Little Fishes

I made a huge chore of learning to swim when I was young on account of being a 7 year old coward. 

Actually, like all human babies, I could always swim. My body understood the rudiments of breath holding and doggy-splash even though I didn't know it did. No one told me it was one of the purposes of survival and that God was smart enough to give us this basic survival tool - our lungs being well attuned to watery breath due to the whole getting born thing and I guess there always existed the possibility that you’d clamber from your soaked prison and be expected to do a bit of inelegant skinny dipping straight off. 

It’s a bit like the giraffe thing, they’re all born as walkers: shaky and uncertain, but solid enough to wobble into a safe area once they've slid into the world, instead of lying down and glistening with stickiness waiting to be eaten alive by any lions lounging in the neigbourhood. But having unlearnt it over the next 6 years or so, I had to find my fins all over again if I was ever to swim properly in the junior school swimming pool and receive the coveted width distance certificate. 

But as time progressed, and certificates and praises were received, I was one of the last ones still flapping about unable to swim without the aid of enough buoyancy assistance to keep a blacksmith's anvil afloat. Water wings pumped up so tight you could almost hear them squealing in agony, and floats shaped like little tombstones made of polystyrene that squeaked in your hands as you squeezed them between your meagre thighs to keep your bum poking upright out of the water. 

These floats had minds of their own, and lines of them could be seen making little bids for freedom all round the pool, leaping out of the swimmers thigh-grips and jumping into the air like shoals of passing river salmon. As time progressed the last little group, which included me, were told to dispense with the floats and make do with the arm bands. Reluctantly we did, which left us swimming about with crazy arm movements, scrunched eyes and legs that felt as if medicine balls were tied to our feet. But a momentum had been established and today the Z group were going from concrete lumps to slick mermaids. 

It was time for the great con called the 'graduated confidence process' (though they never told us it was called that). Each time we managed to shimmy-splash our way clumsily to one end of the width, Mrs Spangler would release a little air from our taut arm bands. Even with the smell of chlorine rinsing through my nostrils I could smell that rubbery wind as it hissed out of the valves that bubbled, and I heard them blow mini-raspberries at Mrs Spangler as she fumbled the caps back on. I envied them. Then more widths. Then more air releases before being told to give up the floats. A pile of them was collected by the benches and ended up looking like discarded teeth pulled from a giant's mouth. A pile of white flotsam. 

Up and down we swam, splashily; eyes tight and sore. Mouths, chemically dried, throats raw, noses numbed, lungs on fire; hearts flicking through our skinny chests like little gasping fish. 

By this stage I was happy, I'd made enough bragging progress to get out. One arm band looking sad and deflated, the other no longer in full bloom; the old pumped up look now consigned to the shrieking dwarves in the shallow end. I had achieved enough; the certificate would wait another week. I looked forward to getting out and enjoying the sublime comfort of dryness. But no, I wasn't allowed out. Miss Spangler was on a roll and no-one was getting out yet; no drownings to report - the great Health and Safety push was a long way away in the future, germinating in the back of someone’s mind - perhaps one of these little would-be eels struggling along with me. It would have taken a drowning to call the session to an end. Even Stuart Stickler’s tears weren't helping him: 

‘Stop being a baby!’ I heard Mrs Spangler shout as Stuart wiped a bubble of snot from one of his nostrils. I made a mental note: tears aren't working today.

More deflation visits to the side of the pool. I couldn't work out why they bothered as by now it didn't make any difference. I'd rest my elbows on the cold slippery surface, shaking and making spluttering comments that made no sense, and listening to the trebling echoes and shouts of encouragement all around me which blended with the stuttering snuffling and mad splashing coming from Stuart who was going the opposite way with a face that was part terror, part grim determination; then with another gurgled hiss from one of my arm bands I was tapped on the head and ordered back across again. I was swimming. I was a winner in everyone’s eyes, except my own as nobody had told me I’d been swimming for 10 minutes and attributing my success to two flat pieces of plastic and rubber that hung limp and breathlessly from my arms.

Edinburgh

To make after a lean period of writing I have used travel as inspiration more than once. In fact travel has over the years been an enormous inspirational source for me during different writing phases of my life. I remember when my ambition didn't go beyond writing a blog (long before doing anything with the OU) writing (what I believed to be at the time) hysterical accounts of holidays in Spain, France, and other parts of the Mediterranean. I must try and re access them and see what paltry disasters they actually were!

