Obiter Dicta

Tuesday, December 20th

I said I would write something of my books of the year.

            I haven’t read a great deal of new fiction this year but what I have read I’ve enjoyed. By and large. The stand-out novel for me was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Funny, insightful, provoking, reflective – everything that a good, thoughtful piece of writing should be. The flawed narrator device rarely worked better. And the main female character, Veronica, is beautifully portrayed. She initially annoyed me as, say Miriam in Sons and Lovers annoys me, or Mildred does in Of Human Bondage. But the denouement had me turning back and reading the whole damn thing right through again, so that I could look at Veronica in a completely different, ie, not phallocentric, way. Brilliant.

            I wasn’t surprised that it won the Booker. I read two more of the short list for that: The Sisters Brothers and Pigeon English. I liked both of them well enough but neither over much. The Sisters Brothers starts off well but ended up, to me, like an overlong spaghetti Western. I liked the adolescent characters of Pigeon English and the ending. But it dragged on a tad for me. It could have been done with being 5000 words less. Or fewer. Or both. Similarly, earlier in the year I read Bed, the first novel by journalist David Whitehouse. It’s about a young man who gets so fat, he can’t leave his bed. Simple idea and beautifully done. But I felt it could have been shorter. Clever idea, though, and an engaging style.

            I read three big literary biographies this year, two of which are Edith Sitwell by Richard Greene, and GK Chesterton by Ian Ker. (If I ruled the world, the name Kerr would always have two R’s. On pain of execution.) Both made me turn to writers I had either read very little of (Chesterton) or had read and found not especially to my taste (Sitwell.) The Sitwell biography is, by a league and a length, the more readable of the two, and I grew to like Edith very much. I re-read the Collected Poems and found a great deal that I now enthuse over – especially among her later poems. ‘Still Falls the Rain’ is astonishingly good. The poems for the atomic age – ‘Dirge for the New Sunrise’; The Shadow of Cain’ and ‘The Canticle of the Rose’ are almost equally powerful. But I found delights in the earlier, more mannered, work too, among the ‘Bucolic Comedies’ and ‘Façade’, although reading too much of these at one sitting is like being force-fed Parma Violets. Parts of ‘Gold Coast Customs’ are worthy too.

            Chesterton is a writer I have only skimmed. The Man Who was Thursday and some of the Father Brown stories to be precise. His writing is not much to my taste, although there are felicities abounding in Thursday. This biography is hard going sometimes, with a tendency to the windy and the wordy. There were long passages I just ignored. But Chesterton turned out to be a person I liked immensely – although I have little in common with him – and I will read more of his work. Hopefully, more of his essays and journalism. (The last writer I grew to like via his biography, like that, was Sir Walter Scott.)

            But the big lit biog this year was the new one of James Joyce by Gordon Bowker. Not the massively detailed labour of love that the old Ellmann biography was, this one at least has some new slants on the great man’s life and I devoured it in a week. I will reread Ulysses in its entirety yet again in the New Year. But first I will read Finnegans Wake in its entirety again. I’ve done it once before, in the centenary year of his birth. But its time to walk the multiverse of genius again.

            In poetry, the only book I remember buying is The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy. As I’ve said elsewhere, this poet is the finest stylist writing in English just now. Better even than the great Heaney, and that’s saying something. The fact that she’s Scottish, female, gay and the Poet Laureate just fill me with delight. And so does the collection. The poem about the death of the last survivor of World War I, ‘Last Post’, is stunning.

            And my book of the year is the scintillatingly brilliant How To Be a Woman by the journalist Caitlin Moran. It’s sparky and sassy, extremely funny, heartbreaking and perceptive. And, along the way, it reminds us of the importance of feminism, of how we should never lose sight of its aims, even as we celebrate its successes. One of the few books ever that I wish I’d written. Although I never could have. Read it and see.

Women are the other half of the sky…

Okay. That’s it. No more dicta, obiter or otherwise, before New Year. Apparently, I have all sorts of media interviews and photoshoots lined up to coincide with the launch of The Locked Ward between then and now. I will tell of you of them anon.

Till then, my friend, think of the world…

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, December 14^th.

This week, I think I’ll write about my favourite reads of the year. Every other bugger seems to be doing it, including that female writer I’ve unfollowed from Twitter because … well, just let’s say ‘because’, and charitably leave it at that.

No, I won’t. I’ll do that next week.  I want to talk about Dentists. Yes. Dentists. Twice within five days since last I blogged, I have found myself upside down in a dentists’ chair – the same one, actually – for ridiculously long periods of time while a (very genial) dentist dug about in the root canals of two of my teeth. I did not enjoy it. Not the first experience, which lasted an hour and a half. And not the second, which lasted a mere hour and five minutes. To be positioned like that, as if I were a shell aimed at the domain of Dental Caries, for that length of time, is not natural to me. The first dose required three injections – one a block injection right at the join of my jaws. I swear to God, I thought the needle was coming out of my ear. And I was deaf for a day and a half. The second bout only required two jags, both in the front of my lower gum. That’s fun, too! Numb nose and lip. Snot trickling undetected. That’s a good look.

Actually, my even being at the dentist’s for such long, unpleasant treatments represents a major step in bravery for me. I go now to the dentist every six months. And I put up with what he has to do. And it only took me something like 50 years to get to this stage. The problem was that my first experience of dental treatment as a child came when I had toothache and had to have a toothy peg yanked oot. Ay me, pain ever, forever!

