VoiceFictive

Nick Cave

2009-08-27T21:36:00.006+01:00

I probably write out of a different part of my brain when I’m as tired as this. Just lying here, lights down, eyes slightly closed, laptop whirring in the night, fingertips dancing. God bless illuminated keyboards. I don’t try too hard. It’s the pleasure of writing this blog. I don’t care how it sounds. It’s just for me. This is just bare bones writing. No imagination. Just typing.

I took a very quick jaunt around town today, avoiding the preparations for Manchester Pride. A poster on Manchester Piccadilly shouted at me this morning: ‘People are just born gay. GET OVER IT!!’. It never occurred to me that I had a problem and I disliked the implication that I did. The only problem I have is people shouting their sexual preference in my face. I can’t recall the last time I walked down a street and angrily accosted a stranger to tell them I’m into brunettes with large breasts and thigh high stockings. I’m just glad I’ll be out of Manchester tomorrow before the festival kicks off. There’s now a huge glitter ball hung outside the transvestite club across the road from the office. For me, it’s not a matter of having any particular attitude towards what people do in their bedrooms. It really is not my business. But I do dislike the gaudy aesthetic. I’m just not a glitter ball guy.

I don’t usually get out of the office for anything longer than it takes me to get to the nearest shop and buy lunch. I should rephrase that. I can go out for lunch but I don’t want to be stuck in the city for nine hours. However, today, I was a little longer and it ended with me facing a dilemma. I noticed a poster advertising that Nick Cave is signing his new book at Waterstones at the end of September.

This is Nick Cave, in the flesh, in a book shop, signing hardback copies of his new book.

Damn!

I fail to understand other people’s hero worship and I’ve never come to term with my own. There are writers, singers, cartoonists, actors, and directors that I hugely admire but I have never thought of myself standing in line to meet them. The closest I’ve ever come was running onto a cricket pitch as a young lad to get the autograph of a cricketer playing a testimonial for a locally born sporting hero. I think I ran up to Barry Richards. I don’t know what became of the autograph. I suppose I have it somewhere, in the envelope where I keep my Geoff Boycott autograph and a letter from Graham Dilly, who was my favourite bowler as a teenager.

Since then, I’ve tended to avoid famous people when I recognise them. I once walked past Barry Humphries in Liverpool. Nobody recognised me and he gave me a strange look when he knew that I knew. I bowed my head, walked on. The same thing happened when I walked past Alex Cox. It was instinctive that I nodded and smiled to him. I thought he was just somebody I knew. I felt terrible when he nodded back to me.
These days, my only contact with ‘heroes’ (for want of a better word) are through signed books I occasionally find. I have a copy of ‘Breakfast for Champions’ signed by Kurt Vonnegut; a copy of ‘The Village’ signed by David Mamet. I also have a cherished autograph of P.J. O’Rourke. I also other signed books, Will Self, Jeffry Deaver (I know!) and a few science fiction authors.

Most of my long standing ‘heroes’ are dead: W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Peter Cook, Arthur Miller, David Lean, Billy Wilder. Even people I’ve discovered relatively recently are no longer with us: Johnny Cash, B. Kliban, S J Perelman.

Who would I like to meet? Tom Waits, Kris Kristofferson, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, the Kinkster, Andy Hamilton, Armando Ianucci, Galton and Simpson, David Mamet, Martin Scorsese...

Tom Waits is the one person I venerate, though Nick Cave isn’t far from inspiring that kind of awe. I love his passionate songs, his angry songs, and his danger songs. Yet I also adore his religious ballads, with ‘The Boatman’s Call’ being one of my favourite albums.

Do I want to go meet him? Hell yes I do. But it’s not going to happen.

It would feel like I’d be breaking some fundamental agreement with myself. Perhaps it says more about my ego than anything else but I feel like it would be tantamount to giving up. Do I want to stand in line, mutter some oft-repeated note of appreciation? Do I want him to mutter thanks, desperate for the whole sorry evening to be done so he can get back to his life? That’s not for me. What’s the point in meeting somebody you admire without being able to ask or say something meaningful? What’s the point of reducing them to the level of prostitutes you’re paying with the amount of a hardback?

I admire them too much for that. I think I’ll stay away.

[Postscript 1: Here's the strange thing: I realise I already have Nick Cave's autograph. A friend of my sister was in charge of organising a big rock concert in Australia. He couldn't think of who to book so he asked my sister. She asked me. I immediately said Tom Waits and Nick Cave. A month later, I hear that The Bad Seeds were booked to headline the festival. About three months later, I got an autographed programme. I'll have to dig it out just to prove that I effectively arranged to get coins deposited in Mr. Cave's extremely dapper waistcoat pocket. It's my one and only claim to fame.

Postscript 2: I only discovered today that Cave dedicated his recent Glastonbury performance to Farrah Fawcett. That pleases me even more than Harry Shearer's deliciously ambiguous announcement that 'without Michael Jackson, there would be no Spinal Tap'.]

Class

2009-08-26T12:49:00.003+01:00

When talking about class, there’s a great line by Billy Connolly (from ‘An Audience With...’) which I usually get wrong. It begins: ‘I'm not saying “love me, love me, I'm thick...”’ Only, I always remember is as: ‘I'm not saying “love me, love me, I'm poor...”’ But that’s the thing with class: where the middle and upper classes can be accused of snobbery, those of us at the other end of the social ladder can be equally accused of inverted snobbery. Class has always intrigued me because it seems to be as useless and it is helpful. Whilst the majority of people seem to conform to the definitions, individual cases don’t. To deliberately misquote Jonathan Swift: I can generalise about mankind but not about Tom, Dick, or Harry.

The problem with class is that it doesn’t totally convey people’s attitudes, and by ‘attitudes’ I probably mean their moral outlook. Some of the people I meet who profess to be middle class are, in my book, woeful human beings. They are duplicitous, conniving, arrogant, and cruel. They achieve much of what they achieve through the wilful abuse of others. When these qualities are seen in the working class, it rightly marks them out as crooks. They are the aspiring gangsters that hang around the gym I can see from my bedroom window. Yet when seen in the upper classes (I have only limited contact with the aristocracy), these low qualities apparently become virtues. Arrogance is assumed. It is not an option.

Perhaps class is only useful when looking at a social group from the outside. We see that ‘Chavs’ conform to stereotype because we don’t know them. The same might be true of university lecturers, journalists, members of the royal family. Class might be very useful when talking about common social types, yet the people that interest me – the people I am happy to call friends – tend not to fit into these stereotypes. Perhaps it’s just that I see something beyond the caricature. Perhaps what marks out a person as interesting to me is the degree to which they differ from their culture. They are square shapes in round holes.

I am from pure working class stock. My father’s side of the family fled from the revolution in Russia when my grandmother was just a girl. My father began work as a wheelwright but went to work in a mental hospital for the job security. My mother, like many women of her generation, became a housewife and a mother.

I attended a working class comprehensive school that did very little to give us hope. It was run down before people noticed that schools were being run down. It was there that literature, which had my love as a child, was ruined by English classes. It was perverted through Socialist ideals into a monstrous social science. We read ‘A Taste of Honey’ to introduce us to the themes of unwanted pregnancy, homosexuality, and race. Even ‘Hobson’s Choice’ (a film I now love) was taught as a way of talking about poverty. Over five years, I slid down the sets until I ended in the lowest, emerging with a grade 2 CSE.

We did our ‘O’ levels and then ‘A’ levels. The really bright kids did averagely well. Not being the brightest kid – and certainly far from committed to my studies – I did less well. It was only when I left school and began to follow my nose, so to speak, that I rediscovered the subjects I enjoyed. I went to the local college, sat an ‘A’ level in English in less than a year and was in a good University within eight months and went on to do postgraduate degrees.

So, now I’m still in a working class area, doing a very lowly job, but with these qualifications attached to my name. And I don’t think I would change any of it. In many respects, I feel classless.

I no longer enjoy cricket. I prefer football and foolishly support Liverpool in an office full of Mancunians.
The need to read pretentious literature was hammered out of me at University.
I love films, hate most art house, but enjoy foreign cinema.
I prefer to watch documentary channels than TV dramas.
I play the guitar fairly well but I hate English folk music and play only American: Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash.
I enjoy the puzzle of computer games and love technology.
I enjoy great comedy, despise bad.
Though I think I’m polite and believe in good manners, I’m often told off by my middle class bosses for being rude.
My politics are quite centrist. I love the writing of Edmund Burke ("Our patience will achieve more than our force") but despise the ideologues of modern Conservatism. I equally despise Socialism – living with a Socialist council saw to that – yet I see the bad that happens when workers have no rights.
I am extremely scruffy and wear mostly black.
I can’t drive and don’t drink.
I have always wanted to wear a hat.

So what class do you think I am?

The Further Doubts of a Dick

2009-08-18T18:43:00.003+01:00

It’s funny. I wasn’t surprised by the reaction of most people to my post. People everywhere are generally decent, understanding, forgiving, and adaptable to changing notions of truth. There are some, however, who are just not my natural audience. They might never have read ‘Private Eye’ (though judging from recent issues, I really can’t blame them) or know the names of the writers by whom I measure my own pitiful achievements. (Surely the most hurtful irony of all was when Richard was blocked by Simon Blackwell, one of the supremely talented writers of ‘The Thick of It’, and then unfollowed by Armando Iannucci, one of the comic titans of this generation.)

Yet I suppose that I have inherited one audience almost by fate and alienated another for precisely the same reason. One audience will never believe that I’ve acted out of a sense of moral indignation. They see it as an outrage, a defilement of something that’s beyond holy: a disruption of the ancient order of ‘celebrity’. These people were drawn to the name that would never appeal to the other audience I secretly crave.

The other audience is repelled by the other me. They don’t want to exist in the mainstream. I know because I’m one of them. Yet many of them have finally come around to understanding what I’m attempting to do. The only problem is that a few have naturally assumed that people in the mainstream can have somewhat skewed senses of humour and have adjusted their opinions in light of that. They tend to live by the battle cry: ‘I didn’t realise that Madeley was such a crazy old duffer but now I love him!’

I still struggle to answer the question: where does the satirist draw the line when they feel the deep burning anger? I try to draw that line everyday when I make certain things apparent whilst feeling that it’s not my duty to explain my every action. It’s like surfing on the front edge of a wave, encouraged by the swell of the tide but aware that your board may slip away at any moment.

Angered by what I’ve done and perhaps for being misled for so long, a fan of Richard’s wrote to me:

‘If you are bitter because your first novel was cancelled, you ain’t going to get far in this world. You bump and grind along that shit track but I still think you are wrong. Would you want to be famous on someone else’s backbone? You have great pride in your writing because it’s yours, not written by someone else.’

It is a fair point if you haven’t experienced the world of agents, publishers, and broadcasters. I speak to other unpublished writers who say the same thing: that all the doors are closed to us. Agents don’t care because they can sell projects easily off the back of establishing names. A person might be able to write the finest cook book of their generation but it’s not getting picked up by the publisher who has just given Peter Andre £1.5 million for his collection of recipes. Whatever the name and whatever the field: getting a book deal is easy. Only if your field is writing does that become next to impossible.

Since I finished my book of cartoons (I’ve still not heard a thing from agents), I’ve written two radio comedies (4 half hour episodes in total). I know they’ll never get read. Agents won’t handle scripts unless you’ve got a production company interested. Production companies aren’t interested unless you have an agent.

Not that I really want either, just a proven writer to read them and to say where I’m going wrong or right. No mentor will come forward via the BBC’s Writer’s Room to help me. They want northern comedy writes for their Northern Laughs project. You can’t get more northern than me. Not with this accent. I’m born, bred, and live in Lancashire, a few miles from Johnny Vegas’ old haunts. Yet the BBC Writer’s Room still returns my script without a thing written on it except the number that marks it out as one of the tens of thousands they receive and reject each year.

People ask me why I perpetuate the charade. I say it’s a whole lot better than being the only person to laugh at your jokes.

Help Me!

2009-08-17T13:20:00.004+01:00

So, this is a plea for help. I sent a script to the BBC Writer’s Room about four months ago. It came back on Saturday, rejected in the first 'sift'. This means they rejected it after reading the first 10 pages. No reason why. They just thought it not good enough to read in full.

