold callers could phoning up and offering to foam fill the cavity walls that we don’t have.

For me the big benefit of ditching all these telephone salespeople would be that I could get on with some proper writing instead of bending my mind to imagining scripts in which I am so rude to them that they never call again.

Sew to Speak

2011-09-19T18:58:00.001+01:00

It is peculiarly appropriate that Lois's latest art exhibition involves a play on words, both because I am writing about it and because some of the sewing is in fact words. Several years ago Lois did a course on Machine embroidery at Malvern College. The group of classmates from the course have continued to meet and have managed to mount an exhibition of their work every year since the course. This year the show is in Ledbury and I am writing this on the iPad sitting in the gallery as the group decide what to hang where. It is absolutely fascinating to watch and listen to group creativity at work. The group has it's own blog site.

Most of the exhibits hang on walls or display on tables with no difficulty, one is an exception (see the picture). Lois's sister Joy, is an artist and over the years they have corresponded about art, and of course all the other trivial that you might expect sisters to discuss. What to do with the letters has been a recurring question as we go through the process of downsizing. Simply throwing them away doesn't feel right, but on the other hand it seems unlikely that the British Museum will want them. Given the context, a work of art was bound to emerge.

Over a period Lois gradually settled on the idea of embroidering text from some of the letters onto an old boiler suit that Joy had used while painting. Initially the plan was for me to make a flat plywood model of a person, to go inside the suit so that it could be displayed like a shop dummy. Enter the second random addition to the plot. Through membership of various art organisations Lois has access to a local scrap store. This is a sort of Aladdin's cave of stuff given away by local industry and other sources, in the hope that it will be of use to local artists. It is surprising what you can find there, but even we were slightly amazed to come across two life sized plaster models created by a local artist but no longer required. We immediately bought one of the models in order to dress it in the boiler suit.

Once the model was home we had to work out a way of making it stand up on it's own. For a while it lay on the table in the studio looking suspiciously like a pale corpse. The model is made from plaster-of-paris bandages, the stuff they wrap around you in hospitals when you have broken your arm. The thing was obviously hollow, because it didn't weigh much and it made a sort of dull clonking sound when you tapped on it. After some thought I drilled holes in the feet and shoved three foot long pieces of hollow metal tube up the legs and stuck them in place by filling the legs with polyurethane foam, the stuff you can get from DIY stores for filling big holes in walls. Not only does it fill gaps but it also a pretty good glue. Be sure to wear plastic or rubber gloves if you ever play with any; oh and remember that the gas in the foam has cyanide in it.

Continuing the recycling theme, and giving a further insight into the problems we have over moving to a smaller place; I was able to use two large flat five kilo weights as a stand. These came off the multi gym that was wrecked by the floods in 2007. I knew they would come in useful one day. They have neatly drilled holes that used to have steel tubes in them, back when they were exercise apparatus. These allowed the tubes inside the plaster lady's legs to lock in place and keep her standing upright.

She is now standing proudly in the gallery in Ledbury, having been carried by me from the car park - see video clip for example of the writer looking silly. If it is art it's OK, right?

Making words work hard

2011-09-12T05:01:00.000+01:00

I have been interested for a while in the way that some authors seem to pack much more interest into a given word count. How do they do it?

In all the material I have read about writing I have never come across this as a concept, so here is my take on it. I can't claim to have this completely worked out, but maybe it will strike a chord with other people who could provide some examples.

A word, or for that matter a collection of words in a phrase or a sentence can do a lot of different things. We all know that nouns are things and verbs are actions and these can be modified by adjectives and adverbs and joined together by conjunctions. OK so that gives us a mechanical view of the way words work, but there is an alternative taxonomy that could be applied. Words might describe a scene, or a character; they may create atmosphere, or drive the plot along. They may add back-story, or they may be there to add mystery or suspense.

I'm sure there are better taxonomies than mine but I think key thing is that really effective writers manage to get a lot of words to do more than one of those things at once.

At a simple level I'm sure all writers know that setting a scene will not only describe some physical features, like where the chairs are, but atmosphere could come in the same package and on top of that the fact that a particular character was in that scene might also tell the reader something about the character and it might be telling you something about back-story or adding something to the plot. If each of those things is done individually, the pace slows down and the piece can start to feel wooden and over written. When the same words do several jobs, readers find themselves more engaged because their brain starts to work the way it does in real life.

If I go to meet someone, for whatever reason, it is quite likely that as I walk into the room, something will remind me of another room somewhere in my past, at the same time I may be looking for the coffee, deciding where to sit and trying to remember all the things I was planning to say. I may be subconsciously taking in what the room tells me about the person I am meeting, or about the company he or she works for and maybe getting some signals about body language, or hoping their perfume doesn't make me sneeze.

If I was better at reading like a writer, I'd have stored up a load of examples, which I could drop with panache into the blog, but I'm hopeless at making notes and remembering stuff like that. You might say that if I don't have any examples to quote, how do I prove that it's true. As someone who spent their life promoting evidence based policies and research in health care, I have to say that's a fair point. In part I don't have the evidence because I'm lazy, but also if it's done right the reader hardly knows it's happening. That's the real trick.

Eminent Emin

2011-08-30T12:44:00.000+01:00

Well, there's a laugh, I sit down in the cafe at the Hayward Gallery to write some thoughts on the Tracey Emin exhibition I have just seen. I type Emin and the iPad immediately changes it to eminent. Clearly I have to mind my words, she has powers I never knew of.

Lois and I came we accidentally saw a documentary about the exhibition on the TV last week and then realised that the exhibition was about to close. We are trying hard to schedule more spontaneity in our lives, so we jumped in the car and set off the very next day.

Over the years, I have come to like Tracey Emin, mostly from seeing her say things on TV programs, rather than a careful study of her art. When Eugenie Scrase won BBC Two's School of Saatchi competition it was Emin who kept her in the hunt in the earlier rounds, at least as far as we could tell from what they showed on TV. I loved the final piece that won, a tree trunk impaled on a fence that Scrase had seen while walking along a London street. Hardly art, you might say, but she did persuade the owners to let her chop out the piece of fence and find a way to exhibit the thing. I was impressed that Tracey Emin had seen something in Scrase’s earlier work that the rest of the judges seemed to miss.

The current exhibition at the Hayward is massive, partly because there are a lot of small pieces, as well as quite a few big ones. For me it was too much to take in while in a gallery that is determined to stop you sitting down to think. I know the Hayward is all dressed concrete, but a few chairs would not go amiss. There are a couple of concrete benches but they are specifically stationed to view particular pieces, so it is hardly fair to use them to simply to muse or let your lower back have a rest from standing.

Most of the people there with me were young women, so maybe they don't get backache from standing too long, but surely they must want to stop and think some of the time.

The audio guide, that can be downloaded to your smart phone relies on some kind of signal, an over enthusiastic assumption in a concrete palace. There is obviously a clever salesman at work somewhere because I had exactly the same problem with a similar system at Tate Modern. Do the people who run these places try using these devices?

Back to the exhibition, what did I think? The most important thing is that I did think, though I have no idea whether what came into my head was what Tracey intended. In the TV show about the exhibition, she complains at one point about personal criticism in relation to her Viennale exhibition. I can understand why she objected; I looked up some of the reviews, the joys of the Internet mean that they are still available. Much of her work appears to be a personal narrative, endless variation on self-portraiture, much of it nude or semi nude. I am not sure if all the stories are true. It is almost as if she makes up stories about imaginary selves and draws and paints their experience, or maybe they are just embellishments of reality. We all do that of course, the stories that we re-tell are adjusted to suit the audience, even the most truthful people often leave out the boring bits, which makes the rest seem more intense. I suspect Tracey Emin is telling the stories of many of the women who visited the exhibition, or if not their stories, then their worst fears or hottest desires.

She is brave, and the simple truth of that strikes a chord with me. A superficial glance might suggest that she simply does not care what people think, but she is too brutally honest in her drawings for that. If she does indeed care and is prepared to expose herself, embellished or fictional, in this way then she must be brave, and she says things in her art that I suspect many women wish they could say.

The other criticism that comes up a lot is that she can't draw, or can't paint. Again it is easy to see where this comes from, many of the drawings are wild and approximate, often not things of beauty. On the other hand, they have an inner discipline of proportion that makes the subject unmistakable. I think that to be able to draw as "badly" as this you have to know how to draw well.

She is also outrageous and pushy, and that might make for some rotten reviews. Howard Hodgkin once said, "Ambition is so much more important than talent." I am in no doubt that Tracey has ambition, she may also be annoying, arrogant, self centred, and subversive, but at least she does it with verve and she has something to say.

Partridges

2011-08-26T09:33:00.001+01:00

This is a filler while I am writing a longer piece.

While I was writing, Lois disturbed me to say that the partridges were out by the kitchen. We were adopted by a pair of partridges several years ago and we seem to have had a pair ever since. I don’t know if this is the same birds or whether the partridge grapevine has us down as a source of good food.

Every now and then, they produce babies but most years there are only one or two and they disappear quite quickly - possibly because there are foxes at the bottom of the garden.

This year a much larger brood appears to have survived and this morning they were running around just outside the back door. Despite the low light, I did manage to grab a few pictures with the long lens.

There are even more of them but like many children they won't keep still long enough for a group portrait.

The riots

2011-08-21T11:19:00.000+01:00

Everyone seems to be writing about the riots, so here goes.

I watched the TV in disbelief, trying to make sense of what was happening. It seems that the total number of looters and rioters is probably not more than a few thousand, but a few hundred people descending on an area, intent on doing damage, can certainly cause a lot of trouble before there is any chance of police getting there.

It is also not surprising that no one saw it coming. Opinion polls take samples of a few hundred people, so the chances of finding even one of the looters in a sample is vanishingly small. From listening to the few rioters who have been interviewed it also seems pretty unlikely that their opinion could be sampled, pollsters would be unlikely to make sense of the incoherent ramblings we have seen so far. I also doubt if any pollster has ever asked anyone what he or she would do if they walked past a shop that was smashed open. Would you pick up a cake? Actually I wouldn't, certainly not if it was lying amongst a pile a wreckage. Would I pick up a pair of trainers, or a jacket? It is hard to say, I suspect there is some object out there that none of us could resist.

We are now seeing many people coming through the courts and in due course they will have their lives made worse though serving jail terms, paying fines, losing their jobs and having a criminal record. There is a risk that this will create an underclass that have no reason to take any notice of the sort of rules the rest of us live by. In all probability, some of them will have regrets. It seems clear that some of the looters were just swept along by the opportunity and probably did not imagine getting caught.

One of the first cases to come up was a man who apparently pleaded guilty to something related to the riots. He has a job working in a school. What effect will this have on his career? Hardly likely to improve his prospects I suspect. Two more teenagers were shown coming out of court, one yelled at the media, 'we don't want to be photographed.' There are probably a fair number of shopkeepers happy to yell, 'we don't want to be looted.' The thing about society is that it is a two way street, we all have to play by the rules. You can't loot shops and then say you don't want to be photographed, you can't join in a riot and expect to carry on as normal the next day.

The deeper problem appears to be that there seem to be groups of people who have become disconnected with society in general. Whether this is the 'fault' of 'the schools' or 'the parents' or 'society' is a pointless question. Establishing blame will achieve nothing unless it can be part of a solution. The right question, which the media seem incapable of asking, is "What will it take to put this right?" We do not appear currently, to have any organisations or institutions that are up to the task.

Although parents are often blamed, the care system appears even worse. Children who grow up with the state as a parent are less likely than average to leave school with any sort of qualification. They are also more likely to end up in prison. The care system seems to be very good at taking innocent victims of family breakdown and turning them into people we can blame for something. Taking these children away from the parents would make little sense. Prison does not do much better, the numbers of ex-prisoners who end up back in jail suggests that locking up the looters in our current institutions is unlikely to reform them.

I am drawn to the idea that something different is required. Fundamentally, it seems to me that the notion of serving time is the wrong model. We need people who are found guilty to come out of the judicial experience less likely to behave badly in future. Personally, I suspect we need something like American Grade School. We need to set some standards for behaviour and everyday competence and when those standards have been achieved, the offender can be released. If you don’t make the grade, you go round again. This is a bit like the theory test before the real driving test. If you can’t pass the theory of society then you need supervision. Some wide consultation would be needed as to the content of the test, the curriculum for being a model citizen, but we already have a citizen test for immigrants, so it can't be too hard to do.

I had always thought that some sort of compliance with society was what the probation service was supposed to achieve. I imagine that some sort of community service order together with geotagging of some sort would probably be effective. Given modern technology it would be simple to tag someone so that we would know where he or she was and if they were anywhere near some future disturbance we would know immediately.

To some extent, supervision must come from an organisation established for the purpose, like the probation service, but some element of supervision could come from the community, either through workplace schemes or contributions to what for anyone else would be voluntary work.

Ultimately if a person continues to offend they will end up in jail, simply to remove them from circulation; but if more potential prisoners were supervised in the community, and effectively by the community, there would be more time and space in jails to do more serious education and reform. It is foolish to assume that prison can completely prepare anyone for a return to normal life; it cannot replicate the same challenges, opportunities and threats. That means that every prison sentence should be followed by a period of supervision and testing in the community.

Of course, it is possible that offenders could cheat, crib the answers or lie, but modern psychometric tests are quite good at lie detection. It can't be very hard to spot many of the bad attitudes and behaviours, much of the time. I'm sure we would all feel more reassured if a significant proportion of potential troublemakers had geotags, and were made to do some useful work, and were only let off when they had proved that they at least knew how they were supposed to behave.

Half-price Senility Kits

2011-08-14T08:01:00.000+01:00

As a child I was dyslexic, though at the time I'm not sure the term had been invented. It took me ages to learn to read. All my children have suffered from the same problem, so I suppose I may have inherited it from them (Joke).

One amusing consequence was that I often read things that were not there. This did happen when reading books, but in that case it is easily corrected by the context of the rest of the page. Billboards on the other hand are a different issue. Driving past in a car, I see words on a wall and my brain comes up with some totally ludicrous phrase. I've learned not to swerve, or even attempt to look again. Usually I just manage to laugh and ignore it.

Give me some examples, I can hear you say. Actually, that is very difficult because some other brain mechanism kicks in to ignore the whole thing. I laugh, but I can never remember what I am laughing about. This is a logical mechanism, and, no doubt, some sort of learned response. What is the point of remembering something that is obvious nonsense? It is almost as though my brain has evolved some kind of sense checker, like a spell checker in a computer.

Spell checkers are a wonderful thing for dyslexics, but they did not exist when I was learning to spell. Predictive text is something else. The iPad I am typing on at the moment has an amazing knack of producing words that I certainly did not set out to type. Proof reading has to be twice as good.

Now that I am older, a lot older, I have developed enough habits to keep on top of the dyslexia. However I am now going deaf and a similar phenomenon is becoming apparent, I miss-hear things that people say. David Lodge has written a whole novel around this (Deaf Sentence, Penguin) Actually I thought the book a bit on the self indulgent side with rather too many clever literary bits that seemed to be included just to show off. I will confine myself to just one blog post.

Last night while reading and watching TV at the same time, I heard a special offer for "Half price senility kits." My brain had already started to consider what on earth could be in such a kit before the error checking mechanism kicked in. I had got as far as wondering whether this was a kit to make you senile, or help you deal with it; when I realised that they had said "Half price cinema tickets." There are, of course, those who might consider the two things to be the same thing.

Unlike the circumstances of most of my previous funny dyslexic mistakes, this time I was reading on the iPad, so could immediately make a note. In the morning it still seemed amusing, so blogging seemed the obvious thing.

Although I remembered this particular miss-hear, I usually find that I forget them. It seems as if the brain really does have self-censoring function, spotting it’s own mistakes and forgetting them. I can see some survival advantages in that. Responding to mistakes is probably a sure way to get you killed in the long run, whether that is visual, auditory or cognitive errors. Miss-reads are a bit different in that most of the early ones probably take place in school, where there is a significant pressure not to look foolish. That would add a social stimulus to learn on top of any long term evolutionary effects.

