I’m now about three-quarters of the way through the first draft of a new poetry project (I’ve shared snippets here before: there are two readings from mid-May). Occasionally I come across lines I’ve written that I simply like, which feel as if they’re almost fully-formed and won’t need too much work.

But then I suspect we all do that from time-to-time, take the risk of being bold enough to ‘like’ our own work.

Yet such a feeling worries me given my default position is that every line will need work, that a first draft is no more than laying down a marker for what will follow. Scaffolding.

A passionate believer in editing, I am inherently sceptical of poets who never edit: “It just came to me” is often proudly uttered as the introduction to a sub-standard piece of poetry…

I include below two tiny extracts from the latest piece on which I’ve been working — and which, I confess, have already been ‘tweaked’ slightly. Think of my sharing as ‘kicking the tyres’…

We measure our horizons in language,
our heads sand-stuck;
our cries, muffled by the earth,
are serenades to waiting worms.

~

Sitting on our own sidelines
we watch others
as they pirouette through life

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Some ten years ago I started to scribble what I imagined might become the opening of an autobiography, and even though there were two different attempts at the opening, I didn’t actually get very far.

In the last week or so I have tentatively picked this work back up and redrafted it — but as if it were the biography of a fictional character who has chosen to review the opening of the life story they had previously drafted… So essentially me but one step removed (or with a fictional ‘other’ running interference).

I have no real idea if this works. You will be a far better judge than I. In the opening extract which follows I have deliberately differentiated between the biography and the gloss recently applied using different fonts (this works well enough on the page, but on the screen I’m not so sure).

Anyway, I’m in your hands…

PREFACE

We should start with Stan. Not because there was anything particularly climactic about that brief episode all those years ago, but because in its combination of humour and pathos — even tragedy — there existed something approaching a microcosm of a lifetime’s experience thus far.

Imagine, if you will, a nondescript street. Terraced houses with narrow bay windows and small frontages which could clearly not be regarded as gardens because each front door was separated from the pavement by a low wall and some four or five feet of slab. These were rigid and expressionless terraces facing each other across a road that went nowhere. We can call this road Parham Road, as that may have been it’s name; a cul-de-sac in a Victorian rather than a modern sense. A road long enough to falsely suggest that to journey along it would lead you somewhere — though in the case of Parham Road merely to a cut-through and a similar and parallel cul-de-sac.

Parham Road was, in those days, framed by a garage — which sat between the entrance to the two dead ends — and a hardware store. The latter was a tall and imposing building which leaked the smell of sawn wood and board, its ranks of variously warped timbers standing more or less upright in their many and various dimensions. The garage, long since gone, for a few subsequent years left a scarred and abandoned forecourt as some kind of testimony to progress — or, if nothing else, proof of the march to the commercial drum.

If you had been a reasonably travelled individual and stood in Parham Road then (in the very early-70s) you might have been forgiven for harbouring the sensation that you might have been almost anywhere in the country, for surely every town had similar terraces and roads leading nowhere.

Now imagine that you are standing on the threshold of a house in that same road. The door is open. Ahead is a long passage which, despite its name, just at that moment seems to lead nowhere too. A dark corridor beckons. The door to the front sitting room, off immediately to the left, is somehow invisible, and the only possible focus, the only hint of promise, comes from a vague light in the distance. And then, taking that first step across the threshold, you become aware of other things. The dark grey unenclosed pipework of the utility meters there above your head to the right. And that smell. A smell you had never encountered before. A smell that seemed to suck hope from the walls and from the dim light towards which you now walked.

And imagine that you are just twelve years old.

~

Stan is of indeterminate history — and with an unknowable and unpronounceable surname. Perhaps he is a relic of the war. He is older than my father, so the timeframe would be right. Although I am certain that, at that precise moment, there was never any entertainment on my part as to where he had originated (nor how he came to own that somehow sordid house on Parham Road) it is possible to invent a history for him that is, shall we say, more generous. Perhaps he found himself in England following his escape from the Nazis in Poland. Perhaps — and here generosity really takes over — he was one of The Few who fought in the skies for Churchill against the common enemy. Was he injured on account his bravery (for Stan walks with a limp) and is this house somehow reward for services rendered?

But Stan has a hump at the top of his back too, and his bulging and discordant eyes are not properly set. To a twelve year old boy whose late uncle was a Spitfire pilot, he is nothing like a comic book war hero.

The corridor leads into a small parlour which interrupts the route to the kitchen, the bathroom and the back yard beyond. There is a small, shabby sofa against one wall, and against the other, beneath a brick wall-facing window, a table with three chairs around it. Stan sits at one of these — the one facing the passage — hunched over a bowl of food. It is this food (some kind of pickled cabbage) which generates the all-pervading smell. Almost impervious to the presence of the family of three now standing in his parlour, Stan clears his throat with an explosive guttural sound and spits onto the linoleum.

As if we weren’t there.

~

Money had brought them to Stan’s house on Parham Road. Both its general absence and — more significantly — the inability to hold on to it even when there was some to be had. It was a recurring theme. Even for a boy of twelve, there was an understanding of the cycle, and of the consequences: looking forward to Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays because those were the days of scones and steak and ice cream, before the week spiralled downwards into instant mashed potatoes, sliced white bread, and sometimes little else.

Time and again they had been unable to handle the mercurial and slippery coinage of the realm, and eviction from a ninth floor council flat overlooking the sometimes bustling and always hypnotic harbour could be blamed on nothing other than that. Even though still a pre-teen, the boy knew there was more to their predicament than a simple absence of cash. He was aware how it arrived and how it left the house — and how, almost inevitably, it failed to come back. It often galloped away on a Saturday, turned into bookmakers’ profits via silk-clad men riding three-legged horses, or was stolen by a golden-voiced Siren who stood on a garish ex-cinema stage and predicted the future through ninety coloured and numbered ping-pong balls.

When people think about homelessness, they instinctively resurrect newsreel images of cardboard cities under railway arches or along London’s South bank. Some assume there are no real victims as these are merely people who have brought destitution upon themselves by running away from something — home perhaps, or responsibility — or who have raced to embrace something unsavoury, like drink or drugs. Homelessness has a stigma about it; a social phenomenon which can only be mitigated by charitable works or ineffective government policies. People miss the invisible and insidious side of this all too human condition. They cannot see — whether by choice or not — the other often hidden causes of being domestically nomadic, and the effect such a plague can have.

~

A little while later I was able to withdraw from the episode; withdraw sufficiently to respond to a creative writing assignment in second-year English with a poem of simple diction and meter that told the story of “Stan, Stan the Crackpot Man”. It made people laugh, though I’m not sure how many of them knew it was in fact a slim abstraction of reality. In any event, for the majority in a class of thirty-odd twelve-year-olds attending a middle-class school, reality was something unlikely to hit them for a while yet.

The poem told the story of how, one day, Stan’s marbles finally fell out of his bag. The police — who were probably still at the house when we arrived back on the evening concerned (I can’t recall) — had been called by a neighbour when they heard Stan going at the gas and electric meters (money again!) with something akin to a crowbar. Whether or not he let the officers in or they broke down the door, very soon they were chasing Stan through the house and out into the back garden where — amazingly defying his limp, hump and divergent eyes — he managed to throw himself over the next two or three garden walls (all six feet of them!) before being finally grounded.

Without Stan being there it was clear that we could not return to the house. Once again the nomadic life twisted the knife. How long had we been there? I simply cannot remember. It wasn’t months; and probably not days either. Perhaps a couple of weeks. One could delve to find out. But that would, to a certain extent, turn a voyage of self-rediscovery into a research project.

~

He wasn’t sure whether that was a good beginning or not; starting with Stan, that is. The words were fine as far as words went, but in terms of pace, rhythm, narrative, was Stan the best way ‘in’? “Might just as well start there as anywhere else” he said to himself, even if he didn’t quite believe it. Amongst the many lessons he had learned over the years, he knew that where one started the story mattered — not so much to him, the writer, but to the reader. Experience told him that one needed to offer something up from the get-go. More than a hook, you needed to be posing questions that the rest of the book would then be obliged to answer; that was the contract you made with the reader. And you never gave the game away on page one! So (and here he was re-reading the passage about Stan again) what exactly had he offered up in those first thirteen hundred words?

Introduction to a boy, and one who (and this he hopes the reader might instantly assume) will be the hero of the narrative — even if ‘hero’ is far from being the mot juste. He has laid out an episode, a snapshot, an incident which is representative of circumstance. More than representative; if truth is anything it is surely that? All well and good. But the beginning needs to be more than a simple retelling; it must hint at other doors to be opened, or — with some doors already gaping — ones which await the reader’s walking through. Money, for example; what’s the story there? And the bookies and bingo? And if the boy is twelve, what went on before and what was to follow? There may be a clue there too, of course: the English lesson, the poem; the ability to take something — a traumatic, tragic, poetic, funny event — and turn it into something else.

That may be the biggest take-away, even if the reader might not yet realise it. Even if… But then he knew he was getting ahead of himself. It would be all too easy to rush on, to let the cat out of the proverbial bag. How not to do so, that’s the question he needed to ask himself. So, rather than move forward, perhaps the thing to do was to move backwards, to surface even more questions and — some of these being of lesser importance — to offer an answer or two as well.

There is enough experience in his locker for him to press on, to understand instinctively what should follow; after all, hasn’t he crafted a real version of himself who does just that? Isn’t being someone who is able to put one word in front of another — and not just any word but the mot juste! — how he wishes to be known? He has worked at it for long enough, crafted enough words (maybe more than a million!) to have passed his apprenticeship, at least in his own mind.

Did he sigh as he opened the ‘Finder’ on his computer and scanned through the tree it presented, drilled down to locate folder he needed, the files which awaited within that.