I understand that the script isn't the next 'Streetcar Named Desire' but I can't fathom that it could really be so bad as to warrant summary dismissal. Anyway, it’s over in my vanity vault of unpublished curios. If anybody would care to read it, I’d be welcome your constructive thoughts. At the moment, I just can’t move forward. I can’t overcome the feeling of ‘what’s the point’...

Huston and Traven

2009-08-05T11:02:00.002+01:00

Born today, John Huston, is one of my few real heroes. ‘The Treasure of the Sierre Madre’ might just be my favourite film – hell, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it is. I’ve seen in countless times and might watch it again now, just because it’s in my mind. It’s an equally impressive book, if you can find it, written by the mysterious (he’s always described that way) B. Traven.

Traven's Wikipedia entry tells an equally wonderful story of authorly deception, multiple identities, and unresolved puzzles. As much as I like the idea that he might be Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared while travelling with Mexican bandits, it’s more reassuring to think he was simply an unknown writer. Otherwise, it's the same old story. Why must any achievement be tied to a familiar face? It happens to be relatively often on Twitter. If people find me funny, they assume that I'm somebody else. I've been accused of being David Mitchell and even (heaven help me) Russell Brand. I usually tell them my name is B. Traven.

Anyway, the point of the post: whenever I’m about to hit the road, it’s Huston I think about. I’ll be gone for two days, heading into Manchester. John Huston wouldn’t put up with what I have to endure. There'd be a few harsh words, a brief fist fight, and then a tall man loping off into the distance in a cloud of cigar smoke.

A Comment

2009-07-17T13:45:00.004+01:00

I started out writing a response to this and at some point in a grindingly awful day here in Manchester, overlooking the 'Ladyboys of Bangkok' pavilion and plotting hotels on a map of Milton Keynes, it became too long to put as a comment.

From the comfort of their well salaried jobs, transgression must seem exciting to academics and critics. It’s a bit of the ‘rough stuff’ to be discussed over dinner with a nice wine. Come live in outer nowhere, they’d meet people leading aimless lives, paying off the debts they amassed buying their big screen TVs which they *simply* had to buy because art to them is spending their nights watching Murdoch’s stream of effluent pumped in for £50 a month. Transgression doesn’t sound that exciting when all you naively want art from art is to be reminded that there’s something better in life. Certainly something better than genital mutilation.

The bus stops around here were recently advertising some ‘extreme’ art event they were holding at the Tate. It had absolutely nothing to do with the lives of the people queuing up in the rain. I don’t know how much the Tate spent advertising their exhibition – funded with EU money, I believe, along with Arts Council grants – but the people directly paying for it through their taxes had absolutely no interest in the art, the gallery, or transgression. You’d hear them talking about it when their bus was late and they had run out of gossip... ‘Look at this pile of bollocks.’ They’d laugh. Nobody would disagree. To them it was a self-evident truth. My mother’s name for Antony Gormley is ‘Antony Gormless’. That is as far as she’ll discuss modern art, despite all the EU grants encouraging her to do otherwise.
Of course, these people don’t understand art any more than I understand art. We’re all too uneducated to really understand the politics of transgression. Screw us. Let the academics share their self-satisfied, mutual-referential theories in their monographs. The rest of don’t deserve to have art in our lives. Except when it comes to being photographed.

Occasionally, I sit for lunch in a local art gallery (usually empty except for staff – there are lots of staff). The walls are covered by photos of disabled people playing sports. The exhibit was paid for by EU money, Arts Council grants, government funds directed to expanding participation in art. Nobody had asked if we really want to look at some 90 year old man in his jogging shorts. Nor did I want to see a close up of a stump, the result of a recent amputation, the product of a lifetime’s alcoholism. However, to the bureaucrat handing out the funds, it was a good use of public money. Art had been supported, supposedly. He doesn’t question whether we need ‘art’ that reminds us that life is full of sorrows; that every human being on this planet suffers in one way or another.

To the politicians, holding the purse strings, art remains a form of remedial social education. It’s the same way they treat literature in schools.

Only I’m bloody sick and tired of art that’s comes at me wielding a baseball bat smeared with dog shit. I tired of grants going to any artist willing to bastardise their craft (if any craft they have) to teach us about what it’s like to live in a sink hole estate. I’m bored with these lofty, pretentious, pseudo-creatives who dress up their high-concept torture porn with a decorous bit of modern typography on the wall of the exhibit.

And the reason I despise them so much is that they are amoral vacuums who suck in what little funding exists in the arts; money that might have gone to interesting artists who are instead ignored or demeaned because they actually care more about craft than they do marketing.

A guy in the office jokingly said to me that he wants to see the empty London plinth used for a ‘f***ing big statue of Churchill stamping on Hitler’s head’. With an absence of real debate about the place of art in our culture, this kind of response is natural. Sadly, it only encourages the critics to tut knowingly. ‘Jingoistic popularism celebrating the barbarity of war. It’s immoral! They know nothing about art!’ Or so the critics would smugly say before going back to their close ups of female genital mutilation.

The Hazel Blears Sketch

2009-07-04T11:12:00.002+01:00

I wrote this, along with about a dozen other sketches, for the BBC Radio 7 show, 'NewsJack'. Naturally, it was rejected, or more precisely, ignored. It's hard to tell when your only reply is an automated response.

However, rather than let these things just sit on a hard drive, I'm going to post a few of them here.

F/X CHANTING

PRIEST: We have gathered here in this ancient place to mark the summer solstice and to beg the Gods to bless us with the renewal of our life-force. Approach now, Sister, and state thy name!

HAZEL BLEARS: (VERY BROAD ACCENT) Hello. I’m Hazel.

PRIEST: Welcome Sister Hazel who bears the name of the mystic tree that bears the sacred nuts...

F/X CHANTING: ‘NUTs’

PRIEST: Do you seek renewal at this most blessed hour?

HAZEL BLEARS: I wouldn’t say ‘renewal’ exactly...

PRIEST: Then you seek rebirth? You wish to strip naked and lie in the field to be
one with nature under the ambrosial skies?

HAZEL BLEARS: No, no, not that either. I was hoping to be reselected.

F/X CHANTING STOPS

PRIEST: You want what?

HAZEL BLEARS: I want to be reselected by the good people of Salford.

PRIEST: Are you sure you’ve got the right place? You do know that this is Stonehenge and that we are the ancient order of the Druids?

HAZEL BLEARS: Yes , I saw the bumper stickers on your Volvos. ‘Pip if You’re Pagan’. Very clever. But I’m here now and I’m ready to make my sacrifice.

PRIEST: Oh, very well... I mean, if you've prepared a sacrifice...

F/X CHANTING RESUMES

PRIEST: Sister Hazel, what is it that thy wish to sacrifice to the Gods?

HAZEL BLEARS: Well, I’ve brought these lovely curtains. They came with the flat but Michael said they didn’t go with our new Ducati leathers...

F/X CHANTING stops

PRIEST: Hang on! You want to make a sacrificial offering of curtains?

HAZEL BLEARS: And Michael’s brought his Goblin Teasmade. We’ve also got a sofa but we couldn’t get it on the back of the bike.

PRIEST: So, you're seeking ‘reselection’ based on a pair of curtains and a Goblin Teasmade?

HAZEL BLEARS: And a sofa that we...

PRIEST: Couldn’t get it on the back of the bike. Yes, I heard... Only, it’s not really up to me, is it? It’s the Gods who decide and... Well, I’m pretty certain they don’t need curtains.

HAZEL BLEARS: Of course they need a curtains. Every house needs curtains. Or at least, all of mine do...

PRIEST: But these are the Gods. They don't even have windows. They make the very sunlight that ripens the harvest and turns all things brown.

HAZEL BLEARS: Hang on! All things Brown? I’m not sure I can work under those conditions. (SHOUTS) Michael, pick up that Teasmade. And start the bike.

PRIEST: But such is the great cycle of life. The sun blesses the earth and changes the green of summer for the brown autumn.

HAZEL BLEARS: The Brown autumn! I had hoped he’d have gone by the end of summer. What about spring? Will Brown be gone by the spring?

PRIEST: It is the way. Spring is the time for greens shoots, when the timid creatures finally emerge from their burrows...

HAZEL BLEARS: Oh, so it’s Miliband in the spring, is it? Well, you can’t say fairer than that. (SHOUTS) Michael. Drop that Teasmade. We’re staying. (SPEAKING) Now then, if I am staying, we need to get this place looking right. Would you look at these stones! Do you know what I think they need?

PRIEST: They have been standing here for millennia...

HAZEL BLEARS: Curtains. (BEAT) Something in maroon chintz, I think. (WHISPERS) And between you and me, we might even be able to claim them on expenses.

END

Some Old One Liners...

2009-07-04T11:10:00.000+01:00

• It was announced this week that head of Apple, Steve Jobs, has received a new liver. The iLiver was chromed and had his name etched on the back. Early reviews suggest that it works no better than a normal liver but spending a penny now costs £1.79.
• This week, disgraced cricket promoter Allen Stanford learned that he now faces 375-years in prison. Reacting to the news, ex-England opening batsman, Geoffrey Boycott, suggested that Stanford spend the first 370 years ‘playing himself in’.
• Sean Penn has abandoned Hollywood part way through his latest film after his children begged him to spend more time with them and their mother. In unrelated news: the world waits for Jack Black’s children to start speaking.
• Concerns mount over Kim Jong Il’s health. Apparently the bugger’s still alive.
• Meanwhile Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on power is slipping. But that what will happen when your fingers are covered in baby oil.
• And as Italy continues to be gripped by the tales of Bacchanalian orgies in Berlusconi’s villa where 18 year old super models apparently parade around the place naked, we ask: how do we ensure our MP’s stop claiming for Jaffa Cakes on their expenses?
• Michael Martin continues to claim that he was hounded from office because of his humble working class background. Indeed, there’s nothing more humble and working class than being crap at your job and having your chauffeur drive you to Celtic matches.
• This week ‘The Observer’ reported that Britain’s nuclear power stations have had 1,750 leaks, breakdowns or other ‘events’ over the past seven years. Thankfully, the leaks all occurred in parts of the UK that don’t read ‘The Observer’. Which is ironic, given all the extra eyesballs they have up there...
• As mobile users in Africa get their own weather forecasts, we get a look inside the high tech software that runs the service: Line 10: Print ‘Hot and dry.’; Line 20: Goto Line 10.
• In the world of coincidence: as Ronaldo admits that he’d decided to leave Manchester United last year, a supporter also admits that it was last year when he decided that Ronaldo was a complete tosser.
• As Facebook launches a Farsi service for people in Iran, we ask: aren’t they suffering enough?
• And, finally, Twitter’s in the news this week as Iranian leaders face a new crisis. They must either stop oppressing their people or Stephen Fry will unfollow them.

Head First Into Shallow Waters

2009-07-02T00:38:00.000+01:00

‘You said that you only read the first ten pages of a script,’ said the woman whose head I could only see from the rear. ‘So, would it be okay if I made the font smaller?’

This was one of the better questions asked at the BBC’s Writersroom event but even this hammered me deeper into my seat and caused my right eyebrow to begin The Dance of Brutal Honesty.

I could feel it rising: the urge to say something monumentally arrogant. I could see myself standing up and launching into my best Peter Finch impression, shouting: ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!’

But, thankfully, I wasn’t the one answering the questions. I was in the audience at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Another prospective writer, or, as I increasingly saw it, another sick fantasy wrapped in a fragile ego wondering why the hell he’d travelled at that way.

Yet, too that point, the day had been going so well. I’d reacquainted myself with the best book shop in the North West: Blue Coat Books, which in my student days was housed in the Bluecoat Galleries but has now been relocated to Hanover Street. I had enjoyed the frothed ice of ‘summer berries’ in Waterstones, where I’d also bought Graham McCann’s book on four of the finest comedy writers of the twentieth century: Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, and Galton & Simpson. I’d then made the tiring slog up a hill I hadn’t trod in about four years and felt strangely nostalgic about the exhaustion.

I’d made that walk, from Lime Street to the University, for about a decade, only to find at the end of it that a doctorate in English Literature made me well qualified to despise criticism and critics. Wanting only to write, I’d quit the offered life of academic papers, lectures, tutorials, and marking, for the uncertainty of poverty, low self-esteem, and creative obscurity. I’d not been back to the University since.

Only, now I was back, I found I was being nothing but critical.

