Memory.

I was rowing. Pulling my wire to a different tune, pulling a load against maximum air/magnetic resistance. Pulling with vigour. Back straight - posture checked against a blurred duplicate also known to me as my less photogenic twin. Always a risky business, reflection checking in the vanity fair of gym-world. I would simper something about "health concerns" if I was ever challenged about looking at myself during a live act, not checking is simply too dangerous. I accidentally applied the back- bent posture a few years ago having taken my eyes off my double for a session and could barely walk for a week - not a good option, the bbo. A silent accusation of preening is a small price worth paying.

And I was rowing. Seat doing the coaster slide, feet clamped for better purchase, legs pumping, hands callousing, arse aching, feet cramping. The Concept 2 Model D Rower. Rowing to health, rowing to fitness, twenty eight to thirty two revolutions a minute. Drag, drag - what a drag. Good sweat, heavy breathing, heart pounding, calorie burning.

I could just about see the TV screens helpfully positioned for the exclusive use of the two rows of exercise cyclists, regiments of super-models and the odd natty-fatty, all immaculately turned out in a sports designer's wet-dream vision of carefully arranged lycra, and not a composure threatening sweat droplet to dampen their brought-to-read-whilst-exercising mags. No sweat, no pounding. No need of the TV screens. But with a little head craning, a carefully stolen squinny, a frozen moment between rows, I spotted on the nearest screen a feature on the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams. Famous also for . . . making a rowing machine - a Concept 2 Model D rowing machine, his last sitting place.

I had read somewhere that he died - mid row. Rowing to keep fit in a Los Angeles gym. Died of a heart attack. At the age of 49. An age not a million miles from mine. Curiously I felt less like rowing as this nightmarish image flashed up in my mind of me keeling over like a floppy toy which then squatted there like an obstinate toad. The top part of my body grounded, my legs stubbornly lashed to their foot holders, an obscene tangle of limbs and somethings gone badly wrong on rowing machine number 7. The nearest the corner TV screen machine. The end machine.

NB since this piece was written I have learnt that it was actually a treadmill that did for DA. So I'm back on the rower and now giving treadmills a wider berth.

First memoir exercise

And it's in games that I find some answers. Or more properly, PE, Physical Education for children. Children, circa 1964, including yours truly. The boys turning out in voluminous shorts, before they became fashionable by way of the kind of shorts-minimalism that made Glen Hoddle look, on reflection, like he was playing football in his jockeys, and the girls, stripped down into heavy duty, industrial strength, navy blue serge knickers.

What was the deal? Why were they made to do it? Even the slim girls looked horrid - though I suppose this was intended - boys get weird palpitations and uncomfortable stirrings from an alarmingly young age and I guess the old serges were the best defence against any of that twitching in the 'Y' fronts and embarrassing bulges business. But all the same, I would have thought the outlining of these female backsides in the company of dozens of mini priapics an unnecessary distraction and unhelpful to the cause of good health through innocent physical jerkery and honest endeavour.

Putting myself back into the arena through the power of memory and imagination, I do recall that one 'serge wearer' during these regular outings was slightly larger than the rest. So large in fact that I can only guess that she would have been a serge wearer because she was permanently excused all physical activities and instead sat out most of these bracing sessions, fatly, on the sidelines.

Extremely fat and even more unpopular. And, if God hadn't been cruel enough already, ensured that her eyesight was such that she would permanently need the assistance of National Health Specs to see, and that her vast body would be impervious to the cleansing and scenting properties of soap and water.

There was a time also, when I was less than popular. At just about this time as it happens. One of those short periods that probably lasted a few months but felt like a lifetime. I wasn't quite ready to engage in any side by side empathy out on the fringes of school child society, out in the frozen wastes of the bleachers with fat . . 'Olive' but, as I too was stricken with less-than-perfect-eyesight, was also forced to wear National Health little round speccies, and therefore considered an 'anyone who's different is odd, oddity. Bit like Olive, but without the buzzing lies and usually hidden, serge knickers. And I suppose it was this that brought us, momentarily, together. On one school games day.