And the reason for that, of course, was – sweeties.

From the age of three, I ate sugary, sticky, glutinous gunk that stuck to my teeth as I chewed or sooked or slurped it. It rotted holes in my teeth even as I crunched. You could peel the enamel off some teeth like strips of sellotape. Fizzers? Spangles? Ping! Another hole. Refreshers. Love Hearts. And again, a ping and a hole. These were hard sweets that you either sucked until they softened, and your teeth softened along with them, or you crunched them and splinters of teeth flew everywhere.

Chewy sweeties were a favourite of many children – Black Jacks, Mojos and Chewing Nuts for example. Beech Nut chewing gum, a sliver of cahootchie inside a gleaming white shell like the stuff they used to make sinks, was dispensed from vending machines on street corners for a penny a time. These could extract a filling or a milk tooth with astonishing ease. I think Chewing Nuts were actually the nuts from tractor wheels, covered in chocolate.  Caries in a glossy wrapper. Some days my teeth twanged like banjo strings.

Smarties provided a cornucopia of multi-coloured tooth-rot. I liked Lucky Bags – and the many variations on the theme, like Jamboree Bags and Skiffle Bags – in each of which you got a handful of Dolly Mixtures, Fizzers, chews and Midget Gems, a tooth-cracking lolly and a gewgaw. A trinket. Some trashy little toy that you immediately lost. Or swallowed. But most of all, I subsisted on Lemfizz Cubes and Creamola Foam. Lemfizz Cubes were slabs of fizzy, sugary, crumbly material that you were supposed to make drinks with, but which we all just sooked. Extremely effervescent and probably packed with the 50’s equivalent of E numbers, they were ultra sweet and as addictive as horse. They were like those lurid cubes you see scattered in urinals to neutralise the stink. (I suppose, never having tried them). Creamola Foam was a powder or, more accurately, crystals that you stirred into cold water and made a sparkling, sweet drink that often shot up the back of your throat and crackled in your sinuses. It came in a tin, the lid of which had to be jemmied off with a teaspoon, and was concocted of these ingredients: sugar, fruit acids, sodium bicarbonate, gum acacia, saccharin, saponin, flavouring and colour. Saponin is a soap derivative that made the drink froth. Gum acacia is another name for gum arabic, a stabiliser (now with its own E-number, 414) that is also used in ink, shoe polish and the lickable adhesive on postage stamps. Sodium bicarbonate made it fizz. It can neutralise battery acid and is used in septic tanks to control bacteria. It kills fleas. Sugar AND saccharin, not to mention unspecified flavouring and colouring. Yum yum! No wonder we ran into the furniture and bit folk on the ankles.

But the best, the unsurpassed and pre-eminent superlative, as recommended by the British Dentists Association, was Puff Candy. This was essentially a rich toffee mixture of golden syrup, butter and sugar which had added to it, as it bubbled, a few shovelfuls of bicarbonate of soda, which made it fluff up ferociously. When cooled, it had the texture of cinders from the fire. You could buy it plain or covered in thick cooking chocolate. It crumbled in the mouth but stuck to the teeth like molten tar. You had to pick it off with a four-inch nail.

My first visit to the dentist came about now. After several years of Puff Candy and Lem-Fizz cubes, I had a stump of tooth rotting away in the front of my top gum that stubbornly refused to fall out, unlike my other front teeth.  (Photographs of me at this time show me to be simpering like a namby pamby, for the simple reason that I could not smile without revealing to the world my missing teeth. So I smiled without opening my mouth. I looked like a simpleton.) The dentist pulled it out. It was an extremely fraught experience  - for the dentist as well as for me.

I managed to sit in the chair, after much persuasion and amid plenty of apprehensive sniffling. The smell of the surgery was enough to set me off. There was a range of sterilised metal implements on a tray, looking like hooks, corkscrews, spanners, wrenches, things for cracking lobster claws and things for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. Mr. Steel the dentist managed to separate my lips, which had been stuck together with a suck like an octopus’s tentacles, and insert his finger into my mouth. I snivelled the more. He introduced a new item to my mouth, a little mirror on a stick. I arched my back like a cat and whined like a buzz-saw going through a knotty plank. The only reason I didn’t scream was because my mouth was full of finger and mirror. He tapped the stump with the mirror and I thought the top of my head had come off and was rattling on the floor like a hubcap. Now I screamed, sufficient to curdle the blood of any other patients in the waiting room.

“We’ll just have to go for it,” Mr. Steel told my father.

I went for it, all right. I was up and out of that chair like a ground-to-air coward. He caught me by the slack of the arse and drew me back, providing for a few seconds of cartoon-like running on the spot for the young Yours Truly. Then my father lifted me up and replaced me in the chair. And then Mr. Steel went for it.

With the dentist’s knee on my chest and my father’s arm round my head from behind the chair, Steel got the pliers into my gob and performed the butchery required - with no anaesthetic. Not that I would have countenanced for a second the introduction of a jag into the equation. He ripped the offending remnant of tooth from my gum and dropped it in a wee dish by the side of the chair. Then he stuck a swab in my gob which served two purposes: it staunched the flow of blood; and it shut me up. My self-pitying whinge did not rise above a low-level moan for the rest of the day.

I did not learn my lesson, though, I am obliged to say.

