Why do I like chick lit?

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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