Happy Valley

Stile Above Happy Valley
Stile Above Happy Valley

When it’s dry enough I go running up the steep northern slopes of the Chilterns and along the top of the escarpment — and the ground is so dry at the moment I have no excuse not to.

I’d like to allude to these glorious views in the novel and probably the best (maybe only) way to do so is to have my characters walk or run up there. I wonder whether the metaphorical associations of looking out and surveying a view or of running along pathways might be too obvious for the points I might want to use in the plot. I might need to adjust my chronology a little as well if I refer to the swathes of fragrant bluebells that are flowering at the moment or the distant views of the yellow oilseed rape fields (although the colour yellow is a metaphor I’ve already used).

The photograph above is of a stile on the Ridgeway above the curiously-named Happy Valley. It’s my favourite point on that particular route as the only way is down. It’s on the Chequers Estate and not far from the house itself — quite often there’s a herd of state cows in the field. The distant field of oilseed rape is one very close to where I live and which has deposited yellow pollen everywhere (perhaps another country detail for the novel).

I ran up Coombe Hill on the same run, which is not quite the highest point in the Chilterns (beaten by a forested undulation in Wendover Woods) but with its recently restored monument is the de facto peak. A couple of days ago two huge guns were dragged up there from RAF Halton and a 21-gun salute was fired to celebrate the Royal Wedding.

I tried, as best I could, having run up most of the 150m or so climb, to take a set of photos of the panoramic view from the top of the hill on a nice day. This is going to become one of Kim’s favourite places — as an artist would appreciate.

View from Coombe Hill to the South West
View from Coombe Hill to the South West

That way there be the mysterious circles of Avebury at the end of the Ridgeway, Wittenham Clumps and Cowley too (subjects of Paul Nash paintings).

View from Coombe Hill to the West
View from Coombe Hill to the West

The Cotswolds are in the distance — looking across the heart of England here. This is also approximately where the anciently-named Three Hundreds of Aylesbury are located — going back to the Domesday book but still marked on Ordnance Survey maps.

View from Coombe Hill to the North West
View from Coombe Hill to the North West

The Vale of Aylesbury — the resolution isn’t good enough (fortunately) to pick out Fred’s Folly (the monstrous office block in the centre of the town). Waddesdon Manor, Bicester and Banbury are in the distance.

View from Coombe Hill to the North
View from Coombe Hill to the North

Wendover and, in the far distance, Milton Keynes and Leighton Buzzard. Such a lovely view that it could only be improved by having a 250mph railway line blasted through it. The proposed HS2 high-speed rail line is planned to go right through the centre of this photograph — essentially through the green fields in the middle. It will be on a big, obstrusive viaduct as it emerges into the Vale of Aylesbury. Construction is meant to start in about five years so this aspect of the view may be destroyed forever.

In keeping with my research on the roles of pubs in the community, our village had a Royal Wedding party on the green next to the pub and I spent about 8 hours there solidly drinking. I was told that I’d sat at the same table for four hours. I didn’t feel too wonderful the next day and decided to test the efficacy of ‘sweating it out’ by going for a short run and avoiding steep slopes with viewpoints (although the hills can be seen in the background). Even my hungover spirits were raised by the incredible block of yellow in the field I ran around — the field is enormous, nearly a mile long and a third of a mile wide and takes going on for 20 minutes for me to run round. The white of the hawthorn blossom and cow parsley offset the green of the vegetation and deep blue of the sky.

I’m trying to write a part of the novel in which Kim tries to decide whether she wants to live in London or the countryside. Maybe this might swing it for her?

Hawthorn Hedge and Oilseed Rape
Hawthorn Hedge and Oilseed Rape

Twenty Five Things Every Writer Should Know

Seems every writing blogger has come up with a few of these and apologies but I’m still working through mine — been stuck with writer’s block at number six.

So here is a link to an amusing, if forthright, list from a blog by American writer Chuck Wendig and tweeted by Claire King.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2011/04/26/25-things-every-writer-should-know/

There’s a simile in number 14 which I thought I’d never see used in a writing context!

I hope number 15  (‘Act like an asshole, get treated like an asshole’ ) applies to the world of writing because, in my experience, it doesn’t always tend to happen in real life although it could be the logline of many a successful novel.

I do like number 20 a lot, ‘Writing is about words, storytelling is about life’, as it gives a satisfying feeling of validation to my visceral dislike of the sort of Sunday supplement article you get at the year end: ’20 Important New Writers Under 21 You Must Read’. I do think the most interesting writers are those who’ve actually had life experiences and have got out and done things rather than just start writing about themselves and their clique of friends at university. As the blog says: ‘Experience things. Otherwise, what the fuck are you going to talk about?’

And as a footnote this article from The Guardian is a worth a scan: http://www.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh/2011/apr/21/writing-literary-commercial-sara-sheridan

What’s most interesting is Sarah Sheridan’s point near the start that the publishing industry has only recently discovered how unprofitable ‘literary fiction’ actually is — with an audience not much bigger than the people writing and reviewing it and teaching and studying courses in it (which seems to be the situation poetry is in).

