Wednesday 24 December 2014

Winter Blues

I hope you have a moment for my little Christmas speech.  Let's call it a ghost story, as is the festive tradition.  I most certainly shall be talking about unseen terrors, and, let's say, I'm the ghost at your celebration.  Let's say I'm behind you, in that empty armchair that nobody wanted to sit on for some reason.  Don't look around, just know that I'm there.  The day is upon us now and we're half way out of the bitterest season.  But, for those of us with mental health problems, particularly the kind that are inflamed during the chill season, the worst is still to come.

My fear of the winter is, thankfully, suppressed and blanketed by my love for Christmas.  I am eased in to the colder, greyer turn of year by the joyful approach of the festive day and all the celebration that comes along for the ride.  And I've had a good ride.  I've climbed a castle while dressed as a Victorian gent, I've sang and danced and drank and I've even had a little Christmas day of my own with my two best friends.  December has been as good as ever (I try to recall how wonderful last year's was but with the hindsight of what happened to me shortly after, and how that was clearly already an idea in the mind of the person who dealt that blow by then, I can't feel fondness for December 2013.  Anyone who has read Children's Hospice will know how I am capable of illustrating a less-than-stellar Christmas).  But Christmas day will be over soon.  We'll have a long, lovely day with the people we love, we'll squeeze every moment and drink every drop and make it count, but it will be over.  Boxing day does good by its name to the depressed as it is the vanguard of a series of thuds and blows thumping us through the close of the year and the dreaded January.  Pain returns in the month of my birth - a pain more complex than the December head-kicking I got a few years back, and far less curable by a wad of titanium in the skull.

Feelings of constant sadness are notoriously difficult to express.  With the threat of embarrassment, ridicule or a change in how your nearest and dearest appreciate you, we feel they must remain inside.  So we suffer through the winter in silence, not ever letting on and, thus, never being asked how we are feeling.  It is at the fault of nobody that we are not reached out to - when the assumption is that somebody is absolutely fine, why bother asking if that is indeed the case?  So I implore you all, on this day of good will to all, to hold the good will tightly and not let it loose when the day is over.  Ask a friend if they're okay whenever possible, even if they seem so.  You can't know what they're going through this time of year, but you can count on the likelihood that they might want to talk about it if the invitation were to arise.  Winter has brought terror to my doorstep every year.  Whether it's in almost losing an eye or clutching a banister tightly and thinking with utter certainty that I am experiencing my very last seconds on Earth, the darkest season delights on doing the darkest things.  I wish I could locate a reason for this connection; maybe it's a lack of vitamin D, or years of poetic, pathetic fallacy feeding my subconscious.  Either way, all I can do right now is try to fight it.

I can reflect on the year that's been and that is a comforting thing to do.  I spent a hefty part of it assuming it to be a year of loss but (although I can say with confidence that this year I've turned getting dumped into a hobby), it really was a year of gain.  I leave with more than I had when I went in - I've finally become the person I've wanted to be all my life.  I've discovered powerful sides to myself that have been suppressed for years and I've made friends that I know will be with me until the very end.  Furthermore I've taken long-overdue steps into doing the sort of work I want to do; perhaps I'm not doomed to repeat the phrase "do you want a glass of ice with that?" over and over again until I collapse into ancient dust.  I had a triumphant mess of a Summer and I've been on some remarkable adventures.  A scroll back through my facebook photos paints 2014 as a year of constant fun, and that is no distortion of the truth; it really was.  When the midnight bell chimes, though, and January rears its head, I must begin to look forward, to an oblique, unknowable year ahead.  And doing that whilst cold and alone can, and always will, exacerbate my low feelings.  I won't ask my friends to be there for me, because I know that I never have to ask that.  Substitute currency for loved ones and I am the richest man on the planet.  I hope you can all compete.

So Merry Christmas to everyone.  I hope your various Christmas days are as fun as mine always are and I hope there are plenty of people near to you who you can legitimately be there for in the coming months, however happy or sad they are feeling.  My ramble is almost over now and if you've read to the end then I thank you.  Go and pour yourself a brandy and play Wizzard at full volume.

And lastly, to wrap this up, I'm talking to you now.  Yes, YOU.  Don't look around, there's no one else there (I was just joking about being a ghost in the armchair).  I don't know if you even read my blog but, if you're reading this, I hope you realise that it's you I'm referring to.  I think you will.  I shan't embarrass you by naming you but I just want you to know that I hope you're okay, and that, as I've promised before, I'll always be there for you in whatever capacity you need me.  If, when the bad winter withers, the year to come makes good on its promise, our friendship will be strong again.  I know how you do in the cold and the dark, and that you've got far worse to return to than most of us, and if things were perfect you'd only ever exist in the sunshine, like you so deserve.  Life won't allow that, but if it's anywhere near a decent compromise, I'm here.  I'm always here.  Merry Christmas.

Thursday 11 December 2014

Children's Hospice - Noteworthy Quotations

Here are twenty-one lines from Children's Hospice that aren't about dogs shitting, women being smacked by chair legs, rotting babies being torn up and chewed or naked boys eating fish out of bins.


"If I were a thousand times more intelligent, and if I were a thousand times more beautiful, then maybe I could be her.  But as it stands I have to make do simply being with her, which is hardly a poor compromise."

"Mummy - the conduit for all of Little Baby Victor's future fallibility where daddy's nine-month-passed euphoric release signalled the passing of his accountability."

"Fatherhood truly makes a man himself."

"Her boy, her joy, a greater melody than ever she created on that piano."

"Oh if he were truly absent this would be a happy home, but his vacancy is just of the heart and this is a Hell house now."

"Guilt is a paralytic in action and cowardice is a motivator in silence."

"The only word that gets around is the word of man."

"The elements hold no such grace against the damned."

"I'm not a liar anymore.  But I'm still a killer."

"She just wants to be home.  But home is where the heart is and the where the bloody hell can that be now?"

"Little things have big effects on the over-aware state of mind that the witching hour brings to the sleepless."

"Must men prove the worth of their sex by denying the right of it to others who simply want to get by?"

"Snuff it in the dark or snuff it in the light, what difference does it make?"

"Hope is like sugar to a baby boy; give him too much and he'll climb the bloody walls."

"All children die."

"January is the very worst time of year and one which we all bafflingly herald the arrival of with merriment and midnight kisses."

"Who they were in life can not matter any more for all they know now is pain untold and unending and when pain is all there is to be known then self becomes absent."

"Killing's a sin, whoever you kill.  Them's God's rules."

"You aborted the second coming before he could teach us things and you looked your abortion in the eye as you did so."

"Man is the creator but also the destroyer.  Man destroys himself.  Woman is the giver of life and seldom the brute force and here she is alive and well!"

"Maybe my marrow heart will get the better of me!  Maybe the muscle - the vessel - the withered, pulsing hunk of meat - will finally let me sleep!"



Wednesday 3 December 2014

Fuck You I Like Christmas

It's very 'cool' to hate Christmas.  When a jingly old Christmas classic comes on the radio it's expected of the occupants of that room to go 'Eurgh' and giggle misanthropically at their fellow man.  To mumble into your drink and offer a dismissive hand gesture at anyone who dares mention the word earlier than mid-December.  It's a C word that offends more easily than THE C word (cunt).
With that in mind I, as a 27-year-old man with alternative interests and a hatred for processed pop music and capitalist John Lewis heartstring pornography, should be the very vanguard of the anti-festive brigade.  Well I'm sorry to disappoint you, you assuming nincompoop, but I love Christmas.
When I hear Slade's old hit for the first time, I smile.  When I'm treated to that first whiff of delicious mulled wine I feel warmer inside than the cauldron it's served from.  I've liked Christmas ever since it was nothing more to me than a morning of free toys, and as its merit to me has morphed as I've grown up, my fondness for it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. 
It's not my fault, my love for this time of year is out of my control.  If you want to blame someone for this gleeful affront to your yearly grumble, blame my relatives.  Blame my friends.  Hell, even blame my ex-girlfriends if you want.  These are the people who, throughout my life, have always made my Christmases happy, exciting and memorable.  They've been conditioning me since birth towards Pavlovian salivation responsive to the first beats of 'Last Christmas'.
Christmas to me is a gathering of relatives I don't often see (and I actually like mine), good music, games, drinking and feasting.  And Doctor Who is always on.  Any day that's on is Christmas to me.  Prior to that it's me and my friends, prancing about like idiots in my flat to silly songs in the shade of my glowing Christmas tree, festive-events and the sudden influx of good, Christmas ales.  I've yet to have a bad Christmas, but after almost thirty good ones I doubt a sour one-off will make much of a dent in my support for it.
I've been consistently lucky.  Millions haven't.  Many have lost someone precious to them at Christmas time.  Many are abused, neglected or subject to some continued, dreaded form of all-the-year-round torment during the festive season and, however their fortunes have fared, they have a justified disdain for the time of year.  Human evil doesn't take a break when Santa's workshop opens.
On the lighter end of the spectrum, others dislike Christmas because their families have never really bothered with it and so they're baffled at the onslaught of celebration.  Sure, they can have that.  And no, I'm not about to careen into a Geldoffian rant about how we should shove Christmas down the throats of entire cultures who have never historically acknowledged it.  By all means grumble at Him, I'll join you there.
But anyhow, I fall into neither of those categories.  I am humbled to have been left in this section of society, and I recognise the struggles of others, I am not ignorant, I am simply thankful.  And Christmas brings this out in me more than any other time of the year.
"Oh but you aren't religious Joe!  What are you doing celebrating Christmas?" I hear you ask (keep it down, I'm writing).  No, I'm not.  But I won't let a lack of piety stop me from enjoying a festival of light and heat, invented by pagans in order to banish darkness and cold, under a tree introduced to my culture by a German prince in the nineteenth century, and unfortunately obtained by a God-fearing cult with an agenda to promote their fantasy starring a magic baby who was born in September.  I'll leave the light and warmth in, and the religion can go out in the cold (ask me what I'm doing for Easter).
Who else was unashamed to love Christmas?  Him.  Charlie boy.  My hero.  Charles Dickens, who popularised the salutation "Merry Christmas" in the very same year Prince Albert brought Christmas trees to Britain.  If it's good enough for Charlie, it's good enough for me.  And I will most certainly be reading A Christmas Carol for the ninth time this year, and enjoying Kermit's rendition of it for the forty-ninth.  And while, yes, Dickens does sign off with a desire to be blessed by God, it is Dickens I am blessed by, every year (I even got a job in his house this year, so he's technically my boss now too).
Finally, you'll tell me I'm in support of a festival of capitalism.  Well save your breath.  That's not what Christmas is to me, and I don't indulge.  I won't be eagerly awaiting the horrific Coke advert (why people are excited to see a convoy of corporate gas-guzzlers lay waste to an idyllic country village is beyond me, they moan about it at other times of the year), I won't be setting foot into a John Lewis or a Debenhams (the queues for that are huge anyway) and I certainly won't be enjoying any butchered turkey flesh either.  If this is what Christmas is to you, I get why you hate it.  But stay out of my way, I'm putting 'Fairytale of New York' on.
Merry Christmas!

