A Purple View from the Bridge.

 I recently went to see Arthur Miller's “A View From The Bridge’ at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick.

I had picked up the tickets thinking it would be a great thing to blog about. And, indeed, it would have been. Miller’s story, about Eddie Carbone, an Italian American Dock Worker who lives with his wife Beatrice and orphaned niece Catherine, seems so relevant (probably why so many theatres are returning to this play, unless I’ve missed some significant anniversary or something) because of its exploration of immigration issues, which are so pertinent to today’s society. I wanted to talk about how fantastic the acting was. How the accents were downplayed just enough to avoid corny distraction. I wanted to talk about the fantastic revolving set design... But during the performance there was something equally fascinating, and dare I say less quantifiable, going on in the auditorium... 

Apparently when you get past a certain age, it is de riguer to attend theatre matinees. Did everyone except me know this? We took our seats (the bar stool ones to the left within the actor's spit range) and watched the auditorium fill. It slowly dawned on me that in a room with maybe two hundred people, we were a minority group. ‘We’ being anyone under the age of seventy. I counted five of us. Fair play, I thought. Husband leaned over on his perch and whispered, “A prize for spotting who was a hotty back in their day.” I scoffed, disgusted at his blatant ageism, and then noticed a rather dapper looking gent in jeans and shirt, with a sweep of carefully coiffed silver hair. “Four rows back next to the lady in the turquoise,” I muttered, hating myself a little. “What about you?”

But just then, the lights began to fade, and we dutifully sat back and shut up.  Ambient lighting filled the stage, and a cast of Brooklyn residents set the scene. But my eyes were drawn away from the action, back at the audience where there seemed to be a general consensus that they were entitled to finish their indepth and long winded conversations before entering into the spirit of quiet observant theatre goers. It was tempting to shush loudly. A reflex response. But everyone knows you can only shush people younger than yourself. Which left precious few options.

If this were the only misdemeanour, it would be forgivable. But next, began the great toffee unwrapping. As a child, I was only permitted non wrapped sweets in an uncrackly packet at the theatre or cinema. And if crackly-packeted was the only option, then I would have to wait until a moment of clapping or loud dynamic action to dive in and quickly unwrap. I knew the consequences… Apparently this octogenarian audience didn't - had never had such an education - and rustled their toffee papers with gay abandon. I’m not exaggerating, the auditorium positively crackled like TV static with the mass unwrapping of Werther's and Chocolate Limes. (Funny how some older people refer to all brand of sweets, whether fruit based, chocolate or caramel, as toffees - gross generalisation, I know... and more senior readers, feel free to put me straight on it!) But rustling abounded. Do I sound precious? Even husband, who never had the non-wrapped toffee rule enforced, found it distracting.

And it didn’t end there. The performance was punctuated with inappropriate laughing, comments and exclamations. Saucy moments were deemed raucous beyond the chortle it mustered from me, leaving me wondering if there was some generation specific joke that had evaded me. Other moments inspired ooohs and tuts and giggles like they were watching a Carry On. Here and there someone would call out some witty rebuff about the action. The actors battled on. I bit my tongue.

The crunch came at the end. Eddie was in the throes of his climactic dramatic death. (Sorry if this is a spoiler...) I sat with bated breath. But in the dramatic pause before the narrator stepped forward to complete the play, several audience members decided that that was enough of an ending for them and upped and left, before an applause could even vaguely start. Well, they’d seen him cark it, so why wait?

Do you think I’m being too harsh? I don’t. This blog is heading in the direction of a badly told anecdote and it's tempting to end weakly with that old line “you had to be there.” I had felt temporarily disgruntled by their bad behaviour. Until I thought about it a bit and brought to mind the poem by Jenny Joseph Warning which begins 'When I am an old woman I shall wear purple'. This audience all had their ‘purple’ on. They were having a ball. They enjoyed themselves and responded to the play with emotional honesty. It reminded me of a time I took a group of young people to see a production of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet was wearing an ill judged length of skirt for a raked stage, which the boys in the group openly perved up. At the end when Juliet, sorry to spoil it again, died (à la Primary School murder-in-the-dark) it was met by open laughter and cheers. I did my best to quell the baying audience. But in all fairness it had been a dire performance and I concurred with the general reaction.