~

The story really begins towards the end of the 1950s. Or at least that part of the story in which there is his direct involvement, some real ‘skin in the game’. There can be a temptation to go back further, perhaps to great grand-parents and a lineage which can boast a tenuous link to Henry VIII; or somehow sideways to that great Uncle who, for many years, was thought to be living dis-proof of Darwin’s theory of evolution: “How could Natural Selection have led to Uncle Bernard?!”

Romance and family folklore inevitably colour the past, can make its retelling something of a minefield. Is it sufficient to unload popular familial myths and make a run for it, or should there be interpretation, a gloss on past events provided by the experience of the decades which followed them? And what of secrets — for there are some. Confidences told, sworn to, never to be divulged. But we are in danger of straying from the path and encroaching upon the green grass of truth. “Do not step on the grass” are signs that were obeyed in a more idyllic, less belligerent time.

~

He was instantly unsure about this too, and especially the second paragraph. The first was okay as far as it went: general, vaguely amusing. But the second? Theoretical? Opinionated?

Inserting himself into his work — sharing his beliefs, his bias — had been something he had tried to eradicate. And now this. He checked the date on the file, tried to locate when he had written it. Was it before or after the piece about Stan — and did it matter either way? It was a long time ago for sure; a time when he had tried to make a start. And now here he was again.

Another sigh. To push on was the only option.

~

When Mother met Father she disliked him immediately. Whilst he went home to boast to his family that he had met the woman he was gong to marry, she was trying to decide how to get out of the date he had finally bludgeoned her into accepting. She found a way in the end — by simply not turning up. He waited two hours before calling it a day. (The story has been mutually corroborated, so must surely be true.) Somehow, despite the warnings (on both sides perhaps) he didn’t surrender — and, at some point, she did. They were married in 1957. If only his horse racing predictions on Saturday afternoons since the 60s had been as accurate…

Prior to their marriage she was found to be seriously ill and needed major surgery. The result? She was told that she could never have children. They had both come from large families — he the youngest of ten, she the youngest of six — and he had openly talked of his ambitions for their family to come. Ruined by the scalpel, those hopes must have seemed a sterile as the hospital ward he visited when she told him the news. Removing the engagement ring from her finger, she offered him a way out; unable to fulfil his dream and extend the dynasty, it was without doubt an honourable gesture. Equally moving must have been his replacing of the ring. The stuff of Hollywood. Perhaps for the only time.

Although there was neither a daft Uncle Bernard nor a trail back to Henry and one of his many Annes, on her side she could boast of an over-tall Canadian man who married an over-short Scottish lass. It didn’t signify much; perhaps the only possibility of noble lineage was through the Moncrieffs. No-one ever bothered to find out. It was a match made from two feet of inequality and captured forever in a black-and-white photograph long since lost. And what of history on his side? Apparently nothing of merit. “Salt of the earth” might have been the most kind epithet to apply.

Post-hospital and post-marriage, and facing into this familial and gynaecological cul-de-sac, came the news that she was suddenly pregnant. Against all the odds and the impossibility of this furtherance of evolution, “life had found a way”; and in mid-1958, from the culmination of what must have been fraught, tense and difficult months, the single — and not surprisingly only — offspring of this particular union emerged. Father, away with the Merchant Navy at the time, was sent for and returned via land, sea and air from the east coast of Africa (Mombassa and Nairobi were just fairy story names until they became real places some forty years later). It proved to be a fleeting visit home until he was called away again, this time to the Far East and Australia; having missed the pain of childbirth, he then missed the pain of teething. Although the second return, when it came, signalled both the end of one thing and the beginning of something perhaps less bountiful, his was a travelling which may have offered some kind of legend (and, who’s to say, perhaps an inspiration?) to his offspring.

For a sensitive soul who would eventually find the most rewarding companionship of his young life being alone, viewing oneself as the product of a miracle weighed heavily at times. Do all children feel that they are Jesus reincarnated? How common is that sense of a ‘special relationship’ with God? Or of knowing that one must be, without question, a ‘special being’? Perhaps such self-elevation was a blessing, instilling a sense of being fundamentally unique or chosen. Perhaps it helped to ensure that, as time passed, the son would rise above the ‘salt of the earth’ epithet, hopefully to make a difference, to make a mark, to achieve something.

During the first twenty four hours of this new life, Mother and child were kept apart. It was not a perfect system in those days; mistakes were occasionally made; confusion and error are bedfellows of the human condition. As our story unfolds, it might lead one to wonder if somewhere in the South of England there might not be an ageing couple who have never quite worked out why their son was such a disappointment.

~

It was another beginning. Perhaps the most logical; certainly the most chronologically appropriate. But was that enough?

Not that the sensation was new, but it occurred to him once again how much depended on the beginning chosen; how and where one started could do nothing other than influence how one finished, the trek made between A and Z. Yet whether he started with Stan — part-way through the story — or at the birth of our ‘hero’, what followed, the skeleton of the entire narrative, its events and timeframes, surely remain immutable. Well that’s what logic told him, but he suddenly found himself uncertain. Hadn’t all the hours he’d spent writing and rewriting taught him that much? The journey itself was one thing (and by this he meant the travels and travails of the protagonist) but the its depiction was something else entirely. What if he followed Stan with another episode, a little way further into the future, an escapade from a romantic adventure? Would that corrupt the timeline utterly, insert at least one more temporal gap to be back-filled at some point on future pages? It would be a perfectly valid approach, of course; and surely he could rely on his readers to keep track of what was going on, after all he had no choice but to put his trust in them one way or another. All his trust really. And irrespective of what came next (or first) — the logical beginning, an experience with love, or something else entirely — not only would the ‘what next?’ question repeatedly arise, but there was, lurking in the background, perhaps an even bigger one: where to stop? Or when to stop, come to that.

He scanned ahead to the document he had recently opened and was surprised to discover that chronology had been abandoned, come to an abrupt end with ‘their son was such a disappointment’. Although they were his words, originally and indisputably, once again he had chosen to segue into the nebulous and theoretical. He couldn’t remember why; nor could he understand how the link between musings on ‘truth’ and the potential of an inadvertent baby-swap in a hospital might have come about. Synapses playing games again; that was as good an excuse as any.

Well, let it see the light of day as it stands, he thought; for now at least. He always had the ability to go back, to delete or enhance; wasn’t that his right? It was his story after all — and in more senses than one.

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In the Tate Britain café, Millbank, London

Even the smallest sounds
ricochet from the walls like machine-gun fire,
and when a tray is dropped
you are tempted to dive beneath the table
to avoid the shrapnel.

Yet no-one moves.

Yes, heads turn,
not to survey the damage but to identify the guilty,
architect of a moment which punctuates conversations
old friends bearing up under the burden of tradition’s years
or between look-alike mother and daughter
the girl wearing her hair, her clothes 
as if strands of her dna
a pattern bleeding from generation to generation
like copycat eighteenth century portraiture.

In the corner, uniformed schoolgirls laugh,
pose for pouting selfies
which supersede hastily taken snaps of landscapes,
Jesus, or the Annunciation;
assignments fulfilled. 
And the table-less wander like refugees,
their trays held out before them in supplication
as if an offering, a votive,
cappuccino and carrot-cake on the order of service.

Subdued excitement coats all the revellers
like varnish haphazardly applied;
and returning to their chatter
the old friends, the mother and daughter
ignore the sweeping up of broken crockery,
await the next brushstroke that will add colour to their day.

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Following on from my visit to London in the Autumn, I have been using some of the paintings I saw at the Courtauld, National Gallery and elsewhere as ‘prompts’ for short pieces of fiction. The story below has been inspired by Paul Gauguin’s The Dream. [Please note: it is not intended to represent an exact descriptive replica of the image.]

In starting to build up a number of these pieces, I am hoping they will turn into a collection later in the year.

Like raindrops dripping from a leaf

When it is still like this you can be forgiven for perceiving an absence of sound. Untroubled by the slightest breath of wind, through the open doorway Mia and Sara could see — away across the fields — the distant ocean, and, coming from there like a heartbeat, the feint sounds of waves caressing the shore. But only if they chose to, for they are not looking in that direction. Almost back-to-back, Mia is staring at the blank wall opposite the open vista, Sara fixed on some other spot between the two. If they were to concentrate, they might also make out the buzz of an insect, or something rustling in the powdered earth layering the cavity beneath the house; and certainly they should hear even more clearly the shallow breathing coming from the small child cocooned in the crib in the corner of the room nearest Mia. Yet they do not look that way, even if they recently had. Perhaps they both watched the child slip into sleep, and — its breathing ever slower — allowed that rhythm to cancel out everything: external sounds, each other, even the child itself. So engrossed are they in their private thoughts they might as well be in the room alone. In some respects they are.

It is not that the general situation is new. The stillness — and under this oppressive heat too! — is common enough, usually presaging rain; and the shack itself, perched on a small incline at the very edge of the village, is infrequently given over to noise. When there is activity such as cooking or cleaning, yes; or when the child is crying because it is hungry or teething. These are episodes which not unnaturally puncture the day. But as the light begins to fade, as all three of them weary, then stillness and quiet descend again; and when the last of the light is almost gone, Sara will rise soundlessly and leave to go home, and Mia will glance at her daughter then prepare her own bed.

Yet there is something else in the air this evening, a novelty preoccupying them to the exclusion of everything else. Sara, dressed in a loose singlet and shorts, surreptitiously glances at her sister now and again, her eyes resting for a moment on the broad expanse of Mia’s back, a back completely exposed since she removed her t-shirt to feed the child over an hour ago. Dark and slightly mottled, if you glanced at it quickly you could be forgiven for thinking it was the back of a young man. Always the more robust of the two — as well as the eldest — Mia exudes a kind of calm strength; and although Sara is, at times, jealous of her sister’s physical presence, she remains grateful that she is the smaller and more slight of the two. The more feminine. And what are they thinking now, these two sisters, as they stare at alternate walls and fail to notice sounds, the fading light? It is as if they have been subsumed in the stillness, become part of it; as if, were they to move suddenly, the whole fabric of the hut, their world — even their own selves — might shatter into a million pieces. Could Mia be blamed for secretly wishing such an outcome?