All in all, a half-price senility kit may be worth snapping up, but you wouldn't tell your friends.

Burton Agnes Jazz Festival

2011-08-08T12:23:00.000+01:00

I spent the weekend at the Burton Agnes Jazz festival. Burton Agnes is a Yorkshire village centred on an 800-year-old stately home, which is currently kept in very good shape by the current owners. It has some beautiful gardens, a vegetable patch in a walled garden that would put any allotment to shame, ornamental ponds, a maze and woodland walk, and a jazz festival. What more could you want? Well, good weather I guess. However, because it was raining a lot of the time I spent an hour in the main house looking at the paintings. Well worth a trip just for that. A very good collection of impressionists in a beautiful setting.

The sun did shine, some of the time, but it also rained a lot of the time. Fortunately, the stage was well protected and there was a big beer tent and tea tent, which between them were able to keep the crowd dry.

The big attraction, from my point of view was Saffron Byass, my son in law’s sister; I presume that makes her a relative of some sort. Short clip filmed with my Iphone attached.

There were a number of other acts including Jaqui Dankworth, though I thought her set was more suited to an intimate nightclub rather than a large well-groomed field with echoes off the stately home in the background. There were rather loud acts towards midnight that sounded quite good from 300 yards away inside my campervan.

One thing I did find interesting was that almost every act had guitars in their line up. My memories of jazz go back to the early sixties when Chris Barber and Acker Bilk were regulars around Bristol and I once saw Miles Davis. Actually, Miles Davis was utterly brilliant. He had Himself on trumpet, Sonny Stitt on clarinet and alto sax, Paul Chambers on double base and Jimmy Cobb on drums and I think, Wynton Kelly on piano. It was probably the best concert I’ve ever been to so it’s hardly fair to compare anyone with that. My point is that there was never a guitar in sight. In the two days I was at Burton Agnes, I didn’t hear one trombone, trumpet or clarinet. OK so I missed some acts, but it must be some measure of the way that the electric guitar has developed that it can now fill the space left by almost any other instrument.

100 posts

2011-08-02T10:58:00.000+01:00

This is my one-hundredth blog post. Some sort of landmark I guess, though why we are all so obsessed with round numbers remains a mystery to me. I ought to be able to deduce some sort of lessons or conclusions or possibly refine my blogging strategy as a result of this experience.

Because the nice people at Google provide the data, I can of course instantly find out which are the most popular posts, but what does that mean? Two posts have had more hits than any other and neither of them is typical. A novel look at novels was a blog about playing with a new piece of software made available by Google. The analysis that it enabled was interesting, and I couldn't resist playing with it. Does it tell me what I should blog about? I don't think so. What it does say is that adding a bunch of strangers who are interested in something novel (that word again) will push the numbers up, but those numbers are not associated with a sustained upsurge in interest.

Similarly, the post about the Spearhead dinghy; that actually came top but it was put there in order to provide additional background when we were selling one of the boats on eBay. That didn't produce a sustained upsurge either.

Novelty is fun, but impossible to do all the time and each novelty probably attracts a different audience, who don’t necessarily stay.

What does push the numbers up or down? Not posting, or posting less often causes a downward trend. The couple of months earlier this year when my mother was in hospital, because she had been knocked down by a car, were associated with a considerable reduction in posts. I visited her every day for several months and it just takes up time. In the last few months I have been posting much more regularly, partly because mum is a lot better and also because Lois is now writing five blogs, all about different things, and putting me to shame.

As to subject matter, that is a harder question. The one thing I was sure about when I started was that I wanted to change my creative direction away from all the things I did when I was working. As a result, there has been very little about public health or the terrible things the government may be about to do to the NHS. I still read and correspond about it, but I don’t blog.

There was a brief relapse over Amy Winehouse, but I intend to carry on resisting the temptation as much as I can, though I might just do a bit more about alcohol some day, just to respond to Lexi and emphasise that it is OK to drink; how much, how often, what and how are issues that can be explored.

My biggest interest now is writing, so there are more posts about that than anything else. I still consider myself a learner, so inevitably I post more often on things that I find curious or frustrating. Repeating back to others the things I do understand seems somewhat pointless, at least until I reach the point where I am sure I know what I am writing about. This is of course contrary to the advice from the big-time bloggers. Give people something they need, they say repeatedly. Probably good advice, maybe when I get past two hundred I'll think about it.

The major area that I appear to have ignored altogether is blogging to attract an audience that might read my books. There is a dilemma here, more than one actually. The first is that it is difficult to know who the audience is. Amazon is very good at telling you how many books you have sold, but I have not found any way of getting demographics. On some of the writing sites, information is available and you can guess it from comment on others. The snag is that these are most likely writers who also read. Are they typical of readers in general? I read a much better blog about this by Livia Blackburne

Her message is that blogging, particularly for fiction writers, may be a waste of time because the readers are likely to be writers and so not the real market.

Ho hum. Add to that a second problem, in my case - I am writing in two different genres. Should I be running two blogs, each aimed at a different audience? The second genre is Young Adult, and so far, I have not finished any of the books. Ideally, I should be doing something to create an audience before I publish a book. There are those who would suggest that the thing to do is to produce one book and virtually give it away in order to attract the audience and then produce another and another.

This is too much introspection for one blog, even my hundredth post. For the moment, I will set myself the modest target of being able to understand all this a lot better by the time I reach two hundred.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2011-07-31T10:18:00.000+01:00

The Help was selected by my reading group this month. For anyone who hasn't read it, this is a story about the American South back in the time of the Kennedy presidency. James Meredith had just enrolled at Mississippi University, accompanied by armed guards. Medgar Evers, his mentor was shot dead in Jackson Mississippi, the time and place where the book is based.

The book is the interwoven stories of two African American maids and a white writer, employed as a journalist at the time, who develops the idea of a book about what life is like for black maids. The three different voices are distinguished, both by the daily lives that are woven through their stories, and to some extent by the way their grammar and sentence construction is mangled. I found after a few dozen pages that I got used to the vernacular, though I found it odd that the woman who turned out to be the better writer of the two maids, appears to have the most fractured syntax. It is never easy to pull off that kind of accent, or local speech construction, but I think the author succeeds better than most.

What I found remarkable was the way that a sense of impending doom permeated the writing. At times, I felt I should be reading it in a cupboard or under a pillow, in case anyone found out. There is a lot of jeopardy and anger in the book, quite rightly when one considers the appalling notions being propagated by some of the white racist characters, and the kind of vengence meeted out to anyone who stepped out of line. Throughout the book, one well-connected lady is trying to promote the idea, through legislation if she can, that anyone who has a black maid should provide a separate bathroom for the maid. She backs this up by frequent declarations that Negroes are subject to different diseases and have a different immune system. Utter nonsense of course, but just one of many ideas promulgated to justify a segregationist, white supremacist way of life.

The constant sense of jeopardy is reinforced by switching point of view every few chapters, so that similar events, and a slightly different take on similar fears, overlap and reinforce each other. Somehow, she manages to make this work without it feeling repetitive. In some ways the naivety of the characters adds to the suspense, because the reader can so easily imagine how they might get found out at any moment.

The three of them survive, and the book is a success, which brings in some money and frees each of them in different ways from the worst of their situations. The world is not changed, but we know, reading it now, that it does change, and meanwhile they survive.

I accidentally watched The Blind Side, a Sandra Bullock movie only a few weeks ago. In fact, it is so good that I watched it twice. In this story a black boy who is talented at football, is adopted by a white family who help to rescue him from desperate poverty. Eventually he goes to Ole Miss, the same University of Mississippi that James Meredith needed an armed guard to get into. What is even more remarkable is that his admission there, assisted by his adopted family, is questioned by the NAACP, who only half a life time ago had needed troops to get into the same university. Perhaps most remarkable of all, nothing is made of this astonishing contrast.

If The Help had been written in the time that it portrays, it is impossible to know how it would have been received. I remember the writings of Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis. Books that were polemic and revolutionary at the time and almost got their authors killed. This is very different, because it espouses no particular political direction and offers no solution. What it does do is tell it how it was, and that is worth remembering.

I also read a Commentary on the Help, a WikiFocus book by George Andersen. This is a total waste of money. All it does is tell the story in a few pages, converting a great piece of showing into a boring bit of telling, to use the creative writing jargon. I had assumed that there would be some commentary involved, expression of opinions, critical review, context setting. Not a word of it. A few paragraphs about how well the book sold, reference to some reviews and a paragraph about a film adaptation, supposedly coming out next month. That is the last time I will but a WikiFocus book.

Why swallows sit on phone wires

2011-07-27T13:40:00.002+01:00

Seventeen swallows on the power line. Four more are flying around but I couldn’t grab the camera quick enough. Every year they turn up in April, usually two pairs and they produce two broods of babies and then set off for Africa. This year they seem to have produced even more than usual, but I doubt if any more will come back next year. It must be a hazardous journey.

I did once start writing a children’s story, along the lines of the 'Just So' stories. It was about how the swallows book the places that they are going to stay. It has to be a very complicated business, when you think about how many swallows there are and how many barns and roof eaves are available. How do they know where to go? I can’t imagine that they want to be rushing around the country trying to find a place to stay, especially after they have flown all the way from Africa.

The answer of course lies with the telephone wires. The reason you see all these birds sitting on the wires is because they use the wires to phone ahead and book their places. Sitting on wires and not falling off is obviously very important to them; after all, no one wants to be homeless. The very first thing the swallows teach their babies is how to fly around our quad and get back into the nest. Once they have done that they start practicing sitting on wires.

They don’t just sit, they get fed when they are little, they preen their wings, and they sing. Why spend so much time on the wires? I imaging that the swallow booking service is no better than BT, they probably keep you on hold for ages, so you have to have things to do.

If you don’t believe me, try listening to a swallow’s song. It sounds just like those noises that old-fashioned analogue modems made. One of these years it will all change and we’ll know the swallows have gone digital.

Why is no one surprised

2011-07-24T18:53:00.001+01:00

Maybe it is too soon to make sense of Amy Winehouse's death. So far there has been no post-mortem, so no one knows exactly why she died. At the same time there seems to be no shortage of people assuming that the cause is drugs or alcohol, and she joins the long list of pop stars who died from using drugs. No one seems surprised and no one appears outraged that this could happen.

Graph added later, just to make the point that UK is getting it wrong on alcohol

Surely it is time that some serious questions were asked about UK drugs and alcohol policy. Of course it is too much to expect the newspapers to examine the wealth of scientific evidence, but there are answers in material that is more accessible to the usual media sources. Keith Richard's autobiography makes pretty clear why he is still alive and Janis and Jimmy are not. When he talks about using drugs, which he mentions quite often in his book, he keeps on saying three things. Use prescription standard drugs is the first message; pure substances in known doses. Street drugs are unreliable, no one knows what they are mixed with. They have probably gone through the hands of several dealers and each has probably diluted the original product with a filler of their own choice in order to increase their profit. No one keeps records. The end user really has no idea what they are taking. The second thing Keith says, several times, is that he injected intramuscularly rather than intravenously. That produces a slightly slower hit, but it doesn't damage veins and runs much less risk of thrombosis or septicaemia. Finally he says several times that there is a limit to how high you can go. Taking twice as much doesn't get you any higher, it just gets you dead.

So there is the package of advice, take pure and reliable substances, by a sensible route in non excessive amounts. Why can't the government say that and also arrange to supply safe drugs in sensible doses? Current policy has failed to reduce the number of people taking drugs, failed to reduce the number of people dying, failed to catch the criminals who supply the drugs and also probably made sure that the Taliban get plenty of money to shoot at our troops because most of the Heroin comes from Afghanistan. How much worse could a policy be?

Of course one more factor could be added to the list, in the rare case of Amy Winehouse; all those records she might have made, and all those taxes she would have paid, have been lost too.

Personally I can't say that I always liked her music, or some of the attitudes that she struck, but she clearly was talented, and although some of her problems were self induced, I am in no doubt that she was a victim. Killed as much by a media that thought they would sell more papers by reporting her drunk or drugged than they would by trying to help. Killed by a government that would rather pander to daft notions and victim blaming in the media, than face up to the evidence about drugs.

Of course one could take it even further. There are six major groups of drugs, typified by Alcohol, Tobacco, Cocaine, Opiates like Heroin, Marijuana, and a range of other designer substances like ecstasy. As a society we have chosen, at the moment, to make two of the six legal. In the past of course we allowed opiates and indeed fought wars to keep the trade open. I mention that simply to make the point that the choices are arbitrary and based on opinion at the time the laws are passed.

A hard look at the evidence makes it quite clear that we have picked the wrong ones to make legal. Tobacco kills at least 100,000 people each year in the UK, and alcohol is coming close to a similar number. Prisons are full of people who are there because they happen to be addicted to the wrong substances and resort to theft in order to pay the high prices demanded by the criminals who supply them. The hospitals are filled with the the people using the legal substances.

If we banned Tobacco and Alcohol and allowed Opiates and Marijuana instead, we would halve the prison population and increase life expectancy by several years. I appreciate that this is unlikely to happen overnight, but we could at least decide to make prescription standard drugs available to addicts, which would save some lives, reduce the prison population, put some of the drug barons out of business and starve the Taliban of funds. Some of the money saved could be put into helping addicts cope and be safer, and perhaps save the next Amy Winehouse.

If the post-morgen eventually shows that it was not drugs or alcohol that killed Amy; her death will still be as sad and tragic and the policies of the government and the media will continue to kill people, they just won't be as talented.

Selling to writers or selling to readers - further reflections on the Legend Press seminar

2011-07-18T09:07:00.000+01:00

Having depressed myself yesterday with the realisation that the publishing world seemed to be lacking almost any objective facts and seems to delight in not making available or even collecting much in the way of data, I usually manage to recover myself by deciding that a few truths can perhaps be discerned in the fog. Not writing, guarantees not being published. Obsessing on a particular book, sending version after version to the same agent or publisher is probably doomed as well. Several speakers at the legend seminar said as much. Actually, they joked about it. They also appeared to sincerely believe that giving any meaningful feedback would be doomed. Stories were told where an author was told about a particular fault, and a new version would soon be winging its way back with that bit fixed. They also felt that so much material was sent to them that they simply did not have time to say anything more than a stock response like ‘this is not for us’.
There was some encouragement to the notion that one should expect to send material to many agents, simply because any given agent may be over committed or simply come to a subjective decision that they don't like your stuff, however good it is. Sending to multiple agents at once was also acknowledged as common sense, life is too short to wait six to ten weeks for agent after agent to say no.
This suggests to me that there is an unexplored territory. Somewhere between not submitting too early and not sending out to enough people, there must be a happy medium, a nirvana that may of course only be identifiable with hindsight. Where that place lies, will of course be different for every writer and will change as the economy and the book market shift up and down. Successful writers obviously find where that place is for them. It is clearly not necessary to wait until something is perfect, what would be the point in publishers having editors if there were nothing to edit?
Another dimension that was illuminated to some extent was the issue of marketing. A naive view is of course that self-published writers do their own marketing and published ones have it done for them. There was a clear message from the panel that this is not true. Most writers do their own marketing. Agents market to publishers; may help with editing and are supposed to be good at dealing with contracts. Publishers publish, and often do little else, or at least concentrate their marketing on a small number of books or authors who they think will sell best.
As the seminar progressed it became clear in my mind that there are two markets in the writing game; one is concerned with selling things to readers; books, e-readers etc. The other is selling things to writers; creative writing degrees, vanity publishing, editorial services and everything in between. To put it a more cynical way, one market seeks to make money from readers and the other makes money from writers.
When you make that distinction the real difference between vanity publishing and traditional publishing becomes clear. If the main thrust of the business model is to make money from authors, then it is a vanity press; if the main thrust is to sell books to readers then it is a trade publisher. Simple as that, you pay your money and take your choice. What about when a writer does the publishing themselves? Well it is obvious enough that they are seeking to make money from readers, so you have to think of them as publishers.
What about agents? It seems clear to me that their market is writers; they may be helping a writer to make money, but fundamentally they are selling services to writers not readers. That seems to suggest that when agents start doing publishing, as some are with e-books, then they begin to look suspiciously like vanity publishers, unless they charge no up front fees and make their money from a percentage on sales. Then they really are middlemen, selling to writers but making money from readers.
I may be guilty of a rather narrow view in this. If one took a historical perspective, it could be argued that agents only gained their current traction as middlemen when publishers downsized and got rid of a lot of staff that previously spent time nurturing authors. After the net book agreement disappeared, the industry went though a period of vertical disintegration, creating a sort of middle ground between writer and reader in which a range of models have been tried. In effect by narrowing the portals of entry into the publishing business, the industry created an incentive for the 'selling to writers' market to increase. Ironic really, because the publishers who were in the best position to sell information and service to writers left themselves out of the market. Creating a market and letting someone else exploit it, seems to be foot shooting of a high order.
Clearly running seminars for writers, as Legend Press are now doing, is a smart move; who better than a publisher to tell writers how to sell to readers, apart from readers themselves of course.
Now of course, e-books, Amazon, iBooks etc. have thrown the whole thing into meltdown. Writers can put their stuff out as e-books very simply. Readers can in theory find the material with a few clicks of the mouse. The only problem is that there are half a million books on Amazon and many millions of readers looking for those books. Readers are bound to ask the question, what is the best way for me to find the book I want?
Other readers are one obvious source, particularly readers who write reviews. Book bloggers are a more sophisticated version of such readers. Advertising must have a place too. So where do agents fit into this? In their current form, my guess would be nowhere. Publicists may have a role, especially if they have expertise in knowing what readers want, but agents whose knowledge is only about publishers may have painted themselves into a corner. Tom Chalmers, the Managing Director of Legend Press, who spoke at the seminar, clearly believes that one of the roles of publishers is to help readers by only publishing material that he thinks is worth reading. As a publisher he has one source of useful data, he knows how many books he has sold.
So we come full circle, my thanks to Legend press for closing some of the loops and making me think, and all for a less than £60 for the day with a chapter review thrown in. Anyone who wishes a similar experience can find the dates of future seminars on Legend’s web site www.legendpress.co.uk.