Sunday 16 November 2014

Angry Man With Stella Can

Angry Man With Stella Can
When were you last okay?
So bulldog-eyed
So swift of stride
All your livelong, snarling day

Angry Man With Stella Can
Doing laps around Soho Square
So many wide-berths
From tourists perturbed
But though you'll grumble, you'll never care

Angry Man With Stella Can
Arguing with the tarmac
Though your words are coarse
And enraged by the sauce
I don't think you'll ever attack

Angry Man With Stella Can
Draped in your coat so grey
Is it the uniform
That impedes your reform
Or does apathy dress you that way?

Angry Man With Stella Can
Who had you been before?
A good man with a vice
And friends not so nice
Given little but promised more?

Angry Man With Stella Can
You frighten me, so you know
It isn't the can
Or the big, shouty man
It's in seeing where my life could go

Angry Man With Stella Can
If I could make you well
And if there was a way
To avoid your fate
Would you be kind enough to tell?

Sunday 26 October 2014

A Night Walk

There are enough monsters already.  Almost as soon as I make the snap decision to walk, at 1am on the border of Saturday and Sunday, from Angel to Soho, my very own Dickensian 'night walk', I am reminded of this.  I zigzag the pavements and roadsides, eager not to cross paths with the snarling, staggering beasts that approach me from the south, pouring out of pubs and chicken cottages, their intent and malevolence made oblique by silhouetting lamplight.  I make it seem as though the opposite side of the road is my intended destination as I am careful not to let on that I simply wish to be distant from them.
I am sober at this time, as I am not supposed to be.  I have lifted the veil of my society's guilty, nocturnal habit, by abstaining from the state-altering substance and retaining my wits and senses.  And it is all melodrama to sober senses.  I see wobbly men, pirrouetting upon the curb, attempting to walk straight but all the more wayward in their intent.  I hear them growl and snarl, the utter embodiments of their disappointing nights - the regression to beast a by-product of their would-be romantic conquests' eventual refusal to accomodate their sexual hungers.  Would I be of their ilk?  For my night has crescendoed similarly yet I am unsullied by beer so I keep a level mind.  My addled beast remains caged and I choose a walk home to cool and sooth him.  And these creatures, they stagger home and screech at the night sky.  Kebabs will have to suffice but the monster will bellow and howl and swipe at the air until the ready-trays of steaming grease are within reach.  They meander and topple and I desperately await the passing of the night-time traffic so I can stray from the possible onslaught they have in store for me.  I do not exist yet, they only wish to be the street, as their ever-stretching armspans make clear, and once my presence is known to them it will illicit a fright and an anger and an urge to right the sensory intrusion I may bring.  So I leap across the road for a stay of execution.  A woman squats by a bollard, hair masking her moist face as she whimpers into her palms.  Her swaying boyfriend stands at a choice distance, savagely demanding she pull herself together and follow him home so she can fulfill his bestial needs.  And so this goes.  I see bastard boys, a thousand potential Jack-The-Rippers, torturing their woman-property at every turn and I modestly walk home alone awaiting my empty bed, quietly boasting the conviction that I am good and true and would be loyal and loving would I ever get the opportunity to be.  I do battle with indignation as I feel ashamed whenever a twang of entitlement passes through me.
Eloquent writers?  Charming clerks?  Modest musicians?  Who are these people in the daylight where they are such drooling vampires under the moon?  It is an idle hypothesis to muse upon for I shall never know - bed is the coveted horizon and that is my joureny's end. 
The sporadic, dimly-lit high-roads of Islington have passed and I detour onto John Street, Bloomsbury, and traverse the tranquil, Victorian residential passage to pass the Doughty Street home of my hero Charles Dickens, an abode I am soon to start working in as a steward, to satiate my passion and devotion to the dead master.  I am feeling content and reflective as proximity to the man always makes me feel and, ever the time traveller, my distance from the donner-digesting dogs and angry vampires has placed me at peace with my bookish, tired self once more. 
But the hideous Centre-Point is on the horizon.  The West End looms - the epicentre for blundering, arm-waving lunatics in vain search for more beer to sing them to sleep.  They swarm and swirl the urine-soaked, pizza-entrenched highstreets there - scowls illuminated by the lights of a hundred theatres and roars echoed among the warning bells of hurtling rickshaws and screeching taxis.  I elect not to walk through Russell Square - having narrowly avoided an unpleasant confrontation with "Angry Man With Stella Can" there only a couple of nights before.  I pass around it and through Montague Place beside the imposing collumns of the British Museum and, after a swift stride through the regality of Bloomsbury I am in Soho.  I duck and swerve and avoide the maniacal glowers of the vampire hordes and with haste I am at my door.  The throbbing, seeping, groaning end of Saturday Night is behind me out in the cold and I hobble up the twisting staircase to my room where a warm bed and a new morning await me.


Sunday 12 October 2014

Love

Love incapacitates.  Love Love Love Love.  Love renders me inert and vegetative and functionless and all I am left with is the ability to think and overthink and over-overthink and twiddle my beard and stare and huff and though I can formulate space and sounds and sights all that pulses through my neural passages is Love.  And all that passes through my veins and makes them flourish and slurp and bulge from my limp arms is Love.  Love brings my abilities down to the grotty curb then thumps my guts with a second wind and heightens all senses and consciousness.  Love makes me a superhero without an origin story.  Love has me running faster, playing faster, talking louder, thinking further and crying harder.  Love is a superpower!  Love brings me to the edge of the noose and Love makes me bat it aside and run away to my life which Love reminds me is precious.  Love tells me I Am Alive!  What a glorious reassurance!  It matters not that Love is unrequited because Love is a superfood and all of its variants are irrelevant because it is above all else Love!  Love makes me know myself.  Love shows me I am limitless in what I can do.  Love is sprawled on brown pages by dead dusty poets through the ages but not a second has passed between their pen and my eyes because I know what they are saying and it is Love and they are saying it to me RIGHT NOW, RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND.  Love can time travel!  Love can kill with a blink and turn people into Deities with one flick of a finger.  Love is God!  Love can make me fly and in a nanosecond ground me forever more.  Love rules!  Love is the emperor of the body!  Love is an immovable object not weathered by time or tide and gazing over the planets as the centuries flit by like seconds on a stopwatch to its heedless, eternal perspective.  Love is an elemental force that lingers on the air and refines and contracts and enters into a human and makes her a Goddess.  Love guffaws at my claim to atheism and catches me out on my knees, worshipping.  Love is a vendor of Tough Love, another sound nutrient as long as it is Love.  Love makes me better by hurting me.  Love makes me stronger by killing me.  Love is all and Love urges I live and never forget to Love.  Love is all-consuming and there is nothing else but Love is everything so I have everything.

Wednesday 1 October 2014

Children's Hospice: Out Now.