I'm just back from a short visit to Edinburgh  It was a very short visit but was almost unique in that I learnt very little about the place due to drinking far too much single malt on the first night I was there. Foolish, yes, but very Scottish so perhaps excusable though there were unfortunate consequences. The main one was that I felt ill most of the following day rendering the open top bus tour that we had promised ourselves pretty pointless - just felt too tired and queasy to take in the sights or listen to the commentary - which was, too be fair, rather poor.

Plenty of cobblestones have remained from the previous last couple of centuries  - I liked that. Tram lines exist, but no trams. Plenty of eateries - almost too many I would say. Some high quality coffee houses including Artisan Roast which was cool. The only problem I had was making a choice between Brazilian and Ethiopian coffee beans! In truth you simply could not hope to get away with asking for a cup of coffee as there are countless beans, variations of bean blends, and blends withing blends.  I think it's almost possible to go in and invent one for yourself by asking for certain mixtures - seriously turning the dimmest of dolts into a coffee connoisseur for the day.

Princes Street is so named so that you'll always call it Princess Street and entertain the locals with your ignorance.  And it's nothing special. There's great architecture all over the place - bits of it look like Georgian Bath - other bits like London. loads of iconic statues, luminaries like Robert Lewis Stephenson, David Hume the philosopher - Adam Smith the economist (OK Edinburgh is scratching around a bit - where there is no Churchill or Dickens you have to kind of make do). A cool castle - sitting high up at the end of the old town which I have to say caught my intention.  As did The Witchery: Boswell's old place apparently, said to be haunted by one of the thousand people who were burned for witchcraft on Castlehill in the 15th and 16th centuries. I liked that. One thing I did spot from the bus during a rare lucid moment was the hanging point now commemorated by plaques. Unfortunately I didn't take proper notice of where it was and couldn't begin to find it again once we were off the bus. Nor did I take note of the Heart of the Midlothian - I'm sure that was a different place -  where you're allowed perhaps even encouraged to aim a mouth full of spittle to demonstrate your protest against the prison toll booth that was once sited there and from where many unjust hangings were authorised. (something like that).

Travel does inspire but I feel it's a bit of an uphill battle for me today.

Notes on Blogs and Notes.

One of the less hysterical of the myriad celebrations taking place in my house at the moment, following the end of A363, is me coming back to the blog or blogging - perhaps where this writing fixation began. And this will be a very ordinary blog as opposed to something lifted from the spotty inspirations generated from A215 and latterly A363. An old fashioned blog entry where one sits at the key board without a copy of Developing Dramatic Technique individual Style and Technique sitting on my lap - or within spit-rattling distance of its precursor Creative Writing, A Workbook with Readings. No. Just a blog to say it's over. Though what 'over' actually means in this context should perhaps be interrogated a little.

I would say that to answer my own question about what it's 'over' means it would be no longer writing to order, being incredibly fussy about word length, trying to fit in as many techniques as taught as possible lest one is marked down for not applying what has been learned. But not writing.  Writing's not over. Don't be silly.

If writing is not over the problem I have now is where to take this newly polished skill. I feel in a way - all dressed up with nowhere to go. Feasted and gorged with nowhere to throw. I started, once I'd unraveled the arcane business of dialogue construction and getting to grips with show over tell, writing short stories.  I enjoyed this, but always knew that I was too heavily dependent on my own life experiences. No surprise when life-writing as a genre came up I luxuriated in it, though my cupboard of stories was quickly depleted leaving very little of interest for any fiction to come. I enjoyed both and I suppose that's where my future might lie - a kind of blended genre of life writing and fiction - though I certainly would have to apply many of the principles taught on the courses for this to succeed.

Chief among these advice principles according to A215 is in always carrying a writers notebook. I can't argue with this. So simple an idea, but so wide ranging a concept. It doesn't have to be a physical notebook - though this is a good start - it cold just as easily be a note taking application or vocal recording device on a smart phone. Either way it would fit several functions. It would motivate you to see, hear, smell and remember things that you encounter, it would provide inspired nuggets later when you feel the cupboard is, if not bare, not prompting any thoughts, and it would allow a reference list of ideas for later - given the twists and turns of the vicissitudes of daily life. I'm not writing about sunflowers at the moment - but I might need to describe them sometime in the future. Who'd have thought I would be writing about lilies, heather, and nightingales prior to May 2012? Or differing brands of cider presses or wildlife found in the Andean Cloud Forests of Peru during 2013?