After this agonising first experience, I still only attended the School Dentist when I was climbing the walls with pain, thereby compounding the problem. The School Dentist was a very quiet and charming man called Mr. White. He soon came to dread my visits to his surgery as much as I did. While not quite as bad as I had been, as an adolescent I still tried to drive the back of my head into the headrest of the chair whenever he attempted to examine my wrecked gob. I still gave a sharp intake of breath every time he touched a tooth with a finger. And I still wrapped my hands around the arms of the chair when he started to drill. Curiously, having a jag of anaesthetic has never been a problem for me. Unlike my father, who always said he hated the injection but, after it took, the dentist could saw his bloody head off if he wanted. I did not mind the needle a bit. And even when my face was completely numb, from just below my nose to the knot on my school tie, I jerked and flinched and writhed about the seat like a snake. I paid maybe half a dozen visits to Mr. White over my high-school career and even I noticed how his smile grew a little frostier and his tremor a little more pronounced with each visit.

Teeth, eh! Whae’d have them!

My favourite reads of then year next time.

Rest you merry till then.

Obiter Dicta

Tuesday December 6^th

No point in continuing to avoid it; it’s becoming impossible, anyway. Bloody Christmas again. King Herod is a much misunderstood man. He had a lot of good ideas going at one stage. Made the camels run on time, and all that. If he’d got his way, I wouldn’t have to put up with shops playing twee CDs of carols and Christmas songs. Or  seasonal delights like Strictly Come Dancing and the X factor.  Or jolly red-faced farts being plump-full of good will to all men.

What I hate about it, what I really utterly LOATHE about it, is the fact that you don’t have a choice. For those such as I, who are basically shrinking violets, who are not in the least Hail-Fellow-Well-Met (more Well-Fellow-Piss-Off-And-Leave-Me-In-Peace), who could just about tolerate all this spurious religious jollity if it were only for the three days of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but who are obliged to tolerate it from an earlier date in the calendar with each passing year (this year Advent started after the cricket season finishe there should be a Not the Christmas Holiday. A Massacre of the Innocents Holiday or something. 

Is there any foodstuff in the world more bland and tasteless than turkey? Why the hell are we expected to consume this crap on Christmas Day? I’ll tell you this, boy: when Bob Cratchit’s family in Camden Town were sent the biggest turkey in the shop, I’m willing to wager that Mrs. Cratchit, in her twice-turned gown but brave in ribbons, took one look at it and told the poulterer’s boy to shove it where the sun don’t shine, and bring her a top goose,  something with a bit of a tang to it, toot de sweet - and the tooter de sweeter. Then she shut the door and, when Bob asked her who she’d been speaking to, said, “That old bastard Scrooge sent us a turkey. Time you were handing in your notice Bob and putting our names down for the work’us.”

Why, in God’s name, turkey? Why not Shepherds Pie? Altogether more appropriate. Or Straw in a Manger? Ox and Ass Goulash. Donkey Escalope.

But of all the teeth-grindingly awful conventions associated with the Season to be Jolly, fala-lala-la, nothing for me beats THE SECRET SANTA. It is now a ‘western Christmas tradition’ according to Wikipedia. A very recent ‘tradition’, unless I am mistaken. I first came across it in my teaching days when a gung-ho, jolly-hockeysticks sort of female teacher suggested we participate in this Roedean idea of fun as a staff. I sneered so much, I had to pull my top lip out of my left ear. Then, when I was a psychiatric orderly, the staff on the ward did it too.

I didn’t. Not then. Not before. Not ever. I never once participated in this wooflingly vapid exercise. I don’t want a cheap piece of tat that some numbskull thinks is what I would like for a fiver. Or that the same numbskull thinks is a ‘joke’ present for a man like me.  I mean it. There’s little I want or need, from the people who count; those I love. Spare me the strainings of the costive sense of humour of some halfwit…ach.

You get the point.

On another tack entirely, I got my authorial copies of my book yesterday – a box of nice spanking new first-edition copies of The Locked Ward, all nicely hardbacked and with a jacket bearing my mugshot and a real ISBN number and everything. I’ve got them all stood up on the shelf behind the bed. Makes the bedroom look like a Locked Ward bookshop. Now, there’s a Christmas present right up my alley.

Here’s to the next time.

Oh, and – rest you merry.

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, November 30^th.

Gather round friends, pull up an attitude and relax, while the ol’ Hot Chestnut Man tells you a story.

Once upon a time there was an Election, and the pople voted in the Tories, something they had been too clever to do for years and years and years. But, some people said that it wasn’t really the Tories because they had joined hands and got married to the Liberal Democrats. But, says the old Hot Chestnut Man, anyone that sleeps with a Tory automatically becomes one. Like in a magic spell. Oh, they may twist and they may turn, and try to protest that what they said earlier was said because they didn’t know enough then, but nothing is ever of any use. The Tories have them in a very powerful spell called ‘Gotchaby Rabollox’. And they become Tories too. So that, really, theTories won. Even though they didn’t. And all because the people of Liberal Democratia, who are a simple people, believed what the Tories told them.

And the people who voted saw that the leader of  the Liberal Dems was no more than a political courtesan. For the price of a ministerial salary for himself and a hand-picked bunch of his confederates, he sold his birthright to a cadre of sneering toffs. Tuition fees, alone. That’s what people should have shouted when they saw him in the street: “Tuition fees alone! Ya lyin’, two-faced, hypocritical, phony, insincere, duplicitous cad!” And the ol’ Hot Chestnut Man said, “I hope he enjoys his place in prosperity – as the man who buried the Liberals once and for all, the man who hammered the final nail in their political coffin. For, make no mistake about it: they’re gone. They’re History - Ancient History. They’re fucking Geology. Palaeontology. From here on in. They’re with the snaw that fell last year, and the glory that was Grease.”

