17th August 2018

Respect

When a great voice leaves the world, the silence is like deep space, dark and infinite.

But then, perhaps a little bit oddly, I thought of a stone tower, square shouldered, and tall, as tall as you can imagine, and right up at the very tip of the tower, so high you wouldn’t be able to tilt your head back far enough to see it, a giant bell.

All around the tower stretches a wide sea of black sand, its dunes rolling like waves to the horizon. Above, the dark sky is half swallowed by a giant planet, gleaming blue and green. The planet looks so close you’d think that if you could climb the tower and reach out you would be able to touch it. But you couldn’t.

A shooting star scratches a line of silver against the night and the tower’s giant bell tolls and if we listen carefully we can hear it, even here, on our world. It tells of passion, righteous and fierce, and it tells of joy.

7th July 2018

Bunkered

Take two leaders out to play: one a dictator, the other a Trumpotato.

Check egos are fully inflated. (You can tell when because when their egos are  pumped up properly, they look like balloons and then their eyes go all squinty.)

Put them in a bunker and give them pretend buttons to play with. (Note: they only like red buttons).

Close the bunker door.

Put your ear to the door and listen very carefully. When you hear them going: ‘Boom. Boom’ and then laughing, walk away from the bunker.

Do not look back.

8th June 2018

In the corner

You are sent to the corner. Naughty. You can’t remember what it was that was naughty but you know the teacher is right because teachers always tell you they are.

The corner is interesting to start with because you know everyone is looking at you …and then they aren’t.

Then the corner changes. I mean it is still a corner but you start to stare at it: the scratches on the green paint are little bits of white. When you get scratches they are red and then they go brown. Blood. Perhaps walls bleed.

You look over your shoulder to see if anyone else has ever had that thought but the teacher tells you to turn round or you’ll be sent out.

You turn round. You don’t want to be sent out. You can listen to the lesson, except it’s the subject that you don’t like so you don’t listen. You just hear the teacher’s voice which sounds all murmury and you think about the sea and beaches. If you tilt your head there’s a map with loads of drawing pin holes in it and lots of sea. The sea is blue on the map but the sea is almost never blue; it’s usually the colour of metal or steel, like a knight’s armour.

You could be a knight in shining armour standing guard, defending the class from ogres, and bears and the dark wizard who traps children in his castle and fills their heads with numbers so they can’t think for themselves anymore. It’s time you did something about that.

You straighten your shoulders; you stiffen your sinews, because you read that in a poem once, and you turn round to face the dark wizard and then the bell goes…. If you were a boxer you would come out of the corner and into the ring.

If you were a knight, you wouldn’t stand in a corner; you would step forth… or fifth. You’re not sure which. In the story, it was forth and it never made sense. Stories should make sense and so should lessons with numbers.

Knights make sense just by being knights, though if they had anything to say you probably wouldn’t hear them on account of the huge helmets they wear.

17th April 2018

Rooted

I thought of the tree’s roots, as I bunched them together and posted them down into the letter box slit of claggy soil, as a message to the earth’s core.

Or as a slow signal from the future tree’s top up to some travelling star.

Or back, through curtains of time, to a gnarly-handed Neanderthal kneeling in the dirt, pushing a seed into the soil.

And perhaps that Neanderthal is thinking forward, just as I am thinking back.

1st April 2018

Grief is a thief

Grief is a thief who dances sideways, stealing laughter and breath; kicking hard just there, in the place that hurts when you thought time had healed.

4th March 2018

Listen to the corbies calling

Corbies, that’s an old word for ravens and crows.

Those are ravens in the picture, hunkered down against the cold, though it’s the darkness of crows I think when the world is covered in snow.

No ravens in my garden today, nor sign of a crow but a pair of blackbirds came flitting out from the holly I’ve rooted from the ground and which I have been meaning to clear. Holly is old even when it’s young and green, and streams with magic… so no wonder it was good shelter for the birds. There was a robin, of course, and fine tantalising tracks in the snow…

I was looking for a worried half man, half goat – a faun- wearing a scarf and offering shelter, Mr Tumnus (from the other side of the wardrobe), but you should know better than to trust creatures in the snow that don’t hide from you,  but instead invite you in.

Listen to the corbies sing:

As I was walking all alane, 
I heard twa corbies making a mane; 
The tane unto the t’other say, 
‘Where sall we gang and dine to-day?’

‘In behint yon auld fail dyke, 
I wot there lies a new slain knight; 
And naebody kens that he lies there, 
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

‘His hound is to the hunting gane, 
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, 
His lady’s ta’en another mate, 
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane, 
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een; 
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair 
We’ll, theek our nest when it grows bare.

‘Mony a one for him makes mane, 
But nane sall ken where he is gane; 
Oer his white banes, when they we bare, 
The wind sall blaw for evermair.’

 This is an old Scottish ballad: The Twa Corbies. It’s very wintry and grim, but I love it.
twa=two
corbies=crows (or ravens)
fail dyke=wall or or bank of turf
wot=know
kens=knows
hause-bane=neck bone
een=eye
theek=thatch

17th January 2018

Nowhere Bin

That’s Oscar up there. Of course. He lives in a bin down on Sesame Street. I’m a bin without an Oscar living in me and I live down another street. He sings sweet songs. I don’t. This is what I sing.

‘Oh Lord, I’m so sick of your bags.

No more plastic bags!

I got an old sock, and a busted clock,

a cotton bud in a butter tub.

a dinosaur and a one-eyed seal

a burnt pan, a bent bike wheel….

But what makes me sick is your plastic bags.

I’m chock–full

shock-full

belly-full of bags.

So no more plastic bags!’

That’s what I’d sing.

And because in the summer I seriously pong. I’d sing a pong song. A bad, sad, pong song.

And when the lights go down and I’m sitting on the kerb, I’d dream about all those bags slipping down to the sea, where a hundred-year-old sea turtle can’t see because he’s got a black plastic bag stuck on his head and a great white shark is streaming shreds of plastic from between his teeth… He needs a shark dentist.

As for me. I’ve had enough of the stuff you don’t want.

So don’t have stuff that you don’t want. Don’t stuff stuff that you don’t want into me.

Give me a break. Give me a treat. Give me a wheel deal to the Wheel Bin Festival, where we slam our lids and the Bin  Band sings: ‘Where’s your bin?’

I bin nowhere. Where’s you bin?

14th November 2017

Face it

Face.

What an ‘over-and-done-with’ word that is. It sounds like slipping on ice and falling on your bum.

Look at this one, dreamed up by the great automata artist, Robert Race. Does he look jaunty with that angled moustache and matching gold rimmed dark glasses? Or mysterious? What would he say if he had a mouth instead of that shadow? Is that a smile or does he look sad? And his bowler hat… though I know that of course a bowler hat is not strictly a part of one’s face but in this case, who is to argue with me? I say that the hat is there to stop him floating off into space…

Or it’s a lid to keep his thoughts in, hidden behind the hidden eyes.

Do you prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet?

Don’t bother. Yours is fine.

28th September 2017

Have you been worded today?

Dialect.

Sounds like a part from a bike, or from Dr Who. Stranger than that… to a stranger; common enough if it’s yours, and if it’s yours, this dialect, make sure you use it.

Don’t let these kindly words slip  over the edge, or be lost out beyond the marshland or self corrected out of existence by your iphone, or spellcheck.

That would be nesh or mardarse. Maybe beazled or lost in a gunnel or jitty. Clemmed, or famished with cold. Perhas even Rawnish. Who knows?

Surely these are words so good you could almost eat them. Better than the words on that tree anyhow.

17th May 2017

Smiling in the teeth of a gale

Here’s to all these astonishingly fearless young women who refuse to be bullied by the screamers and ranters and black-jacket monsters; who don’t duck when the air is thick with violence; who smile in the teeth of unreason.

There’s courage for you.

13th May 2017

Shadow me this

Shadow. Shadow me.

I do.

I walk beside, or glide before, or trail behind you. I’m not blind, just obscured by you, darkened, silenced. Do you hear my warnings?

Slow down! Look!

Do you see or feel my companionship, because I am here with you, even when the skies are grey and I fade to a ghost of myself?

Perhaps you think I am untrustworthy, that because I shrink and stretch according to the sun and that, as light bends in the heat of the desert, my affections waver. Perhaps you think I resent you because you block me from the sun and without you I would be free.

Without you I would be lost.

I am constant, as real as night and day, light and dark. You are my angler. You cast me.

And as the sun sinks, I lean further and further ahead of you, leading the way, until night falls.

17th March 2017

Tumbling words

It’s bad news, Mister

A twister of a day

With clouds like Kim Jong’s bunkers

And hail down on the shore

And the geese are screaming thunder

in skeins across the sky-

A storm net to snag your dreaming

And haul you back to die.

