Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, November 22^nd

Ah! Here I am. Knew I’d get here eventually. I’ve been posted missing for the last couple of weeks.  Missing presumed blogless. But no.  Back again and all blogged up. Chockful of blog. The mind bloggles.

Some of my time over the intervening interim was spent with the dear old Mater in Leicestershire. She had fallen the previous week and, at 86, that could have been serious. Well, it was serious in one sense. I mean, she hadn’t done a comic fall. A pratfall. She wasn’t doing a Mrs. Pastry or anything, Keystone Copping all over the place. She fell seriously all right. She just didn’t give herself a serious injury. Which was a blessing. Is the expression, I believe.

She’d fallen in the living-room. I asked her how she fell. She told me she’d tripped over the rug. I said, ‘Lift the rug’. ‘Ah but son,’ she said, ‘I like it there. It protects the carpet.’

The fitted carpet has a pile on it high enough and thick enough for The Borrowers to have to hack through it with machetes. There are small woodland creatures living in there. It’s an eco-system on its own. I lifted the rug. That evening, she stumbled over one of the three rugs in the hall (also fitted with carpet). I lifted those rugs. Now she has a rugless house but is in less imminent danger of tripping and braining herself on the fireplace or the bookcase in the hall.

I love my mother dearly, as all good boys should, even 60-year-old boys, but her deafness causes me a great deal of stress. Correction -  her refusal to admit that she is deaf, or to wear a hearing-aid, causes me a great deal of stress. Every second utterance has to be repeated, slightly louder and slightly more slowly. And the volume level of the repeat has not to be too loud, or she snaps, ‘I can hear you perfectly, you know.’

Naw, Mum you cannae.

Watching TV has taken on a whole new dimension. ‘What did he say, son?’ is a regular question. So, by the time I’ve repeated –slightly more loudly and slightly slowly – what the actor said, we’ve missed what the next actor said. God knows how she manages  when there’s nobody else there. I shudder to think what skewed ideas of drama or comedy she has taken from her imperfect hearing of the dialogue.

* * *

When I returned from Leicester, I finished my judging of the Edinburgh Writers’ Club poetry competition. The standard of entry was pleasingly high and the winner – For Mary Haldane – was a great piece of work.  It did exactly what I had hoped the winner would do: burned itself into my memory. Congratulations to Kate Blackadder and I hope her poem is published in a literary magazine soon. It deserves wider recognition. The runner-up, by the club’s treasurer, Tony (sorry, I’ve forgotten his surname) was a wonderfully atmospheric and reflective piece called Evening Mooring. It was written in the villanelle form and Tony’s great achievement was that the content and the delivery of it matched the form so well.

And finally, The Locked Ward is nearing publication and Cape’s publicity people are now taking over. I have already filled in two written questionnaires for magazines, and the bound proofs have been sent out to various luminaries to see of we can garner a friendly quote.

First quote is a beauty. Gabriel Weston, a surgeon who wrote the memoir Direct Red for Cape a couple of years ago, has furnished Dan Franklin with the following paragraph. I rather like it. Toodloo till next time.

I really enjoyed The Locked Ward. He is compassionate without any taint of
sentimentality, and the way he uses language is so elastic. It's like he's
the most brilliant court-jester in the most colourful of courts. Bravo to
him!