Tuesday 17 September 2013

Sponsored Write....

Oh god.

So I entered a sponsored writing competition. having not really written much creative work in a while. The brief was to work on the term 'Quality of Life'. Sponsorship went to Macmillan Cancer Support.

This resonated with me as I have been thinking about this quite a lot. I just quit my job to attempt to be more creative. I just had to deal with a house move, and a death in the family of someone whose, quality of life was a very real concern that effected many decisions on whether or not it should continue.

The story I wrote was meant to be performed on stage by actors and should probably have been uplifting and fun and funny and you know... Good and stuff.

The story I wrote however... it seems I feel into the trap of writing for my own therapy. This doesn't make for an entertaining story. And definitely not for on-stage work.

I am sorry... I'm pretty sure that they aren't going to/ didn't use it on stage... but in the interests of full disclosure..

Here it is... My training run... an early start. I will get better again. I promise.

still... It's not all bad.

Dundry Hill

HE
A flight of Birds… tall and heron like, erupts from the reeds that surround the river bed. Startled by the passing of the helicopter which is filming these shots. It’s a necessary evil, but the brief knowledge of it’s existence, the juxtaposition of furious machine against natural serenity doesn’t fully distract me from the images. Not completely. 

Sunset yellow has seeped into everything. Like spilt ink. Where it has touched, the colours are all changed into something wonderful. The deep blue of the darkening sky… the deeper green of the twilight savannah. Either side of the river there are unmistakably African trees, pruned to look like umbrellas by the very giraffes that move beneath them. Right now on the edge of being visible, but on their way to fading into black. Preparing for the night. The camera pans up from the river. No longer distracted by the rhythmic flapping of panicking egrets, the lens pulls its focus onto the sun itself, framed by mountains. Too bright to be seen by the naked eye. Now the birds come up together. To swoop in formation across the sun, as if choreographed. My heart beats harder in my chest. I may be sweating a little too much,  and this may make me uncomfortable later… but I don’t care.

I thank god for HD Television because I am cheating. I have woken up for a moment, and I am not alone, I am just in time to share this quasi-religious experience.

I am in front of a screen experiencing a depth of feeling normally reserved for those who have lived the good life. The perfect life.   If we can sweat and toil and move and mascarade and work and spend and love correctly the these bright-lights and vivid colours, this swelling of the heart is the ultimate reward.

I am not alone and I want to share how I am feeling, in this brief moment of clarity… I try to think about moving. I think about moving. Even though I know full well that I can’t

My attention goes back to the screen. I am transfixed for a moment. I am slipping again it’s hard to know if what I am seeing is real or not. Then suddenly, Someone is squeezing my hand…

I am half in the dream. It is 25 years ago, or 10 maybe or no time at all. Some kind of amalgam. I am tired and happy on a hill side. Looking away from the city.  There is that hand squeeze again… I’m with her!

And I’m about to say something stupid telling her that my socks are magic… pretending I am fluent in Gildensterni… when I am suddenly struck dumb by the view. And we enjoy it together in silence and everything is ok.

I, the viewer, move beyond the silhouettes of birds over the river… and something else appears on the sun. Another silhouette. The words “Experience Africa. A land of unimaginable beauty.” And cliché for me becomes real. Unimaginable beauty.

I close my eyes.

My head falls to the right. I am able to open my eyes again. And there she is. Just for a moment. Still there, still beautiful, still squeezing.

If anyone does, She deserves Africa, I want her to know what I am feeling, not just see the image of it. She deserves the real thing… She deserves unimaginable beauty, and not be here with me, trapped in this room.

I try my best to convey this complex emotion with only my eyes. And then when I am just about sure that she knows exactly what I mean, I am gone again.
 
SHE

When presented with an anonymous survey… Most office workers admit to wasting approximately two hours a day. That’s 10 hours a week. A day and a half… in every five.  Around eighty days a year… just staring blankly, at the screen, zombie-like. Eighty days of pretending to look busy while scrolling down the Facebook News Feed, browsing Twitter, waiting for a conversation you can weigh into with some kind of witty retort. Pausing as you spy a picture of a rich relative looking resplendent on the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Eighty days of Angry birds and longing glances across the car park, over beyond the rooftops and high-rises, out towards the lower slopes of Dundry Hill.