“Have you heard the rumour?” Sara had asked just as Mia was laying the child to sleep.

“Rumour? What rumour’s that?”

“About Charles.”

Mia froze for a moment — just long enough for Sara to notice — then finished lightly tucking-in her daughter. She rocked back onto her haunches, her powerful thigh muscles suddenly impeccably defined. “Go on.”

“Someone told me he was leaving. Going away to the mainland.”

“That’s no rumour.”

“How long have you known?”

It would have been legitimate for Mia to ask her sister the same question, but she did not. “Since he told me.”

“Yesterday?”

“Today. This afternoon.”

Sara nodded then glanced out of the door, trying to imagine the mainland beyond the horizon. Although she had never ventured that far, she’d heard stories from those who had, tales of the weird and wonderful. Their island was small and primitive in comparison, their lives simple. What would Charles make of it there — or make of himself?

“Did he tell you why he was going?”

Mia looked at her sister then moved to sit cross-legged, thought about putting her t-shirt back on but left it resting in her lap. “What do they always say, these men? Work, opportunity, money.”

“Charles isn’t a stupid man.”

“Of course not.” How could he be, Mia wondered; or how could she think so given he was the father of her child? “But he knows someone there who has made him a promise, and so he must go; and in going, he has made me a promise too.”

“To do what? Come back?”

“To send money, things for the child.” Mia paused. “Men’s promises; they cascade like raindrops dripping from a leaf.” She settled herself at right angles to her sister in order to watch the baby for any tell-tale signs of restlessness.

“No other reason?” Sara’s voice came from over her shoulder.

“Should there be?”

And now there they sit, together but somehow apart. Mia knows Charles has a reputation; theirs is a compact island after all, small enough for all of the men to have a reputation of one sort or another. And some of the women too. It has long been the way of things that capable and ambitious men leave the island when they are in their late teens or early twenties, persuaded to the mainland by the need to escape — or lured there by thoughts of glory. A few have succeeded even if that success was achieved at a modest level. A mere sliver of those have made it to legend. Charles will do well enough, Mia thinks, but he has insufficient talent to lead him to greatness.

Often the men return to the island after a few years, some worn and broken. Most are failures of one sort or another. The result of all this coming and going is that distribution of the island’s male population is skewed: top- and bottom-heavy, a scarcity of good specimens in their middle years. And the women? Although she has said nothing, Mia can see Sara as being the type to make that same journey. She is pretty enough, lively enough; she can be wilful, even reckless at times. Usually those who make the same trek as the men never come back. Legend being an impossibility for them, they fade into obscurity. Or worse. Mia fears for her sister, worried she will make the same mistake as many have before.

And what does Sara think? Or what does she know?

Charles told her of his decision the previous day, ahead of Mia and just twenty-four hours after she had given him her own news. If she had been surprised that his resolution seemed so sudden, the fact that he had arrived at such a position did not; after all, his continuing to live on the island would eventually become untenable. Probably as soon as she started to show. Having made promises to her too, news of what he had told Mia merely confirmed what she had dreaded — not thought, but dreaded. What was it Mia said about promises? Sara has watched water running off the leaves of the trees often enough to know what she meant.

But Sara thinks she is different. As much as she loves Mia, when she looks at her sister she sees someone whose island roots are buried deep. Yes, this is in part due to their shared heritage, but it is also a reflection on Mia herself. To Sara’s mind she is devoid of ambition, and in her solidity what would Mia be able to offer anyone on the mainland? But she is not like that. Is she not younger, full of life? Doesn’t her prettiness and relative youth count for something? Although she has not told Charles this — nor does she know how she will break the news to Mia — Sara has already decided she will follow him. She will wait a few days, get her things together, then go. It would be imprudent to wait too long; if her news broke while still on the island then she would inevitably be compromised. She fears being tied to the place, to her sister, to their children.

So the sisters sit. One stares at the blank wall as if it represents her future, a symbol of her abandonment by the man who — for a short period of time at least — gave her life purpose. The other tries to project herself through the wall at which she looks, imagining what lays beyond it: the ocean, a city, another life.

In the corner of the room the baby sleeps on, blissfully unaware as to the nature of the world into which she has been born, and innocent of the decisions which will undoubtedly await her a few years hence.

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They have finally condescended to give me some paper. No pens of course, but rather soft-nibbed crayon-like implements which are just about adequate for the task in hand — even if I do need to keep sharpening the damn things. No knife to do that, but rather an especially-designed sharpener where the blade is tucked away out of harm’s reach. As if I would.

Gifted as reward for good behaviour, they made a big show of handing it all over; perhaps they expected trumpets to sound from somewhere, an alarum to acknowledge their benevolence — rather than what I had done (or not done) to deserve to be rewarded in such a way. Maybe both. Once upon a time I would have been happy with flowers.

What are you going to do? one of them asked, even though I didn’t have a vast range of options… Perhaps they expected me to regress to being a child, that age where houses are daubed as wonky squares with inadequate windows and doors, and where little stick-figures stand behind a picket fence or beneath an equally inaccurate tree. If so, that would represent such a massive misunderstanding on their part, not to mention culpable misdiagnosis.

Didn’t you used to write once? another chirped up. Their voice infused with the tone you might use to a child, a trace of both suggestion and praise; it was as if they were trying to remind me who I had once been. I imagined them reconstructing me as if I’d been a mathematician who had once solved complex equations but was now being encouraged to go back to one-plus-one to see what she might make of that. It was a semi-rhetorical question which obviously didn’t deserve an answer — especially not for them, and not in that moment. Let’s face it, even acknowledging ttheir vacuous enquiry would mean descending to their level, surrendering myself up to inadequate theories both of who I once was and who I now am — assuming those are two entirely different women.

So I said nothing. They left me alone in my room.

I am two entirely different people of course; that is, the person I am now is not the same person I was when I’d first been gifted crayons all those years ago, the child who scrawled uneven buildings, smiling parents, a happy family. Nor am I the same individual as the one compelled to write her first words — my first proper words — in an attempt to make sense of the world and what was being foist upon me. Deciphering inflictions and impositions I suppose. Yet I am also not the same person as the one I was a week ago, the one who could seemingly do nothing but wait for something to happen; the woman who existed before she had this paper which — already sullied — sits on the desk in front of her. I will be a changed individual tomorrow too, and not just because of the paper and crayons. We all will be. Don’t they see any of that? I know they’re looking for difference, but the difference they seek and label ‘progress’ is a kind of regression, a reversion back to an early incarnation of myself, as if that was a ‘better’ model. On occasion, mainly at mealtimes, I can’t avoid those other women who are clearly no more than a shell of their former selves, women who have been truly hollowed out by life; women assailed and assaulted by the everyday, and have been unable to cope with it; or, turned inside-out by confusion, have ended-up defending themselves in an entirely inappropriate way. Of course you never get to see those who have committed the most despicable misdemeanours; they never get to have lunch with us. I suspect they might not get paper and crayons either, though I could be wrong. Yet what if my gift is regarded as some kind of therapy? If that is the case then I will have been wrong about it being reward or recognition. It might just be a con.

Putting that aside, I know — even if they do not — all that theorising’s irrelevant. I’ve already moved on, instinctively understanding it’s what one does with the paper and crayons that counts. That’s the voice of experience talking!

So no wonky houses for me, nor brightly decorated paper aeroplanes I could take outside and fly in the garden (now there’s a thought!) but writing. Didn’t you used to write once? Yes, and only for ever. And little do they know that, even without paper and pen (or these bizarre pencil-crayons), I have continued to do so, curating little vignettes, as yet unconnected phrases bouncing around inside my head awaiting the moment when I can set them free. But now that moment’s here I can see — as if for the first time — it is filled with jeopardy; jeopardy borne not merely in the two key questions my new materials so blatantly pose, but in how those questions might be answered. It has always been thus.

When they leave me alone with my treasure I can do nothing other than stare at the whiteness of the paper, the rounded points on the crayons, and try to imagine what will happen when I bring the two of them together. That first mark. Always the tyranny of the first mark.

I stand and walk to the window, look out on the garden — not for inspiration (I have never been that interested in nature) but rather in an attempt to clear my mind, to allow those two critical questions to present themselves front-and-centre. And even though I am somewhat out of practice — after all, how long have I been in this room, stared out onto that garden? — they accost me at a trot, then pause, waiting for my hands on their reins.

What am I going to write about? What format is my writing going to take?

The first yields readily. I will write about my life; I will write about this place, how I came to be here, fragments from my history. It will be both a record of fact and an attempt to unravel, to understand. In the long run it may even prove to be ‘therapy’, who knows? Maybe they do. Perhaps I will create paragraphs and sentences which will successfully decode everything, free the locks on the doors, the garden gates, the barriers at the end of the drive. Even if only metaphorically, that would be a triumph of sorts.

There is little else I can do when all’s said and done; I am my only frame of reference. But how to unravel things and then sew them back together? That is a question far beyond their comprehension.

Once upon a time (and there I go again, back into childhood; they would be so proud!) I used to juggle with ideas, notions, theories; I would invent themes, characters, incidents, and then knit them together… Think about knitting (which I never mastered by the way, not the woollen variety): you start with yarn, needles and a pattern; you create stitches, follow instruction; gradually the garment grows, shaped by the pattern however flawed your execution of it. That was how I used to write; it was akin to knitting. But now? Almost irrelevant as now I fear I lack the luxury of time. They gave me paper and crayons so recently; who’s to say they won’t take them away tomorrow, or next week? I cannot waste a moment. So not only does this imperative disqualify my old process, by implication it also prevents me from conjuring up a comprehensive new fiction — and by ‘comprehensive’ I mean one which adheres to pattern, is cohesive, flawless. Worse than that, it is not only time which is the constraint; there is something more pressing: the place, this room, my history; all the combined circumstances which have resulted in some anonymous individuals presenting me with paper and crayons in the first place. Would deconstructing all that not be story enough?

