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Remember Ron? My gentle, compassionate, humane, mild-mannered brother? Well, he’s back, in a rather unfamiliar incarnation. I’ll let him explain.

I’m looking for an objective correlative. Not for the same noble, literary reasons as Eliot but for a more prosaic, selfish reason. I need a set of words to match some anger I’ve acquired and which is stuck like a faulty heart valve, causing the vitriol to back up and toxify my normally easy-going emotional system.*

I’m angry because my neighbour has felled an old walnut tree that was on the border of our gardens. A trivial enough thing when set alongside the wider world and its agonies but, without going into detail, the tree meant a lot to me and the manner in which it was done was not very neighbourly. In the two weeks since it was felled I’ve been hatching plots which range from lighting smoky bonfires whenever he’s in his garden to creating some obscene topiary in the remaining hedge, even to occupying the tree but, because I’m a grown up, these are not available to me and don’t offer the satisfaction I’m craving.

And that’s where the blockage really is, in that need to be mature and rational. If I had responded to the initial flow of adrenaline and smashed him and his tree surgeon in the face there would, admittedly, have been consequences but, for a few moments, I would have felt good. The fact that he is also a pillar of the local church, past president of the rotary club and is regularly seen in the local press handing cheques to charities makes retribution even more difficult (and, actually, even more necessary). Instead, I’ve had to resort to using measured words in letters to various agents of my local authority and town councillors, not to mention polite, balanced appeals to said neighbour in the hope of reaching a compromise. None of which worked. Worse, the act of reining back my instincts has led to my current, unhealthy impasse.

So I’m seeking solace, or release, in literature, which is where you guys come in. If DH Lawrence had been handy, he would have given me a storm the night before the felling was due and thwarted the efforts of the tree surgeon. The trouble is, being DH Lawrence he’d have made the tree fall on my side of the garden, destroying my wife’s studio and punishing my anger as well as my errant neighbour’s vandalism. Speaking of errant, if I’d learned the following – from Don Quixote, railing at Sancho Panza- instead of just copying them into a notebook, I feel my enemy might have quivered and reconsidered:

“Scoundrel! Designing, unmannerly, ignorant, ill-spoken, foul-mouthed, impudent, murmuring and back-biting villain! Darest thou utter such words in my presence…and hast thou dared to entertain such rude and insolent thoughts in thy confused imagination? Avoid my presence, monster of nature, treasury of lies, magazine of deceits, storehouse of rogueries, inventor of mischiefs, publisher of absurdities, and enemy of the respect due to royal personages! Begone! Appear not before me on pain of my indignation.”

Even tapping that out on my keyboard helps a little, though part of that relief comes from me imagining the effect of Cervantes’ words: a speechless, cowering tree-surgeon meekly handing over his chainsaw and turning his own newly-enlightened wrath on my astonished neighbour, who runs off and locks himself in his shed. But this is my inner child at work again, much as it is when I imagine my neighbour shaking a collection tin at me during this season of goodwill and me doing something very unseemly and fundamental with the tin. (Incidentally, the tree surgeon is also the town Tree Warden, whose job description includes the words ‘….to maintain and protect trees in the area.’)

For the moment, and despite it being very unworthy of me, I’m hoping Santa helps. With the tree gone, there is now a direct line of sight from my spare bedroom to my neighbour’s master bedroom. I imagine a morning when I draw the curtains and show him my Christmas tee shirt which features Mark Antony’s oft quoted words:

The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.

(*Apologies to Bill and anyone else in search of good writing).

If this is actually appearing with this introduction, it’s a miracle, because it means I’ve successfully scheduled it to be posted automatically. Anyway, the reason for that is that I’m not near a computer and won’t be for a few days. I can’t ask Ron to step in yet again so I’m using a ploy I’ve used several times before – the cop-out blog. I could write something about the collection of short stories I’ve just published, Other People and other stories here in the UK,  and here in the USA but, instead, I’ll just post the prologue to my novella Alternative Dimension ( UK here, USA here). If you’re so inclined, you can hear me reading it on the TRAILERS/AUDIO page, too. It goes like this:

Stitchley Green hated mirrors as much as he hated his name. His parents, Samuel and Samantha, had been flower children and they’d met at a ‘happening’ in a barn which called itself The Stitchley Experience. They’d tossed a coin to decide whether to make love that night or wait until the following day and do it in dew and sunshine. It was tails, so Stitchley was conceived, twelve minutes later, on a hay bale. If the coin had come down heads, he’d have been called Dew, so his beginnings weren’t as bad as they might have been.

The two Sams stuck to their Peace and Love convictions long past the time when those who’d shared joints with them had become bankers and copywriters for ad agencies. As a result, Stitchley’s early schooling had involved sitting in fields looking at blades of grass or, with dad on guitar, singing along to his mum’s lyrics about ‘stones of repentance, trees of despair, and all the bright confusion of disaster’. He didn’t understand any of it but he did like living in a tree.