It’s bad news, Mister

A twister of a day

You’d be wise to get the jist, sir

Of what I’m trying here to say.

28th January 2017

I think of you sometimes

I think of you sometimes, in the early days out there, eighteen years old, trying to look older than you were, your boots and gaiters damp to the bone.

You hadn’t thought about bone and flesh before, though your school was brutal enough, the priests as mad as hell.

But that was alright, you just got on with it.

Here too you just got on with it, knowing that your ‘men’, older, harder, tireder, looked at you as you went by, with your ‘too-young’ moustache and narrow shoulders, and briefly wondered how long you’d live.

Six weeks for a second lieutenant straight from school and keen as mustard.

Were you?

Yes, sir.

Mustard. There were rumours of the gas and what it could do.

Was the wind ice cold on your days at the front, rattling the tins on the wire. Did the rain slick the duckboards, and the mud everywhere…

Could you ever put your head above the parapet?

Who ever thought…

Perhaps you did, sometimes, to take your mind off the bloody noise or that single snip of a sniper’s bullet . I can imagine you estimating the arc of a shell, elevation, distance.

Mathematics.

You should have been an engineer. Paper with little squares. Equal signs. Reason. Rules. You always had a pencil in your pocket along with the pack of Woodbines.

When you turned round to go, down at the bend in the trench where the sides had fallen in, squeezing past the mess of dirt and stone and twisted corrugated iron, was the company runner bringing letters from home, his face a blob in the exhausted light.

There had been a letter from your mother, hoping you were well and keeping warm and to think of it all as an adventure. I expect you shivered and wrote back: ‘Yes, mother,’ and pulled your great coat tight.

When you saw the flares that night perhaps you thought of spotlights along the stage, and the curtain going up.

In fact I think my dad might have been seventeen when he joined up. He was wounded and spent three days out on no man’s land before he was found and brought back by one of the soldiers in his company. For much of the rest of his life, he was closely involved in the theatre.

18th November 2016

Be serious, will you!

I read about it one time.

You did not..

I did so. And it happened to me.

Did it.

It did.

In the whatchyoucall supermarket?

Yes.

Go on then.

Alright. I had the tins: the tomatoes. I buy six. And I  was going for the chocolate.

Good man.

Almost had it in the basket.

Alright. I can picture it. Just so.

It wasn’t a basket though. It was that other yoke.

The trolley?

That’s it.

On wheels?

That’s how they build them.

A mighty miracle of science, the shopping trolley. A pure delight to push one of them down the aisles.

Miracle is right. Your caveman would have had an easier life bringing back the mammoth in a shopping trolley now, wouldn’t he?

You think a mammoth would fit in one of them trolleys.

The big ones. IKEA, you know. It might.

It’s a thought.

It is. And anyhows, coming at me out of the trolley itself, there was this voice. “Put it back,’ it said, bold and clear as the priest himself.

It wasn’t the priest, Father O’Dolan?

It was not. A priest in my shopping trolley! Are you daft, or what?

Who then?

One of them purple bears, they had in that film.

Toy Story.

That’s the one.

It was purple was it?

Purple, yes it was, or blue maybe, only a few quid and I put it in my trolley. A gift like. And there it is telling me to put back the chocolate.

The purple bear did not like chocolate!

It did not.

Are you sure it was the bear talking?

Who else could it have been.

One of them elfs.

You get them in the supermarket?

A supermarket elf? Of course you do.

I’ll watch out from now on.

Do that. And did you put the chocolate back?

I did not. I’m not listening to purple bears.

Nor elfs.

Elves.

Nor them either.

7th November 2016

Excuse me, where did that childhood go?

‘You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.’ Anthony Doerr

31st October 2016

Do giants lie beneath our hills?

Just a thought for Halloween

What is that on the edge of the hill, down below the rounded, tree-less brow, stark against the green and the heather? There! Two stones, like giant’s teeth; as if ‘he’ is there just beneath the surface, his face puckered black leather, his eyes open and blind with mud, his huge nostrils clagged, his mouth agape, and those two white stones, his dog teeth, biting up to the sky.

Was he buried kindly, the hill piled over him by a last remaining child of his kind?

Or was he dragged down and butchered by a swarm of giant-hating, giant-fearing men and women who then, believing his decay would poison the air and the streams, buried him in the hard ground beneath this hill.

Perhaps it wasn’t either of those.

Perhaps he just  grew old and tired and laid  himself down to sleep. Then , as the long years passed, the hill, foot by hand, by leg, by chest slowly swallowed him into itself.

Perhaps one day, on a day like this All Hallow’s Eve, the hills will tear themselves open and all those creatures lost in the half dark of our knowledge and learning will come rumbling and tumbling back into the world: witch and giant, hob and goblin, talking hares and fishtailed men from the rocky shore and they’ll dance the twilight to the tunes of our fear and our delight.

And a good night will follow the hallowed eve.

5th October 2016

Ghost Words

Do you ever see them, up high out of the corner of your eye, when you’re waiting for a bus or feeling a drop of rain on your neck and you look up?

Look again, high up on that wall! Old as ghosts, words and names seeping out of stone whispering some wonder:

Dr Mackie’s Golden

Walnut and Jasper’s

Emporium of

Rusper’s Rustic

Ghost words peering in from another world, hoping to be seen. Or, perhaps they are just waiting for the rain  and hard air to wear them away, or for the gable to fall or the wall to be torn down.

Listen, can you hear them whisper a wonder?

And why is it they make me think of refugees…

.

5th September 2016

Hello Emilia!

Thank you for your lovely letter.

You would like to write a play of THE GEEK THE GREEK AND THE PIMPERNEL? That’s amazing!

And it will be even more amazing if I can give you some advice about how to write a play… Well, I’ll try but please don’t come and hit me over the head with a soggy haddock if the advice turns out not to be very helpful.

Keep it short and keep your scenes short. Have a max of tens scenes (and probably a minimum of five)and make sure you know what you want to happen in each scene.

Never have people talking unless what they say adds to the action, so you keep pushing the story on all the time.

Don’t feel you have to tell the whole story; select what you want to use and skip anything that’s too tricky. It might be fun just to try to use the mystery of who is the Pimpernel as the thing that drives your version of the story.

Remember it is your play so you can do what you want.

And most importantly…

Have fun!

4th September 2016

From the August country

August!

What happened to August?

It got swept up in a storm and tumbled down somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, and me with it, in Mayo, to be precise… which I rarely am (precise, that is, not Mayo. I am often in Mayo… oh, forget it!)

To be even more needle-in-a-haystack precise (which, I believe, is a contradiction) this is the Barony of Erris.

I keep looking for the Baron but he’s nowhere to be seen at all, just like the month itself, which was last seen heading for the door to that curious other universe where all past months go.

No, not to school, they don’t go there. But you do, do you? Is that a good thing? I couldn’t say, though I went there once.

For now, I think I’ll stick around in the August country for as long as I can.

29th July 2016

News from Nice

and this is not a jolly post…

WHO WOKE THE MINOTAUR?

There’s nothing wrong with being angry. We all get angry, sometimes for a good reason, sometimes for no reason at all, but the anger usually, hopefully fades, like a sea storm and there’s calm.

But rage is something different. We seem to live in a time of rage. And rage makes me think of that monster, imprisoned deep inside a labyrinth, with an unquenchable appetite for killing. The Minotaur.

I remember my cousin, Patrick Daly, writing a poem about him more than ten years ago. It was terrifying and timely.

But it feels like the monster’s woken again… He stalks Syria and Iraq. His footprints are in Turkey along the North coast of Africa and in Europe.

So who woke the minotaur this time? Who guided him blind from the labyrinth and let him stumble righteously angry into the light?

Who led him up the church steps?

Who whispered to him ‘the old lie’, that his rage was godly?

29th June 2016

Meet one angry chicken

Ok so it’s not ground-breaking news (and anyway why should news break ground, like one of those noisy hammer drills they are using right now out on the street, gouging the tarmac…) but I met a chicken in Turkey who joined me each morning for breakfast so I named her Chicken’n’chips. This is what she said:  

Don’t call me

Chicken and chips!

Don’t call me

Chicken and chips!

I’m a chicken with hips

I’m no hick from the sticks

I can groove I can mix

I can strut and I can sing

I can fly. I got wings

I can flip and I can roll

Do my Chicken rock n roll

Don’t call me chicken and chips!

Don’t call me chicken and chips!

23rd June 2016

Here’s a horrid sounding word

Of course you may not agree but Brexit is not a good word.

It sounds like an execution to me, the sharp blade of an axe. Off with his head. The Red Queen in Alice knew all about that; she would Brexit, till there was no one left to Brexit.

But it also sounds like  something you might buy in a packet, buy it from Screwfix  mix it up, like grout, feed it to rats.