But how to begin?

Outside of the norm, surely — for are my circumstances not ‘unconventional’? It’s true that I could shoehorn myself into a “Once upon a time”, but that seems too simplistic, too inadequate — and I risk taking too long to get to the heart of things. So if not that — and if nothing can be planned in detail because of what tomorrow might bring — what then? Do I just write one single trigger word and allow instinct to take over? I have never been able to be that free-spirited, impulsive, in spite of what their official records may or may not say…

Needing a first word — one always needs a first word! — I have therefore curated a simple list, words which feel as if they belong, as if they will open doors and relieve me of the burden of choosing (instinctively or otherwise). And I have written them down, each word on its own scrap of paper; and I have found a small bag in which to secure these scraps and from which the words will be drawn, one by one, each word a lit fuse for a segment of my knowledge, my experience, my history — hopefully until they are all spent, vanquished.

And why not this way? Surely it’s a method as valid as any other, even if I don’t know what I will have at the end of it? These blameless words will be the keys unlocking what needs to be unlocked — which, in the end, sounds dangerously like analysis does it not?

Even so, it is not without trepidation that I put my hand in the bag and withdraw…

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One of the most well-loved writing prompts is where each member of a group chooses a single word and then everyone in the group has to write something — poetry or prose — including all the words chosen.

At the new Louth Library writing group I’m running, this was chosen by the group’s members as our first exercise in order to ‘ease us in’. It is a prompt which — given its constraints — I suspect rarely leads to high-quality output; so a bit of ‘fluff’ really.

Here are the seven words offered up — and my response to them:

• Autumn

• But

• Derision

• Chimney

• Spiral

• Effervescence

• Squirrel

~

One of our number claims that waiting for James to walk back through the front door of the club is like waiting to discover who the new Pope is; the news presaged in the white smoke from the chimney, if you recall. Perhaps for a few of us that is the case, but what I think we did originally agree on was the folly of the notion — not that it was unusual for his plans to be met with derision. We’d thought him a little unhinged and eccentric since we’d all met at school. ‘Nuts’ is, I believe, the schoolboys’ chosen colloquial expression, hence his nickname of ‘Squirrel’. But this new idea of his was something in the extreme! And to undertake it at the end of Autumn too! We imagined him missing connections early on, one delay leading to another, a spiral of lost time — time he didn’t have. But then the telegrams started to arrive, missives filled with excitement, his typical effervescence: a near thing here, a close call there. And all the while making progress, progress.

Incredulous of course, yet here we are waiting for him. In spite of our initial reservations — and irrespective as to how we’ve wagered — to a man we’ll be happy to see him achieve his goal of travelling around the world in eighty days.

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At the beginning of June when I wondered what I was going to do with the 38k words of an unfinished novel I had filed away — little did I realise that around six weeks later it would have turned into a 90k-word completed first draft!

As it turns out, I also could have had no idea how getting to ‘the end’ (or ‘the end of the beginning’!) would invigorate me to look at my back-catalogue of part-finished work, the invigoration coming from the knowledge that I’d proven I could pick up something previously discarded and — assuming the basic foundations are sound — see it through to completion.

So, in addition to anticipating the many editing cycles of that 90k draft, what are “reasons to be cheerful”…? [And thanks to Ian Drury and the Blockheads for the providing the so-apt title for this post!]

“One”: The potential to follow the same route as above with another incomplete novel (oddly, also stalled at 38k words). Begun in 2019, this one is set in France and has the potential to be ‘commercial’ as well as literary. I’ve already started the re-editing of the 38k to see if the narrative ‘has legs’.

“Two”: Another novel, though this time with far less of it drafted. Just the opening really. But it could also be highly commercial — not that that’s a reason for doing anything when it comes to writing! Over the coming weeks I’ll revisit the premise, the plot-lines & characters already worked up, to see how attractive resuming drafting might be…

“Three”: A project in a similar state to “Two” in terms of plot & character sketching and words written. Again commercial, and again needing reassessment (though I’m less convinced about this one).

Actually there is also a “Four” on my list: thirty or so short stories that could easily be packaged up into a collection. However at this point I am using them as submissions to magazines and competitions — which seems to be working given six (or 20%) have already been accepted for publication or were shortlisted in competitions. I think the collection will be a 2026 event.

My latest collection (2024):

So, reasons to be cheerful? I think so…

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Here’s an extract from early on in a novel I’ve been working on intermittently for a number of years. I’ve just skim-edited the 38k* words I already have drafted, and now need to decide whether it’s worth pushing on. The whole thing is mapped out to the very end, probably another 50k…

*update: I’ve added a further 5k since I drafted this post

Theo

“I don’t believe in making decisions based solely on words written on pieces of A4 paper,” Eleanor says, glancing down at the two sheets stapled together and resting on the desk in front of her. “Anyone could have written this. No offence.”

No matter what she may say, the evidence that she has read the CV is indisputable. Here and there his original document is annotated in a somewhat exaggerated cursive script, and in one or two places the odd question mark stands alone in the margin. Unable to read her writing upside down, inevitably the question marks are what Theo focusses on as he attempts to decipher to which sentence in his relatively slim professional history they might apply. He understands that in some cases it may be hard to provide plausible clarification.

“Quite,” he says. “You don’t employ a CV do you?”

He wants to strike the right kind of tone in his response, a light blend of wisdom and experience allied with something vaguely conspiratorial, as if doing so will demonstrate he is on her side.

Successful or not, she lets his comment pass.

“Still, if we must…” Accompanied by a clearly insincere smile, she lifts the thin document from the table with her left hand. It is a hand adorned with rings on three of its four fingers — though not the third. Even if doing so tells you very little these days, it is the ring-finger to which men look first, as if doing so is an undeniable part of their genetic make-up, an irresistible attribute of the male chromosome.

Theo shifts in his chair. Convention dictates that she will either ask him to walk her through what she has in front of her — an opportunity for him to replay his history verbally, semi-spontaneously — or she will plunge straight in with her questions. He’d once been interviewed by a man who’d spent the entire hour lauding his own background, resulting in Theo leaving the building thinking he knew more about his erstwhile interviewer than he did about himself.

“What does the ‘J’ stand for?”

It is an unexpected beginning. Theo wonders if this might be a mark of the woman. Could he work for someone who went off-script so early in proceedings? He’d been impressed enough to this point. Eleanor is sharply dressed, in her mid-forties, slightly over-made-up for his taste, but confident enough in how she looks to know she could pass for younger. Perhaps self-confidence is her defining characteristic.

She flashes a more genuine smile, and Theo can only assume that she has already attempted to guess his middle name. Had he been inclined to be unconventional himself he might have asked her to spin the bottle: “I’ll give you three guesses…”

“Jarrow, believe it or not.” He registers the surprise on her face. Such a reaction is not uncommon. “It was where my parents met.”

“Good job it hadn’t been Welwyn Garden City.” She laughs at her own joke.

As does he, though more from a sense of duty than genuine amusement. He has heard them all before. His own favourites are ‘Gala’, ‘Hawick’, and ‘Royal Leamington Spa’. The first two hinted at a somewhat nomadic Celtic history; the latter — arrived at during a drunken night-out with friends — suggesting parents with a wild sense of humour who knew they would end up hating their only son and so wanted to get their revenge in early. ‘Theodore Royal Leamington Spa Baskind’. The name he eventually ended up with has always seemed the lesser of so many other evils.

“Theodore Jarrow,” Eleanor says aloud. “Unusual. Probably unique. Almost refined.”

Even if he has never considered his name refined, her use of the word ‘almost’ unravels the prospect somewhat. Not that he is unduly perturbed by her statement; he has been ‘almost’ lots of things in his life thus far. Theo inclines his head in such a way as to convey the message that the subject has run its course.

“I can see why you’ve settled on ‘Theo J.’.” Eleanor returns her gaze to the CV. “So, Theo J., take me back to school.”

Determined to follow her lead, he attempts to relax into his life history. Throughout an only child’s vanilla upbringing he had shown hints of artistic ability, though when prodded and poked at school the skill he possessed proved to be the thinnest of veneers layered upon a merely average boy. Although disappointingly fragile, nevertheless it had proven sufficient to see him accepted onto an Art A-level class, and later — via clearing — onto a combined English and Art History degree.

“Why clearing”, Eleanor demands. “There can be several reasons of course, though few of them are favourable.” It sounds mid-way between threat and challenge.

“I aimed too high,” he said, not wanting to be dismissed so easily, and attempting to push himself off from the back foot onto which her question had forced him.

“In what way?”

“I wanted to study English as a single subject and only applied to Russell Group universities.”

“So no ‘insurance choice’ then — which is, I think, what they call it?”

Theo shakes his head, unable to deny the potential ‘black mark’.

“When my results came in it turned out they weren’t good enough for any of the five universities I’d nominated.”

“And why was that? Not bright enough? Didn’t apply yourself? Bad luck?”

The way she has articulated the latter choice warns Theo not to seek sanctuary there.

“I did poorly in the poetry paper; I could never get to grips with the Romantics. And there was this girl…”

“Ah.” Theo sees a flash of recognition in Eleanor’s eyes before her smile returns. “Undone by the romantic on two fronts then?”

It is a joke which warrants a smile rather than a laugh.

“I enjoyed the university course as it turned out — not the Romantics though! — and did well enough in the end. Afterwards, I fell into teaching. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and so taking a PGCE to teach English seemed a way to keep the momentum up.”

Eleanor’s index finger travels slowly down the sheet in front of her, a deliberate action designed to ensure she has Theo’s attention. She taps first one then another of her question marks.