So there we have it.  I have closed the book (I'm so sorry) on what has turned out to be a rather tumultuous, mentally ravaging few months of my creative life.  CHILDREN'S HOSPICE - the Christmas/Halloween novella I started in June as a precursor to an Edinburgh show I plan to ignite next year, is now for sale on Amazon and Amazon kindle.  The book that woke me in a cold sweat at 4am, that screeched at me from the corner of my bedroom to be finished, that imbued my nightmares with terrible little footsteps and infantile giggles, that poked and prodded me as I rolled over in sweaty terror and that which may have thudded my writing style off course permanently is now out there.  I am terrified.
CHILDREN'S HOSPICE is a black comedy domestic fantasy drama told in experimental, surrealist prose from a number of different perspectives which leap from one another organically.  It begins on an idyllic Christmas morning as a mother and father play with their newborn baby and his puppy and it ends - well, it ends somewhere none of us have ever been and none of us ever want to go.  It was born from both a recurring nightmare and the act of me trying to embody my long term relationship which died at Christmas and began to rot and fester throughout January.  It is a cautionary tale of victim-blaming and the evil that men do, and it is a modern day nativity story laced with domestic violence, cot-death and a smidgen of cannibalism.
At 100 pages, CHILDREN'S HOSPICE has something to say at every turn - the premise and form are too overwhelming for a full length novel, but equally would have felt stuffed up and rushed in a slighter short story.  It is a novella, a sub-format of fiction that I have always been enamoured with (if it's good enough for Camus and Fitzgerald...).  I hope it makes you laugh as much as it startles you, I hope you find purpose in the graphic sequences for none of them are present merely to shock and disgust.  I won't be offended if you choose not to read it, just as I won't be offended if you borrow or steal it.  It's not there to make me rich - all royalties earned from the book will be donated to the Children's Hospice South West Charity anyway (Far be it from me to grow fat from the depiction of institutions developed to help sick kids).
So have a gander - it's only 77p on Kindle or £4 if you like having something to keep on your shelf.  Share the news, enjoy it as a Halloween ghost story or wait a while for December and read it as a festive parable (Like A Nightmare Before Christmas, it's just as relevant during both seasons) and remember that while I write foremost for myself, everything I do is in part for you - my friends and relatives who have directly and indirectly sculpted me throughout my 27 years into the person I am today, whoever the heck that is.  It's October the 1st.  Summer is over.  A darkness is crawling up from the rocks and ready to descend upon England.  Does this upset you?  CHILDREN'S HOSPICE is the story for you.

 
CHILDREN'S HOSPICE: THE MUSICAL is coming August 2015.

Tuesday 23 September 2014

Soberternity?

Sober October, or Sobertober, or Stoptober - though I think that last one refers more to smoking than drinking and I'm here to discuss drinking (as ever) .  Like Movember wherein all men decide to look like paedophiles for a month in the name of charity, Sobertober pops up every year to turn us all into temporary tee-totals, and your valiant friends proudly proclaim that they're really going to do it this year, and they get 2-3 weeks in and they give up but as they raise their ill-gotten pints to the ceiling they shrug and sigh and say "Well at least I tried, which is more than most."  And they're right not to feel too disappointed as they take that sip; giving up alcohol is difficult in this miserable country, which pulses sickly under a societal blanket upon which is printed "Drink to forget" on every patch.  And those who give it a go should be commended, however far they get.  For every person attempting Sobertober there's a thousand who scoff at the idea of not drinking alcohol.  We British aren't a herd that like to fathom a life without the booze, let alone a month.  That's why we come up with good-will challenges to get people to even entertain the notion. 

It'll be the third year in a row for me, (and the last two were successful, before you ask).  I know my reputation as a pisshead is firm among my well-wishers (even mummy thinks so), but despite this I actually possess something in the way of will power.  At the start of this year I went vegan and am showing no signs of looking back.  I've never been a smoker, my drug use is intermittent and only when someone else suggests it, and I don't really eat junk food (unless Doctor Who is on).  Yo, I've even more or less quelled my Trichotillomania this year (although none of you even know what the fuck that is).  So while alcohol is my primary vice, and one which I flock back to more often than I probably should, I can let it go from time to time (but, at any rate, fuck Movember).

Booze is a mainstay of my life's philosophy.  It forms a thematic basis for the majority of my lyrics and is relevant in some form or other in my fiction too.  I am known to, as one reviewer of my work put it, explore and explain the drunken mind because my own mind is often in that very state.  And at a cost.  I am an introvert and a depressive and neither of those traits fare well under the influence.  With this year being slightly unkind to me I've hit it harder than usual and the psychological effects are starting to mount.  I spout misery, misanthropy and self-destruction far too often, but only with the drink in my periphery.  The drink does this to me.  As I tearfully said to my brother after an unexpectedly emotional trip to Munich this month, I've had a decent life and I don't know why I want out of it.  Drink.  Drink!  That's why!  I'm giving up the drink NOW, not in a few days' time.  NOW!  And why should I stop at the midnight chime of All Hallows' Eve just because the challenger smiles and says "Have one on me, you've earned it"?  I'll just be back to misery and self-destruction again.  Square one after a four week breather.  What's worthwhile about that?  The only other lasting effect of my alcohol consumption, after the hangover is cleared and the money replenished, is that I push people out of my life.  Nobody likes a misery guts, especially a drunk one.  I've lost people I'd rather have liked to hang onto and I don't think that next swig of cold Heineken is worth the loss, to be honest.

Sure, without the drink I never would have written The Life and Loves of Jet Tea but did the world need it?  It was a personal achievement, but so is leaving an attractive corpse.

I'm going to plough successfully through October like I always do and at the end of it I'm going to try and keep going.  If you're ever with me PLEASE don't make light of my endeavour - PLEASE don't cheekily wiggle a Jagermeister under my nose and ask "Are you sure?" and PLEASE don't assume I'm missing something from my life.  I want to keep you and I want to enjoy my time with you and I want to believe that I can do that without the strong stuff filling my addled brain and draining my poor wallet.  I want to keep you all, I will lose no more.  Sure I'll probably slip up on special occasions, and I don't doubt I'll find myself rocking back and forth on dull evenings with a comic-strip thought bubble encasing a luscious bottle of Scotch protruding from my brain.  But maybe - hopefully - next year won't be a year of loss and destitution.  I want memories, not regrets.  Please support me and know that whenever and wherever possible, I'll support anything you choose to do to enrich your life.  Sober Joe does like you!



Sunday 27 July 2014

Children's Hospice: Chapter 1

Children's Hospice is a new novella I'm working on to be released soon.  This is the first chapter.  Please keep in mind that the following contains some graphic and upsetting contents.  If you are easily offended, give it a miss.