The usual ramshackle of events - lots of hopping and things involving buckets. But sandwiched between the egg and spoon and the sack race was the wheel barrow race. The Wheel Barrow Race. Girls pushing boys. Girls choosing boys to push. Boys legs tucked under girls arms and pushed along, wheelbarrow style. Prizes for winners.

I guess the rationale behind the gender chosen roles was that boys had stronger arms to propel themselves along, and boys legs scrawny bits at the best of times, aren't that heavy and well within the strength zone of the average girl. And my legs were going to be held, I was going to be involved in the wheel barrow race.

As the pairing off neared completion, feelings of dejection came over me in waves as pretty soon only one girl and two boys remained. The slightly more confident, slightly more popular girl made her move selecting the none specs wearer. There was to be no wheelbarrow race for me. No more pushers were left. The pushers had left the building.

But wait. There was a rousing of a commotion. A swirling of school mams and mothers, all flouncy dresses, beads, and good natured chivying; pulling, patting and fussing over what appeared to be at first glance, a baby calf being dragged, reluctantly into the open. This turned out to be Olive, sprung from the safety and anonymity of the spectators seating and ordered (this was the 1960s) to strip down to her mighty serge knickers and plug the gap. I was going to be a barrowed after all - but I was going to be wheeled by a mini homunculus.

On the sound of the starting whistle the surge of the serges and their hand crawlers began. Boy's legs were being dropped by weedy, ringletted and ribboned girly-whirlies. Tears and tantrums quickly followed. I was being pushed by a pile driver, my bony legs clamped tight by ham-like arms and the pent up emotions of a friendless soul, making a desperate pitch for a win and instant hitherto unknown popularity.

My twiggy arms and hands were a blur of desperate skittering. They had to be. If I hadn't kept them going I would have fell, painfully onto my face - an accidental wreck of bloody nose, grass-stained teeth and comically twisted specs. My chest - what there was of one - heaved, fear of worse pain drove me on. And on. And on. This great lump, this horrid fat nightmare in serge knickers was pushing too hard, too hard. I'm bound to fall, I will fall. And I did.

But not before Hephalump and I crossed the winning line first.

Back to Blog

I need to keep this blog alive, so a bit of a dear diary entry just to keep it ticking over.

This week-end I have had it easy as the TMA, not due until the 27th was submitted on the 20th whilst I was at work. I pretty much had to do it at work as I have real trouble submitting using my laptop at home. The problem is easily surmountable I suppose, I only really have to convert the file, but the more complex the operation the more anxious about the submission I become. And I don't need to increase my discomfort any more than I have to.

That said, I already have. Like an idiot I forgot to put my name or personal identifier on my work before clicking the submission button, and I didn't want to get into what seems a complicated process, the trying to reclaim it business. Quite how I forgot to do this most simple of tasks I don't know, this is my fourth course for Heaven's sake, I'm not exactly a rookie with the OU. I know the mechanics of the business I must have submitted at least 25 assignments before this one. Schoolboy error.

The assignment itself proved to be quiet a challenge. Earlier on, at the beginning of the course I glanced at the Assignment booklet (once I realised I had to print it off, an odd change if ever there was one) and read the TMA01 details. At this point I thought it looked unbelievably simple. I was even looking forward to it, something that has never happened before. Bit of a free write, short auto biographical memory of some sort, then a little reflection on how I felt about the thing, Oh and how did the book and all its advice help me. I stored something like that in my memory which remained there until I arrived at TMA time at a canter.

The free write was no problem. I'd done loads. I wasn't at all bothered about losing consciousness whilst writing. Losing consciousness whilst driving, or during meetings at work, that concerns me - for the latter I might be sacked or at least feel embarrassed and old, in the case of the former I might turn my wife into a widow and my children into orphans. Neither are good conclusions. And I do lose consciousness during a free write when I sit in bed at 1130ish and I'm knackered from my day's hassles at work. Frightened myself a bit the other night as I watched my fingers try to type 'there are dead people in the...and I pulled back with a heart thud in case the word 'room' materialized. Quite frightening, but no-one is going to lecture me on how to free write. Got it down to a fine - if slightly disturbing art. Or rather it has me down to an art.