Legend Press seminar

2011-07-17T12:32:00.000+01:00

I spent yesterday in Birmingham at a seminar organised by Legend Press. The owner of the business Tom Chalmers, together with two writers and an agent operated as a panel, doing a mixture of presenting material that they had planned beforehand and responding to each other and the audience.

What did I learn? Not much that I didn't have a pretty good inkling of already, but in a way that's not the point. Confirming pre existing concepts and notions is an important part of learning. A bit like an MOT on what I know already. Part of the attraction of the seminar was a critique from a legend editor. I sent a chapter of the Young Adult book that I am working on and got a very constructive and encouraging report.

The seminar re-exposed many of the usual nostrums. Don't submit too early; with of course no objective test of how you can tell. Lots of emphasis on how long it all takes and how much we all have to learn.

More useful, in a sad sort of way was an almost enthusiastic repetition of the idea that publishing is a subjective business. There was no data, no surveys, no focus groups, and no feedback from reading groups. In fact, as far as this group of lectures felt able to say, it is a complete mystery why anyone reads Dan Brown or Steig Larson. I did ask one lecturer afterwards and her best guess was the readers don't want to be challenged. She may be right, but where does that leave the writer, and how does that relate to when a novel is ready? Ready for what? Ready for whom?

The thing I find slightly incredible about attending such events is that I don't come away depressed. Anyone who sets out to be a writer appears to be guaranteed a lot of rejection and frustration. I'm not normally a masochistic, so I am not doing this because I enjoy the pain. I write because I like to write and I get a lift from it that I don't get from anything else. Understanding the landscape that has to be negotiated in the publishing world is helpful only in so far as it is useful to have a map if you set out on a dangerous or complicated journey. The map doesn't really add or subtract from the pleasure or necessity of the journey, but it does reduce the chances of falling off a cliff.

Of course if it was a treasure map, that might be a different story…

More of that later, this topic is challenging my ability to be brief; so part two will follow tomorrow.

Who are the Sun trying to fool?

2011-07-13T19:22:00.002+01:00

I don’t usually blog about politics, or about things that are close to my former career in the NHS. Despite that, I am making an exception today because I feel sorry for Gordon Brown. I never thought I'd say that because in the past he has sometimes annoyed me intensely. His current spat with the Sun is where I sympathise with him.

The facts seem to be clear, the Sun carried a story about Brown's son having Cystic Fibrosis. It seems that no one in Gordon Brown's family gave out that information, so whoever did make it available had no right to that information. The Sun is now saying that Brown was wrong to say that they got the information illegally, and they have produced a tape from someone who said they got the information 'on the grapevine'. I have no idea what that particular grapevine amounts to, but if the information did not get there from the Brown family then it must have got there through some breach of confidentiality.

When I ran a cancer registry, we had specific clauses in the terms of service that said any breach of confidentiality could get you fired. Similar clauses exist all over the NHS.

It is disingenuous of the Sun to say that they didn't do anything wrong. They were in exactly the same position as someone who knowingly receives stolen property. They are a newspaper; they must know the rules on confidential health information. They must have known that the only way they could have got the information was through an act somewhere along the line that was against the rules. They accepted stolen information, and surely that must be just as bad as if they had accepted anything else that is stolen.

I guess some people might argue that stealing personal health information, or passing it on without permission, is not the same as stealing a watch or a wallet. On the other hand bank account numbers or credit card details are just information, and stealing those is certainly criminal. It can't be right for the Sun to make up it's own rules as to what information it thinks is fair game and what it would report as a crime. It suggests that at least to some extent the Sun thinks it is above the law. With a bit of luck the recently announced inquiry will mean that they will have to explain their attitudes to a judge.

Why didn't the space programme invent the Kindle?

2011-07-12T10:51:00.002+01:00

Why didn't the space programme invent the kindle?

Surely such a device would have been immensely valuable in an environment where both space and weight are restricted. It would probably have helped sell them as well, and provided an answer of sorts to all those people who keep banging on about traditional books being so wonderful (which they are). The notion that the space age required something different surely would have had some traction.

Of course, there are also modern arguments in favour of books, like carbon capture for instance. If the entire population of the world had ten extra books each, how much carbon would that take out of circulation?

Anyway, back to the space programme; we have often heard how going into space produces lots of really great innovations, though the only one I can ever remember is the biro that will write on the ceiling. Anyone who is an avid book reader is bound to wonder what the astronauts did with their time up there whizzing round and round the world. Even more so in the space station, sitting in a fairly small apartment for months on end.

I don't imagine that they took a pile of books with them, because the weight would be too much, though we do know from watching the Apollo 13 movie that at least one sneaked a small tape recorder on board. If they did take books someone would have been advertising those books by now as the best book to take into space with you.

Listening to 'The long view' on the BBC this morning I caught a one line explanation - they looked out of the window. The programme was comparing the Challenger ocean exploration voyage a hundred odd years ago with the space exploration by the shuttle. The Victorian pioneers apparently did read books when they were pottering along in quiet seas, but the spacemen looked out of the window.

I don't want to imply that this means that the space men were somehow not up to the mental task of reading, because we know that they are all both physically and intellectually top performers. What it does tell us is something of just how captivating and completely original the view from a spaceship must be. Something so novel in it's experience that it has to be watched whenever possible.

Another snippet of the programme explained that although the physical environment of the space station is restricted. (I'm struggling here not to say there is no space in a space station) You can however, make the most of it because weightlessness means that the ceiling is as good as the floor or walls to store things. What they didn't do was store things near portholes because the crew wanted to spend their free time sitting there and looking out.

OK so all this is hearsay off a radio programme and I have no idea how true it is, but maybe it does explain why the space programme didn't invent the kindle.

What time of day to blog?

2011-07-10T14:51:00.001+01:00

I just read an interesting piece on Amanda Hocking's blog,

Someone working with her agent says she is wrong to blog at three in the morning. Presumably this notion must be derived from some sort of tracking statistics, which in turn must be related to when people are awake in different parts of the world.

I don't know what the English speaking population of each time zone turns out to be, but for sure, it varies a lot. The two graphs come from a web search that is notable for the lack of any kind of ‘official’ statistics, what do they do all day at the United Nations? (Credits are on the graphs)

If like Amanda Hocking, or me for that matter, you are trying to sell ebooks to English speakers who are also on the web, then you are aiming at a subset of these graphs. We can’t assume that everyone on the web speaks English – not even all the English do.

If she blogs at 3am I am likely to read it right after breakfast when I switch on my computer or light up the iPad. If she says something interesting I will probably react, and I'll have the whole day to get on with anything she has influenced me to do, like buy another book or whatever. I may even tell my friends or blog about it.

If her publisher is only interested in the USA, this will look like wasted effort from his point of view. In the world of ebooks however, one has to ask, does this matter. I found one of the most remarkable things about putting a book on Amazon is that half my sales are in the USA. I have no idea who these people are, or what they think of the book, but their dollars count just the same as a sale over here, and I hope they enjoy it just as much as someone at the end of my road. I do wish some of them would write a review, but you can't have everything.

I suspect that this statistic about the ideal time to blog hides more than it shows. Buried in it are some assumptions about who matters in the world and what the blogger might be hoping to achieve. Me, I'm grateful if anyone reads this at all, and I don't mind what time of day they read it, or what they do with the rest of their day. Like Amanda Hocking I propose to go on blogging about what I want to, when I want to. It's nice to have something in common with someone who has apparently sold a million ebooks.

My boycott of the News of the World

2011-07-08T13:49:00.000+01:00

I have only ever boycotted three things, and the results scare the hell out of me.

Last week I was so incensed about the Milly Dowler hacks that I sent a tweet . "Hacking Milly Dowler's voicemail and deleting evidence, how low can you get. Boycott News of the World now" Sent on 4th July.

For me personally that was difficult in that I had never bought the paper in my life, so how exactly could I boycott it? Never mind, after a suitable period of figuration (that word was put in by the predictive text on the iPad, but it seems to work so I'm leaving it), I sent out the tweet, a pretty rare thing from me. I doubt if the closure of the paper arises directly from my action, I actually doubt if anyone else actually saw the tweet, but given what happened after my other boycotts I am left wondering.

My first boycott was of South African products, starting after Sharpeville and continuing until Nelson Mandella asked me to stop. I was part of an audience of a thousand or two at the ICC in Birmingham where he spoke. It wasn't quite a one to one conversation, but I was there and he did ask. After the meeting I drove up to Tescos at Five Ways in Birmingham and bought a South African apple and ate it sitting in the car. I wept, quite overcome with the emotion of seeing and hearing Mandella and with ending what had probably been the first political act of my grown up life. I was almost fifteen when Sharpeville happened.

When I worked in general practice many years later in Balsall Heath, a very inner city part of Birmingham, I used to see every day a piece of graffiti painted on the railway bridge - "Thatcher out, Mandela out" it said. At the time both seemed impossible.

My second boycott was of Sainsburys, the supermarket. Roy Griffiths (no relation), was their chief exec at the time, and did a report on the NHS for Mrs Thatcher. I was so incensed with the superficial analysis and potentially damaging effects that I gave up shopping in Sainsburys. At the time they were the leading supermarket, but once my boycott began, Tesco steadily overtook them and eventually got way ahead. I finally stopped the boycott a few years ago when Sainsburys ran a campaign on healthy food. I was President of the Faculty of Public Health at the time and at the launch event for the campaign. I was able to speak to the chief exec of Sainsburys. I told him personally that I was impressed with what they were doing and was therefore officially ending my boycott, since then their results seem to have improved.

I am trained as an epidemiologist, so I know a bit about interpreting cause and effect. Three out of three isn't bad, but it's hardly enough for me to take the credit for these momentous changes, but just in case I plan to continue to be very careful about what I boycott in the future.

In memory of that day in July

2011-07-06T22:41:00.000+01:00

Being over 60 may have saved my life; I got a pass that let me travel free on the underground after nine o’clock so I wasn’t on the tube at 8.50.

I used to collect a small coffee from the cafe Nero on Jamestown road, just a small one so I could drink it by the time I got to the bin outside the Electric Ballroom. A medium cup stays too hot too long. At the turnstile, with a bag in one hand and a coffee in the other you need a third hand to swipe the Oyster card and you don’t get an extra hand for being sixty.

I dropped the cup in the bin and found the gates of the station closed so I headed to the other entrance in Kentish Town road. I turned the corner and walked into chaos. All the way down Camden road in front of the bus stops, there were hundreds and hundreds of people, as though it was Saturday market but on Thursday and in the wrong road.

A man in a London transport hat said the station was closed.

‘There’s been a power surge, in fact there’s been two - they’ve had to close the whole tube.’

‘You mean there’s been a bomb’ I said.

‘No a power surge - two power surges.’

I remember thinking ‘Good luck guys, this is what we all practiced for.’ Exercise Winter Morning we called it, with the police and ambulance and all the hospitals, but this was summer and that was in Birmingham, where we’d had bombs before.

I walked, heading away from the crowds up the hill towards Regent’s Park. Just level with Arlington road a taxi stopped to let someone out and I dashed up and jumped in. As we drove down the park, serene and beautiful in the summer sunshine, I said to the driver.

‘Have there been bombs on the tube?’

‘Looks like it, five or six and a bus in Tavistock square.’ We listened to the radio and I told him to stop at our office, gave him £20 and said please wait.

Phoning was hopeless. I was supposed to be at the Elephant and Castle, the other side of the river. Should I go back to the flat or try to carry on. I’m supposed to be chairing an important meeting so it seemed to be important to carry on. I picked up the Taxi again and we set off.

Once out of the park there were police sirens everywhere. The driver turned this way and that to try to beat the traffic. Almost right underneath us, people are dead in two wrecked circle line trains between Edgware road and Paddington. I’ve been there a hundred times.

As we tried to find a way to cross the river, I watched London begin to cope. You could feel the spirit. With no underground, hardly any buses and every taxi full, there was nothing to do but walk or help other people. I tried to phone home but the network was jammed.

It’s one of those days, I thought; one of those days when everyone knows where they were. When Buddy Holly died, I was at school. When John Kennedy was shot, I was hitch hiking home and there was nothing but sombre music on the radio.

When Elvis died, I was walking along Euston road. ‘The king is dead’ the news stands said, but we have a queen, I thought. We passed that spot twenty-five minutes ago. What will the news stands say today?

I remember when the real king died, I was at primary school and the gardener told us at break time. I went home to lunch and my mum couldn’t work out what had gone wrong with the radio, sombre music then too. I wonder what the music will be today.

Only three people made it to the meeting, we sat around for an hour and no more came. At least we tried.

I walked from the Elephant to Whitehall detouring around police roadblocks. My feet were sore by Westminster Bridge. The river looks the same as always. It would take more than a few bombs to change that. Hitler couldn’t.

I’m supposed to meet the minister for work and pensions, Margaret Hodge. There is a buffet set for twenty but just five of us have made it and the minister has her own salad. We’re all doctors so it won’t look good if we eat too much. We pick at the food while the minister diets. In the background, the TV stays on and we all glance at it now and then somehow expecting it to explode. We try to listen as we are told about the latest government initiative on invalidity benefit. Trying to make sense of what is planned for the future on a day while we all wonder if anything will ever be the same again.

This time yesterday we heard that London has the 2012 Olympics. This should have been a day of celebration and optimism; for a few hours we were the capital of the world - but what sort of world is it now?

I walk up Whitehall, past the huge TV screen in Trafalgar Square, set up to show the Olympic Vote. Up Charing Cross road and Tottenham Court road towards the office, and in an hour I’m back in Regent’s park. I send the staff home, those that have made it to work. I thank them all for coming, and tell them not to come tomorrow. It doesn’t feel defeatist, just practical. There’s nothing so urgent that it can’t wait until Monday. I finally get through to home and make sure that everyone knows I’m OK. It turns out that some of my text messages got through.