So I have resolved, based on observance of the old and the young, that I need to get over myself and that I, too, should become a miscreant theatre goer. I will book cheap, last-minute seats to performances and leave all my reserve with the ushers at the doors. I will laugh when I think it’s funny, even if no one else does. I will chew, suck and chomp toffees loudly and rattle the packet as I pass it along the row to vaguely grateful strangers. If I need a wee / walk around / drink in the middle of the act I will just get up and go. I will be a purple wearing theatre goer before my time. I will not be a passive watcher, but become part of the action. Isn't that so much better?       

A (Camp) Site for Sore Eyes

Having spent the last few months hunched over the laptop until my hands resembled claws and my pallor turned the sickly yellow of Birds Custard I stepped blinking and squinting into the sunshine and decided to go camping. A writing research trip. I promise. Tent - check. Sleeping bag - check. Cool box crammed with chocolate and beers - check.

We are working our way through the Cool Camping book, a brilliant compilation of the most exciting camping locations throughout the UK, including yurts, pods and teepee sites. And we’ve made a commitment, that I think we are soon to break, never to go back to the same place until we’ve tried them all.

This time we found ourselves at Syke Farm in Buttermere, Cumbria. It is testament to the fact that I’ve spent too much time online recently, because it was a real stumbling block not to read Syke Farm as Skype Farm. This in itself was reason enough to go. And secretly, I was hoping it would inspire some fresh story ideas. 

By some fluke of nature the weather was incredible. Hot sun, very light breeze – exactly what you would book for camping if you had access to climatic authorities. The Syke Farm camp site nestles along the Newlands Valley. A little stream babbles agreeably through the camp site. It is surrounded by a horseshoe of trees that in the daytime twitter and rattle with chaffinches and woodpeckers and at dusk releases skitters of pipistrelles. 

A walk around Buttermere felt worthy and challenging enough to justify sitting with a beer afterwards before a brief stroll down to the pub. 

I included a visit to Keswick Museum and The Theatre on the Lake Matinee for cultural content. More on those in future posts.

So this trip, with its spectacular scenery and glorious weather quickly stirred a few story ideas. Definitely a setting to inspire some late summer, or autumn themed stories, which is what the women’s magazines are buying at the moment. 

But then, as I walked back to the tent one afternoon, feeling sun soaked and peaceful and like the world was a good place to be, I found a poster for a missing dog. He had disappeared whilst he and his owners were walking the fells the day before. The dog in the photo was handsomely shaggy and black, with heartmelting eyes. “He’s probably fallen and impaled himself on a cliff branch or something,” husband helpfully said. I shook my head and glanced up the valley, hoping to see a blur of black bounding over the bracken. I tried not to cry. I will probably never find out if he made it home or not. So this will be the story I will write next. Written in that dog's honour. And I don’t care if you think it’s unrealistic, but it will have a happy ending. If I'd wanted to write factually I would have gone into journalism... Then again... 

Stirring Stuff

Close your eyes. What noise does it make when you stir a Cuppa Soup? How is it different from stirring tea? What sounds do you associate with being in a loft? You hear rustling of some old letters. Can you sense the type of paper, and how old they might be?

Today I’m all about sound effects and storytelling through the medium of the radio play.

I am a radio play geek. If I can’t listen to them live, I put them on the BBC iPlayer, one after another for hours, shushing anyone who tries to talk to me. It makes me feel a bit sick afterwards – like a child who ate all their sweets at once. It also makes me hungry to write my own.  

This weekend I attended a brilliant Radio Play Writing Workshop led by Zosia Wand. Zosia is a prolific writer and an inspirational teacher. I dutifully turned up on the day with my homework -  a five minute radio play with carefully laid out sound FX and scene directions. Group members acted out each others work, to hear how they sounded.

My play was about a young couple about to move to Australia. They're getting rid of the last of their possessions. For him, a collection of Fleetwood Mac vinyls from a previous relationship, and for her, a box of old love letters stashed in the loft. I wanted to explore the emotional attachment we have to stuff. I wanted the tone to be fairly serious. This is where we came unstuck. None of us were professional actors and without time to prepare and read through in advance it was hard to gauge the hoped-for tone of each other’s work. Some serious pieces came out as comedy farces and vice versa. 