Little baby Christmas Rudolph picture postcard tinsel snow and cakes dusty dusty cakes warm fire pretty bow and tinsel tinsel tinsel fire cake and fucking wine elfy Santa cheerful little Christmas baby smiles and songs and the turkey isn't done but Quality Street and Roses and fucking wine and Santa time and celebrations (and Celebrations) here bring the little baby open your eyes little baby open your presents little baby little baby see his little smile joy joy joy fucking eh!  It's little baby Christmas Victor baby little Victor see little baby Victor one year old today!  Christmas puppy yay!
Hoist him to the heavens parade him round the room mummy pass him to daddy take him by the armpits and wave him hither, and thither, and this way, and that way, and point him at the door and thrust him at the television and spiral and swirl and lift him high and show him the tree and feed him the breadstick and dance and skip and hold the little baby tightly and waltz and stride and own the stage with little baby Victor laughing in your hands, laughing at the new world spiraling in midair and now wind down and bend your knees and slink to the floor and place the lovely baby boy delicately on the soft warm carpet for here is his rustling Christmas gift and it must be received.
And little baby Victor fiddles with the pretty bow and the shiny paper on the warm carpet floor under the lovely lovely tree and tears at the surprise and giggles and smiles and fiddles and smiles and wriggles and miles and miles of torn shiny paper flutter and billow out from little baby Victor's little baby palms and strew all over the merry merry Christmas carpet and out from the surprising wriggling shiny mass of shreds and bows wags and wallops and flops and lollops out little Christmas puppy yay!
Little baby Victor claps and gurgles and the Christmas puppy yay dances and flips and spins and wags and yips and sniffs and runs around the warm merry merry Christmas carpet and oh look at the lovely tree aint it lovely?  The lights and the angels and the tinsel and the shiny chocolate pennies and the snowmen and the stars and the beads and the plastic reindeer and the wooden elves and the plush Santa and I don't know about the pink hippo I suppose that was nan's contribution and the tinsel and the candles and the gold and the green and the pines and the red and all of the warm warm merry merry Christmas tree and beneath the tree fluttering and yipping and pawing the adorable the warm the new arrival the Christmas puppy yay!
And Jesus.
Get the camera dad!  Get the camera dad!  See little baby Victor now he's small and good and true and his little baby brain isn't pierced by hate and fear and regret get the camera and film little baby Victor and the Christmas puppy yay!  See him play!  Glorious day!  No dismay!  Christmas puppy yay!
Daddy gets the camera daddy bends his knees daddy points the big thing at little baby Victor and little baby Victor waves and gurgles and bounces on his bottom on the warm merry merry Christmas carpet and mummy claps and smiles and sips her fucking wine and watches little baby Victor through the filter of the lens the glaring neon shiny flat screen even littler little baby Victor is a star character in the centre of the frame and mummy loves to laugh and smile and the music plays on (WHAM MARIAH CAREY BONEY M even JONAH LEWIE) and the living room is warm and there are dusty cakes and Quality Streets and breadsticks and all manner of dip and chocolates to the rafters and cold beer for daddy and fucking wine for mummy and little baby Victor: The Movie is still in production as the Christmas puppy yay flits and darts in and out of televised immortality and mummy watches the little camera screen pretend to be her little baby Victor on this glorious Christmas day - Christmas puppy yay!
Bedtime after the film for little baby Victor and the pooped out tuckered out yawning cream crackered Christmas puppy lay down in its fluffy little pit to experience Boxing Day for the first time in its fleetingly unnecessary existence while little baby Victor sleeps and dreams what babies dream if babies dream perhaps as perceived babies can't dream if they are creatures of instinct what could babies dream about?  If a baby was braindead how would you know?  Without medical assistance at least ponders mummy but never mind that today of all days: Christmas puppy yay!
And Jesus.
It was not always this way.  This idyllic Christmas day preceded annually by the former festive day.  That was the day upon which little baby Victor – then known only as little baby – came into being.  He gestated for the best part of the year inside mummy’s tummy a child in appearance but really just larva stewing in human broth nourished by the fleshy tube and cocooned out of all spatial awareness by the flesh-egg that is growing mummy - the conduit for all of little baby’s future fallibility where daddy’s nine-month-passed euphoric release signaled the passing of his accountability.
It is eight months and twenty-seven days since the blissful twilit creation of little baby and the snow doesn’t fall but the darkness rolls in more frequently now and the shops hang up their lights and hoist up their plastic trees and put red hats on their melancholic workers and pump SHAKIN’ STEVENS through their aisles and the waddling mums and head scratching dads flock panicked to those aisles where SHAKIN’ STEVENS’ glittering salutations of merriment do little to soften their jittery snatches and grabs of all the best toys for all their little baby boys and girls but mummy floats glacially through the cold and the decorated dark clutching the weight of the future in her veined and strained hands for this little baby is on His way (yes they knew the sex) and it could be today it could have been yesterday but if life goes to plan it will be tomorrow – and Christmas for mummy will be back ache and blood loss and bent knees and latex-clad stranger’s hands and wincing and screaming and sweating and straining and pushing and shitting and crying and sleeping and waking and loving and mummy knows this as she puffs and pants in the icy high street wondering what she is doing out tonight for the shops are all full and she dare not go inside lest she suffer the elbows and pushchairs of her would be salivating company who would bound intently toward the spot upon which she would stand, blind to her occupation of it and in their intent would fling mummy like an unwelcome spider into the clattering shelves of the socks and pants aisle.  No this is not a night mummy wishes for so she shuffles home clutching little baby wrapped in its bulbous cocoon awaiting His grand entrance into the cold world.  And she is home and there is smiling daddy who places his paper on the coffee table and rises to take mummy in his arms and help her sit down for although the solitary walk in the long cold street was accomplished without aid it would be unseemly to allow his beloved and bearer of his boy to cross the room to the settee unassisted.  And so he helps and mummy huffs and mummy sits and mummy’s heart pumps and pumps and the active blood slurps through her swirling veins and the goodness and the iron and the nutrition canons into the tubes that feed the throbbing little kicking baby and as He is fed His eyelids rise and His eyes have flames inside them and He sees the flesh and the fluid and the amniotic debris that floats around Him and He knows where He is and He knows where He should be.  It is time to live little baby!  See the light my child!  See the Earth!  And the midnight bell chimes and it is Christmas day and mummy gasps and out comes her hand and into daddy’s forearm sink her sudden claws and she gasps and leans and there is a flourish in her lap and out it leaks and it heralds His arrival and mummy knows and daddy knows that little baby will be a Christmas baby as was foretold.
Darkness streaks by and green blue purple red yellow orange pink white gold streams of light rush past beyond the glare of the steamy window.  Mummy is on cold leather as the wriggling creature animates her insides and scuttles closer to her thighs and daddy drives and it’s going to be alright and on the hill ahead under the black sky the white temple – the star in the sky – the glowing green cross marking out its refuge daddy spins the wheel and swerves and the tires screech and burn and mummy is lifted and the cold nips her skin and the baby slithers within and the door is slammed and she is taken by strangers and lain on a mattress in a small room and it’s going to be alright little baby is coming push push push breathe take daddy’s hand squeeze and strain and grind your teeth and push and bleed and the little baby’s fingers grip the walls and the little baby pulls and shuffles and crawls and slithers to the light and passes through mummy who roars from the strain and the little baby blinks in the overwhelming glare and sees all the wide-eyed smiles and the white walls and the blood-speckled sheets and the parted knees and he is taken by mighty hands and hoisted into the room and his coiling belly-chain is hacked apart by a glinting blade and so seeps the newborn mucus onto the mattress and this is not the world little baby had in mind and so all he can do is screw up his face and cry.  Mummy, have yourself a merry little Christmas baby.  And mummy cries and daddy cries and even the relatively jaded nursing staff shed a tear and on that Christmas morning the walls of the welcoming hospital cry and they are crying to this day.
And newborn little baby is taken home and named Victor and the bubble of a little life takes his bewildered soul somehow to being the one year old little baby Victor who received the little yipping puppy on that blissful Christmas day.  And one year old little baby Victor goes not without some trial and error and the occasional runny nose, to being two year old little baby Victor and all the long year mummy is nearby to hold and love and warm and kiss and teach and protect and feed and change and cuddle little baby Victor, mummy’s boy child born on Christmas day.  On days he plays on nights sleeps tight on days on the soft warm carpet and with the soft warm Christmas puppy and on nights in mummy’s arms and sometimes the cheeky little boy crawls up onto mummy’s sleeping face and mummy wakes and starts and laughs and little baby Victor laughs and not yet amply rested daddy stirs and turns and groans and shrugs indignant at the wayward child, the tearaway and on days mummy stands by the piano and fiddles with the keys making tunes for little baby Victor to laugh and clap to and little baby Victor sits on the piano stool which by rights should be mummy’s seat but she cares not when that super little baby’s big eyes beam up to hers and the music floats on through the soft spot on his baby head (those kids are each born with such a hole there) and she smiles and sometimes cries her boy her joy a greater melody than ever she created on that piano (yes daddy helped but damn it all if he knows it) and she waits again for the nights and cheeky chappy Victor’s nocturnal climb onto mummy’s face to wake her up and now it is Christmas all over again where did the long year go?  And them dogs don't them dogs grow up fast?  Oh what did we do daddy?  That little Christmas puppy will be dead at the prime of Victor's childhood.  Will be cold in its pit when little baby Victor is barely through his first decade.  What did we do?  Why did we get that wretched mutt at such a time in our golden precious prize special gorgeous little baby Victor's little life?
Shut it woman don't be absurd that dog is a year old still laying turds in the kitchen let's leave the worry for a few years shall we?  See how Christmas puppy skips and jumps and wags and yips and rolls over and over upon the ground all of the day and watches the birds in the garden and the dogs in the field and longs to gallop with them but don't we know he's a terror and can't be trusted beyond the ensnaring realm of the leash so shut it woman that wretched mutt will burden us yet Victor will deal when Victor must deal so shut it woman don't be absurd you've had too much of that fucking wine this Christmas day.  Perhaps the turkey needs a look?  Perhaps you've carrots yet to cook?  Perhaps read some more of your book but shut it woman I need to watch this film the telly aint half as good in the long year as it is on this Christmas day and that dog will sniff our wrinkled toes in the end and that dog might even watch one of us go under the ground.  So go and chop that bird for I am hungry and you are drunk and I have no desire to be solitary in an audience for needless fretting.
Mummy swirls out of the room and leaves behind angry daddy and his glaring screen to which all his focus returns and she is in the kitchen now and there is the fat pink bird flesh and bone and veins and vessels and dripping blood and leaking oils and seeping fats onto the metal tray with shriveled leathery hog slices strewn across its plucked torso it lies legs parted on its back severed wing stubs splayed out at its sides exposed for the forced entry of onion and sage and more hacked hunks of hog and drunk mummy has no desire to feed this corpse to fat daddy anymore for fat daddy has said cold words and nothing more should pass those hateful lips tonight so mummy clutches the cleaver and hacks away.  She strikes at the bone and it crunches in two she strikes at the flesh and it splits and globules of congealed blood are spat out by the force of the cleaver as the cold pink skin is severed and some strike mummy’s cheeks and others merely coil up mummy’s knuckles and the body of the bird is flayed and diced and decimated and through all the heavy strikes of the cleaver mummy scowls back through the room and there is daddy on the chair, illuminated by the screen his greasy hair giving wide berth to the pale flaky bald spot on his head, a white whirlpool of resentment and cold yawning malevolently back at mummy who chops and hacks and slices and dices and whacks at the mangled bird corpse, now just gnarled chunks of bacteria-infested flesh and smeared red blood on the metal tray there will be no bird to eat on Christmas day Victor can have his baby mush daddy can have nothing but that glaring screen, ample nourishment for fat repressed hate.  And she stares at him and somehow she recalls a summer time when daddy took her hand and showed her things and there were shouts of promise and garlands of hope and blossoming forever and laughter and embraces and kissing and no forethought of the cold mangled bird and the white flaky bald spot and when daddy gives his bi-annual thought of mummy he dimly recalls his bygone mantra she will challenge me because she is a genius and she is hilarious and she reads clever books and if I were a thousand times cleverer and a thousand times more beautiful then maybe I could BE her but as it stands I have to make do with simply being WITH her which is hardly a poor compromise but there is no such thought tonight.  No, nor is there even the thought of the absence of the thought.  There is simply no thought.
What is this you stupid slut!
It is the bird daddy.
This can’t be!  This won’t feed me!
It is all you deserve daddy.
It’s Christmas day!  This is my Christmas feast!  What have you done to it?
It is still meat.  You can still eat.
You’ve hacked it to bits!
I’ve hacked it to bits.
You’re drunk!
I am drunk.
Mummy lets the cleaver go and down it falls on the kitchen floor.  Daddy raises both his hands and wipes his sad fat face and roars his Christmas day, his day of peace, that stupid slut has chopped it to bits like the cold quivering bird now merely mangled hunks on the metal tray.  This is no way to treat a man on Christmas day go to bed Victor mummy and daddy must talk Merry Christmas little baby Victor we love you don’t we mummy?  Don’t we cherish his little heart and all his innocent love and all the promise for your long life little baby Victor you are our golden treasure and Christmas day will always be a special day a special day for you the best day your favourite day but right now please to bed it’s beddy-byes time our little love mummy and daddy love you so.  There are stars that shine on you when the night rules and there is the rising sun that will hold and love you when the day has come.  Good night little baby sleep so well we’ll tuck you in soon and whisper wishes for flights of angels and the man in the moon to rockabye your tired soul into the serenity of sleep.  Now he is in bed woman I can deal with you.  One more act like the debacle with the bird and hell itself will freeze over before you’re able to bear another son.
Some more fucking wine for crying mummy for daddy at his telly can’t be suppressed out of her mind any other way all there is to do is drink and play the little piano at the little stool upon which little baby Victor won’t sit tonight for he is the banished accessory to the crime of daddy’s absence oh if he were truly absent this would be a happy home but his vacancy is just of the heart and this is a hell house now (what a difference a year makes) father turned his back on little baby Victor his creation and mummy can’t ignore that and that is why she hacked the bird.  She plays and the Christmas puppy yips and with each chime and each yip daddy winces and flinches and tenses and grinds his teeth for this is not the soundtrack to his cherished seasonal television no this is an intrusion this is an affront this is a sensory revolution and he is the monseigneur the aristocracy the decadent emperor of this family house of cards which is destined to fall as all empires must.
Leave it you stupid slut!  Mummy plays on.
Put an end to that hideous tune!  Christmas puppy yips on.
I’ll chop that wretched thing to bits!  The melody lingers on.
Well then you deaf whore feel my fist!  And the music stops.
Daddy swipes and mummy bawls and mummy bites and daddy recoils and daddy strikes and mummy falls and Christmas puppy yaps and growls and the fucking wine bottle tumbles to the carpet and daddy takes hold of the zip on his fly for fatherhood has left little room for mummy and daddy time these days and now here is an angry angry hungry man who lunges and mummy screams.
And upstairs beneath the shade of the sweet night time and beneath the soft glow of plastic stars precious little baby Victor smiles through his baby dream and his little eyes are closed and the twinkle of innocence lullabies him safely through the peaceful slumber.  Today has gone to bed but tomorrow is still dreaming and it will arise with the glowing sun which will shine through the winter and take you carefully in its arms and usher you, little baby Victor, usher you on a golden adventure just like it has done every day of your little life.
But crash!
And bang!
And oh that sound!
Oh that’s mummy!
Oh that’s daddy!
It’s still Christmas day!
And they laugh yet and they play!
I want to see mummy laugh!
I want to see daddy play!
Baby Victor stirs and smiles and gurgles and climbs the climb.
I want to see mummy laugh!
I want to see daddy play!
And maybe, just maybe, a warm cuddle from my Christmas puppy, yay!
So little baby Victor lands on his little baby feet and waddles excitedly to the door and its crack of big light seeping through the bottom come into the light little baby Victor, come toward the light.
There is gnashing and grunting and gouging and thrusting and wagging and barking and flailing and crying and pushing and swiping and bleeding and sweating and crashing and screaming and roaring and kicking and smothering and ravaging and the plethora rolls on round eternal.  Mummy will retaliate and daddy will pacify and mummy’s defeated arms fall back to the warm warm merry Christmas carpet so daddy can continue the plunge and the dreaded plethora rolls on round eternal but mummy sees a way to be free.  There on the ground beside me!  That fucking wine bottle!  Drained of its fucking wine!  Daddy does not know it is there!  For he is too busy with me!
Mummy reaches for the fucking wine bottle and takes it in her hand and, though the hunched fat frame of thrusting daddy stifles the endeavour she swings the bottle over and there opens the big door and out ekes the little face of little baby Victor all excited and glowing like tomorrow’s sun and through the air the bottle goes and it twists and it turns and it flies and it has missed daddy but the confusion has halted his attack and he looks and he sees and he says Victor! And the bottle spins and tumbles and descends and rollicking billowing sinewy streaming black despair pours out into the air with a deafening crash and a sickening crunch the rocketing bottleneck sinks into the baby soft spot flesh brain-skull hole and back out it pings and down he goes with all his promise little baby Victor goes limp on the warm carpet and the fucking wine bottle rolls away from its deed and Christmas puppy barks and daddy pulls away and cowers and puts his weapon hurriedly away and mummy is dazed on the same ground as her deed and she bends her knees and cocks her head and waits for sense and there is little baby Victor by the door, on the floor, he is not moving, he is not laughing, his eyes are not alight, open your eyes little baby, open your eyes little baby, open your eyes little baby.  And daddy shrieks and mummy shrieks and Christmas puppy shrieks and on that Christmas night the house of the family Victor shrieks and it is shrieking to this day.
Oh that fucking wine!