I set off to walk to Paddington, by now it’s almost evening and everywhere there are people walking. I hear snatches of words as I pass.

‘Silly buggers.’

‘Won’t get me down.’

‘Won’t get us down.’

‘Won’t stop us.’

There are days when the world changes, but it doesn’t change much. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down. I used to get up early in those days, before I had a bus pass. I turned on the news and there were people dancing on the wall. I slammed in videotape. I have a tape of the day Mandela was released as well.

The world does change but it also goes on for those of us lucky enough to still be here.

Cherry picking clichés

2011-06-28T20:54:00.000+01:00

We are all warned to avoid clichés in writing, but where do they come from? Take cherry picking for example. It has grown to mean selecting particular specimens or events, or giving special attention to one aspect of something above others. Have you ever picked cherries? We have five cherry trees, so I have experience.

One branch of the cherry tree before picking -
a definitely nibbled cherry towards the bottom left

The first thing to say is that unless you take special measures to cover the trees, the blackbirds and magpies will pick all the cherries. Almost worse than that, they peck holes in the fruit so when the cherries finally get ripe they're half spoiled. You can see that in one of the cherries near the camera in the picture. None of this activity chimes with the way the phrase 'cherry picking' gets used.

I have built a massive metal cage around our biggest tree so that the whole thing can be covered in a net. This entailed going on a welding course and buying sixty quid's worth of steel and spending a similar amount on nets. Not a cheap option, but it does at least lead to a harvest of ripe unspoiled cherries. So does cherry picking summon up in your mind several hours of welding, antirust painting and vast struggles to get the edifice to stand and not fall over; plus of course twice a year balancing fifteen feet up a step ladder dragging thirty feet of netting into places it doesn't want to go?

That is the reality of cherry growing; the picking is something different. Cherries grow in irregular bunches and hang down under the leaves where they are often hard to see. If you just pull them off the tree, you can damage it and cause disease. The best technique is to use scissors, and snip the stems and have the cherry fall off into a basket that you hold underneath, while of course balancing up a ladder.

Bear in mind that you have to get the ladder into the tree to a significant extent because the fruit isn't just found at the ends of the branches. While you are struggling to hold the basket in the right place and snipping with the other hand the wind blows neighbouring branches into your eyes. Whatever you do don't step back, the ground is a long way down.

Just a few of the almost 20 kilos we picked this year

The reward for all this perilous activity is ripe cherries, followed by cherry pies and ice-cream and if you freeze them a whole year of taste explosions and delight. Fabulous, but still not what the cliché has come to mean.

So, where does the phrase get it's meaning? Possibly it comes from the fact that cherries tend to ripen at slightly different rates, so early in the season there are often bunches with one ripe cherry and several around it that are not ready. In those circumstances, you do have to just pick the ripe ones. If you don't invest in nets or other means of keeping the birds at bay, then cherry picking cherries, in the cliché terms, is what you have to do. It's a poor deal because the birds have all day to sit and do nothing except watch your cherries and pick the moment to grab. If you can leave them alone, if your tree is under a net, then there comes a time where they are all ripe together. Picking them at that point is much more rewarding.

Seen from the point of view of blackbirds and magpies, cherry picking means sitting around all day and grabbing the best fruit before the rightful owner dashes out to scare you off. Closer to the usual meaning I guess.

So there we have it, using a cliché is a bad idea because, not only is it lazy writing, but it may not mean what you think. Worse still, you may be mistaken for a sneaky blackbird or a thieving magpie.

Worcester Literary Festival and the compulsion to write.

2011-06-27T07:11:00.000+01:00

The last week and a half has been taken up with the Worcester Literary Festival (http://www.worcslitfest.com), the first one ever. Over a hundred events spread over ten days, a massive undertaking for which the organisers should be proud.

I read a small piece at one event, and despite the dental work earlier in the week, got through it OK. As it turned out this was on one of the few days this summer when it has poured with rain and our audience was somewhat reduced as a result.

I found reading to an audience very different from giving postgraduate lectures, something I have done hundreds of times. Talking as an expert is not the same as performing as a creative artist, though many aspects of performance, like pacing and audibility are similar.

The issue is the content. In a lecture there are facts that can be relied upon, referenced back, verified by calculation or repeat observations. Interpretation is based on those facts and extends from a previous body of knowledge and experience. If I talk about how to control a disease outbreak, people who might have to do the same thing will listen in the hope of doing as well or better when they come up against the same problems.

Set the same material in a work of fiction and everything changes. The facts may be the same, but the audience start to consider whether they think the characters are believable, whether the plot moves fast enough, and a whole bunch of other things that make no sense in real life, even though the fiction may be purporting to imitate reality.

In a lecture, you tell it how it is, or should be; in fiction, you tell it how it could be, or might have been. I started writing fiction when I was still working in public health because I thought that my worst fears might make good stories. In every crisis I dealt with there was a more complex and more dangerous one going in my mind and in the minds of my team as we sought to keep one step ahead of reality. The worst-case scenarios were better stories; fortunately, none of them happened. That is probably the nub of it, real life can be boring; fiction can’t.

Yesterday, as part of the festival we had a 70th birthday party for the Worcester Writers Circle (http://www.worcslitfest.com/worcester-writers-circle-70th-anniversary), which apparently is the oldest writing group in the country (www.worcesterwriters.org.uk). We launched an anthology of members work to celebrate ( The Unboken Circle ISBN978-1-906198-04-6). When you consider that the group began in 1941 in the middle of the war, it tells you something about how compelling writing can be. Seventy years later and the compulsion is still there.

Toothache

2011-06-21T12:53:00.004+01:00

I do not have to write a blog today because I have toothache. Why do I have toothache? There may be a number of reasons. At root, of course it all goes back to Nye Bevan who started the NHS, who paid dentists more if thy filled more teeth, after all, it can't have been my fault, sweets were rationed. Without all that dental attention, my back tooth would not have been full of all the metal that broke up a few weeks ago.

I do have a dentist appointment for tomorrow, when all the different bits of the poor mangled tooth with be heaved out and lost forever. Knowing this does not stop it hurting. I did get an emergency appointment when the thing fell apart and the hole was cleaned and a temporary dressing was put in. That seems to have done an OK job for the last two weeks but not any more. It feels like that side of my mouth is twice as big as it ought to be. If I don't think about it, I can just about fool myself into believing that it has not reached the throbbing, pulsating stage.

Who am I trying to kid; it has definitely reached that stage. Look on the bright side; at least I don't have to concentrate to avoid chewing on that side, I get reminded how sensitive it is about 65 times per minute.

There is one advantage to the current level of symptoms. When it woke me up at about four this morning it was a generalised ache and hard to pin down. At first, I thought it might be one of the other teeth that was playing up. I went back to sleep thinking, well at least I'm going to the dentist tomorrow, he can check the others. We are way beyond that now, I can localise the problem down to a few millimetres.

Later this week I am reading a couple of pieces at an event in the Worcester Literary Festival; black humour and toothache could be an interesting combination.

Thinking about performance and also seeking some distraction, I happened to watch a couple of UTube clips of Amy Winehouse in Serbia. The general consensus seems to be that she was drunk, certainly it was an awful performance. It would probably be a good thing if all her fans that took movies at the concert sent her extracts, maybe it might wake her up and show her what a mess she has become.

With a bit of luck mine won't be as bad; anyway, the expectations of the audience will be less and the ticket price is certainly a lot less. In the event that my speech is slurred and I can't get the words out properly, you know my excuse.

Philippa Gregory – The Red Queen

2011-06-20T10:10:00.000+01:00

There appear to be no end of historical characters that Philippa Gregory can write about. I've just finished 'The Red Queen', selected this month for our book club. I always thought that Henry VII was an interesting character, but this book is about his mother, about whom I knew nothing. I had hoped to get insight into the character of Henry, but it turns out that he and his mother were separated when he was quite young and throughout the book she is only able to keep in touch through occasional visits and letters. The visits were almost always under the noses of hostile supervisors or other interested parties and the letters were frequently secret, and presumably destroyed, so the ones quoted in the book were probably invented by the author.

Did I learn much about Henry? No. The book does give an interesting picture of a pathological, almost deranged, upper class society at the time of the Wars of the Roses, in which back stabbing is as common as front stabbing. Lots of stabbing anyway. There seems to have been a fascinating obsession and reverence for regal bloodlines, which is certainly not justified by the abilities or morals of the various royals in the book.

The reader knows throughout the book, that it is going to end on Bosworth Field, or somewhere nearby, if we are to believe the most modern archeologists. A battle that kills Richard and establishes Henry as king. A battle that Henry should have lost if his mother's third husband and not changed sides at the last moment.

The thing I have not really got to the bottom of is why I keep turning the pages. What is it that Philippa Gregory is doing that drives the story along? Many of the characters are despicable, or boring, or driven by motives that would lead me to cross the road if I met them in the street. The fact that Henry's mother is proud of having calluses on her knees from spending so much time praying makes me despise the woman. Various advisors, husbands etc. point out many times that although she listens to God a lot, she only hears what she wants to hear. Hardly a model of piety, more a deluded megalomaniac. People like that have caused a lot of trouble over the years and much bloodshed too, what's more there are still plenty like that hard at it today. They never learn.

There isn't exactly a character arc either; she retains both her worldview and her habits and beliefs throughout the story. Anyone asking, 'when will she learn?' is going to be disappointed.

So how the hell did Henry turn out to be a good king? I recall from doing history at school that the country was almost bankrupt when he took over and riven by many years of war. Yet this lad, who had spent much of his life in France, somehow united the country, created stability and established the modern nation state, or at least laid the platform on which Henry VIII and Elizabeth did that. Where did he get that from? as far as we can tell from this book, not from his intolerant and bigoted mother, or from his uncle who had similar single-minded view of the world. Maybe the very fact that he was kept distant from her, dispossessed and struggling for much of his early life, was the key to moulding someone who had the nerve to say, let's do it differently.

It could be that the book is an argument in favour of boarding schools, and against the nuclear family, yet on the surface it appears to value blood lines, or bloody lines anyway, above everything else. One could argue that Gregory is using the traditional vehicle of the unreliable narrator to get across a very different point, but I don't think I kept turning the pages because of subliminal social comment, or because I wanted to see this awful woman get her comeuppance, after all, we know from the start that she ends up on the winning side.

I am left with having to admit that Philippa Gregory has mastered a writing style that somehow keeps the pages turning, even though the characters are unattractive and the end of the story is known from the start. In effect she has dispensed with suspense, plot or character as the driving forces in the novel. What then is left?

I think she is very good at knowing just how long each little subplot and story needs to be, how much detail to include and how to balance dialogue with narrative and internal voice with action. It is a style driven forward by immediate events and short horizons. At every stage the big picture looks hopeless, so the characters concentrate on surviving till tomorrow and trusting to God and blood lines for everything else. Jeopardy is clearly a driving force, except that we know the ultimate outcome. We don't identify with the characters because we think they might die, though the various dangers do create a certain amount of curiosity as to exactly how they will get out of each situation.

Philippa Gregory has obviously done everything she can to stick to what is known about both the events and characters and also to use famous historic unknowns to her advantage. No one has ever been sure who killed the princes in the tower, so she makes sure that all the main characters have a motive. I was however, confused by several references to the possibility that one of the princes might have been replaced by a double. Tough on the double, but what happened to the real one? That idea just gets lost towards the end of the book, or is it in a sequel? How many more of these do I need to read?

Germain Greer at Malvern Theatre

2011-06-18T16:26:00.000+01:00

I have always thought that women should be treated as equal to men, but I became a more serious supporter of the feminist cause when my first daughter was born, so I went to listen to Germaine Greer in Malvern. She is a professor so I expected something a little academic. To my surprise, much of the material that she quoted was about celebrities cavorting about, rather than an emerging evidence base in peer reviewed literature. It seems to me that if you read too much into the slogan on the tee shirt that Annie Lennox happens to be wearing you risk arriving at an unreliable conclusion.

She spent some time talking about the recent slut walk phenomenon, and I think she was right. The whole concept is brilliant, in that it produces a very visible confrontation to a set of deep underlying attitudes. Pulling the whole of an iceberg of prejudice to the surface is often effective because such things frequently look ridiculous in the daylight. To take the iceberg analogy a little further, they melt in the sunshine.

Germaine also quoted from a card she had been sent by an anonymous revenge seeking person, she presumes it was a man. The card blamed Germaine for every woman that ever walked out of a marriage. I can’t quote it exactly because I didn’t think to take notes, mea culpa, I am a professor myself, what was I thinking.

I’m not sure who was getting revenge on whom, the postcard writer for sending it, or Germaine for reading it out. She quoted from it repeatedly and simply refused to take the blame for anything it alleged. I have no problem with that because the accusations were ridiculous, but I think she could have delved for a deeper meaning.

Why do people write such things? Surely if they gave it a moment’s thought they would realise that the receiver of such a message, written in a vengeful and exaggerated style, and I suspect in capital letters, would bin it in a moment. Such a message reveals a complete inability on the part of the sender to see into the mind of the person the complaint is aimed at. From that one might surmise that the writer cannot comprehend why they have been abandoned. Might it not be exactly those attitudes that lead to someone writing such an intemperate letter that are the root cause of the deteriorating relationships that were the trigger for the letter?

I think if I were in Germaine’s shoes I would have asked the audience, who were about 80% female, ‘Would you live with a person who writes postcards like this?’ I wouldn’t be expecting them to say yes.

I am reminded of one of the maxims in Stephen Covey’s book, the seven habits of highly successful people – Understand and be understood. If you want other people to comprehend what you are saying, then the first thing you have to do is get where they are coming from. The writer of that card clearly had no understanding at all of Germaine Greer.

I have to pause here and ask myself if I have either. I was initially shocked at the hostility she appeared to show in the early part of almost all her answers to questions from the audience. For example, one questioner asked, what would her ideal world look like? The answer began along the lines: ‘What sort of fascist question is that?’ She went on to elaborate that the Nazi view of the world was an idealised notion of everyone in their place, all that fresh air and hiking of the Hitler Youth etc. All true, but hardly the answer to the question, though further into the answer she did begin to show some empathy without actually ever answering the question.

Why did she respond like that? I suspect because she has spent about 50 years being asked hostile questions, so the first thing to do is clobber the question into the long grass and then construct an answer that takes you back onto your main material, which is what she did. It is a strong response, but one that may have surprised a few people. Whilst the answer disappointed me, it was good to see a tough and seasoned campaigner at work.

I think my other disappointment was that, although the title was 40 years of feminism and fun, she didn’t talk much about fun. She did criticise the women’s movement for not having enough fun, contrasting the average women’s march with the gay pride events in Sidney and in effect saying that the gays were so over the top and clearly enjoying their own outrageous behaviour, that they were impossible to ignore. You can see why she like the slut walks.

I wanted her to go into more depth in examining the role of women. I was surprised that she made no mention of the value of female literacy and education of women. As Kofi Annan has said:-

“We know from study after study that there is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls and women. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition, promote health -- including the prevention of HIV/AIDS -- and increase the chances of education for the next generation.”

As a professor, with access to that literature that Annan was quoting, I expected some of that in the lecture. What better way to drown the cynics and the vengeful postcard writers than to point out to them that treating women as equals would make the world better for all of us.

More thoughts on chick lit

2011-06-12T16:44:00.000+01:00

I bought a Versace jacket. OK so it was second hand, and an absolute steal at the price, but still quite an odd experience.

I tried it on because Lois was busy seeing what she looked like in a new pair of trousers. I glanced at myself in a mirror and was shocked. I looked better than my own self-image. Almost as if I was looking at someone else who happened to have my beard and was wearing my jeans.

Obviously some fashion designers are worth what they earn. I ought not to have been surprised, after all someone like Versace could not stay in business this long if all they sold was image with no substance, but it is still a mystery how this better looking person got into my clothes.