I wonder which is worse; to find humour where the writer wanted contemplative sobriety, or to remain po-faced and stricken through what they thought were killer gags. I had, like others in the group, tried it out on husband before the workshop. But he started reading the male characters lines with the strangest, most strident Lancashire accent I’ve ever heard, including  “t‘loft”, “ayes” and “nay lass”. How bizarre. It wasn’t written like that. Husband said he was trying to “get into character”. (It makes me think we should never resort to roleplay in the years to come.) But it turns out that acting is a Very Hard thing to do. When my piece was read in the workshop, the girl’s part came across exactly as I’d imagined, but unfortunately the male character was read out like lines from a BBC family-time sitcom. It created an interesting effect.  Probably not one I’d want to repeat. But it got the lines across and I learnt a lot from my own and others’ scripts (some parts read by me, I must add, equally as badly) about what to cut and what to keep.

There were the usual gags about coconut shell horses hooves and owl hoots to represent all things dark and spooky, but it got us thinking about where words could be replaced with particular sounds for greater effect, and the power of a character not speaking, and careful use of relevant sound effects. And effective careful scripting. Creating a believable world - where the sounds and effects listeners hear enable them to fill in the gaps is an art different to any other. 

I was struck by the collaborative nature of the radio play. The script writer puts the words down on paper. The producer, director and actors are equal parts of the process. It is a massive leap from the fiction writing I feel comfortable with; sort of starker, and less containable. But isn’t that an exciting thing?

So I’m working on a full length piece, based around the canals where I live. The BBC writersroom is invaluable for this. They have example scripts on there, as well as other great tools, resources and opportunities for writers to explore. 

Oh, and after extensive research, I conclude that the sound created by stirring a cuppa soup is dependent on brand and dried matter content. But a slimmer soup is virtually indistinguishable to tea. Until you taste it. 

Shutter Speed

Husband and I have spent the last week in a contented, navel-gazing bubble. Our wedding album arrived. No one is allowed to touch it without first washing their hands, blowing their nose, donning archivist gloves... I want nothing to sully our beautiful album.

We struck gold when we found our wedding photographer. We had already seen a couple of photographers, one of whom addressed everything to husband and said nasty things about his 'other brides'. And another who also did pet portraits. I was momentarily tempted by the images of pitbulls and kittens.

But then we met Stewart, at Randallphotography. He showed us a slideshow of spectacular images over an Elbow song we had already claimed as ‘ours’. He is an amazing photographer and I feel more smug than I am comfortable admitting every time I look through our photos. He even managed to make my slightly ill-thought-through meringue dress look good. A feat in itself.

Wedding photography must be the most terrifying job in the world. Perhaps only surpassed by a career as a fighter pilot or soldier. Although I'm not sure how much difference there is between a raging insurgent and a soon-to-be bridezilla. I think I managed to keep my nuptial-monster under wraps, although things did nearly come to blows over the choice of napkin bands. 

Not only is photography (good photography; the arty sort that turns people monosyllabic) Very Hard, this is surely magnified under the pressure of being at a couple's wedding, where, let's be honest, there’s always potential for weirdness – a unique mix of personalities, lots of hymn singing and bubbly early in the day and a bride who is constantly reminded this is supposed to be the 'best day of her life’. The pressure to capture the moments as they unfold on camera must be intense. I think if I was a wedding photographer I would have recurring anxiety dreams about forgetting my film/memory cards, or mistaking the wrong woman for the bride’s mother and snapping reportage style shots of an unraveling affair. Hats off (large flowery ones, or feathered fascinators) to brave wedding photographers everywhere. Especially Randallphotography who truly captured our day perfectly.

To justify the procrastination, I’m treating our wedding album as research. It has inspired a few story ideas that I’m now developing. Some are blurred and badly framed (see where I’m going with this…?) others are flashes of brilliance.

I also love old photos. I stumbled across Found Films, a fascinating website showing photographs from reels forgotten about for years in old cameras. I’m not sure about the speculative captions under some of this website's images, but the photographs themselves are intriguing. I'm sometimes sad that digital photography has taken away the mystery of those undeveloped films that used to gather fluff in the back of drawers.

Today, I’m working on a story called ‘Shutter Speed’ which plays with this idea of lost film and the important role photos play in our lives. For research purposes, I’d better just go and have another look at my wedding album…

Ten Things I Hate About eReaders

When I go into a bookshop and see the eReader promotional stand, I want to kick it. Hard. I make loud declarations, like, “These are evil devices. Stealing the soul of literature…” and  “Only pretentious people use eReaders. They’re not really reading. They’re just standing there posing.” 


Husband ducks away from me down the nearest aisle, nervously flicking through anything to hand, be it the Aga Cookery Book or The Guide to Organic Baby Birthing for Vegans until I’ve finished my little rant.


