All Posts by Bill

The seeming fragmentation and accidental quality of living which I bang on about so frequently may be an illusion. I tend to treat isolated incidents as just that – separate, unrelated events with no causal links and no significance. But a chaffinch, two robins and a piece of wood suggest that I may be wrong.

Let’s start with the piece of wood. Some of you may have heard this from me before but it’s the story of the photo I use as my avatar. I started woodcarving classes when I was researching my novel The Figurehead  because I wanted to know what it felt like to carve an actual figurehead. I enjoyed it so much that I still go to classes. The avatar was based on a gargoyle that’s on one of the Oxford colleges and I hung it over my garage door. One weekend when I was away, someone came in, ripped it free from its bolts and took it away. That was a while ago but I still sort of hope that maybe someone will see the object itself somewhere and tell me on Facebook where it is. If it’s found, I’ll be petitioning to restore deportation for anyone who steals a sheep, a car or anything made of wood.

The second incident is linked to this theft because I liked the first carving so much that I tried to reproduce it. The second version wasn’t as good but it was OK enough to hang on a garden wall out of sight of thieves and marauders. So there’s a causal link between the two.

Incident number three, though, is (or seemed) self-contained. It occurred in May, 2010, when a chaffinch decided to throw himself against my window. In my old blog I described it thus:

I hear a small bang and there he is, still flying but bashing his beak against the glass. And he does it again and again. I’ve just been outside to take a photo of what he must see when he makes his assault. I took it from ground level because he always flies up from there for his attack, bashing against the pane at the very top. OK, I’m not a chaffinch, but I saw nothing there that would fool me into thinking it was a good place to nest, so what’s he doing it for?

Maybe the soul of a critic has transmigrated into his body and he hates writers. Maybe he’s practising some arcane act for the next Simon Cowell show – ‘Nature’s Got Talent’ or something. Maybe he’s a chaffinch philosopher and he’s just proving that life is an illusion and ultimate satisfaction is unattainable. Whatever it is, after all his clattering against the glass, he must go home every night and say to his wife ‘My beak’s killing me’.

In June the following year, he was back and, in another attempt to penetrate the mystery, my speculations went even further.

But now, two years on, all has become clear. The chaffinch was an avian estate agent. I don’t know whether the nest-market has gone the way of the human housing market in the past few years but, if it has (and it seems likely that our Chancellor’s fiscal brutalities will have left no corner of British life intact), the chaffinch’s irrational and near-suicidal frustrations are easier to comprehend.

So how did I reach this conclusion? Well, from one angle, the window in question reflects the carving and, this year, two robins have taken up residence in a small hole in the wall behind its head. As I type, they’re busily coming and going, presumably with small items from IKEA, to turn the hole into a home. The chaffinch’s tireless search for desirable locations has obviously paid off. He himself has not returned but two of his clients have.

And so, on the evidence of these curious but now explicable contingencies, over these years, my hubristic assumptions about life’s absurdities have proved to be baseless. There is a holistic flow, drawing creatures and inanimate objects together, creating a unity of purpose, weaving from a multitude of infinitesimally tiny threads a single fabric of cosmic proportions. In short, there is meaning.

Aye, right.

 

 

 

 

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Other people’s holiday snaps are merely things which test your acting ability and your vocabulary as you search for synonyms for ‘lovely’, ‘nice’, ‘how interesting’ and so on. So the fact that I’ve already droned on about our recent trip to the USA and here I am extending it even further is a good reason for you to stop reading now and leave a comment consisting of one or more of the synonyms. Anyway, this is our friends’ house and we stayed in their cottage, which is out of picture to the left (yawn).

If you’re still here, I’ll make it worse by telling you that one of the evenings was spent with my eyes full of tears because I was laughing so much. I won’t name those responsible but they know who they are and one of the topics that came up was the direction my writing career should take. Taking the success of Fifty Shades as their starting point, they began to plan what my next novel (or, better, series of novels) should be. They had the title of the first and kept trying out various pen names of which the least offensive was Ophelia Groyne. The title itself came in for some close textual analysis when the original suggestion – Under the Scotsman’s Kilt – was refined to Under m’ Scotsman’s Kilt and then Under da Scotsman’s Kilt. You see what I mean? This was just a tiny fragment of what genuinely was a hilarious evening but on the screen, it just looks embarrassing.

So, let’s get back to the snaps. We were a couple of weeks too early to get the full pleasure of the Azalea/Rhododendron Garden near the URI campus but I’d really love to build a replica of its Moon Gate in my own garden. (Here it is, with our friends framed in it. YAWN.)

 

On the other hand, while I was fascinated by the extraordinary column in Providence made of guns concreted together, it’s a bit sinister and too much of a reminder of less attractive aspects of life in the USA. But, on the other side of the road there’s a great restaurant called Parkside, which had terrific food, a great ambiance and cost far less than I’d have to pay in Aberdeen for rubbish.