One Day I Went to Listen To David Nicholls

I’m rather late in posting about this but last week I went along to the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival at Christ Church College, Oxford. I was hoping to spend the best part of a day there but one session that I was hoping to attend — an interactive culinary lecture in the college’s kitchen had been booked up before I arrived.

I did get to see the main event I’d planned to see — a conversation between the Sunday Times literary editor, Andrew Holgate and David Nicholls, the author of the phenomenally successful novel One Day, which I’ve mentioned a few times before on the blog.

I arrived in plenty of time and got a good seat in the marquee in the grounds of the college. I was interested to see the size of the audience, which probably numbered at least a couple of hundred and its composition, which was probably 70-80% female, as was the gender of the questioners at the end of the session. While it’s true that women read the majority of books, it seemed from the interest in the author and the nature of some of the questions that Nicholls has done something fairly unusual in being a man writing a book about relationships that has a broadened appeal beyond conventional genre boundaries.

This seems to send some commentators into confusion, such as in this article on the Orange Prize on the Guardian website by Jean Hannah Edelstein that states: ‘Then there’s the fact that David Nicholls’s One Day has been such a runaway success among both men and women, despite the fact that it succeeds as a novel because of its careful adherence to the tropes of so-called women’s commercial fiction (but, hey, it has a manly orange cover).’ After reading this many times I still don’t understand this sentence because I’m not sure which qualifiers apply to which phrases and its internal contradictions (e.g. despite it succeeding, tropes that are so-called). I’m still not sure whether she approves of men writing books that appeal to women — women who can be marketed to by the ‘tropes’ of this ‘so-called’ genre (obviously not Guardian readers or columnists). And if it doesn’t really matter to the argument about whether there should be an Orange Prize then why has she thrown it in — maybe to say that here’s a man invading traditional women’s genre-gender territory so that perhaps justifies a prize that excludes men? And ‘manly orange cover’ — what does that say about the Orange Prize?

Perhaps the answer to why Nicholls works so naturally in this genre is explained by his unusual background for a novelist. The discussion spent rather a long time, a bit too much for my liking, on Nicholls’s biography rather than his novels. He studied English and Drama at Bristol and tried to make a career as an actor — which has supplied him with a library full of self-deprecating anecdotes. Through working with friends and colleagues he branched out into drama writing, eventually giving up acting altogether and working mainly on film and television, including the third series of Cold Feet, which has a demographic of principal characters and audience that’s very similar, I imagine, to One Day.

A few critics, and Amazon reviewers, have said that One Day is a visual novel to the point that they think it’s half-way, if not more, to being ‘a screenplay in disguise’ (Nicholls’s own quotation). The author refutes this — he’s written screenplays and deliberately used fiction as a form when he realised that it was more suitable for the idea he was developing into what became his first novel (Starter for Ten). One Day is his third novel and the first one he wrote in third person — a narratorial style that he found almost like cheating because ‘you can tell the reader things’ rather than have to carefully choreograph exposition using action, as in drama.

While the novel certainly uses the tropes of fiction generally, it’s probably true to say that a lot of its commercial appeal is because it is reminiscent of film and TV drama — partly in theme, style and structure. Perhaps the duality of the characterisation borrows from drama more than fiction — it’s both Emma and Dexter’s story — neither really predominates, although I do think Emma is his real favourite. This goes against a lot of creative writing course advice — ‘a novel must be one character’s story above all others’. Hmm.

The clever premise — of revisiting characters on the same day of the year for twenty years — definitely has the air of the dramatic set piece. I didn’t realise how autobiographical the novel was — all the locations where the action is set on those 15th Julys were places (apart from the one in Goa) where David Nicholls actually was at the time — Edinburgh, a Greek island, a tawdry London fast-food restaurant, Paris and so on. The device of using the same day of the year also allowed some of the biggest life-events, weddings, for example, to happen ‘off-stage’ — another effective dramatic technique where sometimes it’s more powerful to relate important moments in a plot via the reactions of characters rather than depict them literally.

It was interesting to listen to how the idea for the novel developed and, then, to see in hindsight what universal themes Nicholls had tapped into. If I remember rightly, he started thinking about the novel as a reaction to the prospect of becoming a father himself (parenthood features in the novel but not as a major factor in the plot) and also reaching the wrong side of forty — what happened to my life? He said he looked back in eternal regret that he’d been at university a couple of years too early and had missed out on the party and rave culture of the early 90s, unlike many of his friends and Dexter in the novel.

Looking back through the lens of impending parenthood also made Nicholls reflect on the changing nature of friendships — in your twenties you feel you had intense relationships with friends for whom you felt you’d sacrifice anything but by your forties, while you were still perhaps good friends, the relationships were more measured and different. It was this maturing process that he was interested in capturing in the book.

He also said, relating back to the hedonism he felt he missed out on, that some of his male friends had behaved like complete idiots, ostensibly self-centred, egotistical and destroying relationships in their twenties and this may have been related to circumstances —  and that monstrous as they may have become, these people weren’t actually bad.