Does it matter? I'm 66, so hardly likely to be making money or influence from how I look. It is a weird thing that external appearance, which, without a mirror can only be seen by other people, should matter to me. It provides an opportunity to explore what vanity is like. Take how I felt looking in the mirror, and amplify it to an almost psychotic level and there is a character with a very different view of the world.

For a writer the challenging thing about fashion is that it's very much a right hemisphere thing. What goes on in the brain is all pictures and emotions; translating that into words presents a number of choices, none of which can be guaranteed to work. You could spend all day talking about the feel of the leather, or the way the light reflected off it, and completely miss the smell or the way it moves or the fit or the cut.

Actually the sleeves are a tiny bit too long and with the zip done up it's tight enough to keep me on a diet, all of which suggests that I may have been reading too much chick lit.

Why I like chick lit part 2

2011-06-09T08:35:00.000+01:00

Chick lit is more than just Sophie Kinsella. I can't claim to have a comprehensive knowledge, but I have to discuss 'Rachel's Holiday' by Marian Keyes. Julie Cohen, mentioned this in a seminar and I remember downloading it to the Kindle on my phone during her lecture. I’m glad I did. I’ve since given paper copies to other people too, though not as many as Julie gave away in book week (See www.julie-cohen.com for more detail on her blog)

Rachel’s holiday is a serious book about addiction, except it follows a similar pattern to Sophie Kinsella's books by portraying a character who is too trivial in everything she does to realize the mess she is in. Self centered, constantly partying, this woman takes whatever illegal substances she can lay her hands on every time she can. She justifies her excesses with trivial excuses, as she runs up debts and runs off friends.

Obsessed with celebrity and instant gratification she aspires to have everything as soon as possible while propelling herself down a slippery slope to real addiction and poverty.

The book is a study in character development. Why go on reading about this air-head of a woman, an Irish girl in New York for all the wrong reasons, who is eventually rescued by her family? Somehow, she manages not to think twice about why her parents would go to the trouble of almost abducting her from New York to get her into rehab in Ireland. Wouldn't it cross her mind, you would think, that this is a bit extreme, and might mean that other people who know her are seriously worried about the way her life is going? Wouldn't that bring most people to just consider the possibility that she might be screwing up more than she thinks?

Nothing of the sort. Instead, she fastens onto the notion that this is an up market rehab outfit where celebrities have been admitted in the past. She will use the stay there as a holiday, which obviously she deserves, because she has a stressful life, and she will meet loads of vitally important glossy people who will be buddies or trophies as soon as she is back on the party circuit.

The beauty of Marian Keyes writing is that the reader can see all the flaws way ahead of Rachel herself, a classic use of the unreliable narrator, and somehow we keep reading just to find out when the penny will drop. When will she realize that any celebrity who finds their way to rehab is off the rails and only worth knowing if they manage to get their life back together and stop being the ultimate party animal?

OK, so I'm not giving too much away if I say that she makes it in the end, and learns some lessons and has insights that all of us can value. I think that is the joy of the chick lit genre, at least of the books that I've read so far. They are real literature, often tackling significant social problems and doing it in a way that makes the learning and insight accessible to a far wider audience than serious literature ever expects.

You could say that they are modern fairy tales, battles between good and evil, with glossy make believe characters, structured so that the reader doesn't think that they are being lectured to.

I am reminded of Terry Pratchett complaining that his books were not taken seriously. He said something along the lines of, 'Throw in one lousy dragon and no one takes you seriously.'

Chicklit has a similar problem; great stories, but once they mention shoes the serious reviewers stop reading. Wake up guys, shoes is where it all starts.

The Spearhead Dinghy

2011-06-05T12:49:00.001+01:00

In March I mentioned a boat, a dinghy called Spearhead, that I helped design many years ago. Two of them have been sitting on my back yard for the last decade, sailing very occasionally.

One has now gone to a new home. After a couple of weeks of refurbishment, we got it sailing. Not as dramatic an event as we might have liked because there was no wind but it did ghost along. We now have the other one on Ebay.

So, as a digression from my normal obsessions, here is a little of the history of the boat and what makes it special.

The project started out when my father was measurer for the 5o5 world championships. (For those of you who don’t know about such things, that is a class of sailing dinghy, five point O five meters long). The measurer has to make sure that all the boats are the same, so inevitably by the end of the week we knew all the ways that people tried to cheat in order to make the boats go a bit faster.

Flatter and longer with a deeper point to the bow seemed to be the main things and make it lighter if you can. In a 5o5 all those things are illegal, but what about making a new class?

Making a boat lighter, calls for some engineering innovation. In a sailing boat, there are forces at work that will break the hull. Start with the mast, it’s not difficult to see that this produces a downward pressure on the bottom of the boat which would make a hole and sink it. Normally the boat has extra thickening to resist this, but that adds weight. When the wind blows on the sail it pushes the mast sideways, so we resist that with side stays, but they pull the sides of the boat inwards. Also, if you do that maths and triangulate the forces, you will see that tightening the side stays also pulls the mast downwards even harder. Actually, it is all in three dimensions, and some of the force goes through the forestay and that too can deform the hull.

The solution to all this came to me lying in bed one night. A triangular aluminium tube frame fitted under the foredeck from which the mast could be suspended. The stays are attached to the frame so that all the rigging forces are contained. The whole thing weights about 10 pounds and because aluminium is light and the arrangement is very efficient, it allowed us to reduce the weight of the hull by about 80 pounds compared to a similar sized racing dinghy.

The rest of the boat was also packed with innovations. The deck was made in one big moulding, using epoxy resin for the fibreglass because that is stronger weight for weight than the more traditional polyester resins that were traditional at the time. We had a theory that by taking a lot of the stress out of the shell and into the frame system the boat would last a lot longer. Thirty odd years later I can say that we were right, not many wood or fibreglass dinghies last as well.

We created the shape by working in a big shed with a trapeze wire hung from the roof. We spend hours sliding in and out, simulating the movements that would be required when sailing. We gradually built up the shape with car body filler, sandpapering and polishing until we had something we could move around with ease. From that plug, we made a mould so that the whole deck of the boat could be cast as a single entity and dropped onto the hull.

The result, as you can see from the pictures, looks more like a modern racing car than a traditional boat. Of course, they make the cars out of carbon fibre, which would have been nice, and even lighter but we weren’t millionaires.

Why did we call it Spearhead?

Because the shape of the wetted area when it floats looks like a spearhead, well, it would if you were swimming underneath. There are other clever things about the design, on which I could bore for England, but I’ll save those for anyone who asks.

I’m getting too arthritic for cold-water sports, and all the team that built the boats are dead now, apart from me. This is the last one left in the family after free cycle locally found a home for my old boat, so I’m writing this in the hope that we can find a good home for a piece of history that, as the pictures show, is also a load of fun

Why do I like chick lit?

2011-06-01T11:34:00.002+01:00

The book group I belong to are reading Sophie Kinsella’s ‘Remember me’ this month. I think I am the only man in the group, so it is slightly weird that I recommended Kinsella to the others.

‘Remember me’, for those who don’t know, tells a first person story of a woman who wakes up after a road accident having lost the last three years of her memory. The last thing she remembers is falling down some steps coming out of a club somewhat the worse for wear. We get a brief sketch of her underachieving life and tedious job in which she has just failed to get an annual bonus because she has been working a few days less than a year. She has been out drinking with those who did get a bonus and is feeling pissed at her employers who she thinks have been mean, her boy friend, who didn’t turn up, and her dysfunctional family. Did she make it to her estranged father’s funeral? Not a cheerful start to a book but told with enough pace and wry wit to keep the reader turning the pages.

She wakes up in hospital assuming she hit her head falling down the stairs and gradually discovers that she is three years older, rich, with a very good looking and successful husband and appears to be running the department that she used to work in.

Her first reaction is to think ‘Hey great, I have a wonderful life, even though I have no idea where it came from.’

It would be very easy to descend into some heavy serious stuff about amnesia, or if I was writing it, I’m sure I’d have to fight off the temptation to explore some detailed neuroscience. Instead, Kinsella manages to keep moving with the story and uses chance encounters in scenes with other characters to open up just enough of the confusion and anxiety that would be felt by anyone in this predicament. She manages to convey a character who is both too shallow to be seriously bothered by what has happened and yet also driven by abiding curiosity to discover how her life has changed.

We discover that all her old friends hate her because she is now a very demanding boss, nickname cobra. Gradually we begin to get other glimpses of a less than perfect life.

In some respects, it could be argued that there is no plot, not in the active sense anyway; it is more a sort of static mystery to be uncovered, almost like archaeology. What drives the book along is the lead character’s curiosity about the last three years of her life. This is only likely to work as a literary device if the reader has enough sympathy and empathy with the character to care about her life. So where does that empathy come from?

Putting it another way, what is it about this ditsy woman that makes me want to turn the pages? Asking myself the question brings me up against the simple fact that almost every woman I know is more interesting, or at least less shallow than this character appears to be, at least from her own description of herself. I think the crucial issue is the contrast between how she professes to be and what she appears to have achieved, plus perhaps some basic empathy with her predicament.

I think that is what makes me read Kinsella’s other books too. She puts apparently lightweight characters into situations that demand our empathy, and then in rising to the challenge, something emerges in their character that demands our admiration and rewards us for reading to the end.

I’m taking the risk of writing this before I find out what the rest of the reading group think. They may hate it.

Writing groups

2011-05-30T10:28:00.000+01:00

Writing plays a large part in my life, so here is another angle. I go to a couple of writing groups, where members write about a topic or a title that has been set beforehand. One group is part of the Pershore U3A and the other is Worcester Writers Circle which is apparently the oldest in the country and 70 this year. The Circle has all the titles for the year on their web site (http://sites.google.com/site/worcesterwriterscircle).

From that you can see that last week's title was 'Catch the little thief'. Is it a good idea to bend my mind to some random title? Wouldn't it be better to get on with whatever book I am writing?

I think a lot of writing groups do this, so it must work for some, and has obviously worked over a period, so not a thing to cast aside lightly. I usually try to think of something on the subject, at least for a day or two, but there is some benefit in trying harder. If I keep writing the current book, there is every chance that it won't be much different from everything I've done before. Really bending my mind to this week's title might just drag me into writing something I've never done before.

So, Catch the little thief it is.

‘What's your name?’

‘Catch.’

‘That's a weird name for a kid.’

‘It’s what they all say when they throw things at me.’

‘What do they throw?’

‘Rocks mostly, crusts or something I can eat, if I'm lucky.’

The kid grinned, ducked his head and squirmed away, but the big man was too quick for him and grabbed his coat, rapidly transferring his grip to a shoulder as the skinny arms wriggled clear of the sleeves.

‘Put your coat back on, we haven't finished.’

Twisting him around the dark brown eyes searched his face.

‘Do you have another name kid?’

‘What you want to call me?’

‘I’m not calling you names I’m asking questions. Are you gonna run some more?’

The kid looked up, his glance darting between the figure holding him and the nearest building. Half a smile cracked the face in front of him; the bastard knows it’s too far to run. The kid shrugged. The hand on his shoulder relaxed a little, but didn't move.

‘This way.’

Three steps took them to the car and the kid climbed in with startling alacrity, creating enough space to spread his small frame and own as much space as he could.

‘Never been in one of these huh?’

‘Cop car init.’

‘Sure is.’

‘Am I going to jail?’

‘Not unless you try to drive this thing.’

‘How thick are you? I'm sitting in the back seat; even a big bugger like you can't reach the pedals from here. Besides, that bloke in the front can drive us’

The kid stopped looking over the driver’s shoulder for a second and risked a glance at the man alongside him, grinning, raising his eyebrow a fraction. Sensing the attention on his face, his right hand sneaked across to the door handle and pressed it. His body tensed to jump and run, he pushed harder, then sank back in the seat defeated.

‘I can't get out can I.’

‘Not unless you can jump over a big bugger like me.’

The smile came back, but the detective still had the initiative.

‘Where do you live Catch?’

‘Like a house, you mean?

With your mum or your dad.’

‘Fifty two Newbold road.’

The big man leaned forward and touched the driver on the shoulder

‘Did you get that?’

The driver half turned,

‘There's only forty houses in Newbold road.’

‘Try another one kid. Lets have name and address properly this time.

‘Catch. Catch is my name. Only name I go by.’

‘OK Catch, have you got a last name.

‘Little thief.’

The detective laughed.

‘That's the other thing they call you huh? How long have you lived on the streets?’

‘I don't live on the street.’

‘Kid either you live in a house or you live on the street.’

‘I live under the street.’

This brought a pause, a deep breath and a rueful smile.

‘Catch, Have you always been this smart?’ Another pause. ‘Nah, don't answer that one, how would you know. Any idea how old you are?

‘I might be twelve, or maybe thirteen.’

‘Did you go to school?’

‘Before my mum died.’

‘When was that?’

The kid shrugged.

‘Well, roughly, like how many winters ago?’

‘I'm not a Red Indian.’

‘I never said you were.’

‘Then don't make with the how many moons stuff. It was the seventh of January 2007, why does it matter.’

‘You've been on your own since then?’

‘Mostly. Sometimes I hang out with people.’

‘Who?’

Catch turned, taking in a change in the figure beside him, shoulders dropping, one more frown line, he’ll be calling a social worker next, he thought.

‘Whoever. I'm a little thief remember. I go with anyone I can get stuff from.’

‘So I should arrest you for stealing?’

‘Not that kind of stuff.’

A resigned sigh. ‘What then?’

‘Learning, brain stuff, finding things out.’

‘Go on.’

‘Reading, computers, money, languages, stuff to know, good stuff.’

He risked another smile, captivating, enticing, and sucking the detective into his world. ‘Can't go to school, can I, they'd have me in an orphanage and I'd never get out or learn anything either.’

‘That's not how it is ki… Catch.’

‘They don't teach cops much do they.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Do you know how many O levels the average kid in care gets? Do you know what percentage of kids in care end up unemployed or in Jail? Put me in there and I'll end up being a top gang leader in ten years time and give you loads of trouble. I'll have to change my name of course.’

‘Because we'll never catch you.’

Catch caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the window, hair all over the place a smudge of dirt on his forehead and for a nanosecond a mercurial smile flashed across his face.

‘On the other hand we could say I'm sixteen and small for my age and I could help you. Pretty soon, they'd be calling you Catch. What do you reckon?’

It could be said that I cheated slightly by adding a comma to the title, but I enjoyed trying to create a character with the minimum amount of description. There is of course the usual problem that when something begins to work, I feel like writing a book about the character. Catch is now running around in my head full of mischief, but he wouldn’t be there without the writing group.

Great writing

2011-05-24T06:43:00.001+01:00

There is always a choice about what to include and what to leave to the reader. What to write and what to leave between the lines.

Somehow the really great writers put just enough on paper for the reader to leap from one stepping stone to the next, inventing the story in their mind as they go. It may be that every reader invents a slightly different story, but they all invent tales that they live in, love, and remember.

I think that's the real difference between telling and showing.

Tellng is all about downloading the details that are in the author's mind, like writing a technical manual describing the story. Showing, on the other hand is opening the door to imagination so that the story pours into the minds eye of the reader, it becomes their story and they remain grateful to the writer for opening a crack into a different universe.

If I have this right, then that's why it is so difficult to set out a technical description that really defines the difference. There are of course particular sentences, that can be seen as much more likely to fall into one camp than another, but on their own such examples become part of the great lexicon of telling, and only illustrate showing when they are accompanied by the right experience in the reader, and that doesn't happen when the sentence is written, only when it is read.

So some telling turns out to be showing, words, sentences, whole paragraphs that if isolated would seem to be telling, in it's most obvious form, can show a story if the whole thing works.

One example I am reading at the moment is Nicola Morgan's book ‘Wasted’.

I'm taking a huge risk here, she's a better blogger than me and has written a lot of books, gets asked to talk at conferences for writers etc. so it's hardly my place to critique. On the other hand I am a reader, so what the hell.