Friday 20 June 2014

Explaining Children's Hospice

I feel I should explain myself as I am about to sew into the fabric of our culture a short thread which is throbbing at the seams with rape, infanticide, torture, cannibalism, meat-eating and Mariah Carey.  Children's Hospice is unlike anything I have ever written before and does not mark a turning point in form for this writer but is in fact an exercise in dusting off the most macabre, sinister corner of my creative mind.  All human beings possess this capacity (as is clearly evidenced by our history of delighting in such morbid rituals and pastimes) and it is my belief that the acknowledgement of that breadth of human imagination is likely to sooth the mind as opposed to edging it into a spiral of increased darkness, as is commonly assumed.
Children's Hospice was born as a means of therapy.  To reiterate the premise, a husband and wife fall foul of one another during a Christmas day argument and, during a violent clash, the wife attempts to subdue the husband's attack with a wine bottle but accidentally strikes her baby instead.  During the baby's period of brain-death and eventual bodily death, the mother undergoes a series of psychological traumas, hauntings, visions and a visit to heaven (dressed as hell), the access to which is located in the bowels of the titular hospice.
The therapy is the exorcism of a trauma from my own mind.  Several months ago I was victim to a brutal and unexpected dumping from my long term girlfriend.  Prior to her hypocrisy we had shared many talks about our future as a couple, each of us fully intent on sharing the rest of our lives with one another.  We had discussed marriage right down to the exact location of the wedding, and had planned to have children too.  We named the children Victor and Amelia and from then on they began to develop in my consciousness until they were as real as if they had already been born.  Victor was my son and Amelia was my daughter, it was only the dull duty of linear time that prevented me from actually spending time with them or holding them in my arms and as I try not to think linearly (why focus on the end of all things?) they already were.  My significant other had birthed them in a nearby plane of the not too distant future and I just had to catch up.  When she told me our relationship was over, it was not simply our love that died, it was our children.  They were alive to me and thus they died in infancy; a miscarriage - or more accurately an abortion as it was her premeditated doing.
I named the doomed baby in the story Victor.  The fact that he is wounded on Christmas day and dead shortly after stems from my consideration that Christmas was truly the last time my significant other and I were really a couple - she neglected my subsequent birthday with vague reasoning then went away on a tour and swiftly terminated the relationship during a flying visit to London.  The couple of chapter one - before their fight and the slaughter of their child - are of a tenuous bond.  They feign affection for the sake of their child and delegate the arduous task of warm, tender love to a puppy which they buy and rely on to care for Victor emotionally where they need only care for him physically.  By the second Christmas depicted they no longer feel the urge to feign anything and the wife stands scornfully in the dark kitchen, aimlessly chopping a turkey while the fat husband glares dead-eyed into a TV screen.  This is me and her.  I am not and will never be capable of the things he then does to his wife, but as my emotional wound began to heal and the story took shape, I found empathy in her decision and realised that, toward the end of our relationship, I had become gloomy, unresponsive and not worthy of her.  It simply took me longer to notice this.  I applaud her courage with this tale of domestic abuse and child murder.
The other place from which this story originates was the sudden desire of my friend and I to make music that was a little more courageous and challenging than that of the band we are in.  In that respect the title is owed more to this urge than to my personal exorcism, as at first we simply wanted a band name that could raise an eyebrow and attract morbid curiosity.  Children's Hospice was a band, which became a musical story throughout six songs, which we then decided we should add dialogue to and which we now believe should be a full on, hour long musical with a small cast and props (including but not limited to a large papier mache baby which would be rigged to climb walls like a spider).  We intend to take the musical to the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2015 and the purpose of the preceding novel is that I have always found narrative prose easier to write than drama, so I feel that adapting my own work will be less of a challenge than going straight to script.  I have used experimental narrative progression in that rather than a conscious protagonist narrative or omniscient narrator, the prose is made up of clusters of visuals, and subconscious responses to visuals, while the descriptive flows delicately into the dialogue without the usual grammatical indication.  It is never immediately clear if it is the God-like narrator speaking or one of the characters but the events transcribed soon offer that clarity and the story progresses as the reader has finished building the scene out of what they are bombarded with - visually.
There is a religious parallel threaded through the tale, as although I am an agnostic leaning further toward atheism I feel that God must be present in fiction as He has been throughout all of mine.  Victor - born on Christmas day and fated to ascend beyond the mortal realm in the heaven of mother's invention - is the second coming of Christ whose teachings of love are unheeded in his Earthly lifetime.  Mother's rape by father is our cynical iteration of the immaculate conception - Man is the creator and the destroyer and during the assault mother accidentally dooms Victor - thus causing the aforementioned ascension.  Then finally, of course, while father is imprisoned and mother driven insane, who really thrives?  Baby Victor - alive and well and developing in the heaven of invention - an arguably theoretical existence but an existence nonetheless when mother decides to eat the corpse of her deed at the climax of the story, putting the baby back inside her and offering him hope of a second birth.  A resurrection.  As she dies the living Victor confined to her imagination is freed and this second life can begin.  As such, mother's baby is the only real victor of the story.
I hope to self-publish Children's Hospice and copies will be on sale during the Edinburgh show, should it actually come to fruition.