All good stuff. But it's a shame beyond utterances that the writer's notebook remains something of a rare species about my body despite my knowing its inestimable qualities.  I can talk it up with the best of them - but I need to literally put words into action. Trouble is I'm so badly organised. And my efforts largely have led to broken pens, ink spilled all over my underwear, shirt, hands. Notebooks that look so broken and battered they might have been retrieved as artifacts from a war trench. Illegible writing - missing pages, pages falling out. Smudges, scratchings  doodlings, and mind-numbing examples of mundane life that could never be mistaken for artistic observation,  like shopping lists, car prices and currency converters.  Left behind at home in this or that other pair of trousers. the litany of failure goes on and on.

I'm sure I can bring some of this learning and experience to some kind of fruition, but I know I'll not get very far unless I sort out this business with the writer's notebook.

So much for that. Over the next few weeks I'm sure I'll be free writing about other things post writing courses.  The' free write' of course is another technique - one I'm using now - that requires a blog entry all of its own.

Tutorial 1 Part 1

A senior admin assistant and a bread roll.

He sits and looks at the object,

regards it from every angle.

Decides that it looks inedible so,

picks it up and throws it out of the window.

Then, realises that he has performed a selfish act,

takes off down the stairs at the speed of fright,

pushes open the fire-doors,

emerges into the daylight

and hears the alarm he's just set off.

Then gesticulates wildly as security start to question him

and, pointing to the bread roll, now squashed in the road

Looks sorry.

And cries.

Tutorial 1 Part 2

Write a central character monologue based on the earlier scenario which should have involved nothing but actions. 

'And what are you looking at eh? Think it's funny that soon I'm going to be living in a poky flat with a landlord treating me like a student, surrounded with furniture bought off eBay, or from clearance auctions or liberated from recycle centres or gifts from charity minded people. What do you have to worry about - wrapped in your cellophane envelope and your sickly looking innards spilling through your sides? Ham - it'll be that watery stuff she always buys - looks like meat, acts like meat - isn't really meat, just pink fat and utterly tasteless.   Lettuce - brown at the sides, like me, showing its age. Lettuce bloody pray. Someone ought to pray for me for Christ sake.  Why on earth did she make the thing for me if she wants our marriage to end?.  "I've left your sandwich on the kitchen top - just next to the toaster." . she shouts down the stairs this morning with her hand cupped on the speaker part of the phone.  No doubt making plans for the day with her new best friend Shelia she met at spinning class.   Plans that don't and never will involve me. . Yeah, well, why did she even make you if it she hates me and wants to move on, find herself,  have 'me' time instead of 'us' time. What the hell is 'me' time anyway? - doesn't even work, 'me time' - makes me feel sick. 'Me time' - too much day time TV, too many of those life style shows - too much talk of self-empowerment and confidence building and I-will-survive-crap she's been drip fed by her chattering friends at that bloody book circle thing she goes to.  Most of them are divorced or have new partners. Partners.  Everyone has a partner these days, Whatever happened to man and wife. Old fashioned I guess. She thinks the same. I'm no longer required. Defunct.  I'm yesterdays news - like you, like a  bread roll. If I eat you, you're gone. As gone as I'll be. If I throw you from the window you'll be gone.  Maybe I'll follow you out of the window and we'll both be gone. Maybe we should both make a pitch for our own little bit of freedom, Maybe we should both look for a little bit of fucking 'me' time and go window flying. "Your sandwich is on the counter next to the toaster."  I should've left you there. '  

Tutorial 1 Part 3

Write a piece of dialogue involving the central character and one other - neither of whom are capable of saying what they really want to say.  

Admin Assistant:  Mr Breckenridge, I was hoping that you’d had time to sign the…sir are you all right.

Senior AA:  (distracted)   Uh-huh. Sorry Jenny I was just… what do you see there?

Jenny:  Where sir?

Mr Breckenridge:  On the table, there – what do you see?

Jenny:  Well nothing – just your sandwich, is it?

Mr Breckenridge:  No Jenny it’s not just my sandwich, it is in fact the last meal of a condemned man, wrapped tight in an invisible skin, just like me, ready to be consumed. As I am. (looks at open window)

Jenny: I’m sorry sir I don’t…

Mr Breckenridge:  No.  Course you don’t.  Course you don’t.  Everything all right with you, Jenny, is it?

Jenny: Oh yes Mr Breckenridge. Going out tonight with my friend Hannah, can’t wait – we’re all meeting at the skate park and going on to that new…sir, are you all right?