Dundry; that much closer than Kilimanjaro… but still in a galaxy far, far away, completely out of reach, yet embedded in my mind. I’ve never been there but it looks calm and green and is visible from almost anywhere this side of Bristol even from the BRI, that’s the hospital, I don’t work at the hospital, I just… go there a lot, at least once or twice a week.

It strikes me that you might not know Dundry Hill at all, let me explain that it’s green and pleasant and English, and special to me, and a half-day holiday waiting to happen that I have never taken. It comes complete - lonely oaks and silhouetted copses and quaint pubs with real Ale and charismatic staff. I am told there’s a pub out there that still serves Mild. And I know this because he loved mild, though I have no idea why. Some kind of throwback to the mythology of his northern roots.

Anyway, that should be enough of a description for you, let me know if you need more. I mean, I could go on, but some responsible impulse within me is demanding that I get back to the point before someone notices I’m not working. And now the phone on my desk is ringing. But I’m not going to answer it because I am still talking to you, the reader, about the mythical two hours of human waste a day.

I will let it ring. They will leave me a message. I can call them back in a couple of hours, when I feel better.

Two hours… Just think about that. That’s what people are willing to admit to. Multiply that by all of office workers on this planet, take your 80 days around the world… and discover a mountain of limp bodies that dwarfs Dundry, and mount bloody Kilimanjaro.

Millions of day dreams and duvet days later and we still won’t have come close to reaching the peak of this wasted potential. Because the actual reality is so much worse.  A European butter mountain so tall as to require more than just oxygen for the final assault. Something akin to a space suit probably. So many people. Stacked on top of each other… barely alive, watching the clock even when they have the option to leave.

I scrawl a picture on the pad next to the still ringing phone. A spaceman holding a flag on a mountain top. I add a goat. The goat makes me smile. He’s chewing on the flag.

I am sure that when answering a survey like this. People don’t even count the meetings in which nothing is achieved. The teleconferences where you fight against an involuntary nap with the head nodding inevitability that at some point someone will ask you where you are with the Cost-Benefit Analysis, or demand an ETA on the final breakdown of an inter-departmental time and motion study. You will have to be bright, on the ball… fully engaged. You will have to answer. I am not equipped to do any of these things.

The phone finally stops ringing.
Thank god for the lock on my office door.

I stare at a list of emails. Flag one for immediate attention then place it into a folder to deal with at another time. There are relevant tasks I could be doing. Jobs that need to be done. Pivot tables to populate and analyse. Stories to tell. All valid uses of my time and all much too involved for me now, in my current state. It will require herculean mental effort to even move the mouse. And these are ‘start in the morning’ type jobs, not for now. Right now, It is all I can do to just stare out the window until it’s time to leave.

I am too weak to even pretend that this isn’t what I am doing. Because the reality is, I have been in tears for two years but no one else can see them. It’s a poetic description of reality that also happens to be true.

Here’s another. I have been holding onto something with hands that seem weaker every day. Trying to hold on. That is my function now. Comb hair, smile at nurses…  squeeze his hand at the right time, and wonder if he even knows I am there. This, apparently, is what love feel likes.
HE

When poetic reality becomes the truth… you know something is very, very wrong. When the whole world feels as vivid and moving as an African Sunset, touched up in photo-shop and entering my brain through a plethora of expensive filters… When the perfectly exposed image of even the most mundane of objects is too beautiful to bare. These are the worst of times… possibly the best.

Definitely the worst because part of you knows it isn’t real, is aware of its fleeting nature, knows that the memory will later turn on you. And the crippling starkness of its contrast will be the weapon with which you taunt yourself. A violent gear-change jerking you away from the state of mind you are required to adopt in order to function on a day to day basis.