Recently he’s taken to suggesting that perhaps he might like an eReader, but I know he’s only doing it to start a debate; we like to discuss such things loudly and forthrightly on long car journeys. 


So here is my list. Ten things I hate about eReaders. The list has been substantially edited, to preserve sanity; some of my reasons were, if I’m completely honest, bordering on petty. But the ones that remain, I feel, are totally valid.

1. E-readers don’t smell like books.

2. If you leave your eReader on the bus, you will feel very upset and spend hours on the travel hotline trying to get through to lost property. If you leave a book on the bus, you feel mildy annoyed but hope someone deserving will pick it up and read it.

3. You can’t borrow eReaders from the library and return them with curious little pencilled notes down the margin for the next borrower to puzzle over.

4. You can’t visit the home of an eReader advocate and make random, wild assumptions about their personality by looking at the books on their shelves. You would have to pinch their digitized library for that.

5. eReaders give nothing away about the journey you’ve taken with a book. No dog ears, smells or smudges. They don’t express a life shared with a story. In the future, people won’t lovingly pass on the battered books they read repeatedly as kids.

6. eReaders threaten the survival of our little buddy the humble Silverfish, who survives on polysaccharides, paper and glue.

7. eReaders are expensive and perpetuate the advantage of those with money over those without and are being dallied as an catalyst to speed up cuts to library services. A politician interviewed on the radio recently suggested that libraries would become redundant as more people took to eReaders, using this to justify their closures. He failed to see that the whole point of libraries is free access to texts, learning and technology for all. He had the cheek to suggest libraries could be run by volunteers. However well-intentioned and eager, volunteers will never replace our brilliant librarians. I wish I had noted the politician’s name. I would write a twisted little story with his name thinly disguised as the baddy who comes to a slow, sticky end, probably involving a swarm of bees, and stoning with faulty eReaders.

8a. An eReader will break if my cat sits on it.

8b. If I drop an eReader in the bath it won’t be fixed by a couple of hours wrinkling dry on a radiator.

9. You can’t browse for books with an eReader. Yes, I know They say you can. But I like to get off my bum and go to an actual shop and explore shelves of actual, tangible books and I like to actually open their actual pages, and smell and feel...

 10. They rely on a battery which is bad for the environment, and impractical for camping / far flung travel / power cuts / if you forget to charge it. And to be honest, I struggle to remember to charge my phone.

However, because writing is supposed to be ‘What I do now…’ I ought to be able to see the other side of the (electronically distributed) story. What if, for example, I have a character who is heavily into tech? And in her hi-spec airport-scattered flat she had replaced all her books with a large projected digital bookcase. She never leaves home without her eReader; she wouldn’t dream of it and doesn’t know how she lived before. How on earth could she read words off an actual bit of paper, placed there in actual printed ink. How did she manage before when she couldn’t change text font to her exact preference? Could I stop my sneering disregard for eReaders from sneaking, commando style, into the text?

So, let’s see if I can present the other side of the argument.

Things that aren’t so bad about eReaders:

1. They save on shelf space.

2. They are shiny and make you feel superior and cool (a bit like that kid at school in the 90’s who got a Gameboy before everyone else.)

3. They don’t melt in the sun and fall apart.

4. They don’t require as many trees to be cut down to make them.

5. Unlike your favourite book, you won’t lend your eReader to a friend (why would you?) then spend the next few years wondering how you can ask for it back without sounding rude and petty, or stealthily sneaking through their book case.

So, they have their place. And I’m going to have to suck it up because I'll probably get given one for Christmas when they get cheaper. I’ll mutter darkly about it, whilst secretly enjoying the eNote-scribble facility or authentic page-turning soundFX.

And, ultimately, if someone published me, and I ended up on an eReader, I wouldn’t be that cross. In fact, I’d probably kiss them. Everyone has their price.  

Christmas, Chutney and Dead Chicks

And would you believe it… January is over. I won’t go on about how this month has flown by. I reserve that sort of banter for church coffee mornings and jumble sales. Instead I’m looking briefly back over one shoulder, then squinting forward into the near future.

Christmas was a beautiful thing. For several reasons.