I find myself asking, as I read the book, 'Why does this work?' The style is very authorial, you'd cut the whole thing if you followed Elmore Leonard's advice and cut out anything that looks like writing. Of course some of that is just fashion, if we all took Elmore's advice no one would have read a word of Arthur Ransome and all his wonderful stories written in an omniscient third person that can even tell you what the dog is thinking.

Nicola's story is in that same point of view, allowing her to tell us, and I do mean tell, what is in the head of each character as she goes along. Not only that, but she frequently uses the authorial privilege of telling us what will be in their head, or what might be. Yet there is something about the story that makes me want to keep turning the pages, which means that something is right. As Terry Pratchett says, there has to be a hidden message at the bottom of page one that says turn to page two, and a similar one on page two that gets you to three and so on. Those messages are obviously there, else why am I on page, um, well it's an ebook, so page numbers mean nothing, but I am well past half way.

Which in a roundabout way gets me back to where I started, the better writers know, or at least instinctively grasp, what to put on the page and what to put between the lines.

Showing, means enough words to lever open the space between the lines, to drive wedges into reality and open the cracks into the fictional space that lies beyond. Telling fills the page and covers the cracks like Polyfilla; smooth, sometimes even beautiful, but boring.

Suspense is one of those wedges, crucial to inducing the reader to use their imagination to explore what might be hidden deeper or later. Telling has no suspense. I used write papers in the civil service. Suspense is frowned on. You can't write a brief for a minister that says come back next week, or leaves anything to their imagination. Civil Service documents are all Polyfilla.

I think there is an issue too about how big those wedges need to be, and the answer is just big enough. Hammer a huge lever into the crack along with a JCB and an army of construction workers and we are back to a parallel universe that exists in the author's head rather than one that the reader is helped to discover. We are all storytellers but economy and sparsity is the key, just enough telling so that the story and the discovery of it becomes the main experience. Of course literary fiction is important too, it may not always have a narrative, but it does have ideas and images; it does do things to your mind and it still has those page turning messages.

But stick with the story for the moment because the story matters too, which is why the Stig Larson series works. The writing may be littered with Ikea shopping lists and stuff to fill 'what not to do' sessions on creative writing courses, but the story and at least one of the characters are so much bigger than the writing. The lesson from the popularity of Larson and probably Dan Brown and dare I say it the later J K Rowling books, is that if the story is big enough, the writing can break the ‘Rules’.

Rules, like show not tell, are no more than someone's attempt to codify best practice. Whether invented by an individual, or a group, and tested by time, or academic study, they are not tablets of stone and they are often oversimplifications. Who is going to remember a complicated rule?

Show don't tell is good, as rules go, and is probably easier to understand than saying that you should make the content that appears in the mind of the reader bigger, on any metric that you can devise, than the intellectual activity required to read the words. The reader will feel rewarded if they get back more than they put in.

Great writing reveals in the world or evokes in the reader something beyond their normal experience. Whether in fiction or fact, shown or told, the bargain every writer tries to strike is, if you make the effort to read my words, I'll make it worth your while.

PS My thanks to Nicola Morgan for a brief comment on an earlier draft.

York Conference, post script

2011-04-14T12:53:00.000+01:00

I had an interesting time at the York writing conference, going to some really good presentations, like Debi Alper’s for instance, but it was also interesting in the Chinese curse sense.

I may just be the wrong sort of person for such events, for instance here is an exchange that would have driven all my old friends in public health completely mad.

Audience question ‘What do you think of market research?’

Well-known agent on platform ‘Sounds a bit scientific to me.’

Publisher on the platform ‘I’m against it because it could prevent the publisher from using his professional judgement.’

So there we have it publishing is not scientific, or evidence based, so should I believe anything anyone tells me? They do however, believe in markets, if not market research, because so many decisions are driven by what they think will sell.

Part of the attraction of the York conference are the one-to-one sessions with agents and book doctors that come as part of the package.

I met two agents, both of whom said almost identical things, namely that there was no market for medical thrillers and that I should write something else. I'm putting it a bit baldly but quite honestly if I had not insisted on continuing the conversation both one-to-ones would have lasted 30 seconds.

One agent was good enough to follow up with an email

Dear Rod,

Thank you for taking the time to have a one-to-one with me on Saturday in York. The (name redacted) literary agency is very small agency and therefore I really have to love the work that I represent. As I explained, I don’t feel that there is a demand in the market for a medical thriller at the current time and that is why I was unable to look at your novel further.

I wish you the very best with your writing career.

With all best wishes 

So that is pretty definitive –write something else.

I mentioned this experience in a comment on one of Nicola Morgan's blogs and Nicola has now posted the following.

http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/2011/04/rejecting-genre-not-writing.html

THURSDAY, 14 APRIL 2011

REJECTING THE GENRE NOT THE WRITING

A comment from a blog-reader recently needs answering. He said he'd been told during one-to-one feedback sessions (with an agent, I think), "No one can sell medical thrillers, so write something else." He went on to say that in some ways he preferred this to being told that his writing wasn't good enough and that he found it helpful because he had "a better idea of what I'm aiming at - something where they at least reject the genre rather than the writing."

Back to that in a moment.

This links to something else that happened recently. I was chatting with a senior commissioning editor at a major children's publisher and when she heard I was doing an event on how to write for children that day she said,"Tell them not to do anything with vampires. People are always sending us vampire stuff and we don't want any more."

So, obediently, I relayed this message during my talk. I thought I noticed one member of the audience blanche and when it came to Q&A she asked, "That editor who didn't want vampires - was that [name redacted]?" I replied that it was. She blanched further. She told me afterwards that she was actually seeing this same editor for a meeting later that day, AND it was a vampire story she was pitching. Anyway, when I saw her again later, she was beaming. "She's asked to see the whole thing," she said. "She's interested!" Yep, the editor who said she didn't want any more vampires was interested in a vampire story.

Which just goes to show a very important truth: publishers (and therefore agents) do not reject a genre, unless of course it's actually a genre they specifically don't handle. They reject the book or the writing. Almost always. You can overcome any amount of tiredness or disillusion with great, sparkling writing, a wonderful voice, a new take on an old theme. And the easiest way for an agent or publisher to reject a story they don't think has those elements is to say, "We're not publishing vampires any more," or "No one's selling medical thrillers."

They might mean it's difficult to sell more vampires or it's difficult to sell medical thrillers and that therefore the writing has to be even better, but if you get it right someone will buy it.

However, having your writing rejected does NOT necessarily mean that you're not a good enough writer, only that you didn't get it right this time.

It's all in the story.

Nicola seems to imply that the agent was talking in code, and that in fact I should assume that he didn't like the book and that if only I could make it sufficiently wonderful he would have. I guess it is possible to read that meaning into the agent’s email I quoted above. He says he can only represent stuff he really loves, so therefore he didn’t love mine. It might have been nice to have actually said so, and said what was unlovable about it – I was paying for the session.

The response of the two agents was pretty devastating, and to some extent wrecked the book doctor session which followed because she wanted to know what the agents had said and was surprised by their comment, and telling her took up half of the time allotted. All in all, I got about three minutes actual feedback on my writing.

I write books because I want people to read them. I try to tackle subjects that I think are important, not just what I think people want to read. I try to be entertaining, because if I’m grabbing a piece of someone’s life while they read my book, it’s only fair that they should have some fun.

So what did I learn? First of all, it seems obvious that my writing is not so overwhelmingly magical that the agents had to have it, even against their better judgment on the subject matter. Is that a big surprise to me – no, and I have to say that I don’t think I’ve read anything that would pass that test recently. If agents and publishers think they are only publishing magical books then they are kidding themselves.

Second, that old adage about write what you know, may be a load of bunk. Actually at the York conference, David Nobbs said as much in his keynote address. Write magic instead.

Three, it probably is a good idea, at least for me at the moment to write in more than one genre, at least it will make the agents dream up more complicated excuses.

Four, don't write unless you can't stop yourself, it can be tough.

Book, books, books

2011-03-23T11:39:00.001Z

As I said in the last post, we are trying to de-clutter our life, dumping all that stuff we are never going to use again, just like those programmes you see on TV.

There is an awful agony about throwing away books. In theory, our rule is that if we think we are never going to read the book again then Oxfam is a better place for it; but how does one know?

What should we do with the books that represent the passage of time, my old anatomy book for example? When I went to medical school, I had something to prove. I'd slid through school doing just enough and happy to use a variety of excuses for not doing better. We lived miles away from school and I spent about four hours each day travelling, a good enough excuse for skimping on Latin homework. At medical school, the first thing we did was anatomy, so I set out to be good at it, trying to find out how far I could push it. I bought the best books at the beginning of term; I had to manage on whatever money was left. I've kept those books for almost 50 years, simply because there is so much personal discovery somewhere between those pages, but why keep them? I'm the only person who knows it's there and I never open the book. Who knows what Oxfam will make of it?

Other books have different issues; this week's task is to try to get to the point where all the books are in the library and only the library, which means a lot have to go. Everything on photography goes, mostly because chemical developing and darkroom techniques are no longer relevant.

Winemaking is easier to look up on the web, so there goes another batch, along with a bunch of other how-to-do-it books.

The tough decisions come down to novels I should have read, biographies I have a soft spot for, and, for example, the collected works of Dorothy Parker. Before it goes on the pile, I can't resist reading a few pages and then it's back on the shelf. The trouble is I may not read it again until the next time we decide to have a clear out.

What about signed copies, do we apply the same rules? Signed books have more memories attached but I suppose they might also fetch more money at Oxfam, or where ever they end up; though the actual content is no different, apart from what the author wrote that evening.

Oddly, I have a book where the author wrote something that would help with the current exercise, but I propose to ignore their advice. A few years back I managed to attend book launches by Niel Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in successive months. I bought another copy of Good Omens and got it signed by both of them. Terry wrote 'burn this book' I think not, that one stays on the shelf.

Why am I not blogging?

2011-03-19T11:18:00.000Z

Why am I not blogging? This needs a complicated answer, which in turn is significantly influenced by other bloggers. I read about 40 blogs, through various subscriptions and mostly via Google Reader, which I have patched into an app called Flipboard on my iPad. I learn a lot from these other bloggers, and I would like to acknowledge that. Some of that learning has had an effect on how I use my time and that in turn impacts on blogging – that and other things.

For example, Lexi Revellian (http://lexirevellian.blogspot.com) has several times recommended Autocrit (http://www.autocrit.com) on her blog and I finally took the plunge. One way and another it has made me examine every sentence in a new way, very time consuming in a 95,000-word novel. I’m almost there, and I think it’s down to 90,000.

Second problem Teresa Ashby (http://teresaashby.blogspot.com) posted a comment giving me a stylish Blogger award, great, but it comes with a price – you are supposed to post seven things that no one knows about yourself and also recommend a load of other blogs. One way or another, that threw me into a tailspin. Did I want to accept this award, and if I did, was I prepared to post seven things, if I could think of them and then was I prepared to inflict this particular set of dilemmas on other bloggers.

As I have little idea what other people think of me, finding the seven things is either simplicity itself, or almost impossible, depending on which way you look at it.

The third little problem, or cluster of problems as it happens is that my house is getting rebellious. One of the power ring mains has decided to stop functioning, probably because a mouse has eaten into a cable – or at least that was the cause last time this happened. The fact that this is the ring main that normally powers this computer gives another clue to the blog reduction problem, but it’s worse than that.

When we moved here, a while back, we replaced all the electric circuits and I very cunningly ran all the wires though ducts that would enable me to easily trace faults should they occur. Since then, we have other rather more elegant work done by professional builders who saw fit to cover over my ducts in order to produce a much nicer finished look. I will now have to find some way of tracking the fault without turning the house into a building site.

I paused for thought and got the computer, printer, WiFi etc. working via extension leads from another circuit. This has obviously upset the house demons who must have some objection to me writing all the time. The upshot being that a radiator in the bedroom, actually the newest one in the house, sprang a leak and I spent a day yesterday buying a new one and getting it installed.

Clearly, something or someone wants us to move house. Thinking such thoughts is of course a bad idea, because it is hard to un-think them. Suddenly Lois and I find ourselves thinking about life in a modern flat, with no mice, no acres of grass to mow, no fruit to pick, no swimming pool to clean.

Such thoughts are disruptive because we begin to realise just how much clutter we have accumulated in fifteen years, how many hobbies and projects are scattered about the place. With these thoughts a terrible realism is pressed in on us – it would take several lifetimes to finish all the things we’ve started, and even more to deal with the stuff we never began, but which is occupying space in our heads.

One hobby, time wasting activity, pastime, treasured memory maker, is taking pictures. In a previous house, I had a darkroom and as a result, many boxes of old slides and negatives. These ought to be digitised or thrown away, so as I write a scanner is working it’s way through these, using software to remove dust specs and scratches et. Slightly faster than watching paint dry, though similar in many ways. I include one picture because it shows another hobby, sailing. Add to that boat building, because I actually helped design and build the dinghy in the picture, two of them are sitting out on our back yard waiting to find out what we eventually decide to do with them. I’m getting to old for that sort of thing and too old for the surfboards and windsurfers too.

The end result of all this musing is that I am realising that I prefer writing to most of the other things I do, have done, or dreamed about doing, and I don’t need an old farmhouse with two barns, a pool, garage and workshop, plus four acres of grass, in order to write.

The first drafts of two of my books were written on ski holidays and another in a small flat in London. The possibility of swapping the country pile for a modern flat, ski apartment and a big campervan begins to loom large.

Watch this space.

For a slightly different take on these life changing thoughts see Lois’s blog (TUESDAY, 15 MARCH 2011 Why people with food-intolerances need enormous house - on http://blissglutenfree.blogspot.com).

Does that little diatribe include seven things about me? Close enough I think.

Now to spend a few happy hours trying to decide which other bloggers to suck into this stylish web.

St Ives in Winter

2011-02-25T09:22:00.002Z

Most years I make a visit to the Hepworth gallery in St Ives. In February, this is not a typical seaside visit, though some of our summer holidays have had just as much rain.

I'm writing this sitting in a cafe looking out over St Ives harbour with the low winter sun shining across the water. Even in this gentle light, the sea still has that amazing turquoise clarity.

There is some magic that draws me to the Hepworth Gallery, whether it is the huge pieces in the garden or the poetic wooden works in the room at the top of the stairs, somehow I get my breath back and get the world in proportion.

This is in contrast to the main Tate St Ives gallery, where I almost always end up admiring the building and the bay, and scoffing at the art.

In a way, one has to admire the skill of those who select the works for display. Or maybe marvel at their gullibility. How come they are taken in by artists who so clearly have more chutzpah than art?

I think it goes deeper; I suspect the Tate is part of an economic regeneration scheme whose sole purpose is to put on rubbish, so that the art on display at all the little galleries and shops in St Ives looks good. Rubbish is probably the wrong word, and demonstrates my ignorance and prejudice; what they display is often simply beyond comprehension, and therefore cannot be proved to be rubbish, but it has the same effect. To the uninitiated, non-connoisseur, the rest of St Ives looks like art.

In some ways it makes more sense to regard the Tate St Ives as part of a massive confidence trick, designed to encourage you to part with your hard earned cash.

Obviously, such a scheme would have to be kept very secret, so all the local galleries are in on the con and do their best, whenever they can, to be rude about the Tate and complain of their arrogance.

The Tate itself has developed the con with astonishing skill. One would expect, given the artistic reputation of St Ives, that there would be a permanent exhibition of the artists who made St Ives famous. Not on your life. That would be too simple. The ploy is to make you think of that, and then treat you to the fringes of modern art. That has the effect of giving you a good laugh, and thus getting you into a cheery mood and further enhancing your critical faculties, so that now you are convinced that you are a great art critic, if only the right outlet would come along.

Thus fired up, you are ready to delve into every little gallery that you can find in the hope of tracking down a piece of real St Ives art to put on your wall back home to show off to your friends and relatives. You have to admit, this must be one of the most subtle economic regeneration schemes to come out of an old gasworks.