I remember explaining this to her, trying to sound clever, acting every part the “real northern poet” in wine bar in Bath, tucked away on Green Street. I was, going for ‘a little bit crazy, a little bit dangerous.’ I made a point of talking to Ifor the owner, to show her how cool I was… how connected in the scene. She seemed to go for it… to be a little bit impressed. I was doing the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa, she was doing Business Administration at the real university…

The road ahead was lined with milestones, paved with potential. Young, bright, beautiful and creative, she trumped anything I could think of to compare her too. And I tried.. My god I tried. 

Through out the years that followed. I built mountains of scrunched up paper… So many failed attempts, We laughed when I said “we’re going to need a bigger bin.” The truth was I needed a slag heap. Paper balls are the net product of a poet at work. You work the coal face for hours, days, weeks on end and most of the time nothing comes out, and you start to wonder if there is even anything there. And then in a moment of apparently wasted time the poetry comes. In a moment spent staring down at the city from the slopes of Dundry hill. With your mind in the middle distance, your fingers involuntarily reach into your pocket, take up the pen and scrawl down line after line, without mental interference, of what will eventually be your first published work.

Just as a town planner, business guru or administrative assistant, needs to day dream in order to function, so poets need to waste time working on metaphors that they are fully aware are far too cerebral to work. Like waste-paper being the ullage from some kind of imaginary poetry mine.

When we met I was pretentious, half-talented spotty and young. And to my surprise she seemed to like it. And she loved me and she nurtured me, and she read my work and made it better, and I was the dreamer and she made good money. And for years nothing was published because nothing was worthy, but in the end there was a book about a hillside I went to, just to clear my head… and there was adulation and public appearances and readings and finally commissions, recognition and the financial stability of a teaching post.

And so, so much of it was down to her. And then suddenly, with only a few weeks warning, all of that was over. Paradise lost in a single diagnosis, and that wasn’t her fault at all.

And now that day, the night of our first date…. Is the happy, vivid memory with which I like beat myself to death. And sometime I wonder if there can be a better tribute to her than that? And I curse myself for never quite finding the right words and Perhaps I am being too morbid right now, too panicked, but if a man dying slowly by degrees, and brain-first to boot, doesn’t have the right to feel sorry for himself, then I have no idea who does.

But it’s actually not all bad. Not all the time.
It really isn’t, weirdly.

SHE
I didn’t go into work today. I didn’t go to the hospital. I may go later on. I’m not sure. Instead I decided to go for a walk. Less of a decision, more that my legs were making the decision for me.

For the first mile I had no idea where I was going. Even though it was obvious. It was where he used to walk, when he was fruitlessly “digging in the mine ” pretty much two or three times a week if I am honest.

I remembered our first date. The Wine Bar in Bath. He’s never been more out of place in his life. His fumbling attempts to impress me. His awkward small talk with Ifor…. It was all so humorous, and despite everything he couldn’t hide, the person he was going to become. It was as if emanating from his charity shop leather jacket and ill advised hat was the intriguing lustre of an unpolished diamond, still half buried in the ground.

I fell in love with the spark of talent that I knew would emerge between the mass of juvenile comparisons between my neck and that of a giraffe. My body and that of a Cheetah in full run… My heart and that of a bull elephant, rampant and in heat. I never, ever understood that one.

As I walked the city got smaller and smaller. Not just the ones in the distance, but also the building around me Smaller houses, surrounded by more and more space. Space to breath. When he finally hit his stride I wasn’t even surprised. I’d seen it coming for so long.

There is something strange about walking through a place you have heard described so many times by someone you love. It feels like rediscovery, the reality of these once imagined objects makes all of it more true. The Ivy covered pub with the pit-bull for a barman. The lonely oak. I had not come before as I didn’t want it to fail to live up to my imagination but for the first time since the diagnosis, I was doing something that didn’t feel like a total waste of time.