Monday 9 June 2014

Children's Hospice

Little baby Christmas Rudolph picture postcard tinsel snow and cakes dusty dusty cakes warm fire pretty bow and tinsel tinsel tinsel fire cake and fucking wine elfy Santa cheerful little Christmas baby smiles and songs and the turkey isn't done but Quality Street and Roses and fucking wine and Santa time and celebrations (and Celebrations) here bring the little baby open your eyes little baby open your presents little baby little baby see his little smile joy joy joy fucking eh!  It's little baby Christmas Victor baby little Victor see little baby Victor Christmas puppy yay!
And little baby Victor fiddles with the pretty bow and the shiny paper on the warm carpet floor under the lovely lovely tree and tears at the surprise and giggles and smiles and fiddles and smiles and wriggles and miles and miles of torn shiny paper flutter and billow out from little baby Victor's little baby palms and strew all over the merry merry Christmas carpet and out from the surprising wriggling shiny mass of shreds and bows wags and wallops and flops and lollops out little Christmas puppy yay!
Little baby Victor claps and gurgles and the Christmas puppy yay dances and flips and spins and wags and yips and sniffs and runs around the warm merry merry Christmas carpet and oh look at the lovely tree aint it lovely?  The lights and the angels and the tinsel and the shiny chocolate pennies and the snowmen and the stars and the beads and the plastic reindeer and the wooden elves and the plush Santa and I don't know about the pink hippo I suppose that was nan's contribution and the tinsel and the candles and the gold and the green and the pines and the red and all of the warm warm merry merry Christmas tree and beneath the tree fluttering and yipping and pawing the adorable the warm the new arrival the Christmas puppy yay!

Wednesday 5 February 2014

"Flexible Holiday and Disposable Income Makes You More Intelligent"

Travel broadens the mind.  Oh, how I love to be told 'Travel broadens the mind' by a rich kid whose parents are more than happy to foot the bill for a six month jaunt around South America.  Oh, how I love to be informed that 'Life is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page' by someone who can afford to jet off to Malta for a week at the drop of a hat, and not suffer the financial fallout for the ensuing two years.  In short, I have recently realised that I am constantly, underhandedly being called stupid by rich people.
Imagine a child who grew up orphaned.  Her parents were murdered, she was press-ganged into child sex trafficking through no fault of her own, grew up and turned to drugs and voluntary prostitution and eventually resurfaced and built a second life as a doctor or aid worker.  Has she experienced a lesser portion of life than somebody who recently spent two weeks in Egypt because they could afford it?
If travel really broadens the mind, how come people that habitually go travelling can only ever wax excited about travelling before they go, and can only ever repost several hundred near-identical instagram photos of themselves waving at waterfalls online when they return?  Why am I not getting any intellectual nourishment in conversation with their newly-broadened minds?  A 70mph bus to the face also broadens the mind.  It broadens it all the way across the tarmac (if you were looking for a way to broaden it even further without emptying your pockets).  The Queen has been all over the planet - does she have higher claim to relay what real life is really like?
Of course I'm not suggesting that people who travel aren't particularly broad of mind, I'm just expressing the vain desire to see these idioms retracted a bit, being as they are so smug and self-important.  I know people who have never left the country who are infinitely more liberal-minded and socially-savvy than people who spend a third of their year being frisked by airport security.  And I too have travelled, don't think that this is an "It's not fair" spit of bitterness.  I've been everywhere, man (except Australia - I'm scared enough of spiders that can't kill you).  How about we change the phrase to "Travel is one way of broadening the mind"?  Not quite as concise, and doesn't roll as effortlessly from the tongue, but it has scope to catch on.
Right, my passport has arrived!  I'm off to book tickets to Guatemala.  Night x 


Friday 31 January 2014

Common Pieces of Advice that are Actually Awful

"There's plenty more fish in the sea."  "Look before you leap." "He who dares wins."  These three well-known sayings each have two things in common.  First, they're all said so often that its almost as though they're ingrained within our collective psyche from birth.  Who can remember the first time they heard the saying "Look before you leap?"  Exactly.  Secondly, they are all perfectly sound pieces of advice.  Each one concisely relays an important, impeccable way of dealing with life, and it is unlikely that, once heard, they'll ever be forgotten.
But for every common piece of good advice there is an equally common, but utterly terrible one.  Here are just a few of those.

"Never Apologise."
This spit of rhetoric garbage was foremost a way to handle certain acts of clumsiness that could have legal repercussions.  For example, saying 'sorry' at the scene of a car accident instantly renders you the party at fault in the eyes of others and could land you with a hefty fine or worse.  And in that respect, there's nothing wrong with that.
But recently, "Never apologise" has made its way into a more common pantheon of advice and is now readily used as a way to help people improve their assertiveness and confidence.  But, think about this; people who never apologise are fucking dickheads.  It is nigh-on impossible to pass through seventy-plus years on this planet without screwing up at least once, let alone every other month.  In the agonisingly long process of trial and error that is life, it is a given that you're a few wrong turns or double measures away for making somebody else's life a complete mess, for however brief a period of time, and if, in all that time, you utterly refuse to apologise, you're going to develop the reputation of a spiteful, heartless bitch.  The other week I got quite severely drunk and (as I am regrettably wont to do), lost the people I was with due to nothing more than my own inebriated idiocy.  Stupidly jumping to the assumption that my friends had instead abandoned me, I decided to text one of them with a cluster of angry, incoherent F and C bombs.  Now, the sort of person I am when pissed notwithstanding, what sort of person would I be if I'd simply held my tongue the following morning and not bothered to say sorry to my friend?  I'd quite possibly be at least one friend down at the time of writing, at any rate.  Now, this unapologetic way of being is really quite insufferable at any degree of severity.  Working in a bar several years ago, a fellow bartender dropped a tray of empty glasses on my foot.  It bloody hurt.  Want to know how she responded?  She looked me squarely in the eye, shrugged and walked off.  I imagine she'd been advised to "Never Apologise," by some equally misinformed self-styled sage.  Either way, she ended up losing her job not long after.  Guess that not apologising thing is really working out for her.

"Rise Above It."
Okay, this one isn't invariably awful as common advice goes, but there are many occasions in life where "rising above it" is, plainly put, the entirely wrong thing to do.
While "Rise above it" can often mean "don't stoop to the level of the immature moron," it can also sometimes mean "let the moron walk all over you."  For, sometimes, these morons don't go away just because you've held your tongue.  I'm not condoning violent retribution or childish vengeance, but it doesn't always do to internally say "Well, at least I'm not like them," and be done with it.  People that unleash their spew of hatred and abuse to an unwavering crowd of people silently "rising above it" are never going to be motivated to stop being dicks.  And if word starts to spread that there's no retribution against being a dick, sooner or later there'll be nothing to rise to, in a world of unflapping dicks.  Sometimes people need to be stopped, and sometimes that involves dropping slightly closer to their level.  Sorry (see what I did there?), but that's the way life works.