I was thrilled to do a reading at the National Short Story Day in Manchester. This was the first of a fantastic UK wide event, held annually on 21^st December - the shortest day of the year. See what they did there? It promised to be ‘a celebration of prose’s short-yet-perfectly-crafted form’ and it was. Comma Press hosted the event at MaDlab in the Northern Quarter; a quirky gem of a venue which required eagle eyes and a secret knock to gain access - only the coolest literary types, or the most determined wannabes (i.e. me) got in. There were two other fantastic writers: flash fiction master and novelist David Gaffney and poet, writer and accomplished performer Michelle Green. I read second, after David’s brilliant PowerPoint flash fiction and before Michelle’s evocative and moving story extract. I like to think I was a suspicious, untested filling in an otherwise delectable sandwich (think own-brand squeezy cheese on ciabatta roll – uncertain, but it could just work) People clapped at the end which is always a good sign (unless it’s slow and menacing) and I was totally thrilled to be appearing with two great, established writers and to have the opportunity to read my work. And the Gluhwein was delicious. It was a superb event and one to watch out for next December.

           

What else made Christmas? Singing our annual rendition of Fairytale of New York with my brother and sister-in-law until the neighbours complained. We were delighted to see them (brother and sis, not neighbours, although they’re very nice, too) as they’d flown in on a pause from their sailing trip, currently stationed in Sicily on their beautiful boat, Planet. My sister-in-law is also a writer, so we had lots of time to rant about semicolon abuse; and plot how we would both bombard Mslexia magazine with submissions until they caved in and accepted our work.

Finally, it wouldn’t have been Christmas without mass chutney making.

Every year I make chutney and gift it to anyone who I think is too polite to decline it. Every year I have the same anxiety dream that I have somehow bred botulism in the sterilised jars and wake in a cold sweat. I then go downstairs and make a large cheese and chutney sandwich, eat it and sit nervously waiting for signs of paralysis. All clear this year.

Now, looking forward to the weeks ahead, I will be developing a themed short fiction collection, and flinging stories out, until something sticks. And applying for Come Dine With Me.

Today, I’m working on a short story that features, briefly, the decomposing carcasses of garden birds. It’s an unsavoury little tale. Uncertain how long it would take for the flesh of a small bird to entirely disappear, and in the name of research, I googled for images of ‘decaying sparrows’ and ‘rotting starlings’. No doubt the googlegods in their silicon e-tower have my card marked. At least I wasn’t looking up dead chicks. I think that’s a different thing entirely.   

Nodding Dog.

I am sitting with a rug over my knees. It’s flipping freezing.

I have been frantically typing towards 50’000 words to complete my nanowrimo novel in November. And, dear reader, I finished it. It is extremely ropey. It is full of appalling clichés and toe curling sentiment. Parts of the plot are held together with deteriorating threads as thin as spider silk. Other parts are bolted together like a Frankenstein monster. It is not lovely, clever, brilliant or sparkling. But it is mine. And after a hard month’s labour, I feel I can perhaps nurture this thing into growth, feed in some goodness, get it standing on two legs and stumbling along until I can clap proudly one day at it’s graduation into being something I feel able to show to… someone. Or perhaps I will just keep it locked in the attic…

So what has sustained this big book birthing squeeze? Strong coffee from our Bialetti and my lovely husband dragging me out for walks in the cold. Where we live, the canals are fantastically inspiring if you can ignore all the junk people have thrown onto it in an attempt to crack the ice. I think it’s the cold weather extreme sport alternative to dead jellyfish poking. We did find one nice patch, where the sluice had partially frozen into little icicles.

Something else that's kept me going was coming runner up in The Guardian Travel Writing Competition 2010 I wrote about our honeymoon hotel in Mauritius. My photo made the front cover of the travel section (the photo was larger than my actual article extract so husband, who took the photo, is claiming the glory). Alongside mine were other winner's photos; a visitor to the Bolivian salt planes, a family skiing in Sweden and a guy driving the Mongol Rally. All very deserving winners... then there was me, getting tipsy on margaritas. I don’t know if this puts me in the best, most adventurous or professional light, but I still loved it and was totally thrilled to have been placed.

I would have been delighted to actually win. This perhaps, though, is a blessing in disguise. The prize was to stay at a stunning and lavish Castle Hotel and review it for the Guardian, which would have been a fantastic opportunity. But I recently went to a wedding there, got sick during the day and vomited violently for a week. Definitely and categorically nothing to do with the hotel food or facilities (I was ill before it got to that point in proceedings), but it left an umm… unpleasant taste in the mouth.

Today I am working on something to celebrate National Short Story Day, which is 21^st December. A story about a nodding dog. Yes. Really. Scraping the barrel? No. Not quite yet.