HE
Sometimes the experience is so real and so vivid that I forget that they are reflections of something that has already passed. The world stops being painful. Life, no longer fleeting.  And I stop hearing the noise of the hospital, the rhythmic beating of the EKG, I don’t feel the changing of the drip or eavesdrop on the quiet conversations between doctors and nurses. And I feel at peace. Because even when I come back around, I know that all those memories still exist and always will, inside both us and also inexplicably, somewhere else, somewhere very real that I cannot explain. I know in those moments that in spite of everything and from my admittedly skewed point of view, the past is not the past but also my present and my future. And then she squeezes my hand. And even this becomes a part of the memory and there suddenly there exists, in my beatific confusion, the fleeting possibility of a never ending… unimaginable beauty.

So yeah, as I said. It’s not all bad.


SHE
I was about half way home when I decided to hand in my notice, by text message no less. Later this got negotiated down to a career break but I may well decide to never go back.

And it was five days before he passed, that in moment of almost clairvoyant forethought, I bought the tickets.

But of all of that time, the moment that I carry with me, as I look out at the view, complete with giraffes and birds and golden suns… Is the moment in a small square room, when an advert came on, and after being unresponsive for days, I had the sense that he was present again, and together we watched a flock of birds take flight across a golden river, and I squeezed his hand as if to tell him that I was leaving. And he turned his head and looked at me. And I could see from his eyes, that it was going to be ok.

 

Saturday 1 June 2013

Dear Diary

Last night I stayed up late and played the Walking Dead. Ali played for a while and then went to bed.  I played until I found the key to the pharmacy and then I also went to bed it was probably about 1.30AM
When I woke up I went to BnQ to pick up rectangle of Vinyl Flooring 3 Meters by 2 Meters. This is for a couple of breakdancing girls to dance on in a music video that through an odd set of circumstances I am to set to direct in just over a weeks time.
It’s a community song. It’s for the community. I can’t really say anything more about it right now without a Exec producer saying it’s ok. So I’m going to drop it now.
I will say that it is weird that my life has taken this turn. It is weird that I am being given this opportunity. It’s not that I haven’t asked for this opportunity. I may even deserve it. It’s just weird that I have the chance to do this.
It scares me a fair bit. I am constantly worried that whatever I am doing will turn out to be character building life lesson. An example of a mistake or floor in my character. Another snagged nail on the previously unnoticed Achilles heal of my trousers.
Emperors new clothes.
When I was working in tours the was a girl with mental disabilities who really wanted to read the weather. The weather segment of the tour involves adlibbing for a full minute while the map moves around behind you. She was really excited to do it. So I let her do it. As soon as the camera’s turned on. She froze. My worry is that I am about to do the same thing. Only on a larger scale, with larger consequences.
 I have a number of other projects on the go that are not making great progress. I have a few past successes in the bag. If by some miracle this all comes together, then it will open the door to more creative projects in the future. more of this feeling. more worry more stress... more successes in the bag.
If I fail, I fail and I can go back to processing documents for a living, it's just that bunch of people will be able to tell that I’m naked and having been bluffing all along. And I'll be back to the side-lines again,  watching in awe and wonder... with an increased admiration for the people that are able to make things happen.
 

Friday 31 May 2013

13 Notes in my diary that came to nothing.




Most of these don’t even make any sense to me any more.
I will try and explain the ones that do.

Scratch my Afflicted Fake wall

I don’t think the above have anything to do with each other.  My handwriting is a little like a doctors so I can’t be totally sure that the last one is what I wrote.
The middle one I think is a note I wrote for my radio show, Matt used to play me songs he liked and I would tell him why they were no good. It was a great show until we ran out of music. I don’t know which band I thought was an English Weezer rip off. I’m open to suggestions if anyone thinks they know. It might even have been one of the bands I played to Matt.

2. My Grandfather died at Auswitz, he was shooting at prisoners in the compound when his foot slipped and he fell from the guard tower.
This was a plot idea that came from a terrible joke that someone told me someone else had told. They told me the joke as an example of what a terrible guy the person that told it was. The person in question was doing a degree in Holocaust studies and apparently told this joke at Auswitz.  It’s a classic piece of misdirection but the subject matter makes it too tricky to actually use I think.

3. True Crimes- Portugeuse
I have no idea. Maybe it’s a band?

Haven’t seen it. Don’t know when or why I wrote it down.