The hero of One Day, Dexter fits this mould and Nicholls said he used two techniques to humanise him. Firstly, he is given a foil in Emma — the woman who comes from a contrasting background and who sees the germ of decency and attraction in someone who becomes a New Laddish oaf. Secondly, he said he was able to use the odd piece of interior dialogue to signal that Dexter had a twinge of regret when behaving badly and that redeemed him to many readers in a work of fiction — something that would be more challenging in drama. It also fits an archetype of a misguided man being put on the straight by a good woman.

Nicholls also said something interesting about romance as a genre that he’d learned through writing drama — romances are only really interesting if there are obstacles in the way of the lovers. And many of the traditional obstacles that provided sport for writers in the past were no longer relevant — particularly sexually. Class is also much less of an obstacle, although it features in One Day to some degree. I realised that I must have unconsciously realised this myself with my own plot because it hinges on an obstacle that is still problematic enough to create conflict — adultery and the lure of another.

I also got an interesting insight into the work involved in being a writer. David Nicholls said his biggest frustration at his novel’s success was that he’d spent two years not having time to write a follow-up — being involved in promotion and the book’s film adaptation. I also felt sorry for his arm as a long line of people queued in the marquee afterwards for book signing. I tagged along right at the end of the queue so saw that he was genuinely keen to engage with his readers, given the time constraints.

When it was my turn, I had a brief chat with him in which I mentioned I’d e-mailed him last year through the book’s website to comment on his compilation tape playlists (which I’ve mentioned on the blog before). He remembered my e-mail (as he mentioned The Smiths before I’d had a chance to prompt him). I mentioned my creative writing courses and he was interested enough to ask where I was studying, asked after the progress of my novel and wished me luck in pushing on with completing it. And if someone who’s just sold 600,000 copies of his book in this country wishes me luck then I really ought to get on with it.

My Signed Copy of One Day

Here’s my signed copy of One Day — David Nicholls’s signature really isn’t that messy — I just obscured it a bit in photoshop so it can’t be copied.

I Wondered If This Would Ever Happen Again…

…but the new Kate Bush single was revealed today — released properly tomorrow. At least it’s only five and a half years after the last one, as opposed to thirteen, although it’s a remix of a tune released twenty three years ago. It was on Kenn Bruce’s show (the spelling is deliberate, see previous post), which I missed, but thanks to Graeme A. Thomson’s tweets, I’ve found it on YouTube.

Not sure what I think after the first listen. The original wasn’t one of my favourites and this version has some very nice sounds in it — but also some very weird vocals.

The Foolish Joys of Spring

Here’s a photo of a sheep…

Newborn 166
Newborn 166

…and a lamb which must have been a day or two old. I took this about three minutes into a run earlier in the week. The land use around here is a varied mixture of livestock, lots of horses, sheep, cattle and a few goats and pigs and arable, mainly wheat but there’s an absolutely massive field — about 3/4 mile by 1/4 mile — very close which has been sown with oilseed rape this year and will soon be a block of bright yellow that I imagine will also waft a pungent smell for a couple of weeks.

It’s fascinating to observe the rhythm of the seasons in events like lambing and it’s something I want to do in the novel — both literally and metaphorically in terms of the plot — decay and rebirth and so on. It’s been re-assuring, after the persistent snow and extremely low temperatures in December — I calculated about -15C at least in my garden — that hibernating wildlife seems not to have been affected. I’ve seen plenty of bumblebees and loads of ladybirds.

I get BBC Countryfile magazine and the new issue comes with a ‘free CD of British birdsong’. I guess there’s a trainspotter aspect involved — learning the individual songs of each bird if you can really be that diligent — but I imagine that the people who will play it most are those who don’t get the benefit of natural birdsong. (Before Classic FM was launched the engineering test transmissions played birdsong, which proved very popular with listeners.)

Fortunately I haven’t dashed to play my CD as the birdsong in the garden is at its seasonal peak — with the birds busy pairing off and making nests. We’ve got a few resident blackbirds who sing most beautifully perched on the tops of trees, especially at dawn and dusk. It makes me realise one of the best investments I’ve made in a long time was a 16kg bag of bird seed which saw us through most of the winter and has meant the residency of countless sparrows, finches, blackbirds, robins, starlings has continued. But I’m not sure it’s delivered on the promise of the first species on the sack, I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing those in the garden in the winter, more’s the pity.

Great Tits
Did It Do Exactly What It Said On The Tin?

Another joy of spring in the non-natural world is the April Fool. I was a bit remiss myself as I’ve enjoyed doing a few spoofs myself in the past — all I could do is post a very unconvincing status update on Facebook at 11.55am. Maybe it’s because of the recession but there were a lot of amusing hoaxes this year — there’s a round up here.

Legoland Vandalism
Legoland Vandalism

The Guardian has done some good April Fools in the past and this year it tried to convince its readers that it had changed position to wholeheartedly support the royal wedding. If you accepted this unlikely reversal of its stance then there were some very amusing stories on a supposed live wedding blog. My favourite was the desecration of the Legoland model of Buckingham Palace — a suspected trial run in miniature for the big day (see photo below linked to Guardian website).

Best of all — and my favourite for a long time — was the spoof Ken Bruce show on Radio Two. Like all the best hoaxes, and the sort of humour I like in general, this was done with such a light touch that it might just possibly have been serious.