The free write I worked with was the genuine one. I took Charity Shop as a prompt and ran with it. Typed all kinds of crap - even worse than this blog entry. The only issue was that it was way over three hundred words so I had to edit quite severely, the challenge was to maintain the essence of the freedom that went into the free write. But I managed this quite well, ensuring that the final line which was to be my jump off point for the 750, stayed in place - though I added a little element to it (cheating? I don't think so) to allow the join to be seamless.

The 750 words was pretty tough if I'm honest. I was determined to test myself by going for a piece of fiction rather than something I would have found easier - I'm here to learn and I have to stretch myself. Got myself into a right old tangle with points of view and tenses, and disappeared up my own backside several times with the story, its purpose, its length, its characters. But I felt myself to be learning through the pain and the tears and the blinding headaches from too much screen-staring. I also had moments of confusion over the fragment versus completed story debate that was ongoing on the various forums. I was determined to go for something of a conclusion, and even if this loses me points, I feel that I have at least completed something this early in the course and consequently I feel that these are points towards the greater good, if not towards the course.

Tutorial exercise

My offering for Tutorial 1: Write and outdoor scene using the present tense. Piece should include (I'm paraphrasing like mad now) as many of the senses as possible, look at the bigger picture then focus on the minutiae, something like that, and it must be in the present tense. Seems the course people love the present tense. There is a reason for this. I just need to work it out! Anyway, as it was written (which is actually, in the best traditions of how real writers write, an accentuated, edited, bulked, polished version of a previous entry on the blog. How's that for magic? ......

.....My turn I guess. This really did happen, I had my notebook with me, but I was afraid that if I took it from my pocket it would fly off, and I would never see it again. So I made mental notes ;)

I've stopped the car on my way home, as I always said I would, to walk in an area that sits tantalisingly close to the road I travel daily. The sea is the colour of lead and is leaving. The sky, grey but bright. The sand yellow where it's dry, then brown then pockmarked then shiny. On the horizon where the deep sea grey meets the washed out grey of the sky, there are two boats. They look like children’s bath toys, or drawn features on a canvass, put there by an artist to break the monotony of the two vast empty spaces. They're sitting still and indifferent to this little local ritual. Untroubled and unaffected by the seas seeming indecisiveness.

As I’m walking, I notice that the wind, now quite fierce, is ripping through the soft powder sand; gusts are zipping along the dry parts making a daunting yellow smoke that's rippling along the surface. Some of these fine grains are stinging my face, getting trapped in my hair, and my eyelashes are feeling crusts newly made from tears and salt and dust.

Further down where the sea is on the retreat, it's leaving new damp sand behind, impervious to the wind, it's flat and smooth but with a hint of grain, like the surface of polished wood. Like pine or light oak. I look at it closer and it reminds me of something else; the 'grain' in the sand caused by the swirl of the retreating sea has made it look almost like tanned leather.

Further along the line where damp sand meets dry, small stones appear to shimmer, wetly, like jewels washed up and abandoned by the receding sea, breaking the silky smoothness of the sand grain. And I see a new texture here that reminds me of flattened cake mixture, patted and rolled - each stone now either a currant, a sultana, or a raisin.

At the sea's edge, the tiny, thinly rolled waves of dirty white froth, helped by the wind, are making that unbroken waterfall sound, not punctuated by ebb and flow and rattling, but a continuous susurrus sound as it’s being drawn back, almost reluctantly it seems, back into the sea’s belly.

Further along the shore, I notice little semi circular holes appearing in the sand, six rows per section, looking like a succession of half buried cheese graters, all lined up, like soldiers ready for inspection. And everything is orderly once again. But as I look behind me from the direction I came from, where the sand dunes live, and are never troubled by the sea, the smoke sand is reaching its destination, swirling up into transparent yellowish clouds as if the dunes are being reinforced by the ghosts of a thousand mermaids.