Maybe it’s a new cereal, like Weetabix, but even more tasteless (sorry Weetabix) and with hard bits that you could break your teeth on. It does make me think of teeth, teeth like an iron trap that could snap round your ankle and that would be that.

That will be that.

Or teeth that shine under tv lights and smile and smile and murder while they smile. Brexit a new toothpaste, to paste over over all the untruths, and empty words.

Putin doesn’t smile, but he will if we Brexit and so will all those who want to chip a little bit more off the world, making it smaller and smaller until it is just a tiny rock in space with room for only a sign that reads:  ‘No Aliens here, thank you very much.’

2nd June 2016

Swimsong

This hasn’t quite climbed up the ladder into being a story… but I think I like it as it is. It’s really for all short-sighted swimmers or anyone prone to embarrassing accidents.

‘A collision with another swimmer is not unusual,’ she said, ‘except  when the beach is about two miles long and there are only two people swimming in the sea.  That is unusual – even surprising.’

‘She was doing back crawl,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘ You were not doing back crawl, and she was considerably younger than you.’

‘Age has absolutely nothing to do with a swimming collision.’

She rolled her eyes.  ‘Collision makes it sound as if you were speeding along, like one of those Olympic swimmers. You don’t swim nearly as fast as one of them- nor do you have the shoulders, nor’, she said, glancing critically at his stomach, ‘ the narrow waist. Bumped is a better way of describing what you did. You bumped into the only young female swimmer in this entire stretch of the ocean.’

She made it sound quite shameful.

‘I was doing the crawl,’ he said.

‘You still don’t swim very fast even when you are doing the crawl,’ she said. ‘Your crawl is like… crawling- a sort of two year-old’s speed.’

‘I don’t look where I’m going when I am doing the crawl and she didn’t look where she was going when she was doing the back stroke.’ He was going to tell her that the young woman had laughed when they had collided but he didn’t think that that would help the situation. ‘An innocent collision,’ he said. ‘You’re making a meal out of nothing.’

‘There is no such thing…’ she paused to apply her lip balm and said, with what he thought was an entirely unjustified air of triumph .’… absolutely no such thing,’ and here she snapped her lip balm shut, ‘ as an innocent bump… in or out of the ocean.’

2nd May 2016

Somewhere right behind you, the giants of England

‘Gog. And who else?

‘Magog.’

‘You’re kidding me!’

‘I’m not. ‘

‘Giants?’

‘Of course. Giants of England. In fact giants of London, or London giants. I’m not sure which.’

‘With names like that?’

‘They weren’t good at names in those days.’

‘Why not?’

There weren’t many around.’

‘Names?’

‘No, giants.’

‘You think maybe ‘Gog’ was a thing and one giant said, ‘Look that’s a Gog. And the other giant said: ‘No, that’s my Gog!’ Except he spoke funny, I expect giants probably did, on account of being giants, and said, ‘No, it’s ma Gog.’’

‘And then they had a fight about it?’

‘Or a laugh. What do you reckon the Gog was?’

‘A toy maybe.’

‘Do giants play with toys?’

‘When they’re little, maybe they did. Gog could have been a spoon.’

‘Or a rock.’

‘Exactly.’

‘When they were little, they weren’t giants.’

‘Course, they were. Just little giants.’

‘You don’t know much, do you?’

‘I know a bit. I know they’re still around.’

‘What! Gog and Magog?’

‘Yes, Gog and Magog.’

‘You don’t have to repeat me.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Where are they, then, these two giants?’

‘And all the giants of England?’

‘Yes, them too.’

‘Right behind you.’

‘You’re kidding me!’

‘Not.’

28th April 2016

Do you hear me, Major Tom, there’s a Major Tim out there too?

Up there tread-milling through space, headphones clamped to his head … who’d have thought, Major Tom becomes Major Tim, not lost in space, like him, not lost in wonder, like him, but in the marathon down here, virtually running around the pavements and bridges of London.

Good for him.

Maybe one day we’ll have spacecraft powered by treadmills so we can run to Mars, or a host of tiny silver spaceships shaped like airstream cycle-helmets, and we’ll pedal out to the Milky Way. Just a thought… though Leonardo Da Vinci probably thought of it first.

And here we are in the sharp cold of April with breath puffed out white and frosty, as it would if we were all already lost in space.

21st March 2016

Goose chase

If you want to chase the goose or go on a wild goose chase, you’ll have to dip into Story Bag because that’s where this story seemed to belong; but I left the picture here because I liked it.

Anyway, who doesn’t want to walk on water?

7th March 2016

The Neverendeedum Tea Party

‘IN. IN. IN.’

‘OUT. OUT. OUT.’

They were all wearing suits and waving their tea spoons. They looked rather horrid.

‘Who would like tea?’ Alice said.  No one answered. The men sitting on either side of the table were too busy shouting at each other. ‘I do hope you’ll behave.’ They didn’t of course. They looked smart, at least they had looked smart before the tea party had begun, now their very expensive ties were slightly askew. That’s a good word, she thought. I think people are generally askew. The end of George’s tie dipped into his cup but he was too busy looking down at the end of his nose to notice

‘You’re rubbish and you smell!’

‘No, you’re bigger rubbish!’

Alice wished the Mad Hatter and the March Hare were there; they were so much more grown up and made so much more sense than these people from Parliament. Even the Doormouse, who barely ever woke up to say anything at all, was more interesting.

One of the men, a chap with a podgy face and a thatch of blonde hair was thumping the table and growling: ‘I AM interesting! I AM the most interesting person here! I love me. I love ME!’

Beside him, a little fellow with a squeaky voice kept trying to make himself heard. ‘We’ll all get locked up if we’re naughty,’ he said and looked as if he were about to stand up, but he didn’t. Instead he bowed his head and stirred his tea. ‘I am quite naughty,’ he said. ‘I am.’

At the far end of the table was a hefty chap who Alice thought looked rather fierce. He didn’t have much hair but what he had was cropped short and he wore a very tight suit buttoned up to his chin. Rather surprisingly though, he was crying and large shiny, tears were rolling down his cheeks and plopping onto his suit. ‘You are so mean!’ he kept shouting. ‘You are just saying THINGS that I don’t want to hear.’

Meanwhile the blue-suited men on the other side of the table were waving their arms and looking, Alice thought, a little like crabs. ‘Pinch you!’ they shouted. ‘We are going to pinch you! And we’ll have more money than you ever will.’

‘You are all very stupid,’ Alice said in her bossiest voice. ‘I can’t think why anyone would ever want to invite you to their party ever again. ‘You’, she said to the ones who had been chanting ‘OUT’ and waving their spoons,  ‘just want to hide under a pillow and stick your bottoms in the air.’ Bottoms was rude, of course, but no one was listening to her. ‘And you,’ she said to the ones on the other side of the table, who were now pulling faces and sticking out their tongues and tugging their ears, which Alice thought was a very silly thing to do because ears were ugly enough anyway without making them even longer, ‘you are not very good at your job.’

She was right; they weren’t listening.

Really, she thought, they should have left it all to me.

‘And to me as well, of course,’ said the Mad Hatter popping out of nowhere and taking her arm.

‘And me,’ said the March Hare popping out of the other side of nowhere and taking her other arm.

‘And me,’ said the dormouse, emerging from the teapot and hurrying after them. ‘And can we have joined-up thinking for tea?’

2nd March 2016

Jack Dawn

Jackdaws

five of them

in the bare branches

Black winter baubles in the Rowan tree

Hunger and grey skies

Cold air to scrape your face

And bite your eyes

Pliars grip the tips of your fingers and toes

And the cold nips and tugs

wanting to find a way in

and catch hold

of your heart.

17th February 2016

Being New

Starting a new school after half term can’t be easy. This is a scene I wrote this morning  for a story I’m working on. So it’s new too…

 Clarence didn’t seem to mind being new. He was old at being new. He just walked in ahead of her and, while he waited for the teacher to introduce him, he looked around at the boys and girls in the class who were all looking at him. He had a half a smile on his face and when the teacher, Mrs Naffin, pointed out his desk, he nodded, went over and sat down.

And that left Clara on her own up there. Her throat was so tight she could hardly get a word out and when she did it emerged as a whisper. One of the girls smiled encouragingly and that made it worse. She scowled and didn’t look at anyone, not even Clarence; though when she did glance at him, as she was heading for her desk,  he was still fiddling with his pens, straightening out his exercise book and then writing his name on the cover. She bet he wrote neatly.

She felt a light tap on her shoulder and nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned round. It was mad-boy Douglas from the estate. She hadn’t even noticed him when she came in. He didn’t smile. She hadn’t seen him smile yet, not once but he mouthed something at her. She frowned and then realised he was asking if she was alright.