But lo, some said that the ol’ Hot Chestnut Man had lost his marbles. Until the strike. And then they saw that the Tories, the Bullingdon boys  - ‘I’m Bullingdon Bertie; I rise at 10.30 and sneer at the Proles when I do. For they all smell of cabbage, and working-class garbage and old socks and urine and poo’ – David and Boris and Gideon, had inherited all the haughty and disdainful genes of their ancestors. And the Bullingdon Boys thought that it was fair enough that certain lower orders should work longer than they had agreed should be the case; contribute more to their pensions than had been contracted; and then should get less at the end than had been agreed by all parties. Because were these people not schoolteachers and nurses and council employees and such conniving sluggards as these?

And the people said to themselves, ‘Well! Next time there’s an election, we know what we have to do.’

And the ol’ Hot Chestnut man said to himself, ‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’

* * *

I’d like to talk briefly about Twitter too, this week. Oh yes. The old Social Networking Sites.  I’ll be brutally honest; I went on in the hope of punting my book. I’d been footering about the margins of Tweeting before and almost died of inanity poisoning but, on the advice of my agent and my daughter, stuck with it.

I’m glad I did. There are some woofling bores out there, and some barking madmen too. But there are some genuinely amusing people and some genuinely smart and interesting ones too. Like life, I suppose. In 140 characters or less.

There’s an idea in there. Somewhere.

Here’s to the next time.

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!

Obiter Dicta

Thursday , November 3^rd

Some days later this week with the old bloggeroo. I have actually been writing like … whatever the appropriate simile is for writing. A typewriter? Bob Cratchit? Or just  ‘like fuck’, which is what the guys in the pub would say. Towards more picturesque speech!

I have been working on a piece that is, at the moment, called Grand Guignol. It started off as a short story – well, it started off as a poem , many years ago – but it has sprouted wings and taken off, and I’m rather hopeful of its being a novel one fine day. Or a novella. Or a nouvelle. Whatever the difference between those is. It is different; that much I will own to. We’ll see how it progresses. At the moment, it’s taking up all of my writing time. And enjoyably so.

Other things on the go –

Well, the 26 poems arrived that I have to judge for the Mulgrave Trophy, presented by an Edinburgh writing club. I have to say, with no little astonishment – and sheepishness – that the overall quality is staggeringly good. Even on the first reading, I could see that. The subject matter shows remarkablevariety, and the styles no less so. One or two in Scots. Most in free verse. But two in terza rima – and one sestina! On first perusal, they seem to be handled skilfully too. I have to append  a short crit to each one, so there’s a fair bit of work to be done there. And a speech to be drafted too. They’ll get their fee’s worth from me, I can promise you that!

My first published prose work, The Locked Ward, will be published by Jonathan Cape in the UK on January 5^th, 2012. It is a memoir of my seven and a half years as a psychiatric orderly in a secure unit. There are many funny stories, as well as one or two sad ones. And what I hope is useful information about serious mental illness and how to help people who suffer from it. Initially, when my agent suggested I write it, I was reluctant in the extreme. Ethical considerations, matters of confidentiality and the like, made me think it was impossible to do.

But there are ways and means. None of the patients in the book would be recognised by anyone. I have changed names, ages, gender, nationality – anything you can think of, to render the patients anonymous. Some characters in the book are composites – amalgamations of several different people. One patient might be spread around five different characters. Similarly, with staff. I have used ten or twelve names and stuck to them over the seven years, despite the many comings and goings of staff over the period. I wanted to write the book because it was by far and away the most interesting job I ever had, and I thought others might find it interesting too. And I wanted to celebrate the patients: a band of people who, despite the most catastrophic illnesses in some cases, showed stunning bravery, humanity and resolve.

The book written, the audio book voiced, I now have to assist with the publicity for the project. The PR people at Cape have taken over and a very affable guy called Chris is dealing with that for me. He’s been on email to check what I’d like to do. Write? Yes. Public apearances? Yes. Radio and TV? Yes. Those rich old Caledonian tones might be broadcast far and wide yet.

He has also dangled a very exciting possibility before me. But I’m not going to mention that yet. Because, although I’m not superstitious (touch wood) I am very wary of The Unspeakable Law. Which states: ‘As soon as you mention something, if it’s good, it goes away; if it’s bad, it happens.’ I won’t risk that at the moment.

But, rest assured, as soon as anything transpires, you’ll be the first to know.

Obiter Dicta

Monday, October 24, 2011

This week I shall be considering precisely what I’m going to talk about at the Edinburgh Writers’ Club whenI judge their poetry competition next month. I’m expected to give them something of an address before I announce any results.

I shall have to curb my natural tendency to lay about me when I discuss their work, I fancy. I did point out to their President, when I accepted the gig, that my reputation as poetry critic for the (now  sadly defunct) Scottish literary magazine, Cencrastus, was that of a harsh judge. I did say, too, that I have not had a collection of poetry published in the last 8 years (although I have one ready), so she might not really want old Obsolete Sarky Drawers around the tender sensibilities of her writers.