Apropos the Tutor Forum

I'm getting better with the notebook - though I'm still not as organised as I would like to be or as mindful as to why it's with me. I took it with me to IKEA on Saturday and was going to do some little character pen portraits whilst lunching on my Swedish meatballs - but only really used it to jot down the stock and aisle numbers of the two items I went there for. But I at least took my notebook mentality around with me, and noticed a lot of little things to add to my character creations (all human life is to be found in IKEA, better than almost anywhere else I think.) The blog however is where I pull myself back into the reckoning as an active student. The privacy settings on the OU blog system allows me to write complete tosh which I can save for later then return to and edit, change, tidy and improve at my leisure.

The OU Blog is without doubt my 'free writing space’ and has thrown up plenty of surprises along the way. Anything that looks sufficiently polished then gets transferred onto my Blogspot blog which has accumulated an impressive 14 followers! All members of this course, no normal people ;) One or two have actually left comments on this (public) blog, so I find myself trying harder to make the writing look, at least, decent.

I guess it's all good training for later. But I will pursue with the notebook as well - even if it's the little daily diary app on my iPhone which doesn't require a pen (they keep snapping in my pocket) and at least has the advantage of making note taking look like you're sending text messages to your friends and family. Where in fact, you're actually jotting down the fact that the lady who's just served you lunch has forearms like mottled hams, or the chap in front of you in the queue seemed to be dressed in his 1960's Army demob suit.

(Copied from TF)

Freewrite Exercise (gussied up a bit)

When I see that starlings thing. Man it freaks me out. I'm always put in mind of iron filings. Something I remember when I was a kid. Shifting the little iron metal bits with a magnetic pen and making shapes on a man's face that exhibits boggle eyes, a snubbed nose and more skin than the drumming section of a brass band. Maybe it was the Magnetic Man who came fully unrealised with bald head and face.

The idea was that with a little skill and perhaps not much ingenuity one could uproariously give him a full head of hair and an impressive beard. Puberty and a hair transplant in a sitting. A magnetic pen that could imitate a cosmetic hair punch. Predictable, I suppose so. But the starlings I watched moving the other day - swirling and dropping like a million pieces of lead showered out of the back of a passing helicopter, then picked up on the wind, conjoined and swirled into shapes the likes of which I haven't seen since I was given a box of Spirograph for Christmas.

Spirograph might be a more accurate memory here rather than magnetic bald man with no beard. Perhaps the spectacle could best be described as part Magnetic Man part Spirograph. Up and down then folding in on itself. Side to side then dropping like shotgun pellets fired in the air by the Devil himself at the soaring like Angles late for their return to Heaven and to God. And expecting God to be standing at the gates checking them in saying you're late you're late and not really acknowledging the irony of the word and the location working somewhat symbiotically. And not knowing the shower of danger they may or may not have flown through.

Morning Pages (Remember them?)

Morning Pages today concerns two dreams worthy of being recorded. The first one involves feelings of fearfulness and vulnerability finding myself living in a tent, alone, in a dangerous land of bears, tigers and wolves. The sense that these creatures had access to the outside of this tent but for some reason not the inside of the tent provided a sense of uncomfortable, nervous, protection. I could not leave the tent, nor given that it was nothing but flimsy cloth supported by cords, could I hope to feel secure within it with such dangerous beasts always nearby. Most of the time I spent shaking with fear inside, knowing that if I set one foot outside, it was goodnight all.

The second dream was more literal. It involved a disused hospital that you could visit and learn something of its terrible past. For a fee of 25 Euros per head you could visit this now disused hospital where forced abortions had been carried out on pregnant woman who weren't married and who were regarded as nothing more than scandalous aberrations. Within the walls of this place hundreds of women were sent to have their pregnancies violently terminated. And there was talk that it was haunted by the ghosts of these unborn children, and of the mothers who died during the procedure, which made the place diabolical for reasons other than the medical actions that were performed.

Cheery stuff eh?

Free write exercise

I did a couple of new free writes today. It's unlikely I'll find much time for study this week-end, so taking the view that raw writing is the best exercise there is when time is tight I've done two, three actually if I count the one I put on the Tutor Forum. And my intention is to buff them up a bit so they look at least partly sane to be put on the blog whilst maintaining enough of the original text, shape and content to give an accurate representation of what came out.