She nodded. She wasn’t but she would be. The lesson started and she stopped thinking about herself and her tight throat and her heart beating so hard it was like a policeman hammering on a door in Eastenders.

3rd February 2016

Hot Stuff

This  government promised a further £1.3 billion in tax breaks for the giant oil companies, while they have stopped helping smaller, pioneering businesses develop renewable energy. Hmm. Think drilling and fracking versus wind, wave and sun. With enough solar panels in the Sahara we could power the world….

They said there was a field where nothing grows, where the land is dry as old bones; where there’s dirt and sand and a hot wind that can rasp the hide off a rhino. This field was a half a continent wide and half a continent deep; and once, more than a thousand years ago, it had been green and its springs ran clear; but now it’s a field where nothing grows, not even a shadow because there are no trees. And in the sky there’s not a cloud; just a hard, white sun pouring down onto the sand.

They said if we mirror this land with glass, and tilt it all towards the sun, row on row on row, like bathers on the beaches of Cannes or St Tropez we’ll harvest enough light to warm the world; and this field of dirt and grit and stone, and long rolling waves of sand will be worth more than all the oil and coal that still lies buried miles beneath the sea, and all the great forests of the world.

And if we did that, they said, it might well save the world; and then they went back to drilling holes down through the ice and the ocean floor; they built nuclear reactors and promised they wouldn’t leak or explode; and they tore down the forests, and they fracked for gas; and they spilled oil into the ocean and turned the ice black.

And the sun shone down on the desert sand and warmed the dunes.

5th January 2016

Through the Dragon’s mouth

I’m not sure why but I was thinking about exercises like Pilates or Yoga, when you pull yourself into sometimes rather strange shapes, and that led into one of those through the wardrobe moments and a character I have always liked called Mr Tumnus.

Kneel down. First put both hands on the ground. Then you dip your right shoulder and thread your right arm under your left shoulder, as if it were a keyhole, or a dragon’s mouth. Now, pull yourself through.

Pfft.

A world of snow and ice. A forest heavy with snow. A faraway sky pricked with strange stars and down here the not-quite-full- darkness of night because of all of this white spilling out through the trees, deep and crisp, banked up here and scooped into a hollow there.  Man-size shapes frozen in white; one like a bear, up on its back legs; and leading right to where you stand, a line of holes, like black coins in the snow. Hoof prints?

Yours?

You have crooked legs, scratchy sweet-smelling fur, and your feet have the hard, neat horns of a goat. Feel your head, your face. A human head. A human face. Alright. And your hands. Alright. At least you are half what you once were.

But your body is cold. The air moves slow and cold through the forest.

You should be home, Mr T.

Wrap your long woollen scarf around your neck and hurry towards the light.

What world was it that you left behind? You don’t know anymore.

Whom did you betray this time?

18th December 2015

It’s a family affair

‘It just keeps happening and no one knows what to do about it.’

‘And your man does the same thing every time?’

‘He does. Right in the middle of the game.

‘Scuppers it right and blinking proper, every time, and the rest of them standing about like a bloody field of grazing dawks. If you know what I mean?’

‘I know exactly. Of course. And this one… ‘

‘This one! Did I tell you he’s Italian? Well, if I could get my hands round his neck, I’d give him a right and proper choking, I’m not kidding. But he’s up in the air, isn’t he? Up in the bloody air shouting this name that sounds like a pope! Can you imagine? Or like a bloody Roman Emperor!’

‘You’re not serious!’

‘I am.’

‘What’s this name he’s shouting?’

‘Agostino.’

‘Is that it?’

‘It is.’

‘It sounds like a beer, man.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Peroni.’

‘Peroni? That doesn’t sound like a pope, does it? It doesn’t end in O.’

‘Name me a pope, then. One with an O at the end of his name.’

‘Name me one that doesn’t.’

‘I’m struggling. Name me one that does.’

‘Double or quits?’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Pope Yoko Ono. Is that enough for you?’

‘Italian is he, this Yoko Macono?’

‘As pasta.’

‘Alright.’

‘Will I tell you what happened then?’

‘Go on.’

‘This Italian fella appeared out of nowhere, right in the middle of the game. There he was whizzing about in a bright green shirt and … and he’s suddenly up in the air and kicking the ball… from about twenty foot up in the bloody sky like a helicopter!’

‘It wasn’t the James Bond fella, was it? He has a thing about the helicopter. I’ve seen it in a new film , Septico.’

‘I don’t know about that but this fella’s a helicopter-man, that’s for sure. And wait… the goalie’s got a mouth wide as his bloody goal posts and your man, the flying shouter, he pops it in. La deed dah. And then he’s down again, running about like some stupid ostrich, arms out, flapping them up and down. And why would he do that when he can jump up in the air, no problem?’

‘He’s excitable.’

‘He is. I’d say they all are where he comes from. And absolutely no one’s moving, just him, and the people up in the stands just watching aren’t saying a thing either. You could have heard a mouse squeaking on the other side of the Severn Bridge because it was as if the world had gone as blank as bloody stone sheep. Not him, though, running about and making these little jumps. Even did a handstand!’

‘Why don’t you give him the boot, then? Kick him off the team?’

‘Oh, yes. Great thinking, Sherlock. Never occurred to me. Kick him off the team. Genius…. He’s not on the team, is he! And if he was, how do you kick someone off the team when they are always up in the bloody air? Tell me that. Up in the bloody air, like a bloody seagull!’

‘Or a parrot?’

‘Or an angel who likes football.’

‘That’s stupid; angels don’t play football. They play the harp.’

‘I know. Like lager.’

‘A stupid angel, then?’

‘Or just Italian.’

‘Agostino.’

‘That’s the one.’

(John Agostino, born on Wednesday, 18th November 2015)

30th November 2015

30th November 2015

The War Garden

Ashe is in the safe country. Bakr is in the garden. The garden grows metal, in rows as neat as the olive picture we keep in the well. The well is the round silver disk that we thought could be a shield but  it is difficult to hold with one hand  so we left it lying flat on the ground and it became the well. Bakr says it came from a car.

We can hear cars sometimes. They have horns that honk. Mostly we hear voices from the other side of the world. Sometimes we hear the hate. Then the sky burns orange and black.

We are safe if we go  into the safe country. Our parents told us this.

The broken brick is desert, which we must cross to reach the garden, and the safe country has steps that lead down into the  dark where the air is old and thick. Only Ashe likes to stay in the safe country. He stays there all the time. He says it is better there because the hate is further away.

I like the desert when the sky is hot and I must dance on the stone. It makes Bakr laugh.

19th October 2015

19th October 2015

Gone Fishing

If I could fish

off the edge of the world

I would catch

Space trout

the size of America

silver as stars

glittered with dust

a zillion years old

jumping and running and

swiping their tails

diving and turning

behind Jupiter’s moons

burying deep in the dark depth of space.

And if I ever reeled one in

to the world’s steep shore

I’d rest it so quiet

till its heart beat steady

then with its nose tipped to the current

I’d let it go

down that long wide river

to the edge of all things

and I’d follow it there

and know.. and know… and know.

4th October 2015

4th October 2015

Losing Heart

They lost their hearts in the eye of that storm, the one that howled round Piccadilly Circus, ripped  six hundred and seventy-two hats, nineteen umbrellas, one thousand and one mobile phones, four scarves, a newspaper, a watch, seventeen bicycles, along with their cyclists, up into the air. All of the cyclists kept madly pedalling though they no longer had a road to pedal along.  One of them was upside-down and then the right way up; and then came to a stop on the top of a quivering red bus, called Boris.

That cyclist wasn’t the one who lost his heart; it was another man and, as it happens, another woman. She was there, near the statue, when the storm arrived.

The sky in that circle above all the tall buildings was one moment blue and the next a tumbling, seething mountain of black and flickering clouds; and then the air suddenly went still, like an in-drawn breath. Then, just as suddenly, the wind whipped down and everything took flight: the hats and scarves and umbrellas, the watch and the newspaper, a pink Financial Times that peeled itself into separate sheets; and then as if racing after all these whipped-away things were the cyclists, one after another, soaring spiralling up into the crackling sky.

She saw all this through blurred eyes. She saw how the wind pinched and squashed faces, pulled away frowns and scowls and smiles and tossed them away so that all those  faces looked like puzzled puddings. Then the wind caught her and spun her around, her arms out straight, her hair shivering and electric, right there by the statue; her high heels skittering sometimes on the pavement, sometimes in the air.

And he, the other man, the one who also lost his heart, having stepped out from the underground into the gasp of in-drawn breath that was the moment before the storm, was bounced between Japanese tourists, who clung to each other as if they were on a raft; then he was ripped free. He tried to go back down the stairs into the underground, where a sea of white, frightened faces stared up at the storm, but he was yanked back and he too, just like the woman, started to spin.