Mr Breckenridge: Yes Jenny I’m fine – you run along to that umm – skate park with ahh…Leona, is it? And, I’ll be along directly.

Jenny:  Mr Breckenridge?  Sir?    No, I what I meant to say was that I’m going out tonight with my friends not going anywhere at the mo -.  You are all right aren’t you, Mr Breckenridge?

Mr Breckenridge: She’s leaving me.

Jenny: Who? (longish pause). Who…’s leaving you Mr Breckenridge?

Mr Breckenridge: You see that bread roll Jenny – ham and lettuce, my favourite fillings. Mrs Breckenridge made that for me this very morning. Left it on the kitchen top. By the toaster.

Jenny:  I… don’t understand.

SAA: Nor me Jenny.  Nor me. More things in Heaven and Earth eh?

Jenny: I’ll just leave these on the desk if that’s all right Mr Breckenridge. (exits nervously)  

           

Activity 2.10

This is the consequence of Activity 2.10 which I posted on my tutor forum. Apart from the tutor who's paid to look and comment,  it's been met with a stony silence from everyone else. Can't say I blame them, I've yet to comment on anyone else's  work - surely this is that hardest part of this course: peer critiquing . That said it is a  part of the course and you won't pass it without getting involved in one another's work. Activity... 

Two voices one agitated and pissed off the other a model of calm reasonableness. The idea behind this activity is to practice putting together two opposing viewpoints. This is my first go.  Any resemblance that might be detected from within my own life is purely coincidental.  

'The mother in law has threatened to come and visit next Sunday. Christ, she must realise that's the only day Jane and I have to catch up with our busy lives. Sunday is our day, in my mind at least, and I wish I could protect the day from the unwanted interference of others.

I include the whole bloody lot of them. All the kids have left home. About time too. Now it's me time, or rather 'us' time. It sounds insufferably selfish I know, but I'm fed up with sharing Jane with everyone else. They'll all be bringing their problems with them on their week-end visits between now and Christmas and expect us to spend time solving them, talking through their problems with them, spending quality time with them. But what about me I say. Us, Jane and me. When do we get good quality time? I work all week in north Wales and watch telly or read a book in the evenings sometimes ending up climbing the walls with boredom. She's in Aberdeen all week staying in a hotel. The week-ends should be our opportunity to rekindle our friendship and try to reignite the fire in our relationship. How the hell can we do that when we have the cast of Ben Hur (figuratively speaking) waiting in the wings for our attention every bloody week end.

The dog goes mad every time people come into the house, jumping on the furniture, and given his advanced age for a springer spaniel he's now taken to relieving himself on the hall carpet or even in the lounge with the utter excitement of it all. Dirty bloody thing! And as for the mother in law, how long before she gets to that stage? Already I have to help her up the stairs and have to carry her bags to her room like a bloody Sherpa . And she's going deaf which means the TV has to be turned up to an unfeasible volume whilst we sit watching crap like the Antiques Road Show because 'mother never misses it!' Give me strength!

*

It is nice to have an extended family. It's such a cozy affair when everyone rallies around at the week-ends and we get to catch up on each other’s lives. This is what family life is all about. Jane and I understand that we have to take the adult lead and sacrifice some weekends to help support the others who are still finding their way in life, in the case of the children, and the mother in law, who has recently been widowed and doesn't enjoy the best of health really likes to see us and, to be fair, when else can she other than on the odd week-end bless her. 

Apparently she’s ordered hearing aids; I've told her people will think she’s in the secret service if she wanders around ear-wigging people’s conversations in supermarkets which she’s said she’ll do once she has her new ears attached. She’ll probably be furnishing me with story plots before we know it.  Quite a character the MIL. Frank next door will be relieved, he’s no fan of the Antiques Road show, but pretty much hears most of it through the walls when she stays. He says he doesn't mind, his own mothers addicted to Deal or No Deal which he says is far worse as you don’t get to see Fiona Bruce.  Have to agree with him there.  

She never comes empty handed either. Always fully loaded with cakes for us and biscuits for Rufus who adores her so much sometimes he can barely contain himself. He's not long for this world now so we all take it in turns should he have the occasional accident. All part of being a pet owner. All part of the buy in as they say. Jane and I don't see as much of one another during the week due to professional commitments and getting stuck in different and awkward geographical locations, but we compensate for those absences by having at least three holidays a year and dedicate all the time when on holiday to each other.  This is called being a responsible adult and we often laugh about it together knowing that our time will come.  Frankly at the moment I don’t think we’d have it any other way.