Heres’s an example, one of the few I could find after all the years. It’s actually praising the work of Alan Spence. Kind of.

His book of poetry, Glasgow Zen, irritated me. It irritated me because he made me like it, and I am primed to sneer at mock-Oriental woofle. Too many Western writers think a mystical message (“Only in darkness can one see the light”) and Willow Pattern imagery make them wise and exotic. I should have known. Spence is far better than that.

I will, of course, encourage and exhort rather than excoriate this time. Its important to encourage people to write. I am, I have to say, not convinced that writing – or, more accurately, the ability to write creatively – is something that can be taught. But exemplars can be held up and tips can be given, I suppose. I’ve just never read many tips by other writers that work for me. You have to work it out for yourself, as the prophet Brian said.  The most important thing – and I’ll say this to them – is to find your own voice. However long that takes.

I wonder how they’ll react to my judgements. I know that, any time I’ve entered a literary competition, (not often), I’ve felt the slow cigarette-burn of disappointment at not winning. How could the judges be so obtuse as to discard my masterpiece and give the palm to that heap of ordure? People’s tastes are bizarre. I often think. I have no doubt that my victims will think the same of my preferences.

What will I be looking for? I’ll know it when I find it. Best not to preconceive any ideas. I’ll hope to find something with a genuinely original spark, whether that be turn of phrase, imagery or whatever. And, with the writer’s permission, I’ll blog the winner.

*

On a related topic, if more grandly related - I was gratified to see Julian Barnes win the Booker for ‘The Sense of an Ending’. Despite the reservations of some of my followers among the Twitterati, I think it’s a fine work. As I’ve written earlier, I think the ending is truly magnificent. Shocking. Full of despair. Tragic, in the proper sense of the word, not only for itself, but for how it impacts upon the character and self-awareness of Tony. It has some insightful things to say about aging and the process of memory too. I would urge all those who have not already done so to read it now.

I am reading ‘The Sisters Brothers’ now. I enjoyed the first half immensely. Wry and funny. I like the character of the narrator, Eli Sisters, and much of the dialogue. But, as I go on, I am finding it increasingly less appealing. Now it just seems like the middle of a spaghetti Western. I think it could have done with some judicious editing, to be truthful.

And now to draft some ideas for my address.

I really should do some of my own writing too. I will, sure I will. Even if Ali phones and suggests going to the pub, I’ll work instead.

Won’t I?

See you next week. Till then, think of the world.

Obiter Dicta

Monday, October 17, 2011.

Returned on Friday from  my week in Bath. Not my week in the bath, fragrant though some may think me, but in beautiful, Georgian, Gainsborough-Sheridan-and-Austen Aquae Sulis whose water, according to Sam Weller, has "a very strong flavour o' warm flat irons."  And not only the water in the spa – which I didn’t visit on this occasion. The tap water tastes of old feet too. Tip – drink bottled water. The local aqua is too sulis for my palate.

I got there via Bristol, which is not a lovely city. Forgive me, Bristolians, I am prepared to believe that there may be beautiful sections of it. They just don’t include the centre. The Bristol blitz did you no favours. Beirut on the Avon. Although, to be scrupulously fair, I did see a massively impressive church, which might or might not have been called St. Mary Redcliffe.

To get to Bristol, I had to fly. I am not alone in my fear of flying, I know, but I may well be alone in my detestation of it as a combination of simultaneously the most terrifying, and yet the most skull-crushingly tedious, experience known to haunt the soul of sensitive man. Can anything be more dull, irritating or fatuous than an airport? I looked around me as I queued at the Departure gate  at 7.30 that morning and thought to myself, ‘If I have to die this morning, do I really want these people to be the ones I go through my last agonies with? These laptop lapdogs? These irksome yelps who have to be on their mobile phones at all times, to impress upon us lesser mortals: I AM IMPORTANT. (No, you’re not, mate. You’re a paid lackey like the rest of us. Nobody’s asking you if they should sell Rio Tinto Zinc; or whether you will change your flight, head instead to Damascus and make sure a peace agreement is signed. They’re telling you to get your arse in gear and get those invoices up to Head Office at once.) Better than that, though, I had a whistler right behind me. Not a painter of moody impressionistic night scenes, either. One of those fatheads who whistle snatches of melody at random intervals, as a substitute for thinking. It’s always guys, I’ve noticed. Women are rarely that irritating. I turned round and gave him the glare once or twice. But these folk never twig. He whistled on. And on and on. Oh, the temptation to push his  teeth down his throat and say, ‘Whistle now, ya bastard! Give us a few staves of the Minute Waltz, why don’t you.’

(You can maybe tell by now that I was a little stressed.)

Flying didn’t alleviate it. I had a window seat (hate them; have no desire to see clouds or the land that far below me). The other seats were taken up by two callow younglings from Fife, on their way to study grease-monkery at some poly in Bristol. They talked about cars the whole flight. When they weren’t flicking through ‘Nuts’ magazine. At one point, I did seriously consider leaning over from reading ‘The Sense of an Ending’ and whispering, ‘If you’re that desperate for a wank, there are far better magazines available.’ I didn’t, of course. I’m too much of  a gentleman.

A ten minute train journey from Bristol brought me to the city of Bath, its golden buildings of Bath stone shimmering, even though the morning was grey. The guest house I stayed in, the Dorian, was quiet and refined, with taped cello music. Just the ticket for a boy like me!