 

My wife and I have come to an agreement about shopping. She won’t let me come with her – ever. Her reasoning is that she can’t look around, compare styles and prices and things without being aware of my glowering, resentful presence. My reasoning is that she’s absolutely right. I hate shopping (unless it’s a hardware store full of interesting things whose function isn’t clear but which I want as soon as I see them). But in the USA, it’s different. I know we have malls, but they have MALLS, and the one in the middle of Providence is the biggest I’ve ever seen. It’s like being in a Star Trek set without the Klingons. (Here’s my wife and our friends looking out from one of its cathedral-type floors. Zzzzzzzz.)

Finally, though, another visit, to a beautiful place in Connecticut called Mystic Seaport. It’s much more to my liking because, as its name suggests, it’s

about the sea and boats. It has a great collection of figureheads and I got talking to 3 of the volunteers there who act as guides and general sources of information and enthusiasm about the maritime history of New England. I told them I was planning a sequel to The Figurehead and that I had a couple of problems about the accommodation offered to passengers who were emigrating from Scotland to the USA in the 1840s. I wanted to know how conditions in steerage could be improved and one of them simply told me to visit the Charles W Morgan, the last wooden whale ship, which was originally built in 1841, the year in which my novel will be set, and is being restored and preserved at Mystic. He told me to go aft to the officers’ quarters and look for some particular features. I did and found not only what I was looking for, but things that would be of special interest to the woodcarver in my book. Without the guide’s directions, I would never have noticed them. That was just one of the serendipities of the trip. As you can probably tell, I had a great time.

OK, you can stop pretending to be interested now..

The long gap since the last blog was the result of a trip to Rhode Island where nearly all the time was taken up with real rather than online things (such as visiting beautiful places in hot sunshine and drinking wine). It’s a part of the world we know well and to which I’d emigrate like a shot if only they had decent healthcare provision for all. People talk of New England in the fall and yes, it’s breathtaking then, but it’s beautiful the rest of the year, too.

We’ve been there in all the seasons. It started back in the 70s when my wife and I were doing a revue at the Edinburgh fringe and shared a theatre with a group of students from The University of Rhode Island. They invited us to take the show over there and that was the first of many other visits as a visiting professor and visiting artist. I gave courses on textual appreciation, creative writing and even writing sketches (or skits as they’re called over there). I also translated 3 one act Molière plays for performance there. My wife acted in one of them and I directed another.

I also had the enormous privilege (and I really do mean that) of being asked to direct Shakespeare there. It was As You Like It and, while I’ve directed plenty of plays and video/DVD shoots, that was the only time I experienced the full pleasures (and power) of working with a truly professional company. Costume and set designers, committed actors (all students in the Theater Department), technical staff – all treated me as if I knew what I was doing and helped to create a rich production. I have many memories of the rehearsal and performance process but I’ll just quote two, from both ends of the spectrum.

One was when the lighting technician asked me what sort of moods I wanted for different scenes in the play. The set was (of course) the Forest of Arden and the trees consisted of hanging verticals of a silky material (tree trunks), with swathes of various greens looped between them as leaves/branches. I asked the techie (a student) to create appropriate lighting for dawn, dusk and the four seasons. A few days later he was ready to show me what he had and I sat alone in the centre of the dress circle, the stage was empty, the house lights went down and I watched a sequence of shifting, indescribably beautiful scenes as he worked his way through his designs and colours. Tones and brightness shifted from mood to mood and, minute by minute, the seasons and times of day came and went among those trees. It was magical, and it was all for me.

Then, of course, there were the rehearsals and the notes I had to give to actors afterwards. Toward the end, when we were rehearsing the whole play rather than individual scenes, I mentioned to the student playing Rosalind that she’d made a bit of a meal of a particular speech, whereupon she smiled and several others laughed. I said ‘Oh, don’t you use that expression over here?’ Her answer was ‘We use very few of the things you say over here’.

Anyway, back to this trip and it was as satisfying as ever. The trees, the coastline, the lovely clapboard houses and, most of all, the people. In the UK, lots of our ideas about the USA come from movies and, just as Americans have a stereotypical idea of Brits, so we think we know what they’re like. But when you go there, you realise how wrong the stereotype can be. I’ve only been to New England, California and New Orleans, but in all those places, the people we’ve met have been welcoming, friendly, helpful, generous and nearly always upbeat. Waiters in restaurants don’t have the put-upon quality so many of them seem to have in the UK or the superiority their French counterparts are always keen to show. They chat, answer inane questions cheerfully and genuinely seem to care about the job they’re doing.

And I can’t end without noting an extra pleasure I had this time. I met Lynne Gobeille of the Origami Poems Project and spent 3 very interesting hours at a Starbucks chatting with Linda Faulkner who’s a good Facebook and blog friend but whom I’d never met before. It would need a couple more blogs to cover the things we talked about but one very striking feature we both noticed was that there’s a clear difference between the online images we present to the world and the actual people we are. But then, I’ve no idea how Linda would begin to generate on screen the energy and dynamism she exhibited as we chatted.

There are a couple of more specific things I want to share but this is long enough already so I’ll just end with an expression I’d never heard anywhere before but picked up there on this visit. If you haven’t yet been to the USA, ‘put it on your bucket list’..