"There's Always Someone Worse off Than You."
Or; "You're not allowed to feel down because you're not lying in a pool of feces, simultaneously dying of dysentery and malnutrition while your father gets beheaded for desertion and your mother gets ravaged by the militia."
Not only is this one entirely redundant (is there anybody on Earth, short of the aforementioned, who truly thinks that nobody in human history has ever suffered a trauma worse than their cancelled flight?), but it is also condescending, and indicative of a false-friend who doesn't think you're entitled to feel bad about some things.  At best it is innocently misused as an attempt to cheer somebody up, but why exactly is the knowledge that, while you've just been dumped, someone else has just been murdered, a comforting notion?  In short, an absurdly high number of seemingly happy people have warped notions on how trauma can be dealt with; they apply a broad, non-variable approach to their suffering loved one when really it should be obvious that mental anguish is as personal and exclusive as emotion gets.  Being reminded of the real horrors of the world doesn't placate one's own horror, and that's without even bringing cultural variables into it.  For that reason, the complaint "First World Problems," (although not in its most extreme usage) also applies to this list.

"It Gets Better."
The most sickeningly optimistic and baseless piece of prolifically-spewed reassurance ever to befoul the human tongue.  Does it get better?  Definitely?  And you know this how, exactly?  Are you Doctor Who? 
You know how, when a cancer patient asks a doctor if they'll be cured, the doctor doesn't immediately grin and shout "Yes!  And you'll win the lottery, too"?  That's because giving people hope when they can't possibly know the outcome of a situation is an act that should remain entirely confined to children's stories.  False hope is both a virus and a placebo.  It alters impressionable minds toward the delusion that no more bad things are going to happen, and only makes it all the worse when they occasionally do.
There is some semblance of rationale behind the advice; used in a break-up, for example, it is employed with the knowledge that heartbreak doesn't last forever.  But what if that person learns that the former love of their life is now pregnant, or was carrying an STD, or is shacking up with their dad?  There are too many unpredictable variables that will ultimately render the adage "It gets better" a terrible thing to say.

"You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat it."
Let's be clear - having your cake means keeping it and enjoying its visual attractiveness; it's not another word for eating it, as some misinformed critics of the phrase have assumed.  But you can take a photo of the cake, then instagram it so it looks infinitely sexier, then eat it.  Yum yum.

Thursday 30 January 2014

Dartmoor Trek in October

I hopped on the bus at Newton Abbot with the intention of alighting at Manaton, a little village to the west of Dartmoor.  Chatting to a nice old lady about the imminent moor trek I was about to embark upon, she seemed unsure as to why I was going to Manaton of all places, which made me feel a little anxious because she should know.  From this point in the journey I held an increasingly foreboding assumption about Manaton but I couldn't imagine what horrors within would make a passive elderly woman baffled at someone's choosing to visit there.
The driver, making a judgement call about me I suppose, stopped at a pub called the Kestor Inn and let me off.  I didn't immediately get my bearings, so I walked up and down Manaton for a while until I swallowed my introverted pride and asked a lady for directions to the church which sits atop the path into the moor.
Once I found the church I began the trek as my map instructed.  I passed through a gate onto the lower moor and, able to see the legendary 'Bowerman's Nose' rock up ahead, I opted to follow my instincts.
This proved to be a mistake as the section of moorland which I passed over was fenced off halfway up.  To the right of the fence were thick, thorny bushes with no pathway through them.
Having walked back and forth through the long grass looking for a gap in the fence to no avail, I had a sudden rush of aggravated determination and decided to just traverse the hill through the thorny bushes.  At their worst they came up to my chin as I ploughed through them.  I tripped on rocks and cut my shins through my jeans as the hill got steeper and the bushes thicker, but looking back it was quite clear I couldn't return the way I came, and the spectacular rocky tor atop the hill kept my spirits up and kept me going.
The vast, rolling hills and untouched natural landscape surrounding me came up and gained breathtaking clarity as I climbed higher - an endless cascade of beautiful green and little to no evidence of human interference for what seemed like a hundred miles in any direction (even though I knew full well that there was a pub and a bus stop round the corner).
By the end of the stretch the hill had gotten so steep that I was no longer walking but climbing.  Finally I reached the top by the palms of my quivering hands and the highest Dartmoor panorama under the deep blue sky was exhilarating as I straightened my back and waited for my breath to return.


There were sheep roaming on the hilltop and in the distance I could see the Hound Tor (the cluster of rocks that featured in the Sherlock episode The Hounds of Baskerville and supposedly inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write the original novel in the first place), which was the main sight I came here to see.  I started back down the hill on the other side and the walk to Hound Tor was an easy one.
Once I'd made the climb to the tor I sat on a rock and ate my lunch.  I felt I could stay there all day, but I was on a deadline to be back in Manaton before the last bus back to Newton Abbot departed and left me stranded.
I got up and walked down the steep hill from the tor and came to the ruins of a medieval village.  It was quite interesting; the shapes of long-vanished stone huts remained at their bases.  From there I went further on down into the woods and crossed Becca Brook, passed through the shady woodland and came back onto the open moor.
Taking a left turn at the sign to Leighon, I drifted from the path and became lost again.  For the most part I was content with being lost; this was the most beautiful corner of England I'd ever seen.  I was the only person for miles in any direction and I could see the tors I'd passed earlier on the horizon to my left so, even without the path, I still had my bearings.
However, I also began feeling tired and short of breath as I traversed steep, rugged slopes in my attempt to find my way back to Manaton.  At one point I came to another wooded area and decided to run through it, hunched and snarling like a beast (aping the dream sequence from An American Werewolf in London), just because I wanted to and there was nobody there to laugh at me for doing so.  During the run I dropped my coat without realising and had to retrace my steps in order to find it.
I passed through a gate in hope that it would lead me back but instead I found myself staggering clumsily down a hill and landing feet-first into a boggy marsh.  Thankfully, the low branch of a tree was within reach so I easily pulled myself free.  Irritated, and beginning to grow concerned that I might not actually find my way back in time to catch the last bus, I began to run, as fast as my exhausted legs could manage, back the way I came.  Cows and sheep stared bemusedly at me, almost mocking me with their glares like the lost, unprepared tourist I was.  But I was being dramatic.
After an exhausting ramble, in which I almost stopped to fall to my knees on several occasions, I found myself back at the top of the hill and on relatively stable ground.  Manaton should have been ahead but the moor mist prevented me from seeing it.  For a good hour my bearings were irrelevant.  The afternoon mist had lowered slightly but even so I could not glean a slither of the modest village's skyline in any direction.  The ground was damp, the damp seeped through the soles of my ill-chosen shoes and now my already tired feet were soggy to boot.  The mist pinched my nose and cheeks and my stinging eyes were moistened in the freezing cold.  I wanted now to be off this wretched moor as soon as I could be.  A strong coffee and a warm armchair were in order.
To my relief, through the parting fog I could make out the shape of a close by cluster of shrubs, the centrepiece being a gnarly, crooked tree - bereft of leaves (understandably in this late autumn).  Beneath the tree stood an upright figure, rather still - a woman, facing toward the town, I hoped.  Finally!  The first human being I'd crossed paths with in hours.
I upped my pace to a modest jog to approach my would-be guide.  'Excuse me,' I called.  'Sorry, is this the right way to Manaton?'
My friend did not reply.  She remained motionless as I approached, closed in and eventually took hold of the terrible realisation.  She was not standing, she was hanging.
A weathered rope stretched from the lowest branch of the petrified oak, about a metre down to her neck.  Her face - clearly beautiful in life - twisted into a pained, sad snarl and her head was lopsided at the neck.  She was clothed in a thin, grey dress which was soaked through and clinging to her delicate frame, and her skin was as white as the moorland fog.
'Oh - no, no!' I groaned upon beholding all of this.  I stepped back out of morbid embarrassment, as though I had committed some deathly faux pas in requesting her attention a moment before.  Again I moaned, I raised my hands to my eyes and trod clumsily this way and that as I slowly got to grips with what hung before me, less than a foot from the dewy ground.
As I slowly regained my senses I caught sight of the most curious part of the whole grisly situation - the corpse's left hand was stretched out at her side, fingers closed around something.  I leaned in and squinted and realised there were strawberries in her hand.  In a sudden trance I crept toward the body and carefully took the strawberries - her cold, rigid fingers making it slightly difficult as though beyond life she was still reticent to let me have them.  As I closed in to retrieve the fruits I beheld her glazed eyes upon her crooked face and I would not have been completely shocked were they to then suddenly glance toward me, accusingly.  But she did not stir.
With tears forming in my eyes I pulled the stem from one of the strawberries and ate the fruit, staring sadly at the hanging corpse, like a pale ghost floating in mid air, as I chewed.  Beyond her I saw the beginnings of the village.  It seemed a petty triumph now, in light of what I'd just stumbled upon.
Simultaneously relieved and terrified, I ran into a waking daze for the comfort of the fringes of civilisation.  I passed through a gate that I'd avoided earlier because a large gathering of cows had been clustered around it.  They were gone now.  This took me onto a smooth, tarmac lane that helped me regain my calm.  By now it had hit home how ridiculous I was being before, fretting about missing the bus and being stranded on the moors - there was still an hour until my bus and I was already close to the stop.
Even so, I punched the air when I saw the sign for Manaton and, soon after, the inviting shape of the Kestor Inn.  I stopped for a pint of Devonshire's finest ale, perched in the serene beer garden and took out my notebook to write my adventure down before it faded from memory.  Parts of it seemed to already have faded and as I tried to recall every little detail I went hazy and felt as though I'd fallen into a near-dream state.  I looked up and saw something almost human silhouetted in the distant moor, and with a dismissive shrug I began to write.  It was, ultimately, a cheery afternoon's ramble and I'd gladly go back to Manaton. 