The actual recording of the audio book of The Locked Ward was fun. And interesting. Just me and my text on a lectern between two reading lights in a dark studio. I was booked in for four days but completed it in three. Don’t know if that’s good or not. My producer, a lovely guy called David Bell, something of an aging hippy like myself, was very complimentary and said that I was ‘very professional’ in my attitude to fluffs. Just stopped, took a breath and started from the fuck-up point. It annoyed me whenever I did it, so I tried to keep such screw-ups to a minimum. Always worse after lunch for some reason. (And no, it wasn’t a liquid one.)

Interesting that everyone else there to read that week was an actor. They thought it deuced rum that I was reading my own book. They were all very engaging people, and very pleasant towards the wee Scottish interloper but they did give me something of a complex, briefly. There they all were, E-N-U-N-C-I-A-T-I-N-G; and INTONING; and inflecting like fuckers, while I read my wee book in  my gravelly West Lothian accent. I did, I think, read with some expression. But I always hate to hear my voice on playback. A voice an octave lower than a coo’s. David was very nice and said that it was ‘rich’. Besides, he liked what he called my ‘broad Scots’.  Oh no, David! If you think I’m broad Scots, you should visit the boozer on a Friday night. In comparison to these guys, I modulate like Alvar Liddell.

Anyway, my voice is what it is. One can only be oneself, so long as one always endeavours to be the best self one can. And, if nothing else, my rich tones are there for the descendants!

The rest of my stay in bath was enjoyable. I do love the city. And I bought a copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The Bees’. Ah, man! I never thought I’d see a poet overtake Seamus Heaney in my estimation as the finest poet of the times. But Ms. Duffy has. I’ve always liked her stuff, to be sure, from my first reading of ‘Standing Female Nude’. But she has grown and developed and progressed so much that I’d now give her the palm. After having wrested it from the hands of famous Seamus, of course. Like I tweeted when I got back: She’s the Poet Laureate, she’s Scottish, she’s female and she’s gay. About as good as it gets after centuries of middle-class English males. Do yourself a favour and read ‘The Bees’. The poem Last Post, written after the last survivors of World War I died, is a stunning achievement. The notion of time run backwards is not a new one, but what she does with it will break your heart. A genius takes existing techniques and makes them her own.

Whilst languishing in my lonely little guest house bed in Bath, I read Julian Barnes’s ‘The Sense of an Ending’ on my Kindle. (Hey! Mr. Gizmo, or what?) Oh, you have to read that too. If it doesn’t win the Booker, it’ll be a travesty. It starts off like a rites of passage romance. Ends up with the biff of a Greek tragedy. Mightily impressive.

And now my typing finger has the bends after so much work in so short a space of time. I’m off to immerse it in an iced vodka and pomegranate juice.

Here’s to the next time. (And buy The Locked Ward, in all its various guises, when it comes oot!)

Toujours gai.

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, October 5^th, 2011

I write this on the centenary of the birth of the funniest man ever to put pen to paper: Brian O’ Nolan, more widely known in the literary community as Flann O’Brien, author, and/or Myles na gCopaleen, columnist for the Irish Times. Actually, to call him funny might detract a little from his worth as a writer because, as we all know, to be funny does not equate with literary ability. Or so the received wisdom goes. It’s drivel, of course. ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ is an astonishing literary achievement, resonant and thought-provoking. ‘The Third Policeman’ is  a novel of mystery and enchantment, as well as a weird whodunnit. The fact remains that they are both extremely funny, too.

His column in the Irish Times, ‘The Cruiskeen Lawn’, written under the name of Myles na gCopaleen, and published widely now in various collections, is full of writing that actually and genuinely makes me laugh out loud. That’s not a feat easily achieved. Some of the first volume of Clive James’s ‘Unreliable Memoirs’ did it too, but precious few others have. Recurring features like The Brother, The Plain People of Ireland, and Keats and Chapman, are greeted with the same pleasure one reserves for old friends. His excoriation of Bores and Cliches is brilliant. Oh yes, I can take a lot of Mr. O’Brien/ na gCopaleen.

You can keep your PG Wodehouse. He’s good; funny enough. But couldn’t lace O’Brien’s boots. I can only read so much of Wodehouse at a time before the woofling, chortling toodloo-ery of it all gets under my skin. I never feel that with O’Brien. Read him.

As for my own writing, I have worked on ‘Grand Guignol’ all week. It has now more than doubled in size and threatens to do even more. I will let it have its head; see where it takes me. I’m conscious too of having undertaken to write a story called ‘Gogl Mogl’ in competition with my Twitter amigo, Roman Tsivkin. Before the end of this month! Next week’s trip to Bath should afford me the time to let ideas simmer. is excoriatiuon of BofresH(I have one or two). And then maybe I can just write it on my return.

Because of Bath, there will be no posting next week. But I hope to have several good anecdotes (and a fine audio book) to tell you about, the week after that.

Till then - May the bird of paradise fly up your nose.

Obiter Dicta

27^th September 2011

I’ve just put the finishing touches to the redraft of my novel, ‘Wyndford’. Now it’s been whizzed through the virtual ether to Stan, my agent. He can work a few magic passes over it with his wand and start a massive bidding war amongst the richest publishers in the land.

I’ve always wanted to write something about the shale mining industry. Historically, the first major oil-producing industry in the world, it rose and fell in West Lothian in the space of about a hundred years. It started in the 1860s and the last pit, Westwood, closed in 1962. I feel that not enough people in the world know about it. So I wrote a novel with a mining village in 1946 as its setting.