The wind today is blowing great gouts of God's breath threatening everything in its path. And finding things not in its path, to threaten. There's no flying at the nearby flying base today here because of it - except leaves and branches and birds being buffeted by a wind so strong, it's enough to stop them dead in the air where they pause to reflect on the science of flight. Feathers alone are not enough, they may conclude, to guarantee flight against the odds. Already there's the weight thing. Not light as a feather or even a feather boa whatever one of those is. And it's unlikely to be of use if the boa is a boa constrictor. Watch out because he'll squeeze you if you meet one, and he won't stop until your bones splinter and eject them from every orifice of your body then falling to earth like dust before being blown into the sea by the prevailing wind. How many dust clouds will the wind pick up today? How many dust clouds will be the bones of squeezed people who met with an unfortunate encounter with a boa constrictor. These clouds could go all the way up to the sky and form cumulus clouds of a rare off-white colour. When there gorge full they would burst and rain down dirty little droplets instead of pristine rain, dirty little droplets composed of bone and moisture, and people will say umbrellas, no, not good enough, we need shields and reinforced garments, helmets and gas masks to safeguard us from the noxious make up and the gritty texture of the spurtings coming out of these clouds. God knows what they're made of. And he will know.

Morning Monologue

This is the nearest I'll ever get to Morning Pages - perhaps the least spoken or written about 'how to become a writer training exercises as described in the beloved BRB. It was actually a spoken monologue during my morning commute. Fortunately I drive alone, I doubt any passenger would have found the material as engaging and interesting as I do. I felt like getting it off my chest, and actually woke up in a cold sweat this morning with my lips trembling, so keen was I to articulate it somewhere, somehow. Cue the blog...

It's the striving for originality that will make most of the difference to your writing when you have completed this course. But there is no magic vial that's going to insert itself into your hide during the course that will give you a lottery winning idea for a best selling book with multi million pound filming rights and the associated merchandise that will become curiosity antiques in a hundred years time. A Hogwarts, a Wardrobe, or Looking Glass World were all ideas. There isn't a course that can teach this.

Those who are capable of coming up with a winning idea - will do so anyway. Nothing to do with creative writing. Ideas are a different skill altogether. They can happen to anyone. This course is about learning, reigniting and inspiring you to write with greater originality - the way you craft your sentences based on your experiences and the way the course writers want you to think about how you might explain or describe something with more originality than you would normally have done. This is done through the use of effect techniques borrowed from poetry and through being able to convey information in different and innovative ways. That's it in a nutshell. Ideas come as bonuses. Ideas might come from some of the practice rituals in the course, but they might not.

Tutor Forum Icebreaker. Shared.

Introducing Mike Ragan

Mike? Oh yes, I sat next to him at school. I suppose he was pretty good at writing stories. Most of his were read out at the beginning of English lessons by the English teacher Mr Gifford. But he never became a writer or anything like that. Then again, some of the kids in the same class were good at maths but I know of no eminent maths professors who went to Clanceworthy Secondary in the 1970s.

At the start of English lessons it was always the same, you knew whose homework stories had been selected to be read aloud Mr G by the colour and design of the exercise books he had in his hand as we slouched in. The pile changed often, but there were two that always seemed to be there, nestling in his hand - one was covered in pictures of lambs gamboling about in some improbable green field. That one belonged to Poppy Salisbury. The other was a battered looking magnolia thing, distinct only by its blandness. That was Michael's. All the books were covered with wallpaper for their protection but had the unfortunate effect of also showing our parent's taste in 1970's home decor.

For Poppy, it was the lambs (70's sentimental tosh, obviously chosen for her bedroom). For Michael, Mike, it was the magnolia coloured wood chip - cheap, practical. Those two, always there. Dinner money bankers, both. The Superman paper came and went, the psychedelia seventies' gold and orange swirls dropped in and out, even a stately flock deigned the occasional appearance, but always, always, the lambs and the dirty looking magnolia thing.

Poppy went on to become senior features editor of the Manchester Globe and has had several books of short stories published. Michael took a steady job with the civil service. It's interesting that he's showing an interest in writing again. After all these years.

(Bit longer than I had hoped. Sorry.