He caught a hat, and a scarf and an open umbrella, which he clutched with both hands, and was scooped up, twirling and lurching through a blizzard of smart phones, past one bearded, airborne cyclist clutching a New Statesman; and then he was dropped down with a crack onto his knees, just by the statue where the spinning lady span. And he saw her poor face, pinched and pulled by the wind; and he felt a terrible pain in his chest as his heart disappeared.

The wind died. The hats and scarves and umbrellas were draped around Eros, so he looked like an old man dancing on one leg. And before anyone moved, or breathed, or realised they were still alive there was a pattering rain of mobile phones hitting the pavements and shattering one after the other, spilling their little heart batteries out across the stone. Then everyone breathed again and the cyclists, still cycling, bounced down onto the street and weaved through the stationary buses and taxis and vans; and people gingerly picked themselves up, and motors started and traffic began to move in its slow, stop-start way when the lights turned green.

But the man and the woman who had lost their hearts didn’t move. He was still on his knees, and she was facing him, her arms still outstretched because she felt if she brought them down to her side she would lose her balance and fall.

Some tourists, thinking they were street performers in a puzzling play, stopped and took pictures and then went on their way; while the man and the woman just looked at each other and both of them, at the same time, tried to speak. They wanted to say what had happened, and how if this were a film that they were in they would now smile at each other and laugh and perhaps fall in love. But because their hearts were gone, they couldn’t smile or laugh or fall in love.

She helped him to his feet and asked if he would be alright and he held on to her hand and wished he still had his heart, and he said he would be fine. But he wouldn’t, and he asked her if she would be alright and she said, very sadly, that she would be fine, once she had found her heart. He nodded and said that was the same for him; and then they turned away from each other and walked off into the crowds of people, who hurried and shopped as if nothing had happened.

And maybe they came back the next day or the day after that and found their hearts lodged somewhere in among the coats and bags still tangled up and hanging off the old statue; and maybe they even looked for each other once they had their hearts back, right there by the statue; and maybe they found each other, and maybe they didn’t. I didn’t see that part of the story so I can’t say, one way or the other.

3rd September 2015

3rd September 2015

I got me an owl moot and a stealth bomber and it happened like this…

There are half a dozen owls bunched on a branch and one of them is saying: ‘What’s the point of seeing in the dark if your average field mouse or weasel can hear the swoosh of your wings as you go for a grab?’

A shuffle of claws and a fair bit of owl blinking.

‘No point.’

‘No point at all, mate. They’re off down the nearest hole in the wall and you’re lucky if you just get your claws onto the tip of a not-so-tasty tail. Know what I mean?’

‘We need better wings.’

‘Better wings? I like my wings!’

‘Of course you do. Best in the wood. Alright? But if we fix the air flow, cut down on the whistle and woosh, we will have ‘stealth’.’

There’s a low and meaningful hoot of appreciation at this and a fair bit of owl heads ducking down into owl shoulders.

‘And it’s real stealth I’m talking about. Not like the day mob, your kestrels and hawks and such like; the jammy, jaw-drop, dive bombing show-offs.’

‘And they’re not that good.’

‘And, as you say, they’re not that good at all.’

‘Miss more often than not.’

‘Miss pigeons!’

‘Miss sparrows!’

‘Ha ha! Miss sparrows! Would miss a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder!’

‘Would miss a one-legged pirate, an’ all!’

‘Alright.’

‘Alright.’

There’s more nodding, shifting claws on the branch and blinking, and then one says: ‘What is stealth?’

‘Arial creeping, but like fast creeping, know what I mean?’

‘So dinner can’t hear us.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Deadly?’

‘The stuff of nightmares, mate. We’ll be like the dark blade-runner.’

‘And they’ll copy us won’t they?’

‘Humans? ‘Course they will. Haven’t got an original idea in their heads.’

‘Will they go after our weasels and mice?’

‘Have to wait and see.’

11th August 2015

11th August 2015

Who’s a Selfish Giant then?

Walls. I know I said ‘giant’ but it’s walls that set me thinking. We were always good at walls. Not as good as the Chinese, of course. They built one so long you can see it from Mars, if you happen to be going there. But generally, over here, we’re good at them, not the wattle and daub variety for holding up a thatched roof full of mice and spiders but the stone ones.

In my view they were an import from Europe, though, technically speaking, I don’t suppose we should call William the Conqueror a European; he was a Norman with a rubbish haircut. But he and his chainmail-crew were big into walls, great big castle walls to be precise. They splattered them all over the country to keep those Anglo-Saxons, that’s us, out. It must have been pretty scary having one of those castles suddenly looming up over the little town you lived in all your life.

I don’t think that idea – the great wall to keep ‘them’ out and us in – has really ever gone away. You can even, if you fancy, have a posh wall now with an electric gate.

Most countries have a wall around them, not made of stone, but the wall is there all the same and you can’t get in, even if there are wolves biting at your heels, unless you have a magic pass that will let you through the door, in other words, a passport.

I’ve never been to Israel so I don’t know how you get through their wall. You can see that one alright. It snakes through the country, no windows or doors and so tall there is no peeking over it either. It makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant story, ‘The Selfish Giant’.

Maybe our politicians should read it. Who knows, they might even learn something.

14th July 2015

13th July 2015

A Butter Dish Tale

When something is made for you, made carefully – planned, the design drawn out in pencil and then maybe coloured in; and then the clay  bought and shaped, hours getting the corners right, the little knob on the lid; and then it’s painted and glazed and baked and cooled- it becomes more than just a thing, an object, a cup, a mug, a desk, a toy…

Or, in this case, a butter dish. The Queen of butter dishes, if butter dishes have kings and queens, and they might. Why not? You can see it there in the picture, with its dish and lid, its cross-hatch of blues and greys; and all of it hand-shaped, so there are curves on the sides of the lid and everything slides away from symmetry, which makes it the only one of its kind in the entire world. Perfect.

And then it’s broken, knocked from the work surface onto the tiled floor. There’s an almighty crash and the pieces shatter and scatter…

It is somehow so much more than an ordinary breaking, a casual accident.

It was given, and now, you fear, it will be unforgiven.

So the pieces are gathered and laid on the table. This goes here and that there. This must be the lid and that a corner of the dish. Glue. Elastic bands. And slowly, one piece is fixed to the next and the lid and dish begin to take shape again; a little more crooked, the cracks like old scars, visible but somehow grown into the design. But it is whole again, and back in use.

And the love, with which it was made, is still there

1st July 2015

1st July 2015

It’s a teacher thing

Raptor training? Just keep an eye on your teachers. You can bet they’ll be doing the husky voice, the finger click and the stare, with knees bent, just a little, like they’re trying to glide on a skateboard. Be kind and don’t mind them.

All you have to do is practise the raptor hiss, the scuttle and the jump.

Easy.

21st June 2015

21st June 2015

I saw two knights come riding by

In the cool side chapel of a honey-pot cathedral you can sit and wait, while in ones and twos people drift by. Some, like you, linger but most drift on, looking at plaques, staring up at the ceiling, the columns, the light, the altar… You too are looking up, but at a clock: a mechanical dream, a wheel with wheels and more wheels, all turning and ticking, edging past the sun, the moon and the stars…

You want the quarter hour to strike because then, above the crawling dial with its different types of time, on a platform of their own, two jousting knights will suddenly wheel out and pass each other, once and then again: Bam! And one is whacked backwards. Then around they come again.

Every fifteen minutes they fight this joust and the same knight, pink cheeked and silver armoured, topples the dark knight. Shouldn’t the maker of the clock and the rich and holy benefactors have noticed that there is no defeat, no absolute victory? No matter how many times he falls, the dark knight comes riding back.

And one day, one day somewhere on the tip of time, the white knight with his pink cheeks will be surprised to find his lance breaking and the dark knight sweeping past him. He might hear the whistle of the blade that slices off his head and, undead, he might hear the tinkle of his own helmet hitting the stony chapel floor and the gasps of those sitting there, waiting for some miracle to happen.

And that was it: the dark knight, after a million million jousts, won the fight. That was the miracle. Not quite what was expected, but maybe that’s the way with miracles.

P.S. You probably know I’m writing about the famous ‘jouster’ clock in Wells Cathedral. If you haven’t seen it go and have a look.

P.P.S. Simon Armitage has written a great poem about it.

25th May 2015

Another Guitar is Gone

The guitar is the shape of desire

a longing for song

for soul

a bending of strings

to wrench out the blues

and hammer and sing

all the hopes that have been

and the fear

and the fear and the doubt

and the hope

a ripple of notes that hang in the air

bird-winged in the heat of the day

the sweat of the night.

Only sing from the heart

for the guitar is the shape of desire

and this is the hour

and this is the hour.