It lay dormant in my mind for eight years. I made a few tentative notes and jottings in the year 2003, including some historical research and a list of character names and street names. I knew at that time that I wanted it to be tragic; my central characters to be the women of the village, and my main character to be a young woman called Nan Cochrane. Then I put it aside. A conversation with Stan in February 2011 blew the grey embers alive again and I wrote it – 98,000 words - in a little less than two months. Nan is still the main character and her tragedy is a personal one, but played out against a larger, historical tragedy. I rather like it.

The story, ‘Grand Guignol’, that I submitted to the Manchester prize, has taken on a life of its own this week too, and I’ve almost doubled the length of it as I develop the themes already there. I am equally fond of this piece of writing. Something different, I like to think.

Glad to see, among all the bunting and frippery surrounding the impending bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, that people are returning to the novels. Or reading them for the first time. As a child, I knew of  his works, but I suspect I hadn’t read them. From this distant remove, it’s hard to remember accurately, but I think I may only have gleaned the narratives of some of them from Classic Comics. But, like many, my mind was stocked with his characters – Fagin, Pip, Micawber, Sairey Gamp – and his phrases. ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ ‘Barkis is Willin’.’ ‘I’m so very ‘umble.’

It was only when I got to uni in Edinburgh that I read the actual novels: ‘Bleak House’ in first year and several, including ‘Great Expectations’ in third. Thereafter, I bought them all in the orange Penguin English Library series of the time, and devoured them, one by one in chronological order. Now, I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t know these exceptional novels or revere Dickens as one of the finest writers of the age – and one of the finest humorists of any age.

Happy two-hundredth birthday, when it comes, Chuck.

Obiter Dicta

20th September 2011

Much has happened since last I scattered my thoughts in this little thought-bed. I reached my  sixtieth birthday and spent a great deal of extremely pleasurable time in the company of my family. As a consequence of my 60^th, I now possess a Kindle, which makes me feel like Captain Spock. I intend to beam myself aboard several literary starships before too long. My first purchases for it were The Complete Works of Shakespeare, the ditto of Charles Dickens, ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce and the Booker shortlisted Julian Barnes one, ‘The Sense of an Ending’. The first three selections I cannot be without, especially the Shakespeare and the Joyce; the last I intend to read when I am in Bath next month, voicing The Locked Ward for BBC Audio Books.

I am looking forward to Bath very much. It is a city I love and I relish the prospect of being back in it. I will be staying at a hotel very near the Crescent and I will drink in the beauty of the architecture at every opportunity. I may even pretend I am Captain Wentworth in the evenings and see how many Annes I can find.

As to the reading of my book – I am uncommonly excited about that prospect too. It’s time my manly Caledonian tones were heard ringing out in living-rooms and cars around the country, not to mention the fact that it will provide another audience for the book. And there are a hundred characters I’ll enjoy voicing – accents, dialects, moods … Who knows, if I do this well, I may get the gig for other Scottish works.

I have been working on short stories mainly this week. Three of them were submitted for the Manchester Metropolitan University Prize: ‘Night, the Beloved’, ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ and my favourite, ‘Grand Guignol’. A fourth was entered for the Bridport: ‘The End of Things’. They form part of a collection I am putting together on the theme of night and nightmare. This week’s work has been a long piece, tentatively entitled ‘The Dreamtown Sex Play’, but most likely to be renamed before it is finished. It is a swirling dream piece, in the style of Flaubert’s ‘Temptation of St. Antony’ and Joyce’s ‘Circe’. I have great hopes for it.

I have been looking at some philosophy in the last few days, the result of a Twitter friendship with a guy called Roman Tsivkin, who is deeply interested in matters philosophical. To my delight, I found a piece I had written many years ago ( ), in which I reflected on my experience of Philosophy at university. And here it is:

Wittgenstein said “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Unlike many philosophical gems, this is a sound apothegm, and one that the good burghers of my home town have taken to heart and use as an everyday watchword. Except they translate the original German as “Shut yer face an’ nae cunt’ll ken yer daft.”…

Philosophers know what they can do with their Logic, Ethics and Metaphysics, with their Epistemology and their Ontology; with their a priori reasoning (argument from cause to effect) and their a posteriori (talking out of their arses.) It has never helped me understand what anything is about…

One good thing about philosophers, though, is that some of them have died in spectacularly silly ways.

Heraclitus, for example, was eaten by dogs because he was covered in dung – something he had considered was a good way of treating his dropsy. Epicurus died on the loo. (Mother was right – don’t push too hard on the john, or you’ll do yourself a mischief.) Empedocles died by jumping into Mount Etna to prove he was a god. He wasn’t. Socrates poisoned himself with hemlock; Pythagoras died because he was a vegetarian. Pursued by an angry mob into a beanfield, he stopped running, not wanting to harm the beans, and was battered to death by the crowd. Diogenes (who, like Huck Finn, sometimes lived in a barrel) died of eating raw octopus and St. Thomas Aquinas died on the pan, like Epicurus. Perhaps his last thought was “It’s all a load of shite.”

And so, finally …

This is what it’s all about, my friends, and say I said it: You’re born; you grow old; you die. The time in between birth and death might be bonecreakingly long or heartbreakingly brief, but that’s it, all the same: you’re born; you grow old; you die. Spend as much time as you can with the people you love before you go, or before they do. Try to pass on any wisdom you may have acquired. And always check over your answers before you hand in the paper.