The truth is that I despise being around writers. Or, should I say, ‘would-be’ writers. I’ve worked with academics who have published dozens of books and, on the whole, they are flawed, troubled, and occasionally crazy. Yet they are also people that labour under no pretensions as to what they can or cannot do. They go about writing in a professional manner. It’s normal folk who take up the pen that worry me.

Aspiring writers tend to have a crazed look in their eyes, like dogs that spent their formative years with abusive owners and are damn sure that they’ll never be locked in another shed for another long hot Summer. The stench of desperation hangs on them like some primal musk. Everything is easy to them. Writing is not a struggle. They say things like: ‘I’ve got a script here, and one at home, and I finished one this morning, will write another this afternoon... Or do you want me to write something new?’

I felt ashamed to be among them. I could feel the eyes of the theatre staff on me, as though marking me out for special pity. ‘He thinks he’s a writer! Bless!’ And how could they think any different? Like every writer’s group I’ve ever attended, I end up surrounded by people driven by the post-Romantic urge to ‘express themselves’. These are those writers that gather in the local library on a Thursday morning and get their pictures in the free newspapers posted through our door.

‘Me and my friend are going to write a comedy’ asked some young girl at the back. ‘Do you want us to write the whole series first?’

‘Have you written the first episode?’ asked the professional script reader.

‘No, we’re just about to start.’

My other eyebrow began to dance. The opening act to a ballet was being performed above my nose and I knew it was going to end with a tragedy.

Then the guy sitting in front of me raised his hand to ask a question. On his lap: his script. The laminated cover had been reflecting the stage lights into my eyes for the whole presentation. His raised arm allowed me to see the title: ‘A Sample Script For “Doctors”’. He’d written his own version of an established show. But he wasn’t the only one.

A few moments later a hand goes up on the far side of the theatre: ‘Could I send you my script to “Eastenders”?’

Another person asked a question I didn’t hear but the reply suggested they’d asked about a show on Channel 4.

But by that time, I was all out of eyebrows. So my heart just sank. My heart sank and sank and sank.

Yet now I’m home, preparing for two days in my own private Manchester hell, I find that a quite different feeling is enduring about the event. In a perverse way, it has changed me.

I’ve always been hesitant about the purpose of the Writersroom. I’ve suspected it enabled the BBC to appear to be listening whilst going on doing their usual tricks of commissioning work from friends and those already inside the industry. The standard of BBC comedy is such that I’ve believed that no other explanation is likely. My recent attempts to write for ‘NewsJack’ has only increased my cynicism. I would have been happy if my sketches and one liners had been less funny than those broadcast but when I’m sure that my material is strong and still gets ignored, then I have to look for explanations. Perhaps I’m not funny. Perhaps my funny is not a mainstream funny. Did my work even get there?

Yet listening to head of the Writersroom North and the script reader, I did start to have faith in the system I had come to doubt. I believe they believed in the project and that belief now convinces me to believe a little bit more than I did before. I found that I wanted to ask questions, to beg for mercy before them, to say that I’m not like these people with their musicals set around the world of soft cheeses, the reheated episodes of Dr. Who, their questions already answered a hundred times on the Writersroom website. Yet I wouldn’t know what to ask. Not when others have more pressing issues to raise:

‘Can I include real music in my script?’

‘Does it have to look like a script?’

Somebody wise once said: writers write. To which I would add: would-be writers ask stupid questions about fonts.

Just Busy...

2009-02-23T01:51:00.001Z

Some new writing or lots of new cartoons or the nonsense I Twitter.

Updike

2009-01-27T18:38:00.001Z

I was going to write something about the cartoons I've posted but I sit down at the PC to see that John Updike has died. Wish I had something extremely intelligent to say. I just feel that another good has been taken from the world. The darkness closes ever further in.

A Conversation

2009-01-21T21:23:00.001Z

Them: Hi Richard. I’m such a fan. Love and kisses. xxxxxxxxx.

Me: Perhaps you’re not such a fan. I only twitter to advertise my blog. http://www.richard-madeley.com

Them: No, I love you. You’re so funny. Give Judy my love. I’m you’re biggest fan.

Me: But not necessarily MY biggest fan.

Them: Oh, but I am.

Me: But surely a look at my blog will explain everything.

Them: I don’t understand you, Richard. You can be so cryptic. But that’s why I love you.

Me: My blog explains everything. Please read my blog.

Them: Great blog, Richard. Did Judy help you design it?

The Beauty

2009-01-17T00:00:00.002Z

The restaurant was Brazilian. I assume that the waitress was too. She was also stunningly beautiful, made all the more apparent by the way she hovered in the background and on the periphery of the action. She was something of an incongruity among the showy gimmickry of the rodizio, the waiters with their red kerchiefs and swords. Straight hair tied into a simple stroke that trailed from her authentic smile, she had a clean beauty with nothing artificial, nothing added. Just beauty. The only good thing about the meal. My only point of interest.

I was sitting in a corner of Pau Brasil, a restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I was there to enjoy a belated Christmas meal. At the back of the room, flames illuminated the darkness and burned away a few more millimetres from the chef’s eyebrows. He was an intense man, carefully entertaining each lump of meat before he skewered it to make another meat sword.

‘Meat sword’. It was one of the many jokes I wasn’t allowing myself to make tonight but there were so many. I was constantly tempted to say ‘nice meat’ in imitation of Austin Powers. And whenever a joint of beef caught fire, the chef would hit it with his spatula. Every comic instinct in my body wanted me to cry out that he was ‘beating his meat’. I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Enough people think I’m unusual as it is and I had spent the whole evening feeling odd and out of place.

I despise my occasional lapses into shyness. I detest feeling lost for words. I like to talk. I often talk too much. I love conversation, making people laugh, discussing difficult things or shared experiences. I like to hear people’s stories. Except there are times when I just withdraw. Like tonight. I sat and watched my colleagues enjoy all the red meat as one sword after the next was brought to the table and its contents carved or slid from the tip onto the plates. In front of each of us, there was a disk, green on one side and red on the other. The idea was to turn the disk over when you’d had enough meat. Mine had been turned over from the moment I’d got there. I was red all evening. I’ve been red all my life, or ever since I was a child and I discovered that I just don’t like red meat. Perhaps that explains my silence.

It was always going to be a disaster. A vegetarian doesn’t belong in a place famous for the 15 varieties of meat they serve in the course of a meal. The salad bar certainly wasn’t the draw and I wasn’t tempted to return to it after couple of new potatoes and few slices of beetroot. I knew I was never going to get the most out of my evening. I was glad I wasn’t paying. Instead, I made a few jokes as my colleagues slowly relaxed, got mildly tipsy, and began to make jokes of their own. The ‘funnier’ that they became, the less I tried to match them. I like the people and I liked being around them. But I was also out of place and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I don’t drink (I’d be a bad drunk and quick to form myself an addition) and I don’t eat meat. I find social dining difficult. An part I’ve not been trained to play. There are also very few common points of reference. I like films, comedy, books, cartoons, art and literature. And I like beautiful women. Like the silent waitress who cleared away the plates.

I did my best not to look at her. You might even say, ironic though it sounds, that I didn’t want to treat her like a piece of meat. But she was just too stunning for that. The only authentic experience of this whole evening. The only real sense I have of Brazil. A nation of too much meat and of significant beauty.

Monday

2009-01-12T18:42:00.001Z

Three new pictures in the vault. Been in a strange mood precipitated either by an approaching cold or by two days watching the Twitterers go by. It’s as intriguing as it is depressing. Large swathes of human beings have nothing interesting to say but will say it nevertheless. I’d much rather somebody spoke nonsense that read about their preparations for the Sunday roast or how many tax forms they’ve completed. I even find myself defending Wossy who can actually be funny in his Tweets. Funnier, at least, than accountants and ever-so-sincere teenagers moaning on about ‘sickos’ who pretend to be famous people. It’s a difficult balance to strike. I’m tempted to turn Him into a voicebox for aphorisms such as ‘Celebrity is oppression; a tyranny of the few over the masses’ or ‘Fame is toxic and celebrity the result’. If feels like Twitter is now becoming overrun by celebrities at the rate that rats reproduced during the great plague. Yet the truth is that I’d always choose John Cleese’s smallest utterance over the ramblings of yet another social networking guru advertising a blog about media trends. Why do people bore me so utterly? Am I just a freak?

Saturday

2009-01-10T15:12:00.002Z

A bit of a foul mouthed outburst. I think it's my first. Only, I wouldn't dare post it here, so I've posted it over there.

Friday

2009-01-09T13:10:00.003Z

Stunned. Confused. After a solid 10 hour sleep -- it's always the way after Manchester -- I'm now waiting for a 1TB drive to format. I don't know what to do while I wait. After about half an hour, it's at 11%. I suppose this is only going to get longer, as we move to bigger drives. But I'm eager to get working. Only, I don't know which way to do. Him or there. I have the book to work on -- had some real progress last night in thinking about it -- plus I have my taxes to do. Ha! Taxes. I'm self-employed because I write and want to earn money from it. This time around, I have to do taxes for the magnificent sum of £110, which I earned for some cartoons about a year ago.

Hmm. Suppose I should get that out of the way. I've been putting it off for months.

Wossy And the West

2009-01-07T20:41:00.002Z

Another day of Manchester and I’m ugly and tired. I’ve also spent too much money on an external hard drive from Dabs. I’ve had enough of losing work or suffering the torture of last night, thinking that I’d lost work. I’m going to automate the damn thing with a terabyte of disc space to suck up my nonsense overnight. Not a single one of my pointless posts, cryptic cartoons, or unread blogs will be lost.

My mood is probably exacerbated by the letter in today’s mail reminding me that I have to fill in my self-assessment tax return. I’m registered as self-employed given that I did some cartoons last year for ITN, earned a little, and continue to devote a huge portion of my week to my ‘career’. Ho hum. I also thought I might have started to earn money from my book or other writings. It now seems rather sad to be filling in a tax return for a sum as miserable as my earnings so far. Are there any self-employed writers who earn as little as me? I doubt it but I’d be happy to stand them a drink.

I’ve also been trying to write something funny for the other blog but my energy runs out after about a paragraph. It makes writing this blog quite a pleasure. I find that writing the other blog almost a physical activity, like holding my breath and swimming down for a kind of deeper state from which to write as somebody else. I only had the energy to post a couple of new Twitters as Him.

Playing the Twitter game amuses me enormously. Or at least, in short periods of about thirty seconds. Twitter is like blogging but in minutia. It’s a place to write in aphorisms or to attempt to be funny through brevity. I think that’s why Stephen Fry is so good at it. He’s genuinely eloquent and always worth reading. I’m trying my best to make every one of my Twitter posts funny. It’s hard to get an idea into 140 characters but I hope my Twits are more amusing than the usual rubbish I read posted. I’ve probably moaned on about social networking before (and if I haven’t, I’d happy do so right now) but I really don’t want to read puffs for other people’s projects or links to things they find interesting on the web. I’m not actually that interest in knowing if somebody is on his way to pick up the kids. Do people really think that it’s interesting to tell me that their train is ten minutes late but they’ve bought themselves a pasty from the station canteen? As far as celebrity Twitterers go, John Cleese has it about right. He’s always worth reading. And, as I said, Fry is fun, if only to read his ejaculations. Ejaculations? Bless me! Heavens. I don’t think. Tut, tut. Shudder!

I notice that Jonathan Ross (Wossy) is enjoying his new Twitter account. 5000 followers and rising. Ah, the blessings of fame! He can’t stop offering to text/email/ring his celebrity friends to check to see if they are ‘a fan/nutcase’. Those are his words, not mine. Well, actually, they’re from somebody who asked him what celebrities think of fake Twitters pretending to be them. Interesting reply. ‘Most famous people really [l]ike their fans, but pretending to be you then that's clearly strange and unwanted’. That’s probably a good reply to the wrong question. Or at least, the premise is somewhat misleading.

Fake Twitterers are probably neither fans nor nutcases. There are a few who are probably more fun to read than the people they spoof, such as Will Self’s double who is delicious arch. Even if there are a few attempts at spoofing that are genuinely strange, most are probably just like me: people who find it laughable that a system exists by which every mental bowel movement can be recorded for posterity. Twitter is a haven for mediocrity and it’s hard not to want to parody it. That’s not to say that it sometimes worries me that I’m perceived as a ‘nutcase’. It makes for such heartening moments when people understand my game. On the other hand, I do get tired of people missing the joke and being unbelievably nice to me because they think of what I can do for them. It’s embarrassing to see it happen across Twitterspace. They turn up, big grin, slide across the room, a hand slips around my shoulders. ‘Richard, you’re looking so good... Listen, chum, I’ve got this project if you’ve a moment or two to wag chins.’