“So teaching wasn’t for you then? I see you had just one year in the profession before leaving.”

“Yes, that’s right.” He juggles some pre-prepared phrases in his head. “You only really know about a job — especially a vocational one like teaching — once you’ve given it a go, don’t you think? While the PGCE year was okay, once into the real thing it didn’t take me long to know that teaching wasn’t for me; not for the long haul. In the staff room you could differentiate between those who were born for it, and those who’d merely settled for it. I was determined not to become one of the latter.”

“Hmmm.” Her pensive hum is somewhat exaggerated as she contemplates his CV once again. “Then you went to work in a museum for, what, six years; and then became an Assistant Manager in a Theatre. Not exactly the same field. Were you still searching for your vocation?”

“Partly, I suppose.” Having successfully crossed the minefield of a tumultuous year’s teaching, Theo relaxes into honesty. “I discovered that I wanted to work in the arts somewhere. Although I hadn’t been an academic mega-star I enjoyed Art and English, and through my teaching experience found out I wasn’t too shabby in terms of interacting with people. Working at the museum ticked a lot of boxes; in a way it was like continuing my education and being paid for it at the same time.”

“And the theatre?”

“Perhaps a misplaced belief that I needed to get into ‘management’. I’d just turned thirty; I assumed I needed to show some ambition.”

“And?”

“It was going well enough,” Theo tries to strike a tone in order to suggest that, although he could have carried on doing the job had the theatre not closed, it hadn’t been perfect for him. He is well aware that the post Eleanor has on offer is not a management one, and so doesn’t want to put her off by giving her the notion that he has ideas above his station. And in any event, he has a trump card. “And then Covid hit. We all know what happened to theatres over the last two years or so. Ours capitulated quite quickly.”

“That one I will allow you to claim as bad luck!” Eleanor smiles again, glances back to his CV, then turns it face down in front of her. “Let me tell you what I’m looking for here…”

Thirty-five minutes later he is on the pavement outside the Kingfisher Gallery getting his bearings. It is not a part of town he knows particularly well. He had made sure he visited the Kingfisher in the week running up to his interview — though whether or not this has stood him in good stead he will only find out when Eleanor rings him to deliver her verdict. The gallery is housed in a small unassuming Edwardian square not that far from the railway station but on the wrong side of the tracks from Theo’s perspective. His modest semi is about a mile in the other direction, the theatre between it and the main shopping streets. This is a run-of-the-mill provincial town always striving to punch above its weight but lacking the ‘killer attraction’ to elevate it above its nearest neighbours. Turning the Kingfisher Gallery into such a venue had been part of Eleanor’s pitch, trying to sell the job to him once he had finished trying to sell himself to her.

Feeling suddenly parched, Theo acknowledges the need for coffee, something to accompany him on his walk back across town. Near the theatre his choice of café was plentiful enough, even if the establishments were merely cookie-cutter instances of national chains. Not that he has anything against Starbuck’s, Nero’s or Costa; at least you know what you are going to get when you place your order. If he were to think further on the same theme, he might make a similar observation about the entire High Street: incarnations of national brands with their all too familiar signage, layout, even smell. He read somewhere that some stores deliberately percolate their premises with their ‘brand perfume’ so that, as soon as you walk through the door, knowing where you are is confirmed by your nose.

Turning a corner, any further rumination on the subject is halted by the sudden appearance of a small bistro-style independent café, ‘The Extra Shot’. Standing back from the road a little, it has made the most of the available pavement space by having three sets of tables and chairs set outside, the whole fenced off by small purple-and-yellow barriers and shaded by a striped awning of the same pattern. Drawn as much by his thirst as the café’s branding, Theo walks between the tables (one of which is occupied by two men, both around his age) and enters. Pausing for a moment inside the door, he sniffs the air. He registers nothing but coffee — which is as good a first impression as it is possible for ‘The Extra Shot’ to make.

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Autumn Announced

The door pulled open.
A sharp blast of cold air
the house breathes in.

The bird-feeder’s water tray
teetered toward frozen;
the seed-stack almost emptied
in yesterday’s frenzy
as if they knew what was coming

the chaffinches
the sparrows

as if they knew what was coming.
In yesterday’s frenzy
the seed-stack almost emptied;
teetered toward frozen
the bird-feeder’s water tray.

The house breathes in
a sharp blast of cold air;
the door pulled open;
autumn announced.

© Ian Gouge, 2024

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I have always been a fan of Found Poetry. Although I produce it less often than I used to, I still enjoy some of the wonderful poems it can produce. It’s also interesting that, because you don’t start with your own words and are not ‘bound’ to them, you can find yourself somehow freed to play a little more with the formatting of a piece — and I don’t mean in the sense of succumbing to gimmickry.

What is Found Poetry?

• “a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning” - Wikipedia

• “Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage… A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions.” - poets.org

The example below is based on ‘Borneo’s Vast Underworld’ by Neil Shea from National Geographic, March 2019.

I include both a ‘standard’ free verse layout as well as a prose poem format. The words are identical — though it’s interesting how the piece reads slightly differently depending on how the words are laid out…

The Labyrinth  Torch-beams dissolve in the void. In the seam between daylight and darkness, the immensity we’d discovered: gleaming pillars the colour of old bone, caverns lined with turbulent rivers, water at rest in limpid basins; and in a sudden deluge of life, the whir of innumerable insects, bats streaming like smoke out from the cave and into the sky.

and

The Labyrinth  Torch-beams dissolve in the void. In the seam between daylight and darkness, the immensity we’d discovered: gleaming pillars the colour of old bone, caverns lined with turbulent rivers, water at rest in limpid basins; and in a sudden deluge of life, the whir of innumerable insects, bats streaming like smoke out from the cave and into the sky.

I still can’t decide which I prefer!

Found Poetry isn’t for everyone of course, and in some senses it might be regarded as ‘cheating’ — but writing Found Poetry can be a great tool to uncover the joy of manipulating words, an exercise in learning how to edit dispassionately given you are freed from the shackles of being emotionally attached to your first draft.

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Vox humana

listen

carried on the wind
whispered in the reeds
echoed in the chambers of the heart
or carried in the spaces between octaves

a voice

more than vehicles
		        for translation
		        interpretation
voices carry meaning
or portents

there is triumph and regret
anguish and joy
notes played on life’s harmonics
	        andante
	        lento
	        fortissimo

a plea
a shout
a wail added to the cacophony
				                the crescendo of all cries

context is in the orchestration
	a reverberating tremolo of pain
		undercutting the trumpeting of power
	voices drowned out by thundering bass

or later
or before
or elsewhere
the harmonies of celebration
		                	of larks ascending perhaps
are not requiems 
but birth or re-birth

eyes opened as valves might be
	                        		or organ stops
eyes opened to the potential of the journey
of what might be found or re-found
shared or re-shared

through or beyond a closed window
an unseen choir reaches for heaven
a clarion call wrapped in cello and oboe

yet it is more than music
this purity of voice

it is celebration
a demand
to be heard

Thank you for reading Writing until the light goes out. Please feel free to leave a comment, share this article, or subscribe - for free!

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You can read the first section here:

One (continued)

Finding West Beach proved easy enough. Deciding to forego the museum for a little while, he walked to the entrance of the car park and then headed in a direction that seemed to be generally downhill. There was a convenience store at the next junction. It was a run-down place. Two of the letters had fallen off the store’s name so the word didn’t make sense — it said “Co n r” rather than “Corner”. It might have been his own surname, Connor, hiding there. An ancient-looking bubble-gum machine stood forlornly on the pavement, chained to the wall. It was empty. He stopped a woman who was just going inside to ask directions.

“West Beach?” she checked, looking at him slightly oddly from beneath a fraying wooly hat. It was hardly the time of year or the weather to be heading for the sea. She pointed into the near distance. “See those traffic lights? Left there and then follow the road. There’s a fork; the right-hand side takes you back into town, the left down to West Beach.” He struggled with the prospect of going back into town because as far as he could see he’d not actually been in it yet. Still, he thanked her and walked on.

The fork was about another two-hundred yards beyond the lights. If the right-hand turn did take you ‘back into town’ then it seemed a very uninspiring prospect; clumps of squat terraced houses and little else. The other fork turned gradually to the left before a bend almost at right angles, after which the road dropped down dramatically towards the beach and sea, both suddenly clearly visible. He wondered how he had been unable to glimpse the water from further up the hill, pausing for a moment to try and orient himself with the lights, the convenience store and the geography of the place. Instinct told him that its elevation should have permitted him at least a glimpse of the sea from back there — potentially from the Auction House carpark too. But it hadn’t, and there seemed no point in worrying about it now. As he walked quickly onwards, propelled by the gradient more than his own curiosity, he felt the keys in his right-hand trouser pocket, fingers gently playing with them.

When the road levelled out, it turned sharply left again and appeared to follow the track of the sea until the bay petered out. From here, the water looked sombre and uninviting, a dark grey filled with menace, the wind that chased itself towards him harsh and threatening. Across the narrow cracked pavement was a small area of coarsely tarmac’d ground and a roughly made ramp leading to it. Nearby, a two metre metal post, leaning slightly as if bracing itself against the wind, was adorned with a small weather-worn sign. ‘Private parking’ it said. He wondered who would want to park there, a forlorn spot on the edge of a meagre pebble beach that sloped a little too sharply down to the edge of the water — and to the pier.