5. Ring around the bath (RS)
Again… no clue what I was thinking. Perhaps it was a metaphore for what is left of people after they die. A little like Philip Roth’s Human Stain.  We splash and splash around in the water… when it’s over all that is left is the ring around tha bath, the sloughed cells and accumulated dirty we were only too keen to get rid off.  I don’t know what the RS is about.

Plot idea? Title in a video store I thought looked funny? Something to do with their venomous teeth? Who knows now. it’s all a ring around the bath.

7. No AUTOWATCH- 16 year olds
Autowatch was underlined like three times. No idea why. Wait I remember now… is a miss spelling of Autumn watch. This was information for a tour I was giving at work. Autowatch is a misspelling of Autumn Watch. This is me reminding myself that I am not allowed to go there. The tour was for a group of 16 year olds.

First one Um? Your guess is as good as mine. second one looks like a piss take of the Scottish Widows slogan.

9.Blue Peter
Teasing kids with sports they can’t afford.
When I was a kid every time I watched Blue Peter it seemed to be about a group of kids doing QuadBike Polo… or Scuba Water Polo… or some other complex variant of Polo.  a game that I could not afford to play in its most basic form... considering  that Coolios skit about ‘paper-ball’ was much closer to my reality than the motorised super sports of the fortune 500, for me, watching Blue Peter was akin to a French peasant reading about the life of Marie Antoinette before having his face ground into the mud by a group of Yardy gangsters.

 It bothered me then. I guess it still bothered me when I wrote this note. I'm am not totally sure I am over it now.


10. By then though...the last of the good lives was lived.
Well I am assuming that I wasn’t in a particularly cheery mood when I wrote this one. I had this idea that Virtue is dead. innocence is lost. We are so interconnected now that even a modern day St Francis of Assisi would be in some way culpable for the multitude of crimes against nature and humanity that would have supported his existence. Perhaps I was yearning for the sea like Herman Melville, Lusting after empty fields of Ice like Earnest Shackleton. looking for a reason to quote the names of a couple of people in the hope that it makes me look like I've read a bit.

11. People who see themselves from the Outside
Was this important for some reason? Perhaps I was missing the word accurately...  people who can accurately see themselves from the outside. 

There is a story that comes to mind about the crazy person on the bus. Within seconds everyone on the bus can tell that they are crazy…  could provide a list of things they are doing that appear out of the ordinary… perhaps they will give these details later to a police officer… It is a List that would take the person themselves years to identify and perhaps even longer to correct. They say that Hindsight is 20/20 I think what I am sugesing here is that Insight is maybe 20/200...

(just as a brief point of explanation, 20/20 vision means you can see accurately from 20 feet what a normal person can see from 20 feet, if you have 20/10 vision your eyes are twice as good as you can see from twenty feet what normal people can only see from 10 feet away... Owls and Hawks for example have vision that is 20/02... which is pretty impressive... unless you're massively long sighted. 
If you are 20/200... you are considered Legally Blind.)

12.Gold doesn’t fade away like love does.Gold doesn’t bring a tear.
Ridden over by the EMO horse?
Unrelated notes on separate pages… but I think they work well together.

13. Meets in super market
On line?
Like a stuffed animal
In a waiting room
Brothers and Sisters, Fathers day! Is it?
---
Life in the Now
Nothing to look forward too
Can’t get into it
Things we try 
---
Rain-man Style progression
What do you like? 
I like it when you get the Joke
It’s about time they Switched me off
This whole section looks like I am trying to plan something out, like I have an idea for something I am going to write but my “notes” totally fail to actually make sence. Maybe I was writing down my dreams or something? But I doubt it. I guess I just felt like throwing my future-self a curveball.


There are more notes..
Many of them telephone numbers and contact details for people who do weird and wonderful things. A man who paints lampposts gold… a girl who sells fonts to people with writers block… there are many names with email address and numbers that have no notes about who they are. Like furniture in a hoarder’s  basement they are lost to the world. Or at least lost to me.
Goodnight all.