Monday 27 January 2014

The Ashen Bough

The Ashen Bough is to be the title of my next novel.  I am not participating in National Novel Writing Month as I did last year, as I want to spend a long time on this book and not feel compelled to rush any of it by an impending deadline.  It is inspired by a dream I had as a child, in which my favourite boyhood tree turned black and gnarly and starting spouting rotten, severed heads and nasty ravens cawing at me.  The dream stayed with me and comes to me when I am feeling low.  I wrote a blog about it last year, when I was feeling particularly bad, and which roused some alarm among my friends and family.  This year I wrote a song about the Bough which I debuted at a gig at The Spice of Life a couple of weeks ago.  The song went down well.  All I currently know about the novel is that it will begin and end with a sullen child looking at the aforementioned tree of utter dread.  The remainder of this blog consists of the lyrics to the Ashen Bough song, the blog post I wrote a year ago (I'm all better now) and a picture I drew of the dream in order to promote the show I played.

The Ashen Bough (Song)

The Ashen Bough is such a sorry sight to see
You'd never make a lovely table out of this dread tree
But nonetheless, atop a barren hill, it stands in the cold
And it may look dead but it keeps on (it grows and it grows)
And the red glare of dusk flickers 'twixt its twigs
And it coils and it yawns and it starts to spout things
As the little baby me stands and stares in despair
Out pops a rasping, ragged raven and six or seven severed heads

Then the raven flaps its wings and it sounds like a laugh
As the seven severed heads turn to face it at last
And at once the bough breaks and, one by one, the dead heads
Start to wobble and to fall and they land at my legs
So the little baby me takes a sullen step back
But a black imposing wall stops me dead in my tracks
So I look back at the tree and I think that I know
This Ashen Bough is the last sorry sight that this sick world will show

All the severed heads on the Ashen Bough
Try to scream at me through their useless mouths
Dead eyes!  Dead eyes!  Trying to make their pleas
All the severed heads trying to laugh at me
Seven severed heads on the severed head tree

The Ashen Bough (Blog post from January 2014)

A little under a year ago I put myself out there in a way many of my friends weren't expecting and like wolves sniffing the wet blood of a fresh wound the brains on legs pricked their ears and cocked their heads and, like wolves - bloodlust substituted for throbbing urgency to promote superior intellects - they pounced on me.  Casual remarks about the recently translated Iranian existential tome they've just ploughed through, or the YouTubed lectures of esteemed liberal journalists I might not have heard of.  The offhand remarks about the ballet excursion, the "cinema that shows proper films" and the little-known cafe round the back where anarchic, youngblood writers read their political one man dramas and sip espressos well past midday.  "You should go there Joe, incidentally-" They continually try to intellectually one-up me because I've done something.  Appreciation is dead.  People who have had no interest in fiction writing or literary critique are suddenly literary editors when I dare to wax excited about my next book.  From my announcement to the death of time, the ability of my contemporaries to like or dislike something has ceased to be.  You now have to prove why you are a more esteemed authority on the enjoyment, or more accurately the critical analysis, of the work.  "Wait and see, Joe will crumble and go back to talking about The Simpsons.  What's he doing writing a book?  He hasn't done the research!"  Have you ever woken up with striking, stabbing pains about your gut, crippling lethargy and a headache that makes you realise you've never really had a headache before?  Ah but have you woken up knowing exactly why you're feeling that and not remotely surprised apart from in light of the fact that you have woken up at all?  Why do you ask?  Oh, you don't.  It's little surprise given that I wrote a character well known to be based on me, a character who attempts suicide twice and all of my friends and family read it and not a single one asked me if I was okay.  That I put out a blog detailing a real life suicide attempt and the crux of the interest garnered was a couple of facebook likes (are you liking my misery, or the quality of writing and if the latter, why the hold up?).  Every day a new niggle gets my mind racing to that thought again.  Depression used to be its own motivator for the unthinkable, but what now?  I anticipate my lasting, post-mortem reputation as a selfish man, as is the legacy of self-murderers, and that puts me off.  But when you wake in the dead of night virtually choking on your own self-loathing, misery and hatred of being, when the living motive of sparing loved ones of trauma is clouded by the trauma you are already heaping upon yourself, is it really that selfish to wish to opt out?  I stand on the windowsill attached via leather belt to the ceiling, and I must blink images that make me smile into my mind's eye just to muster up the urge to untie and step down.  There is Jade and she loves me and tells me I can do anything.  She is never cynical, never undeservedly cross and she always thinks of me even in her own times of hardship [sic].  There are my friends who make me laugh and do not emit loud, smelly intellectual burps when I try to confide about my next literary endeavour.  But they're not here at the moment, and I'm flaking away from the rationale that it is not their job to be there for me every minute of every day.  Why can't I appreciate or help with their problems?  Why am I only interested in myself?  And oh there I am refastening the belt and teetering on the ledge again.  Round and round and round she goes.  I feel the rancid, festering loathing, the leathery black loss of childlike innocence bubbling up and eating away at my guts and my red eyes see only quivering claws where once they saw a big exciting world.  A gnarly, scorched oaken bough coiling out of my mind upon which sits a rasping, ragged raven, demon-eyed and fluttering malevolently at the little boy who tries to peer in to explore.  And the dead tree winds and grows out of my howling mouth and from its leafless branches grow rotting, disembodied heads which groan and ask for help but they are asking nobody.  Between the jagged twigs the red light of dusk flickers, the collateral of a descending red sun that burns but does not warm.  It is not the night that I reach for in this pathetic fallacy, for the night is peaceful.  I can reflect in the night and I seldom look worriedly over my shoulder as I walk through the night among the shadowy spires of London and the still, sparse parks stretching out and breathing deeply as they recover from a long afternoon of being raped by tourists.  It is the day and its transparent, false hope that gets me as I try and make a straight path through the belligerent crowds of smart-phone zombies who'd sooner take a lamppost or double decker to the face than wait another twenty seconds to read their precious Instagram notification.  The meandering march of the zombie hordes - sallow faces planted firmly down at their shimmering touch screens (the extensions of their minds - brain in hand like the Ood from Doctor Who) is a sickening sight but if I'm the only one actually looking up to see it then is it really a problem?  And if I'm the only one suffering from my suffering then is it really a problem if I take the only straight path left available - the straightening of the falling rope?  But the last hurdle is physical pain - a pain I am (slightly) less familiar with so how about that gnarly, blackened tree with its demon sun and howling heads be replaced by a slowly sagging willow, lilting delicately to the ground as Autumn approaches and the skies darken with the grace of a landing jet plane?  I took an overdose for you.  This is what I've read about those who take the medicine in one hand and the whisky in t'other and close their eyes to their favourite songs and fall into a deep sleep with that scenario imprinting on them forever.  Not an escape of immense pain and damp-eyed anguish which leaves the macabre hanging corpse but a drastic coma - a passing as close to one of natural causes as my hand will allow.  "He went peacefully, in his sleep.  He took several dozen grams of codeine and seventy centilitres of Jameson's whisky to go peacefully but the important thing is he went peacefully." But that ever-pressing oversight of mine which the cod-intellectual wolves like to pounce upon slaps me with a cold wet flannel and I wake up with a start.  RESEARCH, JOE.  YOU HAVEN'T EVEN DONE THE RESEARCH!  Came the morning, it didn't work.  That's not nearly enough codeine to do you in, all that will do is corrode your liver and constipate you for a few days.  Idiot.  And now I'm that nerd from The Breakfast Club who tries to shoot himself with a flare gun.  Laughter erupts in the detention classroom of my mind and I'm annoyed I still have to work.  It's not my birthday anymore, either.  And time passes and I slink through the daily grind with a quiet embarrassment and maybe the world is a sentient being because after this I'm blindsided by decent days in double digits - things are going well, I'm plucking nice, new memories out of nowhere and not even thinking about... thinking about... thinking about... wait a minute.  No, it's fine.  I can get on with my work, go for a nice walk around historic London and fall asleep with the full intention of waking up.  Then I can talk about it (or, best I can manage, blog about it) as an event from the past but I've done the same before later relapses and in the back of my temporarily optimistic mind I know that I'm one gruff encounter or condescending comment away from hurling my collected memories into the fire and reaching for that leather belt again.  Time will tell.  At least I've done the research this time.


The Ashen Bough (Artist's Impression)