If West Beach was uninspiring — a shallow and narrow rump of terrain as far from the traditional image of a seaside holiday spot as it was possible to get — the pier was completely the reverse. Turn the clock back forty years or more and it was easy to imagine it thronged with people, the air filled with laughter and shouts, children with inflatable balls, balloons and ice creams, adults walking arm-in-arm. A little way onto the beach, a broad sweep of pale stone-coloured concrete steps rose gradually in an arc leading to the entrance to the pier, elaborate and ornate ironwork housing two pairs of large gates which, from where he stood, he could see were chained closed. He juggled the keys in his pocket once again. After a little while, and as soon as the decking of their pier was high enough to be out of reach from the beach below, the tall fencing that adjoined the entrance gates gave way to a lower, more traditional kind of railing. His eyes traced along this, estimating the distance to the end of the construction. It was probably about a quarter of a mile. At its far end, a large building of uncertain depth stood proud and slightly disproportionate in relation to its surroundings. It had clearly been white or off-white once, and he could see traces of reds and blues and yellows, shadows of the past stealing through the flaking and peeling overcoat of drabness. Still intact, bold but tarnished lettering proclaimed ‘West Beach Pier’ above three sets of partly glazed doors painted a now-dull burgundy colour. It was bizarre to imagine that, for a mere pound, all this was his.

Strangely resonant, the pebbles crunched under his feet as he made his way to the foot of the steps. He glanced left and right before venturing further. The beach was deserted except for someone walking their dog the far distance. Close up, the concrete had something of a green tinge to the lower steps, residue from the occasional spring ebb tides, and which had not been swept clean in years. Here and there the edges of the treads had lost any semblance of their original clean lines, partially crumbled where they had been unable to offer any further resistance to the sea and the weather. It was only when he reached the top step and looked back down them that he began to wonder if they were entirely safe.

He rattled the pair of gates immediately before him, not because he expected them to open, but rather to hear the noise they made, the chain tensing and relaxing against them. Perhaps he had expected the exercise to tell him something about how solid or secure they were, as if doing so might act as a rudimentary MOT on the whole structure. Beyond the gates, the boards that made up the surface of the pier appeared solid enough, their uniform grey-brown colouring giving little away. He looked for any obvious gaps but could see none. Beyond the gates, the railings nearest him were intact. He had expected to see one or two flaws with either uprights or cross-members missing, but from his initial survey he could find none. They were unloved certainly, but did not appear deficient. He took a step back, wondering if there were any warning signs in place. Anticipating seeing something proclaiming danger as a result of the entire structure’s fragility, he found only one small notice attached to the gates themselves: ‘Private Property’ it said, then ‘Trespassers will be…’ — but the remainder of the lettering, which was not embossed, had long since vanished.

The thick chain that secured the gates was adorned with a heavy metal padlock. There was a sliding seal over the keyhole which moved to the side easily enough. He took the keys from his pocket and started comparing them with the lock; of the nine keys he had, each varying in scale, it was immediately obvious that the largest of them was the only contender for this particular job. He paid scant attention to the others. The big key slipped in without effort and, with a smoothness that surprised him, sprung the clasp. He checked his watch. All he had to do now was to free the chain and then he could simply walk through the gates and onto the pier. His pier. But it was getting late. Indeed, it was much later than he had anticipated, and glancing to the west, saw the sun already low in the sky. Turning the key clockwise, he re-engaged the lock. He would come back in the morning and leave his car in the ‘private parking’ space now undoubtedly reserved for him. There would be more time to explore the following day, and he could come better prepared, perhaps with a torch to enable him to investigate the main structure ahead of him which, he was certain, was bound to be without electricity.

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A few years ago I started work on a novel: The Man Who Bought a Pier. All planned out, I’d completed the first 10,000 words before the project came to a stop (though I can’t remember exactly why). In my recent trawl through past lives, I have resurrected the opening again to see if it might yet have ‘possibilities’.

The story is magic realism, a genre I have worked in once before: my comic novel The Big Frog Theory (started in 1994 and eventually finished nearly twenty years later). It had been great fun to write, and consequently I’ve had a bit of a hankering to revisit the genre. Indeed, there was a sequel to Frog planned - Mita’s Shopping - but that didn’t get very far either... [Yes, I know; my writing life is littered with unfinished projects! (see Shrapnel from a Writing Life).]

Anyway, here is the draft opening of Pier… (there’s more, if anyone’s interested)

One

In the end, he was disappointed with how little of the interview they had shown on television. He had been there hours it seemed, take after take, facing simple questions to which he found himself giving detailed answers because he wanted them to understand. They seemed frustrated with him, expecting him to conform to the programme’s modus operandi rather than tell the truth. They wanted something short, punchy and sensationalist — after all it had been a consumable event of some merit from their perspective. He could see them thinking that if they covered it in the right way they might make the national news. But his story was far more complex than that.

His favourite quote they had, unforgivably, cut altogether.

“It’s not” he had said “about who is chosen and who is not. It’s more random than that. It’s about who happens to be there at one precise moment; at the point when it begins, and from which there is no going back.”

Even if they chose to ignore it, there was no way he could forget that moment; his moment.

Subsequently his friends had used various words when they found out what he had done, the circumstances of his purchase. Now he found himself wishing he had kept some kind of tally. ‘Amazing’ had been popular, along with similar terms all used to express wonder; after all, how many people had bought a seaside pier?! He filtered out memories of those who had said he’d been stupid, that he shouldn’t have been surprised at the outcome. Yet it wasn’t as if the pier had cost him vast sums of money. A pound. On the news he’d heard of whole companies changing hands for a pound, so why not a pier?

That it had been an accident was beyond question, even though he eventually distanced himself from that notion. His idea about being ‘chosen’ was not one that had come instantly to him; subsequent experience which led him to formulate the premise, and partially he did so out of necessity, to try and explain things away. Perhaps it was also a defence mechanism as much as anything else.

“I’d stumbled across this old building on the edge of a car park in a neglected part of town. I’d never been to ____ before, so had no idea what it was. The building, I mean. The front doors were open and so I went in, partly to shelter from the weather as it had just begun to rain. It was only a shower, but I thought I’d see it out under cover before heading for the museum and art gallery, which was why I was there in the first place. There were a few people milling about inside, either huddled in little groups or scattered amidst a range of tables, chairs, old wardrobes. Many of the tables were covered with crockery, cutlery, odd boxes of jumble most of which had seen better days. There were paintings and prints hanging on the walls, and as I adjusted to the scene I spotted other, more obscure things: a full-size stuffed black bear, for example. And then I heard a voice and the bang of a hammer. Or it might have been the hammer first and then the voice. Whichever way round, I knew then it was an auction house. Once I had that reference point to navigate by, I took in the whole room again. Suddenly all the junk and the clutter made sense; and all the furtive-looking people too. I wandered further in as the auctioneer introduced the next lot; watched the bidding; heard the hammer fall again. At some point someone gave me a laminated sheet of white card with a number printed on it: ‘427’. As I watched the next lot sell — a faded old three-piece suite — I understood what the number was for. I hadn’t asked for one, and didn’t need one. Or at least I didn’t think I did.

“It was a fascinating experience, just watching. You could tell the experienced auction-goers; the way they timed their first bid, how they delayed their responses. Often I’d imagine there would be no bid at all on something, and then just as you thought time was running out, wham!, they’d be in there with some ludicrously low offer. I was amazed how often the Auctioneer tried to start the bidding at, say, fifty pounds and then get no interest until he was scraping the barrel at five. Then suddenly everyone was in, and the thing would eventually sell for seventy or eighty. That didn’t make sense to me. And the bidders each had their own unique way of lodging their bids: the little flick of the brochure or their white card; a nod of the head; even a wink. Some were demonstrative, but most weren’t. It was if they were doing something illegal, something to be embarrassed about.

“The lot numbers rose rapidly. I’m sure they were in the three-hundreds when I walked in, but then suddenly they were in the four-twenties, creeping towards my number. I was intrigued to see what was on offer in lot four-two-seven.

“‘Lot four-hundred-and-twenty-seven,’ said the dapper Auctioneer, scanning he room as he did so. ‘A rather unusual item: the pier at West Beach. Built in eighteen-sixty-one, last used commercially in the seventies. In reasonably good repair, considering.’ He checked some notes on the lectern in front of him at this point. ‘Nothing on the book. My instruction is that it must sell. So, where shall we start? Ten thousand?’ There was a little ripple of laughter from my right. I turned but couldn’t see who it was. ‘A thousand? Five-hundred?’ As he gradually dropped the price I scanned the room, trying to guess who might be the first person to bid. ‘Two-hundred?’ No-one seemed interested. From the back of the room there was a clatter of crockery from the small galley kitchen serving tea and coffee. ‘Fifty pounds? Surely it’s worth fifty? Just to get us away.’ Still there was nothing. The place seemed suddenly quiet, eerily so, as if everyone was afraid of making noise or movement in case the Auctioneer saw it as a bid. There was palpable tension in the room. Thinking about it now, I recall how struck I had been by it. ‘Ten? Alright, five?’ He glanced down at his notes again as if he was checking something. When he looked up, he was staring straight at me. ‘If I must… One pound?’

“To this day I have no idea how I managed to bid. I don’t recall sneezing, or winking, or making any kind of movement that could possibly be interpreted as a bid. Maybe someone nudged me, I don’t know. But he suddenly said — still looking at me — ‘One pound bid. Do I hear two?’ Believe me, at that point no-one wanted to hear ‘two’ more than I did! But there was nothing but silence. Nine seconds of silence. I counted them. And then down came the hammer. Lot number four-hundred-and-twenty-seven, bought by the man holding card number four-hundred-and-twenty-seven. For one pound.