I turned on in the car mid-way through the show and thought ‘this isn’t Ken Bruce, I wonder who’s sitting in’. But the lightly-accented Scottish voice claimed he was Ken Bruce. I twigged fairly quickly, especially after ‘Ken’ completed a whole link by burbling gibberish, that this was an April Fool and tried to identify who was the impersonator. Many other people took it literally and complained that it was Ken Bruce himself having his own joke — or that he was even drunk (which isn’t too far fetched given the rumours about another recently departed Radio Two presenter).

I nailed it as Rob Brydon fairly quickly — although the fact he’s on just about everything anyway helped narrow down the odds. His impression of a lecherous, incoherent egotist was so spot on that I felt a bit sorry at the end when the real Ken came on as he’d been so thoroughly skewered. (From a personal note I used to work for someone with a very similar drawl to this ‘Ken Bruce’ and he was also an occasionally lecherous, alternate monstrous egomaniac and paranoid neurotic so I did particularly enjoy Rob Brydon’s creation).

I’ve listened to the first half hour on the iPlayer — and I’ll try and listen to the whole thing again as it’s so funny.  There was perhaps a bit too much smutty innuendo for my liking — not because I’m prudish about these things (as some blog postings will attest) but because remarks about knobs are a bit lazy, like shock swearing, for a comedian to resort to — thankfully I didn’t hear any puns about garden birds and female anatomy.

But there were some inspired moments — particularly when the other presenters were trying to be serious. Hearing ‘Ken’ saying that Jeremy Vine had come in to ‘bore us all to death’ was priceless but I think my James might have been shaking the radio in rage.

The Zeitgeist of the Segnits

I wandered into Waterstone’s in Staines (of past Ali G fame) a couple of weeks ago and was magnetically drawn to a book called Pub Walks in Underhill Country by Nat Segnit, which had the good fortune for a debut novel, to be on the 3 for 2 pile.

It had quite an attention grabbing cover adorned by various pubs signs, which immediately attracted my interest. I had a look through, partly out of dread that the subject matter would be very similar to my work-in-progress, which has a big pub theme. Fortunately it wasn’t — the novel uses a very clever device of parodying the sort of country rambling guides that balance the virtuousness of walking with the promise of indulging in a pint or two at completion and are published in mind-boggling permutations (e.g. Best Walks from Pubs in Bucks, Bucks Country Pub Rambles, 20 Pub Walks in Bucks, etc.).

I always flick through the local editions of these books when I find them, mainly to see check if there’s any that guide walkers through my village — and there’s usually at least one walk that does. Unlike many people, I’m always keen that people do come and visit my local area because it is extraordinarily beautiful in its understated way — if it wasn’t so accessible to London then the scenery might be more valued than it appears to be.

I’ve also written quite a number of pub walks myself, which have been published locally. I was quite surprised to find out that people had actually followed my routes — a local pub landlord took about 15 of his friends on one walk. They’re quite tricky to write as there are only so many variations to make on ‘cross over the field, climb a stile, go through the gate’ and so on.

I can see why it might be real fun for an author to take a character who writes these guides and slip in some personal digressions to this very restricted literary genre and weave a narrative out of this — which is the premise of the book.

My dad is a huge Alfred Wainwright fan and I’ve seen plenty of his idiosyncratic guidebooks and I’ve also seen quite a few Wainwright-inspired programmes, often featuring Julia Bradbury in some shape or form (before she got the Wanderlust and headed off to Germany). Wainwright had something of a curmudgeonly reputation and I seem to remember seeing a documentary about him years ago which suggested his attitudes towards the role of women in society, for one thing, did not share much in common with militant feminism. It’s a very clever idea to make a novel out of the conventions of the walking book genre.

I can see it’s also a very fertile subject to write about — recreational walking is incredibly popular. I saw plenty of hikers this morning as I went for a run that took me (via a bloody big hill) on a short section of the Ridgeway and they were all up there with their Nordic walking sticks. Underhill country isn’t the Chilterns but is apparently around the Malverns somewhere.

I was quite interested in Nat Segnit and Googled him and, strangely, in this era of authors and their social media platforms found very little — no blog or twitter — just some reviews, a couple of interviews and a brief biography on his agent’s page which tells us where he was born and went to university but not much else.

But he does have quite an unusual surname that I was reminded of when I flicked through a book that I’d been meaning to read in the detail it deserves since I bought it as a Christmas present for my sister and then thought was so good that I decided to buy a second copy for myself — The Flavour Thesaurus — by another person called Segnit — Niki Segnit.

I was looking through the acknowledgement page in The Flavour Thesaurus as I now tend to with books I like to try and find out who the agents and editors and so on are. The first person she thanked was her husband Nat who helped with her book ‘while he had his own to get one with’.  Ah, so these two authorial Segnits were fairly likely to be married to each other.

