I often go on about how absurd life is. It’s because I believe it’s true and that so many of the ways we behave must make God sorry he didn’t choose a different species, such as slugs or mackerel, to be the Lords of creation. I’ve no doubt every nationality has its little foibles and proofs that humans are unworthy to have dominion over Chihuahuas, wildebeests, aphids and the rest but I’d make a claim that the UK must be contenders for the gold medal in unworthiness.

This claim is sparked by a small item in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper. For those who don’t live in the UK I should explain that, to the majority of our citizens, being a Guardian reader signifies that you must be a pretentious, gay, communist, ex-hippie, muesli-eating, sandals-wearing coward.

So, over my bowl of muesli, I learned all about a document entitled the Order of Precedence of the Royal Family To Be Observed At Court. I googled it to make sure it wasn’t a belated April 1st contribution and found that, apart from the revelations in my paper, there were all sorts of other arcane aspects to who’s who and who can do what at court. (“At court” – a phrase straight out of the Theatre of the Absurd.)

Anyway, this particular piece, and I acknowledge my debt to the Guardian in reproducing its main points here, noted how the OPRFTBOAC  had been updated to take into account that someone simply called Kate Middleton had appeared in the team photos. Now some people think that, because the Queen signs edicts and laws and things ‘Elizabeth R’, she’s Mrs R. Wrong. She is, of course, Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor (we’ll leave out all the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha stuff). So when a commoner arrives, she has to know where she stands. And the gist of it all is that, despite Father Xmas having given her the title of Duchess of Cambridge, Ms Middleton has to curtsey to Eugenie and Beatrice, the daughters of the Duke and Duchess of York, one of whom was famous for a while for wearing a fascinator shaped like a pretzel. To be fair, Ms Middleton only has to curtsey if William’s not there, but still… And she has to do it whether it’s at a grand public affair or in private. This is because they’re real ‘blood princesses’ rather than arrivistes like her. She also has to curtsey to Charles Mountbatten-Windsor’s wife Camilla too, because she’s the wife of the Queen’s son and therefore ‘better’? ‘higher’? ‘more noble’? than the wife of her grandson.

We’re talking here of the people at the pinnacle of British society, a society whose lower reaches are at present in the grip of an austerity imposed by millionaires who have no idea of how the people they ‘represent’ live, so if that doesn’t earn us the gold medal for absurdity, I’ll be very interested to hear about the antics of those who beat us.

(The picture is from Wikipedia commons).

So began the message on a card my granddaughter had made to welcome me on a visit last weekend. She didn’t then go on to analyse my work or offer any criticism, constructive or otherwise, so I couldn’t really ask her to elucidate her choice of tense, but I found it an interesting one. ‘You have been’ doesn’t have the negative implications of ‘You were’. ‘You were’ means you’re no longer whatever it is, as in ‘You were a grate riter but now you’re crap’. But ‘have been’ still does give you the feeling that it needs to be qualified in some way. You expect it to be followed by ‘but’, as in ‘You have been a grate riter but you need to put some work in to reach those heights again’.

Playing with tenses is great (or grate). There’s a very active sequence in Flaubert’s Salammbô where leaders of the mercenary armies get together and one of them leaps on a table and rushes up and down exhorting the others and brandishing his sword. But the interesting thing is that Flaubert didn’t use the obvious tense which, for actions, would be the Past Historic: ‘He jumped on the table, unsheathed his sword and brandished it as he ran amongst them’ (NB this isn’t a translation, just an example of a sequence). Instead, he used the Imperfect tense. A clumsy English version would be: ‘He was jumping on the table, unsheathing his sword and brandishing it as he was running amongst them.

It has a strange effect, doesn’t it? This is a one-off event but, instead of describing it as a sequence of actions, he’s fusing them all into a sort of status, he extends them beyond the event they’re describing. Rather than convey self-contained, discrete actions, he’s creating a mood of activity.

There’s another form of the Past tense that intrigues me, too. It’s the Perfect tense – ‘I have eaten’, ‘they have gone’, and so on. What would the effect be if Flaubert had used that? ‘He has jumped on the table, unsheathed his sword and brandished it as he has run amongst them’. Again, a strange usage. It all sounds as if it’s preparation for some other definitive event or action. You can imagine it continuing; ‘… and now he stands there, ready to eat his muesli (or whatever)’.

For some bizarre reason, the Perfect seems to be the preferred tense of jockeys. When jump jockeys are interviewed about a race, they tend to say things such as, ‘He’s come up to the fence and he’s got in a bit close but he’s managed to pick up nicely’. If we were writing that in a narrative, it would be ‘He came up … got in a bit close … and managed …’ It does suit their purpose though because, rather than describe it all as something in the past that’s over and done with, it gives the description the immediacy it had for the person as he was riding the race.

And the moral of the story? If you, too, want to be a grate riter, experiment with tenses..

I suppose I’m lucky in that I’ve never suffered from the dreaded writer’s block. Whether it’s stories, novels, plays, blogs, reviews or writing commercial stuff to a deadline, I usually get quickly into the swing of it and get dragged along. Then, after staying away from whatever text it is for a while, I enjoy getting back to it and starting the editing/rewriting process.

Recently, though, I have experienced something like it. I started on the sequel to The Figurehead and, after writing a few pages, found I was unsure of where I wanted to go with it. I knew what the themes would be, how the characters would behave with one another, what the main conflicts and climaxes would be and also how it would turn out, but it was all bitty and wasn’t managing to cohere in my mind. I began to think that I’d maybe done too much research, collected too much information on the commercial aspects of ship owning, passenger accommodation on transatlantic voyages, and also on actors and theatre groups, all of which would be part of the story. I knew plenty about all that but had no idea what the characters wanted to do. Also, there didn’t seem to be much room for them amongst all the ‘facts’.

Then, with the publication and subsequent freebie offer of Unsafe Acts and the blogs and interviews about it, it was obvious that I had to write another Jack Carston. Again, I knew the sort of case it would be, and that it would signify a departure for him which maybe/probably would make it the last in the series. It needs some research, so I’m in no position to start it yet but, again, the impulse to embark on it wasn’t strong.

Rather than worried, I was puzzled by this so, instead of persevering with either of them, I started a sequel to The Sparrow Conundrum, with very little idea of what it would contain. This time, though, because of the absurd extremes of the characters, I immediately started seeing plenty of possible developments. But even then, after a few days writing, I started finding reasons to do something else.

So I wonder whether it’s another manifestation of a desire always to want to do something new. I seem to do things for a while then, without there necessarily being any feeling of having achieved a goal or been successful, I get the ‘been there, done that’ sensation and look around for unknowns.

I wonder, too, whether the whole blogging, tweeting, facebooking thing has made writing less fun and the proliferation of new books has devalued the process. I don’t think that’s the case, but I’m very aware that I’m writing in a very different publishing context from the one in which I started – with more opportunities as well as more competition.

Then again, it’s maybe all down to the trait I’ve mentioned many times before – I’m lazy. The books will get written but, for the moment, it’s relaxing to look through the window at the branches blowing in the wind and the confused flowers which came out in the recent warm spell shivering and wondering what the hell they’ve let themselves in for.

(And it occurred to me that I could write a final paragraph using one of those flowers as an image for/symbol of the author’s dilemma, but you can do that for me.).