“Afterwards I tried to get out of it, saying there had been some kind of mistake, that I hadn’t meant to bid. But they weren’t having any of it. ‘Look at it this way,’ the Auctioneer said as he handed over a set of misshapen keys, ‘it’s only a pound; what’s the worst that can happen? If you want to, you can submit it in next month’s sale. You might even turn a tidy profit. Or even a little one.’ His laugh told me that he didn’t believe that at all, and perhaps he had reason not to. But there was nothing malicious in his face; in fact, it was almost the opposite. For an Auctioneer, he gave the impression of appearing exceptionally benevolent. I hadn’t thought much about Auctioneers at all until that afternoon, but would probably have seen them as shifty, out to make a quick buck. A bit like second-hand car salesmen. But Charles Thomas — that’s what his name badge said, as did the sign on the building outside — seemed entirely trustworthy. He wasn’t laughing because he had taken me to the cleaners (and all for a pound!), but because he thought the idea of manufacturing a profit from an old pier was mildly amusing. As if to prove his trustworthiness, when he took my pound he gave me a receipt to go with the keys. Then we were all ushered out of the hall. As I stood outside in the car park feeling profoundly alone, I heard the doors close behind me with a strange kind of finality. The illuminating lights behind the words ‘Charles Thomas’ flickered out.

“I felt a bit of a chump; an idiot who had just acquired a set of old keys and, almost certainly, some rotten, rusting, dangerous structure jutting out into the North Sea.”

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Portsmouth - 1958-1962

In the late 1950s Mombassa would have been a very rudimentary city. Subtracting fifty years’ development from when I went there myself, it’s the only possible conclusion. Working on the guns of a frigate as a trainee fitter and a civilian member of the Merchant Navy, my father had been posted away during those crucial months of 1958. I have no idea whether there would have been any discretion in the matter — or choice, come to that — but Mombassa, on the coast of Kenya, East Africa, was where the message found him when news broke about my imminent arrival.

It probably would have been cheaper for the Merchant Navy had they recognised he would be needed in England at the end of May and thus not sent him away in the first place. As it was, they ended up taking him from his ship, transporting him inland from Mombassa to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and then flying him back to London. From there, he travelled to Portsmouth. By the time he returned the drama was over, and Ian Gouge — unaware of both the trauma leading up to his birth and the journey home by his father — was lying in wait. [I thought twice about writing that phrase as it suggests something of menace, of a trap…]

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More than once we were technically homeless and had to be found ‘shelter’ by the local council. Taken from the draft of an embryonic memoir, what follows is true…

We should talk about Stan. Not because there was anything climactic about that short episode all those years ago, but because in its almost literary combination of humour, pathos — and even tragedy — there existed something approaching a microcosm of a lifetime’s experience.

Imagine, if you will, a nondescript street. Terraced houses with narrow bay windows and small fronts; not gardens, because their entrance doors were only separated by low walls and some four or five feet from the pavement. These were terraces facing each other expressionlessly across a road that went nowhere. We can call this road Parham Road, as that may have been it’s name; a cul-de-sac in a Victorian rather than a modern sense. A road long enough to suggest a journey along it would lead somewhere, but one which merely offered a single escape half-way — and that the escape to a similar and parallel cul-de-sac.

Parham Road was, in those days, framed by a garage and a working man’s club which sat between the entrance to the two dead ends, and a hardware store on its other corner that offered the unique smell of sawn timber; ranks of variously warped golden beams, standing in mutual support more or less upright in their many and various dimensions. The garage, long since gone, for years left a scarred and abandoned forecourt as some kind of testimony to progress — or if nothing else, to the march of the commercial imperative.

If you had been a reasonably travelled individual and stood in Parham Road then — and by then we mean the very early-70s — you could have been forgiven for feeling that you could have been almost anywhere in the country, for surely every town has roads leading nowhere.

Now imagine that you are standing on the threshold of a house in that same road. The door is open. Ahead is a long passage which just at that moment seems to lead nowhere too. It is a dark corridor. The door to the front sitting room, off to the left, is somehow invisible, and the only possible focus, the only hint of promise, comes from a vague light in the distance.

And then, taking that first step across the threshold, you become aware of other things, like the dark grey unenclosed pipework of the utility meters there above your head to the right. And then that smell. A smell that you had never encountered before. A smell that seemed to suck any hope from the walls and from the dim light towards which you now travelled.

And imagine that you are just twelve years old.

*

Stan is of indeterminate history — and with an unknowable and unpronounceable surname. Perhaps he is a relic of the war. He is older than my father, so the timeframe fits. Although I am certain that at the time there was no speculation on my part as to where he had originated — nor how he came to own that somehow sordid house on Parham Road — it might be possible to invent a history for him that is, shall we say, generous. Perhaps he found himself in England following his escape from the Nazis in Poland. Perhaps he was a Jew fleeing persecution. Perhaps — and here generosity really takes over — he was one of The Few who fought in the skies for Churchill. Was he injured as a consequence of his bravery (for Stan walks with a limp) and is this house somehow his reward for services rendered?

But Stan has a hump at the top of his back too. And his bulging and discordant eyes are not properly set. And to a twelve year old boy, he is nothing like a comic book war hero.

*

The corridor leads into a small parlour that interrupts the route to the kitchen, the bathroom and the back yard beyond. There is a small, shabby sofa against one wall, and against the other, beneath the window, a table with three chairs around it. Stan sits at one of these — the one facing the passage — hunched over a bowl of food. It is this food (which many years later I might place as being sauerkraut or some kind of pickled cabbage) that generates the all-pervading smell. Almost impervious to the presence of the family of three now standing in his parlour, Stan clears his throat with the explosive guttural sound now made art by professional footballers — and spits onto the linoleum.

As if we weren’t there.

*

Money had brought them to Stan’s house on Parham Road. Both the lack of it, and — more significantly — the inability to hold on to it even when there was some to be had. It was a recurrent theme; even for a boy of twelve, there was an understanding of the cycle, and of the consequences. Of looking forward to Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays because those were the days of scones and steak and ice cream, before the week spiralled downwards into mashed potatoes (instant), sliced white bread, and sometimes little else.

The parents had been unable to handle the mercurial and slippery coinage of the realm once again, and eviction from a ninth floor council flat overlooking the bustling and always hypnotic harbour could be blamed on nothing other than a misunderstanding of money. Even still a pre-teen, the boy knew that there was more to the predicament than a simple absence of cash. He was aware of how it left the house — and how almost inevitably it failed to come back. It often galloped away on a Saturday, turned into corporate profits via small silk-clad men racing three-legged horses — or stolen by a golden-voiced man who stood on a garish stage and predicted the future through ninety coloured and numbered ping-pong balls. “Kelly’s eye, number one!” “All the eights, two fat ladies!”

When people think about homelessness, they instinctively resurrect newsreel images of cardboard cities under railway arches or along London’s South bank. They suggest that there are no real victims, merely people who seem to have brought it on themselves by running away from something — home perhaps, or responsibility — or who have chosen to embrace drink or drugs. It has a stigma about it; homelessness is a social phenomenon, something to be addressed by political policies or charitable works. People miss the invisible and insidious side of this all too human condition. They cannot see — either by choice or not — the other causes of being domestically nomadic, and the effect such a plague can have.

*

A little while later I was able to withdraw from the episode; withdraw enough to respond to a creative writing assignment in second year English with a poem of simple diction and meter that told the story of “Stan, Stan the Crackpot Man”. It made people laugh, though I’m not sure how many of them knew it was an abstraction of reality. In any event, for the majority in a class of thirty-odd twelve year olds harsh reality is something that wouldn’t hit them for a while yet.

The poem told the story of how, one day, Stan’s marbles finally fell out of his bag. The police — who were probably still at the house when we arrived back that evening — had been called by a neighbour when they heard Stan going at the gas and electric meters with something akin to a crow bar. Whether or not he let them in or they broke down the door, very soon they were chasing Stan through the house and out into the back garden where, defying his limp, hump and divergent eyes, he managed to throw himself over the next two or three garden walls (all six feet of them!) before being finally grounded. Not quite escaping the Nazis, but perhaps a throw-back to that romantic past?

It was clear that we could not return to the house, and the council recognised we needed rescuing again. Once again the nomadic life twisted the knife.

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Somewhen early in the 2010s I had the notion that I might write a memoir. It seemed to me that my life to that point had been sufficiently varied and ‘different’ to the norm to warrant recording, though for whom I never really established. I was a writer after all - and I’d had a traumatic childhood, earned a degree, had three children, travelled to most parts of the world (excluding only South America and the poles), taught in West Africa… It was a catalogue augmented come the end of 2015 by being able to say that for a while I’d also lived in Basel and Singapore - and had a nervous breakdown in the latter.

Driven by some of that history, I created a list of all the countries I’d visited (though I only counted them if I’d actually slept there) and was amazed how long the list was. I also made a list of the houses/flats/rooms in which I’d lived in the UK, ‘permanently’ as it were. In both cases the lists contained more than thirty names.

Hardly ‘ordinary’.

And now I’ve written over thirty books of one flavour or another, and am trying to carve out a ‘second career’ doing the only thing I’ve ever really loved doing.

A few days ago I dug out the meagre beginnings of that memoir. I didn’t get very far with it; maybe I find my fictitious characters more interesting than myself. However, after just a little tidying up, I offer the opening section - “Ancient History” - here. It is intended, I suppose, to provide some kind of context to my work, to what drives me on. Perhaps I’m trying to explain where and how ‘the writing light’ was lit.

Maybe I’ll return to the project and try and complete more than the two sections already drafted.

In any event, this is how I came into being…

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a question of honesty

these he said are the facts
laid out just so      chronologically
because you know how much i like order

	as if regimentation makes all irrefutable
	precision suggesting sequence
	and not cold calculation

- i don’t believe you

and why is that

- my truth is different

	and so he takes away his words
	deconstructs them to see how they measure up
	whether they resonate as they should

	holds them up to the light
	checks for flaws as he would a precious gem
	or perhaps a crack in a cheap ikea glass

	do they hold truth 
	in the same way a glass should hold water

	then with a little shuffling
	he re-presents them
	flexing a little      adding nuance
	the benefit of looking at things
					                           slant
these are still the facts

- and this is still my truth

are you calling me a liar

	and he wonders about the nature of lies
	how words can be manipulated
	the same words in a different order
	become something else      another story
	facts stripped back to skeleton
	thigh bone no longer connected to hip bone

	or to any other bone come to that

	encased in glass
			cracked or otherwise
	as if it were a relic
	partly fractured
	dug-up by a student archaeologist
	on a field trip

this bone will become precious one day
the truth is always precious

- but that is not my truth and therefore it is a lie

	facts evaporate under a microscope
	if its lenses are looked through 
	with the eye that’s always closed

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“I don’t believe in making decisions based on words written on pieces of A4 paper,” Eleanor says, glancing down at the two sheets stapled together and resting on the desk in front of her. “Anyone could have written this. No offence.”