At last, though, their tree was felled and reality started to push its way into their idyll. Both Sams got jobs so Stitchley had to go to school. Which was bewildering. You’d think, with such a name, he’d be bullied. In fact, to his surprise, he turned out to be quite popular. But it was mainly because the other kids in his class were always entertained by the answers he gave the various teachers. When they were studying the Tudors, the History master had asked him how many English kings had the name Henry.

‘Well, I’ve heard of the one who killed his wives, Henry VIII,’ said Stitchley.
‘Good,’ said the teacher. ‘So how many Henrys were there, then?’
Stitchley gave it some more thought and said, ‘Four’.

It was the same in Modern Studies. The teacher wanted to know which middle east country was causing problems by threatening to make hydrogen bombs. It was the main one in what George W Bush, when he was president of theUSA, had called the Axis of Evil. Stitchley tried Cardiff, then Ireland, then asked for a clue.

‘OK,’ said the teacher, and he suddenly ran down the aisle between the desks.
‘Now, what would I say I’d just done?’ he asked, panting a little. ‘I—?’
‘Went to the back of the room?’ said Stitchley.
‘No,’ said the teacher. ‘Listen – today I RUN, but last week I—?’
‘Walked?’ said Stitchley.

And so it went on. Stitchley frowning with puzzlement as his classmates and teachers fell about roaring with laughter. He told the Religious and Moral Education teacher that the Pope was Jewish, and his efforts at Creative Writing are still kept in a special file in the school library, which gets read more often than any of the great literary masters on the shelves. People just love reading stories in which ‘Sir Lancelot was as tall as a horse which was six feet tall’, or ‘They had never met before that day, so they were like two people who had never met before’.

After school, he’d had a series of poorly paid jobs until the economic situation and some brutal government cuts ensured he’d probably never find work again. So when we meet him, at the age of forty-two, he seems to have lived down to his name with great success. One look at him explained immediately why he hated mirrors. The kindest word one might use of his appearance and demeanour would be ‘unprepossessing’ but most people satisfied themselves with sounds of simulated vomiting. Later, though, when he resurfaces here, we’ll see how a simple online role-playing game turned his life, and reality itself, upside-down and brought him satisfactions far in advance of many of those enjoyed by his contemporaries and an opulence which changed his sixty-eight year old mother’s lyrics forever.

 .

I’m due back in hospital on Tuesday next for the operation that, through nobody’s fault, has had to be put off a couple of times. As I said before, I’ll be out of action for a few days so I’ll try to set up a posting to appear automatically while I’m away. Given my technological ability that will mean ‘Watch this space but don’t expect anything to appear’.

Meanwhile a couple of things this week merit a mention. First there was the news that Sanal Edamaruku, who’s apparently a well-known rationalist in Mumbai, may be sent to jail for blasphemy. It’s because, while everyone else was marvelling at the sight of a statue of Jesus weeping, he checked the plumbing and found that the water was coming from some leaky pipes. No surprise there but the story does offer two excellent images/symbols for writers. Apparently, the pipes were for sewage, so the thought of Jesus weeping sewage is a (ahem) Godsend for sceptics and believers alike – the former can scoff at religion, the latter can draw conclusions about how disappointed the Saviour is at what He’s witnessing in His world nowadays. Either way, it’s a great message. The second narrative thread comes from the fact that believers in the miracle have been drinking the tears to cleanse themselves – forgive the cliché but you couldn’t make it up.

Next, I don’t want to go into any details yet but a publisher wants the translation rights for all my Carston novels except the first, Material Evidence. The reason for omitting this one is that many other countries are less tolerant of graphic violence than ours and the ending does have some nasty stuff in it. Interestingly, I put it in because (this being my first ever crime novel), I assumed it was what readers wanted. Since then, apart from an episode in Rough Justice which was essential to the narrative, I’ve avoided it. It made me wonder though whether that’s why readers are buying three times as many copies of Material Evidence as any of the others.

Anyway, the whole area of translation is interesting. If a translator knows her potential target audience is squeamish, will she deliberately tone down anything she considers potentially offensive? If so, how will that affect the impact of the narrative or the characters of perpetrators and victims alike? More generally, will Jack Carston and the rest be the same people if they’re speaking Urdu or Mandarin?

And there are other dangers, as one personal experience brought home to me a while ago. I taught French at Aberdeen University and, during one summer vacation, I happened to be the only member of staff available when a call came from a pharmaceutical company needing a French translation of the instructions for an asthma inhaler. It was fairly straightforward and didn’t involve anything much in the way of technical vocabulary so I was able to do it very quickly. Of course, I took great care to double-check all the terms I used and yet, for the next few months, I was anxiously waiting to hear whether the population of France saw any sudden downward fluctuations which could be inhaler-related.

Now excuse me while I write a story. ‘Il y avait une fois une statue qui était très triste.’.