The one surprise of reading Wossy’s twitters is the realisation that some celebrities do actually live in that insane world where every friend is another celebrity. He has them all on his mobile and texts them to see if they Twitter. Charming but rather sad, I think. Celebrity is a drug and I think some people are liable to overdose.

Scrub That Order To Panic ...

2009-01-06T23:34:00.003Z

Well, that was a fun couple of hours...

Turns out that the anti-virus software had tampered/corrupted my BIOS settings and the PC was booting from the wrong device. Sounds simple now but at the heart of the maelstrom, where I panic because I think of two weeks work lost, it wasn’t so straightforward. It took me a little while to figure it out but it’s a good lesson learned. Tomorrow I will be taking my half-hour at lunch and I’m going to see if I can find myself a reasonably priced external drive. I don’t know why I’ve never thought of this before but I should have a second hard drive running parallel to my main PC with software to back my important directories up at night.

Heading to bed, relieved though still pretty annoyed with myself. I should have got more work done these two weeks. A few dozen cartoons and some blog posts isn’t enough to help push me beyond this job.

[Expletive Deleted]

2009-01-06T19:44:00.003Z

It's like my main PC knew I was feeling moody because I'm back in work tomorrow. Why else would it choose tonight to lose/corrupt/destroy its own hard drives?

I did a virus scan tonight and it detected some threat which it immediately deleted. It then asked me if I want to reboot, which I did, and then it tells me that there’s no system disk. Hate to think of all the work I’ve lost. And before anybody says it, I know I should back work up. And I do. Just no so regular as to make this really painful.

When I bought the machine, it was already set up to use the two 250Gb drives in a Raid0 array, which means that it put the two drives together to create a single drive that was just under 500Gb in size. This array has now disappeared, along with... I don’t want to think about it. Writing, cartoons(!), emails and email addresses... I knew over twelve months ago that I should have reconfigured it to use drive mirroring. Now it’s come back to bite me. Hard.

I don’t suppose anybody has any ideas on how to recover that data? Or am I lost? To make matters worse, I won't be able to do a thing about this until Friday. I have a feeling that things are going to be really quiet around here for the next week.

Typical

2009-01-06T17:00:00.004Z

For years I've bought the 'Artists and Writers' Yearbook'. Then I stopped buying them since I never found the bloody things helpful. Last year, I had a change of heart and bought a copy of the 'Writer's Market UK', which has proved similarly useless. Only now I need a copy of the 'Artists' part of the Yearbook and I haven't a copy in the house.

I'm in Manchester for two days -- I can't believe I'm back so soon -- which will at least give me a chance to pick one up, along with another packet of this HP photo paper. That's if I take half an hour for lunch and work through until five, catching the later train home. The temptation is always to get the eight hours out of the way, to get home earlier...

I'm collecting all my drawings together and keeping them in a folder. I have about thirty printed out in high quality (they do look stunning), and a dozen or so more to tidy up and print. I have no idea if they're worth anything but I have to live in hope. Especially when I have two days of proofreading leisure reports ahead of me in Manchester.

And just when I was getting back into the routine of writing and drawing...

My Gaming Biography

2009-01-06T01:19:00.008Z

I’m continuing to discover the energy-giving properties of peanut butter which today resulted in a couple of new cartoons (I'm very proud of the parrot), a Madeley post, some tinkering on ‘the book’ and now this post. There was also some less cerebral action taking place on the PS3 where my love for computer games has found a new outlet in the ‘Valkyrie Chronicles’.

I rarely (if ever) talk about my gaming activities. I suppose it’s not something I’m particularly proud of admitting to. It’s like saying that you like to sit watching Coronation Street with a large box of tissues and some Cadbury’s Roses. Well, I don’t watch soaps, I’m not so keen on chocolate, and I have no idea what the tissues might be for. But give me a packet of pistachios and a good game and I’m set for the evening.

I began gaming way back when computers first hit UK homes. I was among that generation of programmers who began with a BBC Model B, which all of its 32kb of memory. I taught myself BBC Basic and then 6502 assembler, discovering every ‘peek’ and ‘poke’ of the machine's operating system. (I once got into trouble at school for writing a program that enabled one machine to take over another. A friend abused the power I’d given them by sending messages across the network to the teacher using another machine. It was the only time I got into serious trouble at school but they did ‘punish’ me by putting me in charge of the network and allowing me to do an ‘A’ level in computers. I suppose it was their way of keeping me out of further trouble and curtailing my career as a hacker.) My early enthusiasm for all things ‘geek’ was beat out of me at university where I spent three years learning to program in Cobol (such an ugly language -- I hated it!) on an old Vax system. It was hardly a cutting edge course but I didn’t have cutting edge exam results. I was always too busy teaching myself how to program. On the third year of the course, we touched on assembler language and they introduced us to the concept of pushing and pulling from ‘the stack’. I’d done that when I was about 12. No wonder I hated the course and came away with a lousy 2.2. The only thing left of my computer proficiency is that I’m pretty good at hacking my way around HTML, SQL, PHP and whatever is thrown at me. I keep telling myself to learn C or C++ and get a decent job as a programmer but I have neither the time nor motivation. I used to be red hot at Clipper and dBase IV but it all changes too quickly and when things went ‘object orientated’, I couldn’t be bothered to start again.

Gaming comes from my early love of computers. Back then, I’d sit for hours pressing down cassettes into tape decks to get games to load. I’m probably one of the few people who still have an original ‘Elite’ badge after attaining that legendary rank on the BBC (‘Right on Commander!’). Then disk drives came along with the five a quarter inch floppy on the BBC and then 3.5 on the Atari ST. I celebrated my first hard disk when I bought an Amiga 500 (a great machine!) before I finally moved on to PCs, a slight detour to and from Macs, and then to the consoles.

I suppose I feel slightly self-conscious about admitting to my history of gaming because the majority of computer games are so poorly written. Most but not all. I recently finished playing ‘Far Cry 2’, which on TV is advertised as a generic shooter, when, in reality, it’s a less then generic shooter with lots of references to ‘Heart of Darkness’. Good writing makes the world of difference but it’s so hard to find. This year I’ve been blessed with a few exceptions. I finished ‘Fallout 3’ (I had already played 1 and 2) and found the post-apocalyptic world surprisingly fresh. I finished ‘Mass Effect’ on the XBox 360 and cried my eyes out at the end, something I’ve not done in such a long time. I always enjoyed the wit of Lucasarts adventures (the Monkey Island series or Sam & Max) and regret that adventure games have become a rarity these day. Fable 2 was fun but not particularly gripping, though Stephen Fry provided a welcome touch of humour.

The thing I look for in games isn’t the repetitive tasks that make them addictive as much as the mental problems I need to overcome. It’s the thing that most people who knock gaming seem to forget. It’s much less passive than TV and the best games are really just large and complicated logical problems that need solving. ‘Valkyrie Chronicles’ is one such game, which brings out the military strategian in me. I can spend a relaxing couple of hours deploying my troops to make flanking manoeuvres or conserving my forces for the right moment to push home an advantage. It’s also one of the most radical looking games I’ve seen in a while. It has some fancy techniques for producing a cross-hatched effect on the cell-shaded characters. I love to see great programming. Reading great code, like following a great mathematical proof, can be like poetry. I just wish I were better at all three.

There: another little known fact about me. I’m a one-time geek, now a ‘graphics whore’, and I’m proud of it.

Sunday

2009-01-04T13:50:00.001Z

Three new cartoons.

My Last Words On 2008

2009-01-03T16:37:00.004Z

Moving on means that I've been very busy writing content for another of my blogs. It’s a blog that I haven’t yet publicised here or anywhere, and I still have to decide how to launch it into the real world. It needs the right kind of exposure; a nudge not a push. The premise is very funny but it’s not a true blog. It only provides ‘back story’ to something else I have in mind. I’m also somewhat reluctant to move on from Madeley, chastened by Selena Dreamy’s generous words: ‘If you want to drive a man to become a radical destroyer of his proper genius, just give him half a dozen blog.’ Well, let’s just call it half a dozen plus half a blog.

While looking to link this other project into the blogosphere and find it some unsuspecting readership, I came across the following. It’s an article about the collapse of The Friday Project (or TFP as it’s become known in my darkest mutterings).As some of you might know, it’s a story very close to my heart. This is the last time I hope I'll feel motivated to write about the last year but I write this for myself. Just to put it on the record so I don't forget.

The piece awoke some of the bad feelings I had about my dealings with TFP. Yet I should make it clear that I never had bad feelings about the people. Clare Christian was always polite, friendly, helpful, and, much more important for any writer, supportive. After the collapse, she clearly regretted what had happened. I was sorry that she felt so sorry. I felt sorry that her business had collapsed and that she was suffering the fury of other unpublished bloggers who treated her as thought she was the anti-Christ. I might have had reasons to be angry but that's not my way when it's a case of good intentions failing in the real world. Was I too sympathetic? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that people set out to hurt others. The whole business was regrettable. I had to just dust myself down and move one. It was another lesson learned the hard way.

Yet the news that my novel wouldn’t be published was the beginning of a year of hell. I had taken a proof-reading job for two days a week in Manchester. I thought it would only be for the short term. Now it’s a year later and my role has expanded from proof-reader to include IT support, graphic design, designing Powerpoint presentations, reformatting documents. I like the people but the hours are too long in front of a computer screen (8 hours without much of a break). It is slowly destroying me. My eyes have really been suffering lately and my spirits are shot.

The book’s cancellation also marked the beginning of the months when my father collapsed with an aneurism and I was visiting him in hospital, trying to help him recover his speech. There were good moments, bad moments, and then the end. I remember one Thursday in October, standing without an umbrella in the rain on the end of the platform at Manchester’s Oxford Road station. I was sobbing like a child. I’d just been told that there was no hope for my father. Everything about my life came together in that one moment. It was the worst moment I’ve ever known. I’m still not right. I still cry when I come into the house at night. I cry if I’m alone with my thoughts for too long. Everything I feel now is the product of 2008 and I’m happy to put that year behind me.

Yet, before the truly bad things happened to me, there was the novel, which I’ve never really talked about. The article, published months ago when I was too busy to care, sours whatever lingering good feelings I had about The Friday Project. Not because of my own sense of abandonment. I’ve had enough of those in my life. What disappoints me is the talk of excess. There’s money owed and monies paid. Huge amounts of money; debts of over £1 million. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad. I made nothing from my book and lost only the months it took to write, rewrite, proofread, and prepare for publication. And my debts aren’t in the millions -- yet. But I still think of what I really wanted from the publishing deal. What would have made me happy as a writer? £10,000 a year, perhaps. I could have written one or two very funny novels a year, made my name, living poor but happy. Was it too much to expect? Or weren’t my ambitions big enough?

‘Publishers are wary if you’re too prolific’.

That was the advice of the only literary agent I’ve ever spoken to.

It was around the summer of last year. After the book was cancelled, another blogger (who probably wouldn't want me to name but who was unbelievably kind to reach out to me) asked her agent to talk to me. I had a phone call from Patrick Walsh of Conville and Walsh. Walsh was impressive from the moment he began to speak. He was articulate, interested and interesting, and with the kind of rich melodious voice that made my own Lancashire accent seem like the flooded gurgling of a peat digger stuck in a patch of boggy marsh. This was the man, mentioned in the article, credited with landing the biggest deals for bloggers. And he told me at once that there was ‘no novel in Richard Madeley’. Of course, I thought he was wrong and I still feel that he’s wrong. I also believe he was more concerned about issues of copyright, rather than the idea for a book. I tried to explain how it was satire and quite flattering satire at that. In this postmodern world, I still think that a pseudo-biography could work very well. If Sue Townsend can write two fictional accounts of Queen Camilla’s life, I don’t see why I couldn’t create a book set in a fictionalised world of celebrity, Bill Oddie’s owls, and Jeremy Clarkson’s rocket car. However, that was a book I was thinking of writing. My finished project was still looking for a home. I sent him a copy of the manuscript to ‘What Ho Proles!’, the novel that The Friday Project had abandoned.( Incidentally, I had restated the original title ‘What Ho Proles!’ after TFP had made me change it to something that would clearly not attract readers of Wodehouse. They had managed to slip some bad language into the title, to make it sound ‘funnier’, like their other humorous books such as 'It Is Just You - Everything's Not Shit' and 'My Boyfriend is a Twat'.)