This might not have seemed a particularly remarkable co-incidence — I guess that writing can be such an anti-social activity that if  some people end up with a partner who’s a writer, especially a debut author who’s writing in time off from the day job, then perhaps a case of ‘if you can’t beat them’ may be the most harmonious solution. But it’s the subjects of the two books that I found particularly fascinating as both are very relevant to themes in my novel. As mentioned above, Nat Segnit’s book alludes to pubs and deals with the escape of the great outdoors. Niki Segnit’s book is a marvellously inventive variation of the endless popularity of all things foodie.

I may even have James in my novel getting hold of The Flavour Thesaurus and treating it like a bible which will give a bit of theoretical grounding to some bizarrely elaborate concoctions he’ll try and put on the menu. The book works a bit like one of those food-and-wine matching guides (I remember a classic line in a Hugh Johnson guide that suggested a two and three-quarter year old Italian Merlot was required to partner sausages — ‘or a red anyway’). But it’s food-with-food combinations that provide the books’ framework.

There’s a flavour wheel with 16 flavour categories (sulphurous, woodland, etc.) and which contain in total 99 ingredients or food components (onion, walnut, etc.). (The flavour wheel is very similar in principle to a painter’s colour wheel — again another connection with the themes in my novel.) The book is then structured into pairings of the these components — so you look up something you like the taste of — say horseradish — and the book lists some interesting ingredients to pair with horseradish — oysters or beetroot, for example. There are some very interesting pairings indeed but I won’t spill the metaphorical beans by listing them here.

This structure is also remarkably clever as it accommodates a serendipitous mix of scientific research on flavour of the sort Heston Blumenthal is a fan (Niki Segnit has a background working for big food companies), impromptu recipes and, my favourites, her own anecdotes and opinions. There’s a great story about her driving through Italy with a boyfriend with whom her relationship was souring which comes under the unlikely heading ‘Globe Artichoke and Bacon’. She may even have convinced me that the peanut, like its friend, the single kernel of sweet corn, is an ingredient that has some culinary merit and not just a cheap product of the American agro-industrial machine.

Niki Segnit is extraordinarily well read on her subject — with a huge bibliography of cookbooks and other food reference books. She references quite a few authors that are on my shelves, from salad and vegetable guru, Joy Larkcom to domestic goddess, Nigella Lawson. However, what infuses the the book, despite its lack of illustrations or sexy photographs of styled food, is a genuine love of food and the sensual pleasures it offers and, as such, a dog-eared copy would certainly merit a place in my fictional character’s kitchen.

The British At Work

I’ve been enjoying Kirsty Young’s BBC2 documentary series — The British At Work — a complementary series to a similar social history last year on the family. The episode just shown tonight took in the period 1964 to 1980 — the second half of which becomes increasingly distinct in my own memory.

What I particularly enjoyed about the programme was the music. I often loathe extraneous music piled on to TV soundtracks — more or less any sport documentary attracts it and it seems sometimes that producers like to signal that they’ve got A Big Budget on programmes like Doctor Who or Wonders of the Universe by plastering some bombastic orchestral music over everything at any opportunity.

But The British At Work used a nice selection of contemporary music — some well known (and quite apt lyrically) like Pink Floyd’s Time, Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat and Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past and others I would never have identified had there not been a really handy track listing on the programme’s page on the BBC website. (I’m glad I discovered through this that it was Steve Miller who did the ethereal Fly Like An Eagle.)

I’m already looking forward to next week’s episode because it was trailed with the outro from the Associates’ Party Fears Two — one of the oddest tracks of the 80s.

We’ve had an ongoing debate in the MA workshops about quoting lyrics from pop songs in things like chapter introductions and so on. If a writer even quotes a couple of lines from a song then the song’s publishers are entitled to for royalties, which might be OK if the book is going to sell a lot (royalties like this are often flat-rate) but a significant proportion of income for more modest sellers. Titles are safer — they’re not copyrightable — and if a reader recognises a quoted lyric then these may well be brought into mind by a mention of just the song in itself .

The programme was also interesting as it featured Charles Handy, who wrote some fascinating books in the 1990s on the future of work, such as The Age of Unreason and The Empty Raincoat — and I have a signed copy of his autobiography, having gone to an Association of MBAs function featuring him in Oxford. But I wish his prediction of the portfolio career would have become more widespread than it has so far, as it makes an awful lot of sense — and having writing as part of one’s portfolio might be the only practical way for all but the most best-selling writers to make a living (see this very interesting blog entry posted today by Martha Williams: http://wp.me/pMRZG-1Yg. )

Trouble in Causton

Brian True-May, the producer and co-creator of Midsomer Murders has been suspended by ITV over remarks in an interview in the Radio Times, which has just popped through my letterbox, in which he says ‘It’s not British, it’s very English. We are a cosmopolitan society in this country, but if you watch Midsomer you wouldn’t think so.’

This is a fairly unarguable observation about the programme but he then goes on to say ‘It wouldn’t be the English village with [ethnic minorities]. Suddenly we might be in Slough.’ He then says Causton in the series is based on Slough, although in the series both Wallingford and Thame (both places extremely unlike Slough) are used for filming the town. He then goes on to make the comments that probably earned him his suspension ‘And if you went to Slough you wouldn’t see a white face there. We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.’