How come, I hear you say, that these same people who commission ‘rubbish’ in the Tate manage also to look after the Hepworth, that is so obviously a national treasure. Surely, this means that they really do know great art when they see it.

Could it be possible that I am wrong, and that the stuff I see at the Tate St Ives, year after year, is in fact great art? I don't think so. I think the Hepworth just proves that the whole Tate con is deliberate. Only people with superb taste and understanding would be able to reliably commission work that made the rest of St Ives look good, and do it year after year.

Let me make clear at this point that I have been a member of the Tate for many years; I have even driven all the way to St Ives for private views. Lois once exhibited an embroidery piece based on one of those private views. I mention this just to demonstrate that I am not biased against the Tate, I am actually paying good money to be served up this overblown self-indulgent claptrap.

I will admit that it does cross my mind that the real skill is the ambition and self-confidence of the artists who manage to sell this stuff to the Tate. I once heard Howard Hodgkin say in a TV interview, “of course, ambition is so much more important than talent.” A remark I regard as so deep that I am forever trying to work it into pieces like this. I suspect that the commissioners at the Tate already understand the importance of ambition, and what better way to provide encouragement, than to hang rubbish year after year and tell the artist how good they are. It's all part of economic regeneration.

* * *

In the unlikely event that anyone was wondering why my posting has become almost non existent; back in December, my mum was knocked down by a car, broke several bones and ended up in hospital for almost 8 weeks. Visiting hospitals and trying to do some modifications at her home to prepare for her rehab turned out to be time consuming. To get our energy back immediately prior to mum coming home we took a three day break in St Ives.

We had a restful break and enjoyed seeing the roads dug up and the shops being refurbished ready for the summer influx. In between the rain and the closed cafes, we did manage one really good meal and bought some pottery. I wrote the above on my iPad, sitting in a cafe by the harbour.

See Lois’s blog for the restaurant http://blissglutenfree.blogspot.com/2011/02/st-ives-porthminster-cafe-gluten-free.html

Another Year, another film

2011-01-08T17:48:00.001Z

We have a local film group; we watch films and talk about them afterwards. The one thing this achieves is that I always watch to the end, but 'Another Year' almost broke the mould. One might think it was the right film to be seeing at this time of year, the right title at least.

It got off to a bad start with a scene showing a GP examining a woman’s chest with the stethoscope applied on top of her blouse. That is such a joke. Breath sounds are quiet and subtle, like a breeze on autumn leaves, the last thing you need is the added sound of cloth rustling as the chest moves. Then she takes the blood pressure, and pumps the Mercury up to 140 and tells the woman that she has high blood pressure. At that value, she does not. Why make such basic mistakes? I should have guessed right then that it was going to be a disaster.

It is difficult to know where to begin or end, because the film has no story. It is just another year in the lives of a few people, who quite honestly have a more boring life than me. It makes ‘Waiting for Godot’ feel like a tense plot driven thriller.

All the acting is good and Lesley Manville is brilliant. Like much good acting it makes you feel as though you were watching real people, the trouble is that they are real people I would not want to watch. In fact peering in at their sad and needy lives feels like an intrusion.

The camera work and cinematography is excellent too, which somehow makes the complete absence of plot or narrative structure even more obvious. Maybe I am missing something; perhaps this is a new art form, reminiscent of those 60's hippie happenings, where only the people doing it knew what was going on, though in the sixties I'm not sure the hippies knew either.

Without a narrative structure, the audience is given no reason to attach any emotional currency to the characters. There are no heroes or villains. At no point in the film did I find myself caring a damn about anyone. I won’t deny there are some amusing scenes; the audience laughed a number of times. Seeing people fall over in the street can make you laugh too, but it’s not comedy, nor is it tragedy, or art.

There is one merit, though I may be in a minority in thinking this. The characters that smoke and drink too much, come off worst. Throughout, they look like the failures. Their eating, drinking and smoking habits are used as a means to signal their lack of control over their own lives. This is unusual in films, where smokers are very often shown as cool role models; drinking is often shown as a means to cope with stress, rather than as something that makes it worse; and over eating is often associated with taste and gourmet sensibilities, not obesity and shortness of breath.

Not so in this film, and as a public health professional I should be grateful for that. Unfortunately, again I think because there is no story, these home truths are not connected in a way that would make those lessons clear. I haven’t found any other reviews that noticed.

I presume that the film did not get any covert subsidies from the drink and tobacco industries. It does acknowledge, in the opening credits, some support from the UK Film Council. Personally I think the Film Council is a good thing, or should I say, was a good thing, but I did keep wondering whether this film was the reason why the government decided to get rid of it. To paraphrase the last line of one of Seigfrieg Sassoon's poems, 'I wish they could have killed you for a decent show.' *

*(From - To any dead officer, Seigfried Sassoon).

Forensic trousers

2011-01-03T21:57:00.001Z

The police have seized my mother's trousers. It seems like a pity to use a line like that on a blog, it surely would be good enough to launch a novel
My Mum who is 87, was hit by a car, broke a few bones and ended up in hospital. Once there, her trousers were seized by the cops as forensic evidence.
I should say that mum is in good spirits and seeing the funny side of all this, but I think I might be spending some time helping with rehab. It's not really a good idea to have an accident over a bank holiday, it makes it harder to find anyone who can give some indication of how the next few weeks will unfold, so for the moment, we still have little idea how it will go from here.
No doubt it will all provide useful material one day, but for the moment there is less time for writing.
(Written from my iPad)

Home births

2010-12-30T12:16:00.003Z

I heard a piece on the Today programme about home births. It was a follow up to a statement from the Royal College of Midwives. According to these various reports, only 2.4% of women in England have home births, because they are being scared out of it.

It made me think back to a period when I used to do night calls for a GP locum agency. At the time I also worked as a GP part time, but I didn't do home births. One night I was called up by the agency and asked to see a woman who needed sutures, having delivered a baby at home. I protested somewhat, on the grounds that I didn't sign up for that sort of thing, but they insisted that no one else was available. In the end, I went to the agency to collect a suture kit.

I found the house OK and was shown into a bedroom upstairs where a woman was lying in a big double bed, with a small baby lying in a little cot. The lighting could best be described as romantic, certainly not bright. There appeared to be no way of getting it to be any brighter. Luckily, I had a big torch. Usually I used it to be able to see house numbers from the car. It is surprising how small some people make their house numbers. No doubt they are discrete and artistic, but damn hard to see from the road.

Any way, there I am staring at this woman lying in a double bed that sags a lot in the middle. If she moved, it sagged wherever she lay.

I'm not going to go into the gory details as to exactly what has to be sewn to what, but it needs both hands to do it, and you can't hold a huge spotlight in your teeth.

With the torch balanced on the bed, I started off by putting in as much local anaesthetic as I had, because the last thing I needed was the poor woman to feel anything as I worked.

Of course, the main effect of the local was to remove any anxiety from the woman and transfer it to me.

Cold beads of sweat really do run down your back.

It all went together very well; maybe it was a good thing that I did more than 80 episiotomies when I was a medical student. I also worked Monday nights in a busy casualty department for five years and learned a few plastic surgery techniques. So, as far as I could see by the light of a powerful torch, it all looked beautiful.

That's when the really scary thing happened. As I was clearing up, and to the accompaniment of a very small gurgling baby the lady said, 'I had my last baby in hospital and it was awful, and really painful being stitched up. This time it's been lovely and I didn't feel a thing when you did the stitches. I'll definitely have my next baby at home.'

That woman was making a rational choice, based on the information that she had; information seriously distorted by all the local anaesthetic that I had available.

She wasn't scared - I was.

I’m not sure whether it is mothers who are scared into hospital delivery or doctors who are scared out of home births.

I am sure there are midwives who will say that doctors are not needed for childbirth, which may be true enough so long as all goes well. The real problem is that a whole system is needed and successive governments seem to be doing their best to break everything up into little pieces that are bought and managed separately.

If we really want to know the right number of home births and give mums and families the choice they should have, then we all need to work together. Any chance of that in 2011?

Bob Dylan 1966 - a piece of nostalgia

2010-12-26T10:24:00.003Z

Despite my reservations about Rupert Murdoch, there is something wonderful about Sky Arts. This morning I accidentally listened to Mickey Jones, Bob Dylan’s drummer on the 1966 tour talking about that tour and showing bits of his movies taken at the time.

It took me right back. I was at the concert at the Odeon in Birmingham, not the one where someone shouted Judas - that was Manchester.

The first half was Dylan doing an acoustic set, pretty much like the previous tours, except better sound than the old town hall in Birmingham.

When the curtains came back for the second half there was a massed bank of amplifiers and speakers, and I mean a massed bank. From where I was sitting, it looked like a ten-foot high stack, and it may have been bigger than that. The band rolled in with isolated twangs and strums, almost as if they were tuning up.

Gradually the isolated notes begin to pick up, one guitar, then another and then the organ and more instruments coming in and gradually coalescing into a rhythm and then a massive crash on the drums that almost hit you off your seat, with everything else coming in at the same time in a huge wall of sound - probably the loudest that any band had ever played in Britain at that time.

‘Tell me Momma.’

I can still hear that crash now.

Then they just slammed on, weaving complex, intricate and very, very loud, melodic, intoxicating, rhythms around Dylan’s words. I remember being completely blown away from the first note.

The audience fragmented into two groups, or maybe three - if you count the ones who started walking out as a group. Among the rest there were many who boo-ed, some standing on the seats to boo louder. The rest, like me were clapping and cheering. I think maybe the boos won; but I knew was that I was hearing the best music ever. All the wild and rebelliousness of rock and roll woven together with the poetry of Dylan’s words.

By the end of the concert, I was exhausted and flying high at the same time, without the aid of any illegal substances, I might add. Back then I was an impoverished medical student living in a little flat, and the only sound system I had was an ancient portable record player. For days I sat and played my old Dylan records, over and over and over. I only had the acoustic albums, because the electric ones had not come out. Listening to those tracks with the concert still pounding in my head, I could imagine that sound in Dylan’s mind all along. I think it was always there, in the cadence of the words, the strumming and picking on the guitar and the harmonica breaks.

I watch as Mickey Jones talks about how the audience didn’t get it at the time and I’m almost shouting at the TV.

‘I got it.’

I got it from the first note.

A note added afterwards - the programme is actually incredibly boring, as a programme, and Mickey Jones is a somewhat self indulgent commentator, but none of that matters if you were there.

Telephone insanity

2010-12-24T11:10:00.000Z

My mum’s phone has an intermittent fault. It sometimes cuts out in mid conversation and sometimes it doesn’t ring.

I have tried to report this.

I rang BT. They ask me what number I am calling about, then take me though umpteen menus ending up by telling me that it is not a BT line, so they can’t help.

After four attempts, trying different menus and coming at it via the 100-operator number or through the 0800 route I always end up being shut out in the same way. So far, all I have talked to are tape recorders.

So, I phoned Tesco, who do my calls, after a couple of false starts when their tape recorder told me they were closed, but open every day at times that included my call, a conversation with a friendly human actually took place. They couldn’t help either unless I knew who was the provider for my mum’s calls.

Why don’t I phone her up and ask her? because her phone isn’t working. I am reminded of that song, ‘there’s a hole in my bucket.’

My next attempt was to call Ofcom.

Why can’t BT or Tesco pass on my fault report to my mum’s provider? because it would infringe competition rules. One provider can’t know who is providing to other numbers. So, it is official policy to have a fragmented system that does not connect.

All they need is a central fault service that is independent of the phone providers. I suspect that a computer and a few tape recorders could do it.

How did we manage to set up a telephone service where competition is more important than service?

The insurance companies have a central fund to deal with car crashes involving uninsured drivers, and all those companies are in competition – ask any Meerkat. So why can’t the phone operators have a way of dealing with faults that is foolproof.

I at least have done my bit and suggested to Ofcom that they might look into it. It is their responsibility to regulate the whole system. My guess is that I won’t hear anything from them and nothing will be done. I suspect that the underlying assumption is that we all have mobile phones and can fend for ourselves.

The Ofcom chap implied that I should know who was providing my mums calls, so I asked him if he knew the provider of his mum and anyone else he cared about. No answer to that.

‘Can’t you phone her?’

There’s a hole in my bucket.

Happy Christmas everyone.

The riddle of Santa Claus

2010-12-19T08:40:00.003Z

I watched part of a movie last night in which Whoopi Goldberg is persuaded to become Santa Claus. I woke up early dreaming about Santa Clause, which is why I’m writing while it is still dark. Whilst it is somewhat improbable, I'm sure Whoopi would make a great Santa, though she did take some persuading. While she was resisting the idea she did ask the obvious question, how do you get to three billion children in one night?

Assuming that night lasts about six hours, (though there’s no night at all around the south pole at Christmas, but fortunately no children live there) and being aware that time sort of moves around the globe on a daily basis I reckon that gives about 30 hours to get the job done, so a billion children every ten hours.

What is the average distance from one child to the next? I have no idea. Some children live very close together, but what about the little boy who lives down the lane? If we make the wild assumption that kids are on average a tenth of a mile apart, it keeps the arithmetic simple at least. Santa would need to cover a hundred million miles every ten hours - ten million miles per hour.

Light travels at 186282 miles per second, so at that speed he could cover the distance in less than a minute, leaving 59 minutes every hour for dashing up and down ten million chimneys and dropping off the parcels. At least that accounts for why we can’t see him, he’s going way to fast for the human eye to register.

It is possible therefore to conclude that Santa Claus doesn’t have to actually break any known laws of physics in order to get the job done, assuming he only has to do our planet. He could cover the distance and we wouldn’t see him if he did. Like Whoopi Goldberg being Santa it is improbable but not impossible.

That gets me on to the second part of my dream.

Douglas Adams invented the Infinite Improbability Drive. I’m not sure if invented is the right word, he included the notion in fiction, in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe series. A spaceship fitted with the drive could visit everywhere in the universe, pretty much at the same time. To work it, all you had to do was know when to get off.

In the case of Santa Claus, all he has to know is what to drop off. I woke up being somewhat surprised that Santa didn’t feature in Douglas Adams’ books. The great thing about the notion of infinite improbability is that it fills the gap between very unlikely and impossible. Think of a place that is so hard to get to that it is almost impossible, and that’s where Santa Claus lives. Infinitely improbable but just possible.

A novel look at novels

2010-12-18T12:06:00.007Z

I guess I am a sucker for playing with data, but the new Google thing called Ngram viewer is too much fun to resist.

As many people know, Google has been digitising all the literature that it can lay its hands on for some while. They have now made available a new tool based on this stuff. What it lets you do is explore the use of words and phrases as they have occurred over time in the sample that they have made available. They are caling this culturomics, see www.culturomics.org

My first instinct was to explore the word novel. Here I am trying to write them, so I need to knowwhere they sit in the culture. The first graph (fig 1) shows you what comes up. It looks like they are going out of style. I am fifteen years too late.

Like any investigator finding a disappointing result, I immediately began querying the data. How do I know that the sample means anything? According to the paper in Science, (Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644) this tool looks at about 5.2 million books, 4% of all the books ever published. It could still be a biased sample and the bias could change over time. I emailed the authors of the science paper about it and they agreed that I had a point and gave me some more information, but not enough to resolve the question in my mind.

I am stuck with the elephant in the room that so often is never talked about in popular writing in the media; can I rely on the data?

What things are constant? I asked myself. I fell back on Benjamin Franklin who said “nothing is certain but death and taxes” and he said it in 1789, before the Google sample starts, so I’m not adding bias or double counting by relying on it. Franklin said this in a letter to one Jean-Baptiste Leroy. By an amazing coincidence, one of the authors of the Science paper is also a Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste gets no score at all and Benjamin Franklin varies widely, peaking in 1940, so I stuck with death and tax.

Franklin may be right that they are certain, but if this literature is to be believed, our interest in them is not constant (fig 2). I’m still left with the elephant in the room, so I tried elephant, alongside death and tax (fig 3). Elephants live a long time and I don’t think they go in an out of fashion much, so perhaps it is no surprise that they give a relatively constant score.