So, my manuscript was in the hands of an agent and, naturally, I’ve heard nothing since.

I suppose my novel is still out there. Forgotten. It’s the way of the world. Or so I tell myself. I’ve wasted three years of my life blogging, waiting for a break. Compliments keep me going but... Well, I’m still confused as to how the publishing world works. I go around Borders and Waterstones at Christmas and notice that they are heavily promoting humorists. Funny writing sells. Or so it seems. Yet where did TFP go wrong? Was it because they assumed that comedy is anything with ‘shit’ in the title? Or was it that they tried to ride the gravy train known as ‘misery memoirs’? The article describes how Rachel North’s book had 'projected sales of more than 30,000' but 'underperformed, selling only 5,000 copies'. And this after she’d been on Richard&Judy talking about her story. I hate to think what the projected sales of my own book would have been? 500? 600? Half a dozen?

My problem with The Friday Project wasn’t that they had the wrong business model. It was that they were selling the wrong books. There was nothing in their catalogue which I, as a regular reader and book buyer, would go out and purchase. They relied on impact sales, not on the slow success of an author publishing a series of books. They were all about one off hits. Perhaps that says something about my own book. In terms of their humour books, they seemed to rely heavily on the Christmas market – the stocking fillers bought as a joke but left unread. Yet my book, even retitled, was never going to become another ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat’. It was sub-standard P.G. Wodehouse with some Tory politics thrown in. Perhaps it was no surprised when it was dropped. Perhaps I should be thankful that it never made it to bookshelves.

In the end, I confess that I don’t understand any of it. I see that the Friday Project intends to begin again as an imprint of HarperCollins. They’re beginning with a book about ME. An uplifting title, I’m sure. They clearly know what they’re doing this time around. But if they want a misery memoir, perhaps I should write extensively about my bad year. I have a tale to tell, which they might find quite close to their hearts.

Tractors

2009-01-02T22:50:00.001Z

So who wants to collect tractors? The ad on TV says that each week, I’ll be able to collect a new model of a piece of farmyard heavy machinery. There are dozens and dozens to collect. If you like tractors.

Tractors...

I’ll trying to think of something interesting to say about tractors. Proper bloggers would know what to say. Some might even own a tractor. They would comment on farming subsidies and how there aren’t enough tractors in the country because of Gordon bloody Brown. Only I can’t think of something interesting to say about tractors. My attempts at being ‘me’ and a ‘real’ blogger are failing miserably. It was easier being somebody else. I could make something up about tractors.

Didn't somebody once write a good poem about a tractor? Or am I thinking of Adge Cutler? He really was worth listening to. I’m no fan of the Wurzels post Adge. But, if you think about it, Adge was probably the closest thing we’ve had to a British Tom Waits.

Hang on. They sang about a combine harvester.

So, in the end, I didn't actually have anything interesting to say about tractors.

Bugger.

Blogging Meltdown

2009-01-02T22:35:00.000Z

Generally, it isn’t wise to make resolutions. They are fragile things, likely to break under the merest cheesecake or a must-buy hardback. However, I’m starting the year intending to carry on blogging as myself, a couple of times a week. ‘And this is me,’ as Mike Yarwood would say. Of course, we always knew it was him. He was to impressions what David Cameron is to conviction politics. But I really do mean it when I say ‘and this is me’. In fact, not only will blogging as ‘me’ be great, I’ll be a better version of ‘me’ than you’ve ever seen.

No doubt about it: ‘me’ will be something special. Naturally, I intend to be far less honest about my bad moods and my bad luck. No more late night posts about the neighbours. I’ll also cut out all the moaning and anecdotes about how life in the North tends towards misery, compiled into a compendium of gloom. Instead, I’m hoping to reinvent myself as a genial sort and pose as a briar pipe smoking Tory, with just the occasional wry little post on political scene, popular culture, and the worthy things that my colleagues in the blogging community get up to.

Oh, 2009 I salute you! You are the year when my nose will be rank with the sweet aroma of flattery.

2009

2009-01-01T19:05:00.003Z

A couple of new cartoons.

A new post.

It's been a busy year.

Elton John

2009-01-01T14:25:00.004Z

Elton John sounded rough this morning. But perhaps I’m not the best man to judge. I always think that Elton sounds rough. Sit him behind a piano and microphone and he reminds me of bullfrog trying to swallow a fat bluebottle. He’s the antithesis to everything I want from my music but I didn’t particularly warm to the sight of the cloying loveliness of the Tarquins and Theresas smooching in the audience as dear Aunt Elton coughed up his lyrical syrup. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about me but I don’t do ‘sweet’. I also don’t go in for large toothed, high income, big collar, Range Rover driving accountants snogging their pearly perfect wives/girlfriends/secretaries on my TV while I’m still trying to digest my morning yoghurt.

I was also feeling tired. I’d been woken at 7am by the children playing in the bedroom next door. The great benefit of living in a semi-detached house is that we can all enjoy the noises of children playing whilst their parents sleep off their New Year’s festivities in whatever strange bedroom or bedsit they’d found themselves.

Despite the above, I am in a better mood. Yes, I sometimes get up feeling cheerful and today was one of those days. I put this down to now being on the other side of the ‘festive season’. I’ve also just finished a sketch of Elton’s lead guitarist which I’ve posted over there, for the few of you who have asked to get in (I do need your email address to invite you in). I’m quite pleased with it, having been studying my Ronald Searle to get the face just right. I’m now going to spend my day printing out gags. I bought some quality HP inkjet paper and have the ‘Artist and Writer’s Yearbook’ beside me. I have no idea how to go about this process of submitting cartoons. I also think that most of mine are too surreal to get accepted. However, I’ll give them a try in the belief that with a new year, anything is possible.

Today

2008-12-31T16:50:00.001Z

Better after going back to the Underground.

Kerry Katona's Wheelie Bin

2008-12-31T00:53:00.003Z

I’m getting to bed and to sleep. But if I'm lucky, the neighbour’s kid will howl through the night and I might dream of bonny lasses dancing in Iceland TV ads. Hopefully no more dreams like last night when I met Steve Martin. Who wants dreams about meeting one’s heroes? I was bought a signed copy of Steve Martin’s autobiography for Christmas but I should have held out for a packet of cheap prawns from Iceland and a signed picture of Kerry Katona.

Urgh. Sarcasm. Forgive me but this is just me. Not Him. Perhaps I’m turning into an old man or I’m still as easy to annoy as I’ve ever been. I’m just being typically misanthropic as I wonder what is about people that makes them such aggressive pursuers of their own selfish desires. Have we really lost the ability to empathise with others?

I know I’m being trivial, hence the trivial nature of this rushed cartoon, which I scribbled in the five minutes since I arrived home.

All night I couldn’t think of a thing to draw. Then I arrived home to discover that the neighbours had put out their wheelie bin early (somebody should tell them that there’s no collection tomorrow) and stuck it directly in front of our gate. Naturally, they are keeping their own gate clear of the sight and smell of their collected Christmas waste. Their bin, heavy with rotting rubbish, now obstructs our gate and anybody walking past will assume that the bin belongs to us and that we don’t care if we block their path. Any visitor to our house has to squeeze past the bin and I now have to go out, past midnight, and move it. I feel petty doing so but I think you have to make a stand. I'm also annoyed because it’s as though they know that my father isn’t here to stand up to them. He wouldn’t put up with it. I’m so much gentler, much more of a coward than he ever way. Should I have to put up with it? My bolshie self says no. The coward sits here writing about it, rather than doing something about it.

I suppose that’s me. I walk around, scowling at the world. I’m generally shocked at the way that people treat their homes, their surroundings. The wet weather hasn't stopped people from parking their heavy trucks on the grass verges, which are now cut down to a depth of about half a foot. The ruts are full of mud and pooling water.

Then there are the neighbours on the other side who routinely park their cars across the pavement. Hard to describe the arrangement, so here’s a picture.

I know I'm being petty again but isn't it these small things that show how selfish we've become? Two cars on the road, one on the grass verge, one across the pavement, and two in the drive. The result is that if you want to get past, you have to walk in the road. They don’t see the problems they cause. They never walk anywhere. The only good to come of this is that it’s made me search my CD collection to finally add Lou Reed’s ‘New York’ to my iTouch. It’s probably his finest album, the one where his lyrics crackle with anger. It’s undoubtedly my favourite. ‘Transformer’ is too full of the camp aesthetic that ruined his post Velvet career, his false falsetto and bits borrowed from Bowie. 'New York' is how I like to think of Reed. A real poet of the city. A hater of mankind.

Americans don't care too much for beauty
They'll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream
They'll watch dead rats wash up on the beach
and complain if they can't swim

I sometimes wish that the credit crunch might affect them and their kind. The neighbours have six cars in a house of five – or six or seven or is it eight? I’ve lost count of the babies. Their attitude is screw the environment. Park a car where there’s grass, stick decking where there’s soil. I’m no eco-warrior but this brings out the nihilist in me. I saw we should just go out in a spectacular display of arbitrary consumerism, drunken liaisons with whatever orifice passes before our inebriated gaze, another baby squawks through the night, keeps me awake while its randy father sleeps soundly in his vest and track suit bottoms in a bed, streets away.

Sorry. I guess I’m just tired.

I’ve just come back in, finished moving the bin, and found a gem of a comment over at The Spine. One of the stories I wrote a long time ago was about Natasha Kaplinsky choosing to wear a Walrus hat at some London Premiere. It still receives the occasional comment. Tonight’s was one of the best. ‘Not only was a walrus killed...’ goes the comment, ‘he was killed to look like a fucking idiot. Ohh... and don't really think the walrus cares too much that after he was dead he was worn by a famous person. No wait... I'm sure it was his life's dream.’

I wish that walrus hats were all the rage in London. It would make more sense if I were getting angry at that, rather than wheelie bins and a neighbour who resembles Kerry Katona’s evil twin. Kerry is a local girl. I’m meant to think that it’s good to see her succeed. Strange but that’s the last thing I feel.

I hope I'll dream of Steve Martin. He always gives me faith in the world.

Gary Larson

2008-12-30T06:47:00.000Z

The first thing I do whenever I write is reach for the volume on my speakers. I can’t write with music playing.

The first thing I do whenever I’m drawing is reach for the volume on my speakers. I love to sing along whilst scribbling.

Lately, I’ve been unable to write. I find the silence too upsetting, my mind easily distracted and led to sad thoughts. I don’t know how these things affect people so I don’t know if it’s normal to still feel the way I do. To say it’s two months since it happened is to make it sound like I should be over it. I think it’s the months before that which are still getting to me.

Anyway, I’ve posted a few more pictures over on my new closed blog (the invitation is still open to anybody who cares to go look). I’m out today, making the most of my ‘holiday’ to go into Manchester to buy myself some quality inkjet paper. I’m not at all sure what constitutes a portfolio but I intend to print a selection of my better cartoons in as high a quality as my HP can output. As yet, I’ve avoided looking at which magazines might accept cartoons. I’m also losing a bit of faith that my scribbles are funny enough to earn me money.

I think I’m probably suffering for a mild form of cartoon envy. I’ve been reading ‘The Far Side’, which does a good job of making the business of writing single panel gags look far too easy. I sense that Larson’s success has made him something of an easy target among aficionados of cartoons. I just think that his humour sits well within the mainstream but there are always enough with an offbeat slant to maintain my interest. For everyone that seems too obvious (a guy opens a fridge to find his potato salad holding a gun to the rest of the groceries – the tag: ‘When potato salad goes bad’), there’s one that’s more offbeat. A couple lie on the floor, acting dead, as another couple leave the room. The tag: ‘The Arnolds feign death until the Wagners, sensing awkwardness, are compelled to leave’. Larson’s genius, I think, is in the writing of his lines.

After reading a couple of volumes of ‘The Far Side’, gag writing begins to look effortless until I go back to trying it myself. I bought myself a second-hand copy of ‘The Pre-History of the Far Side’ (69p + p&P), in which he talks about the processes that go into creating a cartoon. It did nothing to alleviate my suspicion that he’s just copiously gifted. I can sit here hours trying to think of gags. It never works. It’s like trying to think of narratives. It’s better when I just switch off my brain and wait for something strange to cross my mind.