For BB King

25th May 2015

29th March 2015

A murmur of starlings; a kindness of crows

That sounds a bit Game of Thrones to me but there’s not a Stark in sight, nor a great wall , nor a wildling, just an old dog.

This is it.

The old dog lowered himself on a patch of warm, sunlit ground on the green road, a lane-way down to the sea. The day was still. A small bird chat chatted from the gorse and then darted up into the air flighting down the lane a little way, landing on a post. The dog heard his name being called but his bones felt heavy and he stayed where he was.

Overhead, there was a shifting pattern of darkness, wavering, breaking apart, coming together, coming down, lower and lower, as if to fold over him, like the blanket that was sometimes laid over him these nights. He could hear a rushing of wind through feather and a different scent on the salt and heather air. His eyes, still clear, looked up, watching as the starlings sky-danced for him.

A bee sounded. Zig-zagged in front of his nose, touching the gorse and back, nuzzling the heather bank.

And then a large black crow landed, bouncing a little.  (Aren’t crows always large and black? But then maybe this one was a little larger than other crows and with a dash of night in his black feathers). It hunched its shoulders, as if shrugging, tipped its head sideways and eyed the old dog. Its eyes black and bright. They looked at each other like that for a moment and then the crow hopped forward. The dog’s old ribs heaved up and down. The ground pulled at him. Something like a sigh escaped from his closed mouth. He felt the bird’s no weight on his back and its muttered croak, that sounded like a question; and then hazed in among all the other sounds, them calling his name again. His eyes closed.

18th March 2015

A Deeper Well

18th March 2015

Do you ever feel you need to go to the well, the deeper well? To scour it and scrub it until its stone sides are shiny-wet? Do you then drop the bucket and jig it down there in the cold black? Brim it until it’s slosh-full of ideas? Haul it back up, hand over hand?

But if that’s no good, lower a ladder right down into the dark. Not metal, no. Something homemade with wobbly wooden struts, rope tied, that’s what you want. I don’t know why.

Down you go. Mining.

Now, call out and hear those words you thought you could not find. They are rolling around you, aren’t they? Bouncing off the stone, spiralling up and into the circle of light. Raven-black, winged words taking flight.

Let them go, and keep looking. Don’t mind the candle. Don’t mind the light. Use your eyes in the dark.

2nd March 2015

2nd March 2015

Human Beans In Space

Suited and booted, zipped, strapped, mapped and routed. A bean in the can. A human bean. Yes, sir, a human being, named and trained, and sharp as pencil ready to write, ready to go. Read-steady-go all the way to Mars.

There’s hope. There’s a dream. Dreams by the bucket load. How many packed in the space tin and hurled through the wide black? For how long and how long and how long will they glide through the emptiness of space? Will there be a window from which they can look back and wonder if they made the right decision; a window to peer ahead to their future?

And their future is a dark-red thumb print on the star map.

The Red Planet.

How will they live? What will they do? Make a house, a home, a hut or a cave burrowed into Martian stone? A shelter from the storm… if there are storms on Mars. It held water once. Maybe life. I don’t think they will be packing umbrellas for the trip.

Mission to Mars. A colony on the Red Planet. Not in a thousand years but round the corner, only a step or two down the road. 2025. And I heard you on the radio, Hannah Earnshaw, 23, one of the hopefuls. Here’s to you and your hopefuls, we hope for you too.

May the flame from your rocket burn new writing across the sky.

Why do I think of you as we say goodbye to the real Mr Spock.

Live long and prosper.

12th February 2015

What’s this!

It’s not quite what you think it is. So, read the post below.

9th February 2015

They Shovel Dreams, Don’t they

Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I think they do. Not all of them, of course and it’s hard to tell who are honest and decent workmen and just doing their job of mixing up concrete and who are the ones doing something so mean they’d make the white witch seem like an ice cream fairy.

And it’s the same with the machines. Most concrete mixers do exactly what it says on the tin. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Here and there, out on the street, in a drive, or a yard, lumpy with muck, scabs of orange coming through the dirt, and with a big round mouth all ready to swallow sand and stone and cement and rumble and grumble it round and round till it’s ready to pour?

But all the same it’s best to steer clear because there are some that are a little bit more than they seem. These ones grind out a particularly ugly song which sounds something like this: ‘Grumble and groan, shuffle and stone, and bones and bones and bones.’ If you  chance to hear that and you see that the man with the shovel  and stonky boots spattered with cement is giving you a hard look, then you had better run a mile. He’s not what he seems. He’s as different from Bob the builder as a witch is from a watch.

His eyes are dull and grey as concrete and what he does is shovel up dreams he can glean from the street he’s working on and throw them in the mouth of his ordinary but not so ordinary mixer. He shovels in all the gold and the bright, all the silver and hope; he shovels in the green valley and the rainbow sky, he shovels it all  down to a hard, grey slop. Then he porridges it out and lets it set hard as algebra and then he moves on; and the street he leaves behind is a little more drab, a little more dull, and the faces of the children are gaunt and worried; and it’s going to be a bad day.

They shovel away dreams,  these not-quite-ordinary men and their not-quite-ordinary mixers, and no one knows why they do. They just shovel and mix and pour the slop down onto the ground and let it go hard so  no dreams can grow , and everything bright is turned grey.

They leave the dreams buried deep.

24th January 2015

24th January 2015

At The Bridge Called Albert

It’s as pretty as an old fashioned ice-cream shop, and they don’t exist anymore on my side of town, or anywhere I’ve been for a while now; but here it is on the north side of the bridge, shaped like a twenty pence piece, except it has eight sides and that stupid coin has seven. Pale blue columns at each corner. Elegant like a little temple. Magic. If Dr Who designed a theatre, it might be like this.

Step inside through the criss-cross, white and grey door and who knows what you will find: a blast-away control desk with glowing valves and blinking lights; a vast hall filled with shiny-domed men and women wearing orange cloaks, earnestly planning the future of the universe. Or maybe just a monkey. Who knows?

The booth sits on a black plinth. That’s a giveaway: sure as a bridge is a bridge there are stumpy little rockets set behind that neatly painted, wooden base. Yes, sir.

I can hear the countdown; I can see the white glow, the slow lift, the orange flame and cloud billowing out like a ball gown from around the base. Its pointed hat is sky bound. There it goes.

And now there is nothing left ; just melted tarmacadam and a deep red and white sigh: ‘All troops must break step when marching over this bridge.’

I’m not surprised.

10th January 2015

Mark this

Mark was my god son. He would have been thirty on Sunday. This is the pin I wear sometimes, my Mark pin. And below that a poem for him.

Mark this
Badge, brooch or pin
It’s on my lapel
A silver flash
Jagged, like a piece of lightning
Snapped off from the tip
Of that fork in the sky

Silent
of course
No thunder
But ariel –
I think of that character too
‘Who flamed amazement’
And
So much more than I ever say
When asked about
This badge, brooch or pin

Remarkable
Yes

8th January 2015

I heard the news today, Oh boy

That’s the first line of a song by the Beatles.

I wish I had one for the twelve men and women who were murdered yesterday, in their Paris office, because they produced a magazine with jokes in it. The killers didn’t like the jokes. They didn’t like the cartoons. They shouted ‘God is great’ while they did their killing.

Three of those who died were cartoonists. The job of a cartoonist is to surprise, shock, delight and entertain; to hold up a mirror and stick it in front of leaders and shouters and haters and make us smile while making us think.

Those killers didn’t want anyone to think differently to them.

A poet called Yeats wrote this:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Nothing wrong with passion. Nothing wrong with intensity either. But when the two come together so there’s room for nothing else, no one else’s ideas but your own, and all that passionate intensity comes spilling out of the top of your head, you can become, what we call, a fanatic. Fanatics can’t smile.

Don’t forget to smile, folks.

14th December 2014

Bag End

Bags, boxes, sacks and chests. Things for putting things in. Things for taking things out of. All those names: hand bag, shoulder bag, rattle bag, duffle bag, sea chest, gunny sack, haversack, knapsack, shopping bag, feed bag,rag bag, and trunk. That’s like a full stop.

Trunk and chest. You can’t carry them, not in your hand. You have to shoulder a chest and if it’s a sea chest, you would have to shoulder it up the gangplank because that’s what sailors did. Except it was probably the skipper who had the sea chest because he had a decent cabin; your ordinary sailor, hanging in a hammock, with no room to swing a cat, might just have a ditty bag or a ditty box. That’s the one I like best; it sounds like something you might keep a song inside; or a carved seal tooth, or a button, a needle, waxed thread and a pair of dice.

But second best is gunny sack. What is that! Not something you keep a gun in because that would be duller than a dish of spelling tests. I heard that name, gunny sack, in Johnny B Goode, a song by Chuck Berry, and I think that’s what he carried his guitar in. That’s very good, almost as good as the ditty box, which wouldn’t fit the guitar.