I tried running novel against elephant, it shows a rise of popularity, as compared to elephants, but it still peaks fifteen years ago. Is my writing career really doomed?

I tried running thriller against elephant because I write thrillers, and I did get some encouragement, thrillers are a lot less popular than elephants but are clearly on the up. Finally, I ran thriller on its own, and it gets better still. I leave you with thriller in the American English data (fig 4), because that’s the most encouraging graph, while I rush to get back to writing before they go out of style.

No fear

2010-12-17T13:40:00.001Z

A woman from Iowa has no fear, because she has damage to her Amygdala. For those of you who did not study the anatomy of the brain, that is a chunk of grey matter deep in your brain. There are two amydaloid bodies, one on each side a few inches back from your eyes. It has been known for some time that it is associated with emotional learning.

Following the press reports we find that this woman has no fear and apparently as a result has been in several life threatening escapades, from which we are told she is lucky to have emerged alive.

So what this tells us is that being fearful has survival advantages, it is OK to be scared. Actually, that is pretty obvious, I guess. If being scared had no purpose, it is hard to see how it would have survived as a human trait.

I am reminded of that little poem by Piet Hein, (he called them grooks).

To be brave is to behave

bravely when your heart is faint.

So you can be really brave

only when you really ain't.

There is speculation in several of the reports that this knowledge might somehow lead to a cure for fear, or possibly for PTSD. You have to love our media; first they tell us the woman is lucky to be alive and that having no fear has almost killed her. So what do they conclude? That a drug to get rid of fear would be a good idea. Can I suggest that it ought to be tried out on reporters and editors first?

Luck, skill, books and films

2010-12-14T11:17:00.000Z

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was on the radio this morning. Some while ago I read his ‘Fooled by Randomness’. Apart from being very smug in parts, the book is a good read with some important lessons. What impressed me most was the way he dealt with skill and luck.

If you think you have been skilful when in fact you have been lucky, then you are making a very unsafe error. If you do the same thing again, and because you thought your success was down to your skill, then you might expect it to work the next time. You are unlikely to be successful, knowing how luck works.

The safe thing to do is to assume that you have been lucky when in fact you have been skilful. That would tend to make you continue to try hard and not expect too much.

Taleb takes his examples from the stock market, where skill and luck can lead to big rewards and also to big losses. How does it work for writing? When an agent turns me down, do I put it down to bad luck or to my lack of skill? The safe thing to do is to assume that it is because of my lack of skill. That should make me try harder, keep revising and produce a better product.

If in fact my lack of success was down to bad luck then there is a reasonable chance that I will do better next time. If my skills improve then that should help too.

What this makes clear is that it is a bad idea to assume that I am a good writer but I’ve been unlucky, which is what people tell me. Why do they tell me that? Because they think it will make me feel better, but feeling better won’t make me a better writer.

Trying to write better is not helped by the huge success of badly written books. I used to be a bit shy about saying that, but I’m helped by a polemic in the Observer (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/12/genre-versus-literary-fiction-edward-docx). I’ve read all three of Stieg Larsson’s books and seen two of the films. The books are so full of telling not showing that they ought to become textbooks for what not to do. They are also padded out with a lot of stuff that has little to do with the plot of the story. It is worth noting that both films start about 60+ pages into the book. I remember one of Elmore Leonard’s nostrums being that writers should take out the bits that feel like writing.

I’d like to propose another rule: - Take out what the film will leave out. I have two reasons for suggesting this, one is that it will make the book shorter and more dramatic, the other is that thinking about the film may provide a bit of added inspiration when the writing is proving hard.

Cafe Rouge

2010-12-09T09:34:00.003Z

My wife Lois blogs about food, (http://blissglutenfree.blogspot.com) gluten free food to be precise. Recently she’s taken to the road or more exactly to restaurants armed with a new phone.

For the last year or so she has been very wary about eating anywhere away from home because it only takes a tiny amount of gluten to cause a couple of days of symptoms.

This picture was taken at Café Rouge in Worcester, her blog gives the details but the upshot is we will probably go there again. This is something of a turnaround because we ate in Café Rouge a long time back and had a bad time. The waiters were rude, the food took a very long time to come and wasn’t worth the wait. It felt like they were trying to replicate the worst of classic French café dining. Arrogant, tardy waiters may be essential to a holiday experience, giving the English something to moan about when they get back home, but it doesn’t work in Birmingham. There are too many other great places to eat, so we never went back to Café Rouge. Advertisers and management consultants take note; one rude waiter might lose you a thousand pounds worth of business over the years. Multiply the thousand we might have spent by all the other people who may have been similarly offended, and it comes to quite a dent in any business model.

So why did we go back? Because Lois came across a feature about a gluten free menu somewhere on the web and felt honour bound to try it, complete with new phone and ready to blog.

Of course our pleasant experience may be down to just one nice waitress in that particular branch of the chain, it’s not proper market research we are talking about here. We are not collecting statistics and we are probably biased.

What is fascinating is that Lois's blog post about Café Rouge has had more hits than anything she has ever posted and for a brief period yesterday had her up as far as the second page of hits on a Google search on Café Rouge. Why are so many people searching on Café Rouge? Perhaps it’s because it’s the Christmas season and lots of people are looking for places to eat.

My impression was equally favourable, speaking as someone who has no specific dietary problems apart from hating cucumber. I’m happy to report that there was no cucumber in anything I ordered. This is slightly surprising, because it seems to get added to a lot of things for no good reason that I can discern. Maybe that’s a seasonal effect as well. It’s a bit cold for growing cucumbers at the moment.

The picture (taken with my iphone) shows Lois composing her blog on an HTC Desire Z, an Android phone. The little keyboard works well, but she still hasn’t cracked how to get material from there to her blog in one seamless move. I’m sticking with Apple.

Gmail spam scam?

2010-12-02T15:14:00.007Z

I just recieved the following email.

It seems to me to be very unlikely that it has in fact come from anone at Google.

If they really were having congestion on their servers it would be a big surprise.

Surely Google of all people can afford a few servers.

It seems to me that this is an obvious scam.

In fact it is so obvious that I am amazed that google don't have some automatic way of

detecting stuff like this.

How hard can it be, given that their name is all over it?

Gmail ✆

to support.info

show details 14:28 (45 minutes ago)

We are shutting down some accounts due to congestion in our database system and your account was chosen to be deleted. If you are still interested in using our email service please click reply and fill in the space below for verification purpose:-

Full Name:

Pasword:

Occupation:

Year of Birth:

Country of Origin:

Note: This email is only for Gmail users (Users should reply within 48 hours to avoid "Permanently Lockup" Account)

Thank you for using Gmail !

The Gmail Team

So there it is. I'd be interested to know if anyone else has had anything similar.

Winter

2010-11-30T10:12:00.005Z

Today was symbolic of winter. Snow and heating oil both delivered on the same day.

I appreciate that parts of the UK are under a foot of snow, have schools closed, trucks stranded and are standing by for the TV cameras to arrive and film their misery or snowball fights. We are in the Vale of Evesham, however, and it hardly ever snows here.

We have about one inch of snow. Yesterday the temperature got down to minus 10 Centigrade, again rather unusual and we spent the day putting fleece around the fig trees in the hope that the poor things will survive the winter rather better. Last year we had a long cold spell that actually killed off the ends of some branches and we had no figs at all. The trees did try hard and started making figs towards the end of summer, but they didn’t make it to being ripe before the leaves started falling off. I don’t know if wrapping the trees for the winter will help, we will no doubt find out over the year. Actually the snow has warmed things up, it’s only zero outside now.

The other amusing ‘event’ of the day was a comment on here that I decided must be spam. The comment included what looked like a phone number. I put the number into Google and found a number of similar comments attributed to the same name on a range of different sites. When I searched on the name I found other sites with similar comments including one where this name contributed 85 comments, actually all the comments on that particular post. Some of them have proper text and some are repeats of the sort of thing I got.

Up until now I have pretty much been pleased to get any comments at all, and although I have the moderating box ticked, I have published all the comments that have come my way. It now seems that I will have to have a comment approval policy. Heady stuff. I actually went on a course on blogging where this was discussed, the lecturer has a five-point policy that she published on her site.

So here is my policy, at least for the moment.

My inclination is to publish all comments unless they are offensive, libellous, or look like robots have sent them. I might even publish those if they are amusing.

Radio

2010-11-28T10:46:00.002Z

I'm often up by 6am. At that time of day you can catch some interesting stuff on the radio. This morning as I made coffee I heard three presenters talking from inside an oak tree. I suppose they do sound a bit muffled, but they have the mike in there with them. They are discussing fungi, some of which they can see as they stand or sit inside the hollow of this tree, which is apparently seven hundred years old.

All this is on the radio. I am reminded of the day when I was about seven years old and first heard the Goon Show on the radio.

'This is the sound of Eccles riding along on a wall,' followed by a sound I’ve not heard since, presumably because Eccles no longer travel by moving wall.

I remember that line, I guess because the sheer incongruity would impress a kid that age. I also recall that my mum was ironing – that’s how the mind works.

Now I hear the sound of three naturalists talking inside an oak tree. So not much has changed in fifty odd years, except now they don't call it comedy. Once they have exhausted the possibilities inside the tree they move out to discuss the landscape.

Don't you just love hearing about a view on the radio.

Actually one of the funniest pieces of radio I've ever heard was a discussion about the proposed route of the Midland Metro on the Ed Doolan show. For those who don't live around Birmingham, UK, where I used to work, ED has a radio programme with the biggest audience in the region. OK why was such a mundane topic so funny? Try to imagine the sound of four people in a radio studio arguing about a map.

'No, no, it's further over to the left.'

Sounds of rustling paper.

'By the fold there.'

Sound of chair moving.

'No, past the end of that road there.'

And it went on, for about five minutes, until Ed managed to curb their enthusiasm and get things back under control. Quite clearly none of the participants had any conception of how impossible it was for anyone outside the studio to understand any of their discussion.

I actually laughed so much that I had to pull over.

That kind of radio is dangerous, as the Goon Show knew only too well.

OK so some radio is ridiculous, but when it’s done right it is brilliant because it feeds directly into your imagination, and the best radio makers know that. Think of that line from Educating Rita.

‘How would you stage Peer Gynt?’

‘Do it on the radio.’

Good literature does the same.

Television, on the other hand is so often much more boring because somehow it seems to assume that the viewer has no imagination. They add a picture to everything. Radio and literature know that the real picture is in your head, TV feels obliged to show you an actual picture. It’s fabulous when they show you something that you could never see otherwise, but so often it’s mundane.

They seem determined at all costs to avoid 'talking heads'; yet facial expression is what we all use a lot of the time to decide if we thing we are being told the truth.

When I used to be interviewed about health issues there seemed to be an obsession with filming standing outside a hospital - as if that had anything to do with health.

If you fill the viewer’s head with mundane pictures the chances are that their head will fill up with mundane thoughts. What radio and literature do is give us images. TV so often just gives us pictures.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Google analytics tells me that some people read this blog in far-flung places, well far flung if you are flinging from here in the UK. Places that are as far apart as the USA or Vietnam, if you believe the graphs. Could any of you tell me about radio in your part of the world? Do you ever get anything as much fun as three naturalists inside an Oak tree?

IPad triumph

2010-11-27T09:30:00.005Z

While shopping in Worcester we went into the boutique that supplied the dress that Lois wore at my daughter's wedding. The stepmother of the bride dress. I had some pictures, one of which is attached, on the iPad and with me, so we showed the owner of the shop. End result, I think her husband will want to buy an iPad. All staff suitably wowed by the pictures and I end up giving technical explanations to husband. The iPad is a transforming technology. OK, so I could have shown them pictures on almost any breed of smart phone but the impact on the bigger screen of the iPad is dramatic. I've shown pictures on a phone and it does not produce the OOs and AAHs that we got in the shop. Not just from the sales staff either, a couple of customers joined in the general eyeballing and eyebrow raising.

The picture also shows the cupcake tower that Lois made for the wedding. 120 cupcakes, all gluten free, plus a big one for the cutting ceremony. A useful tip for anyone contemplating the same sort of thing, nicely patterned cases wrapped around the cakes after baking make it look a lot prettier. Lois had made lovely sugar flowers as decoration on all of the cakes, but you can't see most of them when you look at the tower from the side, so the stylish cases make the whole thing look much more elegant.

I wasn't certain that there was much point in putting lots of pictures on the iPad and I only loaded a few just to see what I would do with them. It was a pure accident therefore that I happened to have pictures of the dress and cakes when we visited the shop. I can see how this could turn out to be very useful in situations where instant access to pictures or diagrams was needed. The fact that you can email to the device by 3G phone probably adds to the usefulness. It can only be a matter of time before we see iPads woven into TV crime dramas. I can imagine a plot, probably involving a serial killer who is working across country or state boundaries. The whole thing will turn on someone being sent crucial pictures on his iPad that he rapidly compares with the new crime scene.

Of course I could have imagined a female detective, but somehow there is an expectation that it will be blokes rushing around with new tech, unless the iPad is full of pics of the mother of the bride of course. Apologies also at this point to Suzi Perry, from the gadget show, because she does a brilliant job of proving that women can handle tech.

Happy and Sad day

2010-11-23T10:02:00.002Z

Today is Lois's birthday, so anyone reading this please pop over to her blog and wish her a happy birthday. http://blissglutenfree.blogspot.com This is very magnanimous on my part because her blog is rapidly catching me up on page views.

It is also the anniversary of my brother Laurence being killed, see the earlier post 'The day the music died' for more about that. It's a bad thing, the two things happening on the same day, but Lois didn't have much choice about when she was born and Laurie had no choice at all about the day he died. That's just how it goes, I guess.

I still miss him. Laurie was brilliant at maths and physics and computers, he had worked for IBM and Microsoft, though never Apple, which is a pity. Whenever anything weird happened to my PC I would ring him up and similarly he would phone me about medical problems.

Fortunately, he was a bit of a hypochondriac, so he phoned me about as often as my PC played up. Just as well I've switched to Apple since he died. I still have a load of stuff he wrote, it sits on my hard drive with the notion that someday I will figure out a way to use it - the bits that I understand, anyway.

For the moment I'll just remember him, and if anyone who ever knew him is reading this, please remember too.

Andrew Marr on Kennedy

2010-11-21T22:11:00.001Z

I would not normally blog while annoyed by something, but for once here goes.

I have just watched Andrew Marr telling us how awful John Kennedy was in the way he campaigned and I'm struck by how often the programme seems to require lingering shots of Andrew Marr sailing, hanging about in scenic views, standing by impressive buildings and generally displaying his Andrew Marrness for all to see.

Does this make him more believable?

I am all agog to see whether he owns up to this cynical manipulation before the end of the programme.

I would have thought it was obvious that Kennedy exploited his personal charisma in a way that Nixon was unable to do. Does that make him bad or smart? Or is it bad to be smart if you are president of the USA? I fail to see how this is sensational, didn’t Hitler do the same thing? Wasn’t Churchill a bit that way inclined? OK so Churchill used the radio rather than the TV, but that was what was available.

Let me make clear that I am not objecting to Andrew Marr because he was rude about bloggers at the Cheltenham festival; and for the record, I am 65 and not writing from my mother's basement, in fact she does not have a basement, she has a house of her own and so do I.

As I write we see Andrew walking, Andrew going up in a glass lift, Andrew staring meaningfully into the middle distance accompanied by some nice jazz. Did they commission too long a show, so that we have to have these fillers or did he not have enough things of substance to say?

Another Kennedy crime is revealed, he faced up to issues and tackled them head on. Is Andrew seriously trying to get us to believe that is a bad thing?

Now we have Andrew eating chilli, in order to talk about race, was there no other photo shot anyone could think of?

Finally he manages to end by suggesting that it a bad idea to emphasise style over substance. Quite right Andrew, so why do you do it?