Which, oddly enough, has just made me think of a cartoon and a tag. I should go to bed before I spend a couple of hours cross-hatching a suit. I’ve come to the conclusion that an addiction to cross hatching is a form of madness.

Another Damn Blog

2008-12-29T14:12:00.004Z

Yet another blog is probably the last thing I need at the moment but I’ve opened one where I intend to put all my cartoons. If I’m serious about getting any of these published (I’m serious in so far as the response to them has exceeded my expectations), then I think it’s probably a good idea to limit their distribution. I’m sure somebody would point to the Creative Commons licensing scheme but I’d be happier knowing that I can tell anybody who asks that they’ve never been published. Unlike some of my rougher pictures I’ve tended to post here and there and everywhere, I’ve already put up some of my favourites and the cartoons I think I have the best chance of getting published. Depending on your response, I’ll keep on adding to them.

Naturally, if you want to get in, you’ll need to leave a comment or email me. Everybody is welcome.

Something About The Mouth

2008-12-26T14:45:00.003Z

I thought I'd spend the day writing but found myself consumed with finishing this cartoon for The Spine. Getting a resemblance to a real person is something I haven't conquered. Some people are easier than others. Philip took seconds. The Queen still isn't right after countless hours. In the end, I decided to cheat and traced her face from a portrait. If I have more time, I'll figure out the right codes so I'll be able to sketch her quickly. It doesn't seem right spending so much time on one picture. My versions of her were getting increasingly baboon-like. It's something about the mouth...

A Bit But Not Much

2008-12-24T16:26:00.003Z

Lola sends me this link and It occurs to me that from my last post it might be suspected that I'm actually a geek. Well, it's not true. I did write some pseudo-code the other day but that's as far as my geekdom goes. Oh, I own some technology (I love my iTouch) but that's it. I'm not fanatical about Star Trek, though the new movie looks promising, and I don't own any Star Wars action figures. I don't even read Manga. And I do have a life away from the keyboard, can speak in more than monosyllables, and often make eye contact, just prefer not to.

And yes, I do protest a bit too much but it's better than not protesting at all. As I believe Spock once said in episode seven of series two...

In Which I Become David Moorcroft's Spokesman

2008-12-24T13:41:00.001Z

Another sleep. Another elusive dream. In last night’s episode, I’d applied for a job working for British Athletics. I was to be their new spokesman. I remember meeting key figures in British sport, including David Moorcroft and Sebastian Coe. Why I had this dream has me beat, though there might have been some lingering vestige of my day among leisure consultants in the mix. It’s the only explanation I have. I don’t remember if I took the job – moving to London seemed to have been an issue – nor if I was offered it. I also can’t imagine why anybody would consider me for such a role. There can’t be many people who are less suited to being a spokesperson; lacking photogenic appeal, any sartorial flare, and having a Lancashire accent full of muddy, flat vowels.

Whatever the meaning of the dream, it was a very deep sleep. Whether I’m righteous or not, I really couldn’t say. I am moderately alert and anticipating two weeks of holiday. What I’ll be doing with that time is probably far from what I’m hoping. This Christmas, I’m in no mood to celebrate. It’s going to be quiet and I’ll be happy if I can stay where I am, at home working away on some yet-to-be-decided project. I face the New Year with the realisation that I have nothing to sell. One rather disappointing aspect about blogging is that once you’ve done your piece, it is published. Finished. That’s an end of it. I can’t go forward to sell it. I can’t make money from all my past efforts. Which means that I need something new to keep me going into the New Year and beyond. I have a series of cartoons, all based around a single theme, which I’d like to send out. I’m tempted to put them in a locked blog to see what you all think about them, but it’s the novels that really do need finishing. I’ve had two for these last six months that have always seemed promising when I go back and read what I have of them. I just need to concentrate my energies there, ignoring what I feel I should be doing with blogs.

This morning I thought it would be fun to dash of cards for some fellow bloggers. I fear there won’t be time to get one to everybody that deserves one. And some people I can’t send cards to because I don’t have their email addresses. However, it felt like a good thing to do, though I’m now running out of steam. If I miss you out, forgive me.

I’ll probably be here tomorrow, typing away about something or other. I’ll be celebrating Christmas my own way, which most people would probably find hugely depressing but I’ll be quite happy. In the meantime, let me wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all the hopes of a prosperous New Year. I’m now off to doodle while I listen to Jim Morrison growl his way through ‘LA Woman’, which remains one of my favourite tracks, and the perfect tonic for these cold days in December.

A Card For Work

2008-12-23T18:47:00.003Z

I’m typing this with my eyelids dropping below the forty degree angle but I’m not sure why. I think I just wanted to post the above picture of the card that went into circulation today, hoping to extend its audience from a rather pitiful five to a rather healthy eight, based on the readership stats of this blog. I knew it would be a mistake to blog as anybody other than Him and I’m reminded of ‘Unforgiven’ when ‘The Duke of Death’ talks about royalty having a certain majesty that makes it impossible to assassinate them. The same is true of celebrity and being a blogging celebrity. They are read irrespective of what they write. I suppose it has much to do with already being in the public’s psyche. What people know, they know. What they don’t... Well, that’s where the majority of blogs come in. Published by the masses, unread by the masses. I should pack in now before I waste the next two weeks of holiday trying to breathe some life into this place.

I digress, rather morosely too. I just wanted to talk about my card, the subtleties of which you’re sure to miss unless you’re a leisure consultant, worked with leisure consultants, or do a little leisure consulting on the side, perhaps as a hobby or charity work. If so, I’m sure you’ll see the genius of the piece. I have a feeling that it will be seen as a classic; the finest leisure consultancy-themed Christmas card that there has ever been.

And God bless the Gods of Hewlett and Packard for doing such as good job of printing it out. Can God bless Gods or would they just stand them for a beer? But I digress again...

I don’t normally go the homemade route for Christmas cards. Friends at University used to embarrass me with their finger painted daubs, which I tried to appreciate but couldn’t never avoid the feeling that I’d been short-changed out of a card. Woolly liberalism never came quite as woolly as my friends with their finger painted cards. Perhaps my work colleagues think the same about me and my ‘witty’ cartoon. Although I did think I’d save myself some money by producing my own, I really did it in order to make people smile. Which they did – perhaps out of pity – and my day way brighter for that. I would like to think that in a hundred years, these five cards will be worth a fortune, but I think the reality is that they’ll quickly turn yellow, the ink will peel off, and they’ll end their days torn to shreds and serving as bookmarks.

I have to now go off and scribble out three more cards. Once my family saw what I’d done for work, they immediately said that they looked forward to their cards. I seem to have set myself a precedent it will be difficult to break. I’m a one-man Hallmark.

High Noon

2008-12-22T15:55:00.001Z

I make reference to 'High Noon'. Quite witty, I thought. Only nobody has seen 'High Noon'... Not so witty.

Today

2008-12-22T14:15:00.000Z

IF (!proof-reading) THEN
{
WHILE (TIME<4.30pm)
{
Cut();
Paste();
} ENDWHILE;
}

Twelve Monkeys

2008-12-22T13:45:00.003Z

Brit mentioned Terry Gilliam this morning, which was odd given that I’d just finished watching his interview with Clive James on my iPod. A quick jaunt around town convinced me that we’re living in a nightmare of Gilliam proportions. Humanity reduced to hammering away at each other as they fight for their place in Christmas queues. I managed to get into Waterstones, only to realise the futility of staying the ground floor. Thinking I was being clever, I sought refuge in the poetry section. Only, even the poetry section was full.

I pass or visit the poetry section of Deansgate’s Waterstones at lunchtime two days a week. It’s always empty. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it full. Which either says something about the popularity of poetry as a means of saying that something special or that people will buy just about anything for Christmas gifts. The fact it was full meant something. Twelve monkeys time, I thought.

Christmas Monday

2008-12-22T08:47:00.005Z

I’m not totally sure why I’m in work today. Then again, I’m not sure why I’m in work on any day. There are so many better things I can be doing. Today (and tomorrow) are exceptions. I feel justified in wondering what I’m doing being here. I normally make it a point of using whatever holidays I have for the last few days leading up to Christmas. This year I’m told that I haven’t any holidays. I used them up being sick and taking compassionate days after my father died. So I’m here.

I spent my weekend drawing two cartoons (one unpublished but my best yet) and doing a little writing. My eyes wouldn’t allow me to get much done. They were red and puffy for most of the time; a result of working Thursday and Friday last week, two shifts of eight hours staring at these screens. I'll have to learn to take more breaks when I’m here.

The trains were half-empty. T he station quiet. Even today's Metro (the newspaper) is thin and barely worth picking up. I don’t read it myself. It’s for other people in the office.

[Update: I have received my first Christmas card.]

[Update 2: I should add that I'm in one of the worst moods I've ever afflicted on an office. Listening to Cohen's 'Songs of Love and Hate' on the way into work probably didn't help.]

[Update 3: God bless eye-drops and paracetamol. I feel a little better. I can now see the screen. The woman in Boots told me that I had to be careful not to take more than eight in a day. I replied that she was giving me ideas. She seemed to believe me and gave me a leaflet on depression at Christmas. I replied that if I was seriously thinking about doing myself in, I wouldn't have spent three quid on a Mexican style bean wrap.]

[Update 4: Note to self. I must try to be more cheerful when I blog. If He really did write a blog, He would definitely be more upbeat. I should write some poems about a love for vintage automobiles. Perhaps post some pictures here of quaint English pubs.]

Art or Arthur

2008-12-21T14:01:00.004Z

Sad news, either way, but is Arthur Spiegelman THE Art Spiegelman? Yahoo is reporting the death of Arthur Spiegelman, reporter for Reuters, but has a picture of Art Spiegelman, cartoonist and author of 'Maus'. The body text doesn't actually mention anything of Art Spiegelman's work.

I grabbed a screenshot to prove that I'm not imagining this.

[EDIT: As I thought, Art is not Arthur.]

Drawing Bush

2008-12-20T18:53:00.003Z

It feels much easier being me. I sit here and simply write what comes to mind. Little imagination required. No attempt to be more interesting than I am.

I’m off the back of a marathon sleep. I was out for something like eleven hours last night. I’ve always been a good sleeper but usually restrict myself to seven or eight. But whenever I hit my Manchester days, it breaks whatever work and sleep pattern I’ll have established in the previous five days. I drag myself by my ears from my bed at six o’clock, on the train for seven, and I’m in the office and working for eight or eight thirty. The day is fixed. I have to work eight hours and, like most people in the office, I choose to work them in a solid block, eating lunch at my desk and with only a couple of ‘bathroom’ breaks. By four thirty, I’m usually a mental and physical mess but happy to heading home. The nights aren’t much of anything. I’m paid for eight hours but they’re really taking eighteen. I travel, work, travel, doze in front of the TV, and then I sleep. A rush of energy on Thursday was the exception to the rule. I managed to write a few posts. My ‘Coming Clean’ piece was the product of peanut butter, which I’ve been told is good for energy. I think it was the relief of confession that drove me on but last night, I was unable to function.

Today I’ve been unable to write. I spent this afternoon trying my hand at drawing a political cartoon. I’d had the above joke in my head for over a week but hadn’t had time to draw it. Unlike my more surreal jokes, scribbling political figures requires far more time and effort. I finished today’s picture (don’t ask how long it took) and sent it to my sister who immediately pointed out that my George W. Bush looks remarkably like Donald Rumsfeld. She had a point. I went back and added a slightly more prominent lip, smaller ears. I think it is enough for the joke to work. I posted it over at The Spine, just to keep that site going.

Caricatures don’t interest me all that much. I see them as a necessary evil when making a joke about a public figure. That was always the pleasure of writing The Spine regularly. I could use photographs to make my point. The down side to the site was that I could never sell my gags to newspapers because I would have to account for every element of a picture. The copyright laws just don’t make any allowances for new forms of cartooning involving Photoshop. The other problem was that any joke was always constrained by the availability of a picture. I would often resort to taking photographs of my own elbows, hands, and knees, just to fill in a gap. Sketching allows me to get closer to my ideas, though I face a different difficulty drawing recognisable caricatures.