This raises all kinds of general questions about drama and fiction and their representation of authenticity. There are plenty of books, TV programmes and films that concentrate on certain ethnic groups — one of my favourite TV series, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiam, largely features (and derives its humour from) Jewish characters. Most soap operas now have a sizeable proportion of ethnic minority characters that reflects the diversity of modern urban society so it might be argued that Midsomer Murders is similarly reflected the demographic of its location.

I’m particularly interested in this as my novel is set in notional Midsomer county. I’ve just submitted an extract to my tutor on the MA where the characters actually say that the pretty lanes and cottages that surround the Angel are used for filming ‘murder mystery things’. Midsomer county isn’t anywhere near the Somerset village of Midsomer Norton as many people might think — it’s essentially the Chilterns and a bit of adjoining Oxfordshire and Aylesbury Vale. (The proposed HS2 high speed rail line is almost going to run straight through Badger’s Drift — which is a village near Great Missenden called The Lee in reality.) The locations are of great interest — Joan Street runs a very informative website on this and has even published a book on the locations.

His comments, however, applied to the TV series rather than any particular real-life geographical area and Midsomer Murders is hardly the most gritty and realistic of dramas. It’s set in the present but its world is a stylised version of escapist nostalgia — a mix of every cliché about rustic rural England that probably stretches way back to Agatha Cristie, H.E.Bates, Stella Gibbons, Enid Blyton and many more. In that context, I don’t see that an absence of ethnic minorities is an issue, any more than it would be in The Darling Buds of May, and many of the ‘most English’ characters in Midsomer Murders are extremely loathsome. But, equally, it’s not right to claim that this is a good thing, which is what appears to have caused offence, even when done in a fictional context.

I live in a village right in the middle of it and I can tell Mr True-May that he has his facts wrong about pure English ethnicity. Just in two or three roads I know of at least two French people, a Ukranian, a Latvian and at least half a dozen people with Asian backgrounds (one has a business making home-made Indian chutneys and sells them at the local school fêtes).

Admittedly this is at the end of the village with less thatched cottages and more modern housing but if I drive up the winding lane in the morning towards the church and the chocolate box cottages with wishing wells in the garden then I often pass a very friendly black chap who walks a circuit of the village every day. It’s maybe under the UK average in terms of ethnicity but it’s certainly not all-white and I’m sure most people who live in Midsomer-like locations would find it offensive if Brian True-May’s comments were used to suggest there’s any more racism in the countryside than anywhere else.

If there’s a skewed demographic in the countryside, it’s nothing directly connected with race, it’s more to do with the age of the population — and this may inhibit social mobility more widely. Even in the Chilterns there are a lot of retired people in the prettiest thatched cottages and while there’s a fair number of school age children as their parents move out of more urban areas for quality of life, there’s a lack of affordable housing for people in their twenties.

In The Angel, Emma comes from the village but has had to work hard at her career and marry a similar high-achiever to afford a nice place to live. There’s no way Kim could ever afford to live there if she didn’t get accommodation with the pub and barman Gabriel lives with his very rich parents. The ageing demographic is a real obstacle for James as his geriatric diners prefer to have scampi and chips rather than some creation with palm hearts and pomegranate juice.

The question of reflecting the ethnicity of characters in my novel’s setting is something that has crossed my mind, especially as it features the pub as a meeting place for the whole village. I’d like to try and represent this aspect authentically and naturally but as a novel has a limited number of principal characters and a number of minor ones it’s easy to fall into a trap of thinking in terms of quotas.

The wider subject of integration into a different culture is, however, one of the major themes of the novel and I have a non-British protagonist who will hopefully explore some of these issues. Kim’s lived in London for a number of years and certainly feels quite comfortable in her identity as a Londoner — but move 40 miles away into Midsomer Murders land and she’ll find attitudes are quite different.

Also, she’s the nationality that it’s probably still most ‘permissible’ for the British to insult — even more than the French, Irish or Australians — she’s a German. She’ll have to put up with a similar sort of ‘banter’ to that which passed for comedy on ‘Love Thy Neighbour’  forty years ago. But she’s give as good as she gets and The Angel will be partly the story of the sort of integration in deepest, rural England that won’t be found on Midsomer Murders.

One fascinating fact is that Kim would very likely have watched Midsomer Murders (or Inspektor Barnaby as it’s called) in Germany (or her parents would) as its version of Englishness is exported to 231 countries. A Google news search on the Brian True-May story today brought up three German websites with the story — including this one from Stern — so a story set in this location definitely has international appeal.

And spring seems to have arrived here. The countryside is a beautiful place to live when the days are long and the sun is out but it’s horribly bleak during January and February — dark, wet. muddy, dormant. But despite the awful December weather, the bees (and wasps) were out today and I finally finished off the 12.75kg sack of bird seed that has seen through the winter countless robins, wrens, sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, various tits and finches and even woodpigeons and woodpeckers when the weather was at its worst. And if you listen carefully you can hear the newborn lambs bleating from the fields.

Trouble at the Bull?

I’ve now got an even better reason for keeping up with events in Ambridge — there’s a plotline about the Bull that has resonances with the fate of the Angel in my novel.