Up in our attic we had something we called a rummel kist, which I have never heard of since but that’s probably because I have spelt it wrongly. Kist is an old Scottish word for chest but rummel… who knows where that comes from? It should be rummage for rummaging in. We had old bits and pieces and clothes for dressing up in our rummel kist. Perhaps it was really a rommel kist. Rommel, the Desert Fox, the famous German general. Perhaps he was in there but I never noticed.

Or maybe there was an actual desert fox in there, like this one.

25th November 2014

Did you see the poppies?

Did you see the glass-red poppies running round the Tower of London?

Did you see the thousands of people leaning over  and peering down, staring and staring as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing?

Did you wonder whether it should stay there for all time but growing poppy by poppy, each time there was a terrible war, so the Tower turned red?

And when the Tower turned red should we drift them into space, glass-red, porcelain poppies circling the world like a great, crimson sea so that travellers from distant stars should know what we do and beware?

3rd November 2014

The Albatross Boss

Albatross?

Is it a heavy weight, something you hang round your neck? A huge bird that spends its days hunting a sailor with a crossbow (its the sailor who has the crossbow)? A crazy cartoon creature with massive wings, a flying helmet and goggles. Just like this.

Yes! This is the one I like! The funny image is sort of true: a young albatross needs a runway to take off from and I imagine they try loads of times to get airborne, lumbering along, like some stitched together early plane, all struts and wires and cloth and wood, tilting this way and that, the feet paddling on the ground, skipping, catching air in those ungainly stretched out wings; sometimes beaking (that’s not a spelling mistake) down, belly skidding, losing dignity… And then sudden, soaring flight way over the long valleying waves of the ocean… So be it.

It makes me think of writing.

Of course, they really look like this:

Wow! Look at that beak! It looks like it’s made from beaten gold; and its ghost-white head is so smooth and has fine pencil streaks- I guess those are special feathers tiny and sleek to let it cut through gales and tempests- and its eye is deep and dark as the ocean it flies over. And this is why it’s the boss.

OK enough about albatrosses.

8th October 2014

What? No Fish!

OK, enough with the fish. I know, I know  but the river I like to wander along doesn’t have so many salmon swimming up it anymore  and that is such a bad thing that if I could, like the mighty Doctor, go back in time I would put back that wee fish in that net  that you can just about see in the picture below…

Well, I might.

But the real thing is what if there were no fish? What would have happened to Jonah when he was tossed over board and was swallowed by the whale! (Do not correct me! I know, scientifically speaking a whale is not a fish but in the story that whale is called a fish and that is good enough for me.) Would Jonah have to be rescued by a giant turtle? I can just imagine that: there he is,with his long wet beard, the wind and waves giving him a right battering and he’s clinging on to the edge of the giant turtle’s shell and God says: “Jonah! What do you think you are doing?”

Jonah says: ‘Clinging on, God, that’s what I’m doing. Why couldn’t you invent some large animal, call it a fish, or a whale if you like, and it could swallow me whole and I could live inside that giant fish and I wouldn’t have to cling on to this poor old turtle.”

To which God would say: “That’s something I’ll think about. Meanwhile, mind you look after that giant turtle. She needs a clean beach without sun beds on it…’

‘Sun!’ says Jonah. ‘What sun? I am in the middle of a storm here…’

Ah, well, leave him there but I think there will be a different kind of Jonah in the story I’m working on. He comes from somewhere the other side of the universe, across the big void and the other side of the Edge.

15th September 2014

15th September 2014

Write Fish Wrong Fish

If a man appears scrambling up from the river looking a bit pleased with himself the chances are this man has been fishing and he’s caught a fish. Yes! I see a not very big fish in the net. Size doesn’t count (of course it does). BUT, the thing is, what does this have to do with writing stories?

Easy – ask me another- standing on a river bank staring at the water, looking and looking and looking for a stir, a swirl, a hint of a rising fish is not unlike staring at the page looking and looking for the hint of a tale, or a twist in the tail or an end to the tale.

And if you hook that fish, that beautiful flash of silver, that leaping dream of far-away seas, you are in for a fight; and if you hook your story, your character, your place, your plot, you will be in for a fight too. Unless you’re lucky. We all get lucky sometimes but you can’t rely on luck because she (I don’t know why she’s a she but she is) will twist away from you when you need her most, so keep looking. Looking is the thing. Looking closely. Seeing what is out there, just beneath the surface…

And what if that man crossing the river wasn’t smiling and didn’t have a net with a fish in it? What if he had just seen something up the river, round the bend, above the fast water, caught on the ford…

2nd September 2014

Rip the Van me Winkle!

Yes, nonsense, rubbish, worse than slimy Big Mac packaging and that’s just my mangled headline up there, but, tell me,  who would really want to sleep for a hundred years?

Well, maybe…  if there was school for a hundred years and not a day off but other than that, absolutely other than that, no. No, Sir! Not me. That gap between my last post and this one… an illusion. There, that’s sorted.

So, this is it, what would you do if you were just about in charge of everything and an alien turns up, uninvited, on a space station, one of those floating rooms up there somewhere where the crew all come from different countries, so,it’s not like there is a lot of chat. Anyhow,  in comes this perfectly nice somebody from some other corner of the great black and wide yonder.

What are your instructions?

Just wondering.

17th January 2014

WINTER SWIMMING ANYONE?

Not me! But a little while back I saw a tiny and very, very, very old miniature ivory carving of a sea otter and its cub, tucked against the mother’s tummy and I wrote this. I’m not really sure why I did, but I did and so here it is.

SEA OTTER (mother and cub)

The kiss of cold wet

that sleeks face fur

Eyes washed with salt

Cub tucked close

A rush of sound

Bird calls

Scratch, like my claws, at the air

The tumble and roar and white of the waves

And down

Wheel, turn, bubble-drift

And fly

Through silence

In a green depth of turning and twisting

And touching tails of weed

And shadow

A silver flash

The twist and bite

Flesh, bone and bite

Salt-warm in the mouth

And up to the light

Air and sound

And down and

A grey ghost from the dark

Stone eye

Black hole mouth

Needle teeth and teeth and teeth

and the fear-rush of pain

Cub tight in my coil of life

Slick to my fur

Swift through surf and stone

Earth-safe

Mother and cub.

5th July 2013

New Call Down Thunder illustration

Illustration by Tom Smith: smithopolis.tumblr.com

14th March 2013

READING RIOT!

Well, not quite but Book Week was a buzz and I am sure loads of authors felt the same.

Thank you to the year 8 students of Clapton Girls’ Academy who have been reading CALL DOWN THUNDER and who made a fantastic giant card and wrote a seriously cool poem about the story.

A whole class writing a poem! How do you do that? Magic fingers and magic minds? Must be.

And another thank you to the students of Bethnal Green who also gave me a great reception on the Tuesday of Book Week. There seemed to be loads of budding (and actual) authors in the group and I wish we had had more time to hear more of the ideas you were so busily scribbling down. Excellent  questions too. There should have been a prize for the best one. Next time…

In Clapton I was Daniel and two days before I was Will, no wonder I was in a spin. Here’s the poem I was talking about:

In the village of Rinconda,

Where the fish swim in the sea,

Lies a mystery yet uncovered

By the two kids, Reve and Mi.

Reve was Jackfish fishing,

While Mi sat in the car,

Reve spied a red headed figure,

Like his sister, from afar.

Mi thought it was a sign,

To find their long lost mum.

They’d journeyed to the city,

And leave behind their slum.

They arranged to meet at day break

And catch a passing truck.

They’d journey to the city

And wish for lots of luck.

They arrived early at the market;

They didn’t like the crowd.

They’d journeyed to the city;

They now found it too loud.

They came across two good thieves,

They thought of them as scum.

They offered Reve their service,

But will they find their mum?

23rd February 2013

Book Day’s A Comin’ Along

Hello Clapton Girls School, or maybe just hello to year eight, or maybe just hello to one very special class in year eight. Yes, that’s better.

Ok Special Class, make sure you have some impossibly, devilshly clever questions to ask me because then I will absolutely NOT  be able to answer them.

See you on the 7th… unless I get lost, and Daniel Finn gets lost quite a lot….

23rd February 2013

Who Nose

What larks, eh!

The Cheltenham workshop was fun and I hope the talented young writers who spun some pretty sparkly tales had fun too, and maybe even learned something. Daniel Finn learned that if you put up a silly picture of yourself you’re likely to get a shadow finger up your nose!

Live and learn.