I try not to be influenced by the way real illustrators draw their victims. I had to deliberately avoid Gerald Scarfe’s method of drawing the simian-like Bush, big ears and huge baboon maw. His caricatures are some of the best in terms of taking a hard swipe at a figure. He’s more in the tradition of the great seventeenth century artists and, naturally, I think of Hogarth. Scarfe’s figures regularly display their genitals or are to be found facing us arseways, sphincter compressed. As much as I admire his work, I don't think he's chasing outright laughs. They more scatology than wit, more outrage than punchline. He’s not, as far as I can see, a humourist who cares about the laugh. He's probably greater than that.

Thinking about all this reminds me of my local shopping centre where a lad runs a stall where he draws caricatures of customers. I always glance over and see what he’s doing. He clearly has a skill for it but, for me, it’s too close that that episode of The Simpsons (doesn’t everything remind us of episodes from The Simpsons?) where Lisa is allowing herself to be drawn by the local caricaturist. If I remember it correctly, the artist simply sticks her in a car and exaggerates one feature (her hair). It’s implied that this is exactly what he does with every subject.

Could mutter on some more but my laptop battery has dropped below 10%...

Coming Clean

2008-12-19T00:44:00.006Z

The idea attracted me immediately. Perhaps it was the perversity of the concept that engineered the folly it would eventually become. That I would create a blog where I would be me in everything but name was counter to everything that I was meant to do with a blog. Blogs are about attracting attention to the undiscovered self. They are about promoting ego. This was something else. This was a huge finger directed towards everything else.

At that point, I’d been blogging for over a year and I hadn’t hidden my identity except for a change in surname. I had a real life, thought I might still stand a chance of working in academia (I foolishly thought a Ph.D. from a good university stood for something -- it doesn't!), and I was worried what people might think about my strange new blog, clearly written by a madman. Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried. That first version of me was nominated for two national awards (I lost both). A second blog gave rise to a book which was accepted for publication only for it to be aborted a few weeks before of its arrival in bookshops, these events overlapping with my third blog. That’s when I began to write my fourth major blog – major in the effort it took, not readers. This has never been about having many readers. Just about having a few loyal readers whose company I enjoyed.

I suppose I chose the subject of that blog out of a petty grievance, although not completely. To be Him was to be part of the process that had seen my novel deleted. I was not one of them, so I would become one of them. I would become one of the prime movers. It would be fun, funny, and disruptive. As Tom Waits would say: the three missing dwarves.

And so it began.

At the beginning, it all happened quite quickly. The first thing I noticed was that I was being rapidly accepted onto blogrolls. Everybody wanted to be near Me. They sent Me emails praising Me for my blog. I was the funniest blogger they had ever read. In fact, I was simply the funniest guy on the planet. A huge talent. ‘So much funnier than you are on TV’ they would say. The Guardian found my blog and (knowing what it really was) reviewed it favourably. I was a pick of the week. (Ironically, they also linked to my other blog on the same page but I could never make much of this double success.) More readers dropped by. People emailed me to congratulate me on my blogging success.

Then, slowly, realisation dawned. The number of blogrolls linking to me slowly began to fall. A few angry emails followed. I was no longer such a huge talent. I was no longer the funniest guy on the planet. I was no longer a huge talent. I was, in fact, a rather sad lonely figure, sitting along in a bedsit, amusing (possibly self-abusing) myself, who should get a life or, if possible, die. So they said.

I felt vindicated. Their anger was real, so I didn’t tell them that this was the point I was always trying to make. My satire was never ever directed at the person who everybody assumed I was targeting. Satirising celebrity is tedious, pointless, and, ultimately, self-defeating. Celebrities revel in being satirised. It’s a sign of their success. No, the people I wanted to mock were the people who placed context before content. I’d been inspired by a well known story of an academic who had presented poems to undergraduates, seeing if they could spot the great poems without the name of the author to influence them. I was out to get the British Public. I wanted to expose the hypocrisy of audiences unable to judge talent. These were the people who wanted to be close to Me but only because of what I could do for them. The evidence was there for all to see. And say what they liked, these were the people that lauded me, asked me to read their books, help them get published. Above all else, they demonstrated how we don’t live in a meritocracy. Context is everything and when that context is the BBC, ITV, or Channel 4, talent is assumed. It is a given. The irony is, of course, that moving to satellite TV should been seen as diminishing that talent. And that’s what happened. Viewing figures dropped. Suddenly, the golden couple weren’t so golden. Had they lost it? Of course they hadn’t. In fact, their shows were better than ever. They were more relaxed. They had matured. Yet they failed because the context had changed. Context had given them status. A different context had brought about a change in status.

On the other side of the game were the people who cheered me on. All along there were those that apparently liked what I was doing. They understood the joke and still understand the joke, even if it’s faded somewhat. I continued to write it for them. I worked damned hard to make them smile. But I also worked in a very strange way to improve the reputation of the person I had apparently set out to mock. Yet mockery was never my aim. The lesson one quickly learns when writing satire is that you usually get quite close to the person you attack. I actually began to really like Him. I began to understand what a terrible ordeal celebrity must be for Him. Unable to trust friends, doubting the judgement of every stranger who congratulates you on your latest success: celebrity is lonely. Very, very lonely. From a distance, I watched Stephen Fry accept the 25,000th person to the list of people he follows on Twitter. And I watched people regularly direct comments to him. I see John Cleese doing the same. I have even, somewhat playfully, joined in once (to Cleese). Yet I did so feeling a degree of shame that I was doing the very thing that I had accused others of doing. (Although, in my defence, I would argue that I’m a fan of both because of their content, not context).

Along the way, there were moments I regretted. I fooled a few people who didn’t deserve to be fooled. I felt truly bad about it and still do. Two stand out. One was only fooled for a day and, I think, he has forgiven me. The other I can only hope smiled before he moved on. I sent him two of the funniest emails I’ve ever written. They took me hours to get just right. He replied to the first. It was a brief but wonderfully vulgar and poorly typed reply. As a fan, I’m delighted that he emailed Me. I’m just disappointed that he didn’t email me. He emailed the other me. I got myself out that pickle by replying that I doubted that he was really who he said he was and asking him to stop emailing me. It’s crazy to think back on it. I actually asked (demanded!) that one of my heroes, a man whose books and TV programmes I’ve read, watched and admired since adolescence, should stop emailing me! It was the best moment and the worst of being Him.

The strangest part of this whole game of being Him is that, unwittingly, I think I did some good. He didn’t acknowledge me or the work I was doing except to deny that he was me, that I was him. He didn’t know about the people I’d helped in his name. He wouldn’t know how I’d tutored one person through an English coursework; fixing punctuation, teaching the correct use of the apostrophe, and talking literature (something I’m supposedly far more qualified to do, anyway, and could probably have charged by the hour). He wouldn’t know about the times I’ve helped people track down books, recipes, or whatever it was that they wrote to ask me about. Though I was playing a role, I always knew that it came with a responsibility. Previously, people had expressed contempt towards me (as him). Soon they began to warm to me (as him) or him (although me). I learned to do my best to give the game away whilst being subtle but there were some people who could never see the truth, no matter how blatant. It’s strange to find oneself improving another person’s reputation. My talent, whatever that is, was suddenly his talent. All my work was doing some good for him. The irony – a tragic irony as it turned out – was that he published a book and began to talk about family just as I was losing such an important part of mine.

Which has led to the confusion of tone which needed sorting out. It’s why I’m over here in this old lapsed blog, talking about these things for the first time. It’s not a divorce. As Brit put it: it’s a separation of voices. The people that matter – the people that understood me – already knew. Those of you that come here, come here and learn a bit more about me, should you really wish to know me and not Him. And now you know what’s been going on over there. I feel isolated. I feel exposed. I also know I won’t have many readers and may well lose a good few. Who wants to read me? I’m insignificant in a big way. Just another fool looking to make his way doing the things he loves. I’m not even sure what I’ll do with the other me. Perhaps I’ll add Him to my CV. I’ll probably carry on writing it. Just to see how this separation goes. I’ll be funny and Him over there. Serious, depressing and more like myself over here.

For the record, I have now written four quite substantial blogs. The Spine (631 posts), I rarely update. My Harry Potter pictures are still a huge draw but the political side of blogging no longer interests me. (And too many of the supposedly humorous political blogs are vile and filled with hate, verging on racism and misogyny. I want no part of them, even by association.) I’m also tired of photoshopping images. I could never sell them due to copyright. I might go back and use it as a place to put my cartoons, although the few I’ve published over there have yet to attract any interest.

My second blog, ‘What Ho Proles!’ (135 posts) dwindled but only because it was the genesis of my book. For the moment, it would hurt to go back and write as Murgatroid, though I already have a good idea for a second book. Jacob still gets regular emails from the Conservative Party, who seem to believe that he's real.

‘Chip Dale’s Diary’ (363 posts) was a huge effort to write and I’d like to revisit it. There’s also a book in there, though I suppose Chip and Gabby have now separated given that Lembit has lost his Cheeky Girl. I still get regular emails from people asking about my stripping services. The British Thong Society (another of mine) still attracts regular emails from people (mainly Americans) who are secret lovers of the thong. It has also been listed in various places as a real organisation.

None of my blogs, except The Spine, attracted many readers, yet the word count of all my blogs is probably getting close to a million words. Total earnings for a couple of years of constant blogging: about £150, most of which came from a single commission from ITN for two cartoons. It proves that pictures are worth more than words and that pictures of dogs wearing knickers are worth more than a thousand pages of prose. There are (and were) other blogs, some obviously me, some obviously not. Probably over a dozen. But I’m coming clean about those that matter to me because I just want to have it on record that I did all that work. As I come to the end of 2008 – the worst year in my life – I think it’s time to say: this was all me. I still have many ideas and too little time. Manchester drains my spirits more than I can ever explain, yet I want to still blog and draw, and write some more novels. I want to talk poetry, write poetry; talk about films, write films. Perhaps I’ll do that here. Perhaps I’ll do it for a day or a week, a month or a year. I’ll do it before I’ll go off quietly and begin again; committing another outrage, offending a few more people.

Odd

2008-12-18T22:04:00.001Z

When I began to think about coming back to write this blog, I also found myself thinking about the title. Back when I created it, I wanted to use it as a place to jot down my ideas about fiction and voice. But the more I think about voice, the more I realise that it’s just a by-product of my own thought processes and that when I’m writing fiction, I am really writing about myself. It’s heavily disguised but everything I’ve ever written contains a mutated form of my experience. Sometimes those are experiences I’ve lived. Sometimes they are experiences that I’ve found at second-hand, though books, film, the television. The point isn’t that I’ve moved away from thinking about voice. I’m just happy to be writing as myself. It’s liberating to be myself. It’s still all a fiction, of course. Even as I try to write about personal experiences, I’m transforming them into something else. Anybody who reads me will transform them again. Voice is all fiction. Even when I mean it to be quite real.

Trickster Is Me

2008-12-18T20:34:00.002Z

‘Abandon form and trust the voice.’

So said Martin Amis to Clive James in the podcast I listened to for the umpteenth time as I rode the train home tonight. Those shows make me unbelievably happy and the Amis interview is the best of the lot. And his is a good piece of advice to be posting when supremely tired and aching in eyes, brain, and legs. I’ll trust to voice and assume that something I say here will make sense to somebody.

***

Tonight I’m bitter, a bit bewildered, and tired like the damned. It’s all normal for a Thursday. These are the moments when I feel the most rebellious. Always do the opposite of what’s expected. Or the opposite of the opposite.

The last week or two, I’ve been dipping into Lewis Hyde’s ‘Trickster Makes This World’. The subtitle is ‘How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture’ and, for obvious reasons, when I spotted it in the local Borders, I was drawn to it like filings towards a tax inspector. Good read with some stunning passages. It contains some of the best lines I’ve read all year: ‘To learn about intelligence from the meat-thief Coyote is to know that we’re embodied thinkers. If the brain has cunning, it has it as a consequence of appetite; the blood that lights the mind gets its sugars from the gut.’ I gave a whoop of delight when I read that last part. Perhaps it’s some misguided projection on my part but I identify with the trickster. I once wrote a 90,000 word ramble about appetite and poetry and reading this reminds me of the things that interested me back then. The trickster is the embodiment of sublimated appetite, an escape around vices and into a different kind of eating, growing, procreating.

Why do I tell you this? I don’t know. It’s not funny or inkeeping with anything. Listen to my inner voice. It’s just me. Tricky old me.