Obiter Dicta

11th September 2011

I find myself approaching my 60^th birthday this week with a piquant blend of emotions. Part of me is flabbergasted that I’ve got this far. How can a sprite be 60? I look back over the years and find that I’ve been a lucky sod all my life: cherished by parents, doted on by grandparents and wider family; and, most of all, lucky in love. I found the Gold Ticket in Love’s lottery really early on. I married my soulmate and we have a daughter who has been a source of happiness all her life and who has presented us with two beautiful granddaughters who bid fair to be likewise.

And I’ll stop the goo there, so that the reader can  inject with insulin before continuing.

What I don’t have is what I half expected. A feeling of having fallen into the ‘sere, the yellow leaf’. There are no gathering swallows twittering in my skies. And this is a man who knows gathering and twittering when he sees it. In  my youth, sixty was the age of my grandfather and his cronies: bent old men (bent physically, not morally) who walked with sticks and whose eyes purged amber and plum-tree gum. I don’t feel like that at all. Maybe 60 is the new mellow.

I have been working on the - hopefully - final proofs of my memoir, ‘The Locked Ward’. In these here times, seeing a book from the PC screen to publication still requires a great deal of scanning intermediate versions. Even though the days of hot metal are gone. Scrutinising the flat proofs in June was a hell of a task. I read the damned things ten times in two weeks. I’ll probably never read it again, once it comes out. At least I wasn’t like one of my literary heroes. Joyce must have driven compositors and typesetters daft when proofreading ‘Ulysses’. He added so much that the novel grew by a third at the proofreading stage. Rather, I cut out a few sections that I felt were impeding the flow and I think the book is better for it.

And finally, now that I have almost certainly reached old fogeydom, what the hell happened to commas? I have been aware of this for a long time, but publishers tend not to like them any more. For whatever reason. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions on which I have had to pause in the reading of a sentence to go back and pick up a lost thread, the fault of a missing comma. Commas exist to prevent ambiguity. Let them be used. I provide, free of charge, a gross for you to use whenever your reading material is deficient in them.

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Welcome to my blog, although I feel like Emperor Candrax from the planet Tron even using the phrase. ‘Blog’ is a vile word. (‘That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase’). We all know the derivation of it – ‘web log’ (OMG!, that’s so neat!) But it’s such a clunky word. And there are so many more beautiful ones that could have been created, with a little imagination. How about, for example, ‘Ethechron’: an Ether Chronicle? Particularly appropriate as ‘ether’ can be defined as ‘the space between particles’. There has to be a joke in there about the space between articles. I wish I could think of one.

I also like ‘ViDi’: a Virtual Diary, and not at all a sexually transmitted infection. A ‘Journet’ or ‘Journal on the Net’ has a French and faux sophistique ring to it. ‘Orbital Dicta’ – oh, now, I like that! Thinking with gas, there! In fact, now I do think of it, I’m going to have a page somewhere on this bleedin’ blog called ‘Obiter Dicta’. Space age technology maybe, but we should never lose touch with the classics. O tempora, O mores!

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει καὶ δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης

Onyhoo, hard hats are recommended – not only because this site is still under construction, but also because some of my ideas are not predigested, mindless pap regurgitated from some execrable TV show or Celeb magazine. (Did you see what I did there? ‘Not only… but also’, not only as in the Pete and Dud show of the 60s, but also a translation of the Latin ‘non modo … sed etiam’ – just after some classical tags. This isn’t just thrown together you know.) Weapons grade readers are welcome here; as are people with liberal values.

(The Latin phrase means ‘O what times! O what customs!’ and was first said by Cicero. He was not a Brazilian footballer. The Greek sentence is pronounced ‘Panta chōrei kai ouden menei kai dis es ton auton potamon ouk an embaies’. It means ‘”Everything changes and nothing remains and you cannot step twice into the same stream”. Said by Heraclitus of Ephesus. (It’s on his Greatest Hits compilation, ‘Now That’s What I Call Metaphysics, 29.’) It is also pretty much the central tenet of Buddhism. I’m not really a Buddhist, but I may have achieved enlightenment. Through a mixture of spirituous liquors, loving the same woman for over 40 years and daydreaming a lot. Rather than working a lot. I can recommend it. If you don’t end up thinking like the Buddha, you certainly end up looking like him.

Will you join me in a think?

The Life and Times ….
(short version, nicked from my literary agent’s website. Or should I say ‘bsite’?)

My name is Dennis O’Donnell and I was born in Bathgate, West Lothian in 1951. I still live in the West Lothian hinterland. I am very married – in fact, since 1972.

I have been a teacher, a joiner’s labourer and, in my youth, a chicken catcher. Nowadays I’m too old to catch chickens and too wise to be a teacher. I have also been a columnist for The Scotsman. Most recently, I’ve been in psychiatry – on the nursing side.

I have had two collections of poetry published by Curly Snake Press – ‘Two Clocks Ticking’ (Winner of the Saltire First Book Award 1997); and ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ (2003). Nobody has yet agreed to publish my next collection, ‘The Last Ostrich in Shotts’.

A memoir of my time as an orderly in a secure psychiatric unit, ‘The Locked Ward’, will be published by Jonathan Cape in January 2012.