24th September 2012

Hello Cheltenham Literary MacFestival

If you are one of the cunning and hardy souls who have booked into my writing workshop, a double hello to you. I hope you have fun. I hope I have fun too! And who knows maybe we’ll all learn something useful about getting those stories down and making them as real as the mud… but a bit more interesting. Let me know afterwards what you think. I’ll be there to chat and sign a copy or two of ‘Call Down Thunder’ and ‘Two Good Thieves’. See you there.

7th July 2012

A Load of Old Finn

What’s it like to teach your own book, in your own school, to your own students? I tell you, it’s the bit before you begin that’s a bit nerve-wracking. I wrote a little piece about it that’s in The Times Saturday Review today. If you would like to have a read, click here. (If you’re not a Times subscriber, you can pay £1 for 30 days’ access.)

And the new book, CALL DOWN THUNDER, is launched! Hurrah! There it goes sailing off to reader-land…

3rd July 2012

‘Thar she blows!’ crows Daniel Finn ‘cause Meg likes his book

Which is what the lookouts on whaling ships shouted when they spotted a whale erupting from the deep. This has not much to do with anything except my new book, CALL DOWN THUNDER, has also just emerged from the deep and is to be launched this Thursday on the 5^th of July, so I hope it doesn’t bump into a whale.

I have nothing against whales. In fact, I like them very much and would rather that excitable hunters wouldn’t try to pin-cushion them with harpoons. However, a whale would swamp my book and that wouldn’t be any good at all. What would be really good would be if  the book were swamped by  readers with hungry eyes and grabby hands each one of them snatching a copy from a real or virtual bookshelf and settling down to what I hope is a rattling good yarn.

What’s it about, this CALL DOWN THUNDER? You’ll have to check it out on the My Books page

But hear this: MEG ROSOFF says it is ‘Sharp as a blade and … electrifying!’

So, how about that? I am as puffed up as a triple puffed puffin from Puffin Island.

3rd July 2012

Will the Pimpernel Pimpernel again? And Will says:

A very nice reader asked me if there was going to be another Pimpernel book after ‘Rip Runner’ and I said…. ‘I don’t think so.’ Which is a bit of a shame, since there are queues of horrible people out there dipping their greedy fingers into the lives of ordinary folk like you and me, who the Geek, the Greek and the Pimpernel would just love to tip into a bowl of sludgery stew. But this is it, my friends, for the time being anyhow.

Will will have to devise something fiendishly new when his other half, Daniel Finn, takes a break. Until then… stay disguised and don’t be smart!

19th March 2012

The walls of the city

It looks shabby now; it didn't look shabby then

I went to Istanbul looking for the old city of Constantinople, the great apple  of the ancient world. (Sorry about that, Babylon. Forget about it, Rome. ) This is it. Right on the edge, surrounded on three sides by water: the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorous, the Golden Horn. And these walls, still standing. What a place for a story!  It steams in the summer and shivers in the winter. Imagine those stinking Crusaders at the gates and the soldiers on the wall looking down at them; imagine treacherous emperors plotting against their own families, chucking their nephews into the dungeons, raiding the treasury and running away. Imagine a small lad who thinks he knows it all and his dad turns out to be….

6th February 2012

NEW BOOK ON THE HORIZON

July the 5th. That is the date. Stamp it on your cranium and remember that July means school is nearly over and the holidays have nearly begun and that is just the time to find a good read. And this had better be a good read or your cranium will look foolish!

5th December 2011

All Along The Watchtower

‘All along the watch tower the princes kept their view…’

If you haven’t heard Jimi Hendrix playing that Bob Dylan song (Yes, of course I am ancient!) you are missing out… Big time. Well, I think so. And that line is the beginning of the last verse, which ends with a rider approaching and the wind kicking up into a howling storm. You never know exactly why there are so many princes stuck up on the watch tower but you can bet that rider is bringing some important news. I always hope it’s going to make them happy but I know deep down that it won’t. (Cue in thundery, gloomy doomy  music at this point).

And so I have to have a watch tower in my next story,  but I don’t have much time for loads of princes (What have they ever done for me?) so they are definitely not going to be up there standing around watching. Instead, I see a young lad, curly black hair, and he’s sharp as a Jamie Oliver kitchen knife. He’s peering out over these massive walls- Imagine Hadrian’s Wall and then go; ‘Pah! They’re just squiffy small compared with the ones that guard the city in Daniel Finn’s story.’- And he sees something coming his way. It has a thousand stinking feet and a thousand bloodshot eyes and a thousand bellies that ache with hunger….

It sounds grim.

Believe me, I hadn’t thought of this at all before I just started writing a moment ago. So, whatever happens, remember this: IT IS YOUR FAULT!

Happy Christmas from me, Daniel and him, Will.

2nd September 2011

A Whole Year!

I don’t know where it went. I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve looked under every single stone on Doolough beach (that’s in County Mayo, Ireland for those of you who want to know) but I still couldn’t find it. Mind you, a smart guy could say that all that looking and peeking and peering probably took a year and so that’s exactly where the year went. Enough! Who wants smart guys telling you things you don’t want to know?

Daniel Finn has been working away on his follow up to TWO GOOD THIEVES  (or  SHE THIEF depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be standing) and it is called CALL DOWN THUNDER. It’s not a sequel but it does sort of connect with  TWO GOOD THIEVES. And yes, it is pretty stormy. It should be out next summer. So there is another year gone, just like that.

As for the other me, Will Gatti, him of geeks and Greeks and that sort of thing, he seems to have done a real Rip Van Winkle. I’ll have to give him a shake, rattle and roll. It’s time he did something wizzy, funny and odd, like a pair of left footed boots.

I’ll go and wake him.

5th July 2010

Hello American Reader

I hope that when you finally stumbled onto this site you weren’t confused by these cunning publishing people, because, yes, SHE THIEF is really TWO GOOD THIEVES.  In fact SHE THIEF was my original title for the story so I am very glad you guys have reclaimed it for me. I must now stir myself to get an image of the jacket up on this site because way back in 1967 when hip talk was hip it would have been called Dead cool. So that’s where we are….

…Almost, because now I need to say

HELLO TO ANY DUTCH AND GERMAN  READERS

who have popped into the site for a spot of confusion. Yes, your cunning publishers decided not to call me Daniel Finn but … Will Gatti! What larks, eh! (Old fashioned English for ‘fun’, in case you were wondering.)

Never mind. I promise (and yes, I always break my promises) I won’t leave it for so long before adding a bit more chat.

15th November 2009

Long Beach Long List

Should I be excited? Perhaps I should.

I got back from a wonderful holiday where I spent a great deal of time padding up and down a beach called Turtle Beach looking for turtles but the turtles were obviously on holiday. They were probably sitting at my desk writing my new book. I am not complaining. I expect turtles are really good at writing my stories…

I didn’t mean to mention turtles. What I meant to say was that the news I got when I came home was that ‘Two Good Thieves’ is on the long list for the Carnegie Award. I think that is pretty cheerful making but I do wonder if the long list is as long as Turtle Beach, because that is a very long beach.

Note to me: Find picture of beach. It looks a lot better than the photograph below.

12th October 2009

12th October 2009

A strange man, claiming to be the author, Will Gatti, was spotted in Hoxton Square last Friday holding a knockabout question and answer and funny voices session with Year 6 students from Whitmore School. The real Will Gatti claimed he could never look as daft as the man in this photograph and anyway, last Friday, he was in Mexico. Then he said maybe it wasn’t Mexico but somewhere like that.  We stopped talking to him because he suddenly ran off down the street to buy an almond croissant.

17th September 2009

And after The Two Good Thieves

I’ve spent the summer padding up and down wet and windy beaches on the west of Ireland trying to peer over to the other side of the Atlantic and see this little, scruffy fishing village, just down the coast from the city where Baz and Demi did all their running. It seemed to me that there was a story in that village, maybe one that tells us a little bit about where Fay came from, before she became the mother of thieves…

So that’s what Daniel is up to. The other one, Will, he’s pitching up to a festival in Hackney. It’s called the Starlit festival. Maybe he’ll see you there. I’m not sure if you’ll recognise him though because he says, he’ll be the one in disguise. It’s that Pimpernel thing again, isn’t it; everyone pretending to be someone else. It’s so confusing!

13th July 2009

Hello

Welcome to my website. Come in and have a snuffle around.

My new book Two Good Thieves has just been published. It always seems like an age between the time I have finished writing a story and when it finally emerges clad in its crisp, shiny jacket. My first signing session for the book was in Harrods which was good fun, especially since I was only about twenty paces from the pet department where I saw a puppy called a ‘cairnoodle’. What a name…

I am now in the west of Ireland writing a prequel to Two Good Thieves. In fact I am not sure that strictly speaking it is a prequel – more like a first cousin, but there you are, I am not so good at the technical terms. Anyway, thank God for the summer holidays – even if it is lashing with rain right now …