***

I still see the woman the train who never stops typing. She’s worn her keys down until the surfaces have gone and they’re down to the black plastic. People write too much. I say that but I should really look into buying a new laptop. Ideally, I should look into buying a new life. Amis talks about writers whose talent turns gangrenous if not followed. I feel it within me on these nights when I barely eat because I’m so exhausted. I don’t even know if ‘talent’ is the word for it. Feels presumptuous. I prefer to think of it as a hunger. It’s the insatiable appetite to do what I want to do. I’m not one for being told what to do. Friends say it’s my big fault. Hairs on my back turn into the Grenadier Guards when I’m ordered to do anything. Working for others makes me deeply unhappy. I become a different person. I keep describing it as a form of attention deficit disorder. I cannot sit still and seek distraction.

Today I met somebody who said that they look for ‘career progression’. I gave a shiver. I told them that I don’t think like that, which I assume to be true because I believed it when I said it. Yet I wonder if it’s the right term for my peculiar form of indifference. I don’t feel like I have goals in terms of arbitrary titles within arbitrary institutions. Is it money in the bank? I suppose I want that. Enough to be happy. No more. But whether I’m senior or junior to somebody else doesn’t concern me. I’d be full of self doubt in either situation. I just want to be read and for people to laugh at (think about) what I write and draw.
***

Not for the first time, I’ve been thinking about agents. I sometimes wonder if I should just sign a devil’s pact: ask somebody to represent my work for 50% of the income. I’m no good at selling myself. I just don’t do it. I don’t play the game. Failure is my own doing. I don’t try to succeed.

***

Abandon form and trust the voice. It’s a seductive idea. I’m sometimes too obsessed with form. Narrative feels like it should be there in some pre-ordained structure. My novels tend to get difficult when I fear they don’t have a shape. Perhaps I should stop thinking and just write, trust that I’ll find something along the way. Not thinking worked in the past. I think.

Coming into Piccadilly this morning, I finished the first book of ‘Molesworth’. Reminds me of Burgess, a little of Joyce. Strange book with the most basic form. It’s just a series of self-contained lists. Wonderfully written and Searle’s pictures keep me just as entertained. The look in Molesworth 1’s eye transfixes me every time.

***

What exactly are Gladiators? Why do I feel like throwing the cat at the TV whenever they come on? The ads talk about records being smashed and legends made. What records? Man in spandex balancing on podium while other men in spandex hits him with a large rubberised baton.

There’s a guy who travels home on my train. He’s a body builder. It was raining when we got off and he tried to run for cover. Hilarious. He’s incapable of bending his legs. Incapable too of crossing his arms. Imagine a man in splints trying to do the 100 metres. A form of paralysis, perhaps. He’s given himself a disability. Perfection comes at a price.

***

Twitter confuses me. I’m not sure I like it but I like playing the game. Trickster. That’s me.

Titles

2008-07-22T11:16:00.001+01:00

Titles to novels are almost harder to write than the novel itself. This isn’t apparent from the point of view of the reader. On my desk, I can see Terry Southern’s ‘Candy’, Philip Roth’s ‘Zuckerman Unbound’, and Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’. Each title exists, in my mind at least, as though they are integral to the novels they represent. When I think of the book. I think of the title.

As a reader, you know the title before you know the book. As a writer, you often come to know the book long before you know its title. I have spent days thinking up a title for a story I’m in the middle of completing. Nothing seems right but then, the book is still a series of problems I have yet to overcome. Finding the title transforms the story (or a series of written pages) into something more imposing. It gives the manuscript an identity. It’s like putting the roof on a house. Until that point, it wasn’t a house but a series of walls, abutments, and foundations. I want to give these pages an identity as a book but perhaps it’s too early. I’m still standing in the foundations wondering if this thing will ever get built.

Bones

2008-07-17T16:34:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I fear that I write for words and not for meaning. A novel is more than a sequence of chapters and writing any kind of narrative from the inside requires a knowledge of their anatomy. Much of it is empty space. The places where the blood flows, where the simplest prose can suffice and mere detail exist. But to create these spaces requires knowledge of where cartilage must be strung, where the supports of the narrative’s bones must rest. Too often I find myself filling space before I have the skeleton in place. At other times I worry too much about bones. Somewhere between the two, lies a novel.

The Writers

2008-07-16T16:03:00.001+01:00

From my room, I hear the hammer of weights from the gym. In the summer, they work out with the doors open. The sound echoes across all the gardens and the waste ground separating me from them. The routines are always the same. They have the same regularity as my fingers find on this keyboard. They exercise as I exercise. Big fingers hitting iron keys. These guys are as local as me but they grunt when I sniff. They swear when I try my hardest to find just the right word. More often than not, the words they find are much better than mine. In their way, they are also writers. I can tell because they also growl when they exercise.

Two Lines: The Mirror of the Sea

2008-07-16T12:33:00.001+01:00

"Landfall and Departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seaman’s life and of a ship’s career. From land to land is the most concise definition of a ship’s earthly fate."
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (1906)

Absolute stunning perfection.

So much could be said about two lines that hang together like the balanced sails on some turn of the century clipper. The lines have a ‘rhythmical swing’ and a caesura sits about the middle of the first line (after ‘swing’) which leads the ear to find an equal length until we reach the full stop. It’s only natural for us to then read the second line with a slightly forced pause after ‘concise’, which the pushes us on to stress ‘definition’. The technique is poetic. The effect sublime.

Cultural Hyperventilation

2008-07-15T14:15:00.001+01:00

The media is in a febrile state. The internet has made it so. Where once we had a relatively few collections of individuals, to whom we even ascribed friendly names like the BBC, NBC, HBO, Macillan, Random House, Hodder & Stoughton, all producing TV shows, films, books, newspapers, or journals, we now have millions of individuals breaking all the rules and teaching us how to be creative. Low cost HD cameras and a general will to anarchy has made it possible for consumers to become producers and for the mainstream to embrace everyday culture in a new and, apparently, invigorating way.

Increasingly the web is the place where the media source material for broadcast. We are encouraged to send our videos and photographs into news channels for which they pay us nothing but the honour of having our names read out on air. YouTube has become the free repository of gaffs, gags, and the grisly, and it is these momentary oddities of life that are delivered into our living rooms on a daily basis. They may be cheap filler but they are increasingly defining our culture, and who and what we are.

Against these new standards, older forms of expression seem precisely that: old, outdated, lapsing into insignificance for all but a few who wish to cherish their archaic mannerisms. Structure went out of the window with the talent. This is a world made by and for William S. Burroughs where everything it cut up and rearranged. The most damning criticism of any form of culture these days is to describe it as ‘safe’. Although new media isn’t really new media at all (though the medium has certainly changed), it is a new way of ascribing value to the brash, the bold, the ballsy. MTV can lay claim to have been in the vanguard of this new aesthetic of grotesque banality. ‘Jackass’ (and it’s UK derivative ‘Dirty Sanchez’) represented the most extreme examples of the low-brow writ large. When a man is willing to put a staple through his own foreskin in order to get on TV, there’s very little chance that the slow burn privations of long term artistic integrity stand any chance of succeeding. What chance the young but talented landscape painter against Damien Hurst’s diamond-encrusted skulls or the media-savvy doodling of ‘Banksy’?

As rank amateurism flourishes, professional amateurism gains ground. It is now an established practice that all those tangential to fame also find fame. The world is filled with hundreds like Karl Pilkington (mate to Ricky Gervais) or Jimmy Doherty (he of ‘Jimmy’s Farm’ and childhood friend of Jamie Oliver). Give the audience more of what they think they want. Why be satisfied with Ozzie when there’s also Sharon, Kelly, and Jack? We want more, more, more, more of the same...

The ironies are as apparent as they are vulgar. Democratising the means of production has led us to the point where the daughters of rock stars can present the news, footballers wives produce newspaper columns, porn stars write books for children. The product may be inferior to that of the professionals whose jobs they have taken but only by reducing our standards have we allowed ourselves to become in thrall to those standards and to these people. Our banality breeds their banality and it can only get worse.

As the visual has risen, it is customary to say that the written has lessened in significance. Yet the written word still has a role to play: it’s that of the placeholder or the tag. It isn’t so important that words are put together with any artistry. They must simply exist in the right form to help people find the visuals to satisfy their hunger for quick Big Mac entertainment. It isn’t hard to envisage a time when good tagging is cherished over good writing. In fact, it might already be here. Welcome to the world of the blogosphere.

Is it possible that too much creative oxygen makes us hyperventilate? Do we breathe hard and fast because there’s simply too much culture to enjoy? Or is it that we’ve not enough quality carbon dioxide in the blood, too few producers of merit and note? And how do creators keep pace in a world where the average consumer with a video recorder stands more chance of success than an artist in a studio? Is it culture? Is it art? Is it even good for us?

The most popular websites in the UK are generally those like the BBC that already have a large readership because of their (old-media) mainstream activities, or those that embrace the counter-side of culture. Yet to describe it as counterculture is trite when it is really in the ascension. To be counter in our culture is to still believe in the role of the library or the museum, it is to read books other than those plugged 24/7 via Amazon’s newsletters. To be different is to refuse to embrace this cult of difference. A few people still succeed by working the old way. From the creative individual’s point of view, it has more guarantee of success. However, when the creative pool is measured in the many millions, the media can carry on plucking out the lucky strikes. From their point of view, there is always another funny clip of a dog wearing glasses, a guy trying to mix cola and mints, another monkey who has struck a few keys together and accidentally written a masterpiece. No wonder so many of us are confused and gasping for breath.

First Voice

2008-07-01T15:43:00.000+01:00

I suppose I begin with the thing that started my thinking about voice and it’s that quote by Philip Roth I’ve put to the right of the page. When I first read this line I questioned if ‘voice’ is really as uncategorisable as this quote would suggest. Might we not equally equate it to ‘genius’ and from there leave it alone as an irreducible truth? The assumption is that ‘voice’ is out there, to be picked up from ether if the writer has the talent. It’s a fairly common assumption. It’s the hackneyed line: ‘You either have it or you don’t, kid... And you sure as hell don’t’.

My instincts – my faith, I suppose – encourage me to believe that it’s more practical than that. Voice is a deliberate construction which at the most basic level comes down to lexical choices, runs through syntax and grammar, and expands to include something as nebulous as ‘world view’ or ideology. Might we not say that Orwell’s voice is still apparent in many an iconic dystopia?

At the level of words, though, I think we can be more precise. Roth himself writes the words of Nathan Zuckerman who is himself repeating the words of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. And he makes an subtle choice in the quote that really began my thinking about voice. ‘Voice’, says Lonoff, ‘begins at around the back of the knees’. I think the ‘at’ is superfluous unless it does something we don’t initially notice. Voice ‘begins around’ would make for an easier read. Only, voice is not about what’s easy. It’s about what is characteristic. The ‘at’ gives us a broken rhythm of speech, or, at the least, it locates us in the idiom of the Jewish writer living much of his life out in the countryside. Lonoff, Zuckerman, or Roth: the line passes us by unpolished. And to my untrained ear (or eye) is critical to understand voice because voice is as much about the unpolished nature of prose than it is about presenting clean marble. Voice is alive when prose appears to be hewn from a natural rock face.

To jump metaphors: it is the background radiation – a ‘white noise’ – that lies beneath whatever we’re hearing.

Take another example, and speaking of 'White Noise', it is from the first page of Don DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’.

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

Where is the voice here? I would say it’s the prolonged detail lapsing into repetition (the running and repeated images of people covering their faces). I also think it’s most apparent in the disjointed fourth sentence, beginning ‘They had shoes...’. The narrator breaks off, ‘a woman with a shoe in each hand’, as if the woman has literally run through his sentence. The voice here is harried. It makes, of course, for a great opening. There is momentum generated by fleeting glimpses of a scene, rather than a prolonged exposure to detail.

A Blog About Doubt.

2008-06-30T23:54:00.000+01:00

One of my ideas was simple. I wanted to put my ideas down about the books I’ve been reading. Yet more important were the doubts about the books not yet written. My own books and my own voice. The things I think and the things that I don't think but should. I’ve never given much thought to my own voice in an academic sense. Is voice more than that habits we hold onto? Is it the habits we break or make for ourselves? Where does voice live in the text of a novel? And what can we learn by reading books? How have other writers established this obscure thing called ‘voice’? This is an excise for me. A place to put doubts so that I don't trip up on them.