No matter what she may say, the evidence that she has read the CV is indisputable. Here and there his original document is annotated in a somewhat exaggerated cursive script, and in one or two places the odd question mark stands alone in the margin. Unable to read her handwriting upside down, inevitably the question marks are what Theo focusses on, attempting to decipher to which sentence in his relatively slim professional history they might apply. He recognises that in some cases it may be hard to provide plausible clarification.

“Quite,” he says. “You don’t employ a CV do you?”

He wants to strike the right kind of tone in his response, a light blend of wisdom and experience allied with something vaguely conspiratorial, as if doing so will demonstrate he is on her side.

Successful or not, she lets his comment pass.

“Still, if we must…” Accompanied by a clearly insincere smile, she lifts the thin document from the table with her left hand. It is a hand adorned with rings on three of its four fingers — though not the third. Even if doing so tells you very little these days, it is the ring-finger at which men look first, as if doing so is an undeniable part of their genetic make-up, an attribute of the male chromosome.

Theo shifts in his chair. Convention dictates that she will either ask him to walk her through what she has in front of her — an opportunity for him to replay this history verbally, semi-spontaneously — or she will plunge straight in with her questions. He’d once been interviewed by a man who’d spent the entire hour lauding his own background, resulting in Theo leaving the building thinking he knew more about his erstwhile interviewer than he did about himself.

“What does the ‘J’ stand for?”

It is an unexpected beginning. Theo wonders if this might be a mark of the woman. Could he work for someone who went off-script so early in proceedings? He’d been impressed enough to this point. Eleanor was sharply dressed, in her mid-forties, slightly over made-up for his taste, but confident enough in how she looks to know she could pass for younger. Perhaps self-confidence was her defining characteristic.

She flashes a more genuine smile, and Theo can only assume that she has already attempted to guess his middle name. Had he been inclined to be unconventional himself he might have asked her to spin the bottle: “I’ll give you three guesses…”

“Jarrow, believe it or not.” He registers the surprise on her face. Such a reaction is not uncommon. “It was where my parents met.”

“Good job it hadn’t been Welwyn Garden City.” She laughs at her own joke.

As did he, though more from a sense of duty than genuine amusement. He has heard them all before. His own favourites were ‘Gala’, ‘Hawick’, and ‘Royal Leamington Spa’. The first two hinted at a somewhat nomadic Celtic history; the latter — arrived at during a drunken night out with friends — suggesting parents with a wild sense of humour who knew they would end up hating their only son and so wanted to get their revenge in early. ‘Theodore Royal Leamington Spa Baskind’. The name he eventually ended up with has always seemed the lesser of so many other evils.

“Theodore Jarrow,” Eleanor says aloud. “Unusual. Probably unique. Almost refined.”

Even if he has never considered his name refined, her use of the word ‘almost’ unravels the prospect somewhat. Not that he is unduly perturbed by her statement; he has been ‘almost’ lots of things in his life thus far. Theo inclines his head in such a way as to convey the message that the subject has run its course.

“I can see why you’ve settled on ‘Theo J.’.” Eleanor returns her gaze to the CV. “So Theo J., take me back to school.”

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Determined to follow her lead, he attempts to relax into his life history. Throughout an only child’s vanilla upbringing he had shown hints of artistic ability, though when prodded and poked at school the skill he possessed proved to be the thinnest of veneers layered upon a merely average boy. Although disappointingly fragile, nevertheless it had proven sufficient disguise to see him accepted onto an Art A-level class, and later — via clearing — onto a combined English and Art History degree.

“Why clearing”, Eleanor demands. “There can be several reasons of course, though few of them favourable.” It sounds mid-way between threat and challenge.

“I aimed too high,” he said, not wanting to be dismissed so easily, and attempting to push himself off from the back foot onto which her question had forced him.

“In what way?”

“I wanted to study English as a single subject and only applied to Russell Group universities.”

“So no ‘insurance choice’ then — which is, I think, what they call it?”

Theo shakes his head, unable to deny the potential ‘black mark’.

“When my results came in it turned out they wouldn’t have been good enough for any of my five choices.”

“And why was that? Not bright enough? Didn’t apply yourself? Bad luck?”

The way she has articulated the latter choice warns Theo not to seek sanctuary there.

“I did poorly in the poetry paper — I never could get to grips with the Romantics. And there was this girl…”

“Ah.” Theo sees a flash of recognition cross Eleanor’s eyes before her smile returns. “Undone by the romantic on two fronts then?”

It is a joke which warrants a smile rather than a laugh.

“I enjoyed the university course as it turned out — not the Romantics though! — and did well enough in the end. Afterwards, I fell into teaching. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and so taking a PGCE to teach English seemed a way to keep the momentum up.”

Eleanor’s index finger travels slowly down the sheet in front of her, a deliberate action designed to ensure she has Theo’s attention. She taps first one then another of her question marks.

“So teaching wasn’t for you then? I see you had just one year in the profession before leaving.”

“Yes, that’s right.” He juggles some pre-prepared phrases in his head. “You only really know about a job — especially a vocational one like teaching — once you’ve given it a go, don’t you think? While the PGCE year was okay, once into the real thing it didn’t take me long to know that teaching wasn’t for me; not for the long haul. In the staff room you could differentiate between those who were born for it, and those who’d merely settled for it. I was determined not to become one of the latter.”

“Hmmm.” Her pensive hum is somewhat exaggerated as she contemplates his CV once again. “Then you went to work in a museum for, what, six years; and then became an Assistant Manager in a Theatre. Not exactly the same field. Were you still searching for your vocation?”

“Partly, I suppose.” Having successfully crossed the minefield of his year’s teaching, Theo relaxes into honesty. “I discovered that I wanted to work in the arts somewhere. Although I hadn’t been an academic mega-star I enjoyed Art and English, and through my teaching experience found out I wasn’t too shabby in terms of interacting with people. Working at the museum ticked a lot of boxes; in a way it was like continuing my education and being paid for it at the same time.”

“And the theatre?”

“Perhaps a misplaced belief that I needed to get into ‘management’. I’d just turned thirty; I assumed I needed to show some ambition.”

“And?”

“It was going well enough,” Theo tries to strike a tone to suggest that, although he could have carried on doing the job had the theatre not closed, it hadn’t been perfect for him. He is well aware that the post Eleanor has on offer is not a management one, and so doesn’t want to put her off by giving her the notion that he has ideas above his station. And in any event, he has a trump card. “And then Covid hit. We all know what happened to theatres over the last two years or so. Ours capitulated quite quickly.”

“That one I will allow you to claim as bad luck!” Eleanor smiles again, glances back to his CV, then turns it face down in front of her. “Let me tell you what I’m looking for here…”

Thirty-five minutes later he is on the pavement outside the Kingfisher Gallery getting his bearings. It is not a part of town he knows particularly well. He had made sure he visited the Kingfisher in the week running up to his interview — though whether or not this has stood him in good stead he will only find out when Eleanor rings him to deliver her verdict. The gallery is housed in a small unassuming Edwardian square not that far from the railway station but on the wrong side of the tracks from Theo’s perspective. His modest semi is about a mile in the other direction, the theatre between it and the main shopping streets. This is a run-of-the-mill provincial town always striving to punch above its weight but lacking the ‘killer attraction’ which might elevate it above its nearest neighbours. Turning the Kingfisher Gallery into such a venue had been part of Eleanor’s pitch, of trying to sell the job to him once he had finished trying to sell himself to her.

Feeling suddenly parched, Theo acknowledges the need for a coffee, something to accompany him on his walk back across town. Near the theatre his choice of café was plentiful enough, even if the establishments available were merely cookie-cutter instances of national chains. Not that he has anything against Starbuck’s, Nero’s or Costa; at least you know what you are going to get when you place your order. If he were to think further on the same theme, he might make a similar observation about the entire High Street: incarnations of national brands with their all too familiar signage, layout, even smell. He read somewhere that some stores deliberately percolate their premises with their ‘brand perfume’ so that, as soon as you walk through the door, knowing where you are is confirmed by your nose.

Turning a corner, any further rumination on the subject is halted by the sudden appearance of a small bistro-style independent café, ‘The Extra Shot’. Standing back from the road a little, it has made the most of the pavement space available by having three sets of tables and chairs set outside, the whole fenced off by a set of small purple-and-yellow barriers and shaded by a striped awning of the same pattern. Drawn as much by his thirst as the café’s branding, Theo walks between the tables (one of which is occupied by two men, both around his age) and enters. Pausing for a moment inside the door, he sniffs the air. He registers nothing but coffee — which is as good a first impression as it is possible for ‘The Extra Shot’ to make.

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I’m particularly interested to know what you think about this one…

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poems are sometimes like photographs

sketching a life in fragments
occasional impressionistic pieces
you hope might one day coalesce
to form something coherent

this was me you want to say

and then
to examine each piece in turn
identifying a place      a person
your mother’s third wedding-day
that uneventful holiday in Greece
the love of your life
	before the second love of your life
		(and so on)

but all too often you find the images blurred
their language letting you down
as if the autofocus was on the blink

either that
or you see the same thing depicted over and over again
like tourist shots of trees by a lakeside
a picture-postcard waterfall
the big hills still in the distance

was this me you end up asking

disappointed by your clumsiness with composition
your inability to sharpen edges      refine colours
you are wearied by the sameness of a life in monochrome

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