Thursday 30 May 2013

Job Interview



It starts with a blank page. Like every life. Most Lives.
Like the universe itself. It starts from nothing.
And then what.
A man walking though the woods, gathering wild flowers.  Not real woods. These are the woods of a fairy tale. The slightest hint of neon in the too green trees that seem to form a perfect circle. A perfect frame around whatever object catches your attention. This is how is starts… A long time ago in a land far far away… that looked for all the world like an advert for expensive perfume.
There a man walks. There a man steps with wonder from branch to moss covered branch gathering wild flowers.
This is the world of his imagination. This is what he sees when he closes his eyes.

At first of course nothing.  The black smeared with red. Patches of light passing like rush hour traffic though his eyelids. Thoughts of the day. Thoughts of work and then eventually this garden.

A mediated Eden.

He opens his eyes. It’s 3pm and he is on a train. He is wearing an suit that he bought the day before. He is in the quiet carriage. The only noise is the gentle rhythmic pulsing for the train wheels over the rails. He thinks about what it took to build all of this. The kind of drive and vision and organisational skills. How much of an effort it was. A force of will. He is pushed along on the force of somebody else’s, dream of success.
Into the gentle rhythm of the quiet carriage drifts another sound. A woman's voice. Half of a conversation. It’s hard to tell if it’s a telephone conversation or just that in this particular form of white noise, a woman’s voice carries where a man's doesn’t. Something to do with bass tones and frequencies. 

He thinks it’s the latter. He also feels like he has heard this woman before. On another train somewhere.  Perhaps on every train in every quiet carriage he has ever been on. His memory is playing tricks on him. This is clearly impossible.  For this woman to have been on every train journey of his life would mean one of two impossible things were true.

Either that he was the only truly sentient being in the universe and all other beings were simply robots or holograms or something. specifically designed to lend realism to his constructed universe.

Or that for some reason his life. To be more specific the rail centric portions of his life had perfectly synchronised with that of a complete stranger. If this was true what should he do with this information. He considered making a note in his diary. Writing something down that would prompt him to check. The next time he rode the train.
Is this the same woman.
What if it was.
What if she was identical.
How much proof would he need.
Should he photograph her.
If she did prove to be the same woman wouldn’t this mean he was now forced to confront her.
Hello.

He imagined himself saying. I would like you to compare diary's with you. Do you keep a diary. Is it a work diary or simply for pleasure. The thought drifted away into the fog of her possible responses. Numbers and words. He closed his eyes again in the hope of returning to the forest with its flowers lit with internal LEDS and Rabbits that while highly realistic were perceptibly animatronic. He wondered briefly if they had used real rabbit fur in order to construct them and then remembered that it was a dream and that obviously in that case no rabbits had been harmed.
The woman was still talking. From what he could gather.  His eyes now shut. His brain still open. She was talking to a man she had just met.  They seemed to have a lot in common. He was making her laugh. The Man. Our Man. Began  to feel a camaraderie with this unheard stranger. He wished him well. He wanted him to do well. We wanted the kindling sparks of the burgeoning relationship he was watching to blossom into something more.  He was like a football supporter cheering every pass. Listening as intently as the mystery man himself to the woman's ubiquitous voice.  Like a tight rope walker watching the rope. He though.  Listening and watching. Responding appropriately. Perhaps on the edge of being inappropriate. Where it's most exciting.

He wondered. What the hell it is about human beings that made them want to support each other. What was it that worried if rabbits were harmed. He tried to analyse if this part of his brain was a strength or a weakness. He gave up on sleeping.

Before the nothing that lead to the garden and the thoughts described above. Their had been another train journey, Outward bound... in hope.

He has bought this suit for a job interview in London. Now he was on his way back. Still suited up. Less Hopefull. He wondered as he looked around the quiet carriage if people could tell he was an imposter. Or if they just assumed, that he had every right to wear the suit. He tried to say with his body language that this was his Everyday clothing. He became slightly embarrassed about the fact that his bag was a little incongruous with the rest of his outfit. Would his scuffed and worried laptop satchel be the clue that gave the game away.

Through no fault of the bag. He didn’t get the job.