I was getting a bit worried a couple of weeks ago that the plot might get too similar but Jolene looks to be seeing sense — although I’m not sure about Kenton. Good to see there’s a healthy interest from the Radio 4 listening public to after-hours shenanigans, though.

I’ll be listening carefully next Sunday as usual as I jog around my own bit of countryside in the Chilterns.

Behind Closed Doors

In W.H.Smiths in Marylebone Station I recently spotted a new novel by Lucy Kellaway, the FT’s management correspondent, whose debunking of management theory codswallop is always entertaining. Her last novel ‘Martin Lukes: Who Moved My Blackberry’ was my holiday reading a few years ago (if you don’t understand the joke in the title then you’re happily innocent of one of the more ludicrous management bestsellers of the past few years).

However, it was in the ‘Buy 1 Get 1 Half Price’ offer and, of course, the fallibility of my mind to marketing psychology meant I scanned around for the ‘bargain’ book to accompany ”In Office Hours‘ and succumbed to the temptation of a book I’d seen partially serialised in The Times a few weeks ago: ‘The Sex Diaries Project’ edited by Arianne Cohen.

(Curiously, this book has a relatively high sales ranking on Amazon and is number one in its niche category in the health, family and lifestyle section but no-one has posted a review so far — which is odd.)

The book is formed of around fifty diaries kept by British people in which the diarists recorded their sexual activities and thoughts — although most diaries spend more time reflecting on relationships than recording the mechanics of sex. Perhaps calling the book ‘The Relationships Diaries Project’ would have been less commercial but a third of the diarists record no sex at all (for various reasons) during their week. The diaries aren’t, of course, a representative survey of the population — there are probably a few too many ‘unusual’ diaries for that — but there’s a very varied spread of gender, age and sexual orientation.

It’s not particularly salacious or erotic — it’s tame enough to have been discussed on ‘Woman’s Hour’ on Radio 4 — I found an interview with Arianne Cohen on the BBC website. (It was quite amusing to hear Jenni Murray finely navigate the line between being over-euphemistic and speaking too frankly.)

I’d argue (honestly!) that this book is a very valuable resource for anyone writing a novel which emphasises the development of any intimate relationship between its characters. These are frank accounts of behaviour between real people written in the language they genuinely use. Almost by definition these activities are private — they’re not the kind of things a novelist can sit and wryly observe from a coffee shop. The diaries are published anonymously (although Cohen does a lot of checking to ensure they are not hoaxes) and, like diaries of the more conventional sort, the writers commit to paper much that they would never speak out loud to anyone else.

One assertion that Arianne Cohen makes in the interview, which is re-assuring to writers but also perhaps surprising given the tone of much of the debate on gender, is she believes that the male and female diarists ‘experience relationships in a very similar way’ and in terms of ‘minute-by-minute thoughts men and women are quite similar’.

Where the difference lies is that men express this experience somewhat differently — usually in a more explicitly sexual way. However, the female diarists are certainly just as capable of commenting explicitly on the sexual attractiveness of others. Maybe to emphasise the point, the gender of each diarist is printed in very small type. It’s sometimes easy to forget whether it’s a man or woman writing the diary.

Jenni Murray said she detected an undercurrent of misogyny in some of the male entries and Arianne Cohen agreed that around 15% of the male diaries showed a disturbing objectification of women. This might be summed up by the serial adulterer who also visited a prostitute almost every week and who seemed to believe his attitude to women was shared by most men. (It isn’t.)

On the other hand, it’s misleading and self-deluding to assume (as was possibly implied in the Woman’s Hour discussion) that infidelity is automatically linked to misogyny. In anything but the shortest flings, there are usually two people involved in the deception — in the case of (straight) male  infidelity it’s the despised ‘other woman’.  While the man may indeed be objectifying and using both women in a shallow way, it’s also equally true that his actions may be driven by passion and emotion — not a dislike of women at all.

This leads to the question of whether women can easily be categorised, as maybe they are in soap operas,  into the likes of predatory husband-snatchers or faithful home-makers. I’d guess it’s not so simple and there’s a continuum of behaviour that suggests, depending on circumstances and many other factors, that the majority of people could end up being either the ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’ party in an episode of unfaithfulness.  I hope so as this is one of the main dilemmas for the characters in my novel.

The honesty and accuracy of the diary entries is perhaps vouched for by the frequency of the occasions where the diarists record masturbation. There really isn’t much kudos to be gained by an individual to record that they’ve masturbated — the nature of the activity itself means that anyone can do it and independently of any relationship. That people masturbate such a lot might be simultaneously the most enlightening and least surprising finding in the whole book — precisely because it’s an activity that is very rarely discussed or written about and only often in abstract, de-personalised, self-help terms.

But it’s the near ubiquity of the activity which is quite striking: it’s recorded at a similar sort of intensity by men and women, people who are single or in relationships, young or old (although not the very oldest). There are a couple of oddly touching anecdotes on the subject — one the man in his 60s who is unhappily resigned to the physiological challenges involved at his age and the pregnant woman who debates whether her unborn baby is technically a witness — and, if so, what does this mean ethically (she decides it’s OK).

The last point also stresses the privacy (usually) required. If the diarist is in a relationship, almost every incidence of what  is euphemistically called ‘self-love’ is kept hidden: people are aware that their partners probably do masturbate but the where and the when aren’t really considered, apart from one particular entry that stood out as the exception that proved the rule. (I was startled to read of some of the diarists nipping away from their work desks for the purpose.)

This revelation of the inevitable must be interesting to fiction writers — this is something your characters are pretty likely to do and it may reveal something of their inner-lives, unlike involuntary bodily functions that everyone does but don’t normally appear in novels. On the other hand, a solitary act of (another euphemism coming up — no pun intended) self-relief is almost, by definition, lacking in the drama that occurs when a sexual act is part of a relationship. I can see why masturbation is not a common event in fiction but the candour with which these diarists record it makes me wonder whether writers tend to shying away from using a fairly universal experience.

If every aspect of the book that’s fascinating to writers was discussed in detail  then this would be an even longer post than it already is (and I think it’s already the longest one on the blog — more of an essay than a posting). There follows a list of a few points that were particularly thought-provoking. Some are seemingly obvious and intuitive but that may lend credibility to the implication that the more apparently deviant attitudes are more common than might be generally supposed. Again, there’s no science to this list — it’s what struck me while reading the selection of  diaries.

  1. Ex-lovers feature a lot — both in people’s thoughts and in physical encounters. Many, many diarists long for a previous partner — and sadly many of these people are in other relationships with people they prefer less. This is often in spite (or because) of a recognition that any lasting relationship with that person is emotionally impossible (such as the newly-divorced woman pining for her ex-husband). Many report that sexual encounters with ex-partners continued on a sporadic basis long after the relationship finished. The ability to impulsively hook up with an ex has become much easier with new technology: mobile phone ‘sexting’ is another example of the greater intimacy and audacity people use with the written word. (I’m convinced that people tend to favour texting due to its privacy and asynchronous nature. There are a number of examples of where the utter simplicity of a text saying something like ‘Come over — I want to fuck you’ works very effectively for all parties and this brevity and directness is a lesson to writers.) The internet is another obvious tool (and Facebook is mentioned a lot in the book) for ex-partners to keep in casual contact. People tend not to talk about exes to their current partner — so again this is good, private, fertile ground for the writer.
  2. Many of the straight women describe an aspiration for sexual experimentation with another woman. This seems to be borne out of inquisitiveness and curiosity about whether this would be a different, maybe more sympathetic, sort of sensual experience than with a man. This was often acknowledged to be something that would remain in the realm of private fantasy although some expressed regret at having lost the opportunity to try it.  Straight male diarists seemed to have no interest in other men (except perhaps as an unavoidable consequence of group sex).
  3. When the respondents were interested in sex then there was little gender difference in the levels of desire recorded. However, it seemed in committed relationships that men were more likely view other people in terms of sexual attraction. Women, by contrast, tended to comment on others mainly when they were dissatisfied with their current partner.
  4. Traditional (or even stereotypical) roles seem to be preferred. To use a parallel from the dancing world (is it just tango?): it’s expected that the man takes the lead. This shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a green light for blatant sexism. It’s not — women want caring relationships with people who pull their weight domestically. However, effete ‘metrosexuals’ aren’t popular (there are various approving references to men behaving ‘like men’). Passive, indecisive, wimpy men appear to be held in almost universal contempt. (One woman complains she always ends up with docile partners which means that she ‘always seems to be the man’ in relationships.)
  5. Self-esteem is very closely linked to behaviour in relationships — sometimes directly when a person is suspicious of anyone treating him or her well because they don’t feel they have earned it or deserve it and sometimes people enjoy an inversion of status and control during which all their choice and self-determination is denied — something they curiously find empowering. The most bizarre entries are ‘dom/subs’ where the word ‘I’ is symbolically written in lower case by the submissives with their ‘Masters’ or ‘Mistresses’ referred to as He or She.
  6. Physical intimacy (feelings being safe, wanted, cared for) is perhaps more valuable to people than sex — particularly to those who have lost a partner through death or a traumatic split. However, there is powerful evidence of the beneficial effects to relationships of hormones like oxytoxcin or dopamine released during sex. Some diarists report deep frustration at their partner’s perceived withholding of sex over periods of days which ultimately comes across as near-loathing. Yet when they’re put out of their misery and have sex it’s a joyous experience and suddenly they record they love their partner very much. How long this effect lasts is questionable — I’d guess that anyone who internalises that their partner is using the restriction of affection perhaps as a power game is going to remain unhappy most of the time and that the humiliation of sexual rejection, whether deliberately or accidentally inflicted, probably contributes more to infidelity than any inherent predisposition.
  7. Availability often outweighs attractiveness: as the diarists are anonymous and there are no photos there’s no way of gaining an impression of their physical attractiveness but people’s own perceptions are hinted at widely, unsurprisingly women being self-critical about their weight and so on. While stunningly attractive people are often remarked on, sometimes people are far less selective about the choice of  the level of attractiveness of a potential partner than might be imagined — and this is not just men wearing ‘beer goggles’. One young woman, who would appear to consider herself attractive, describes her frustration that men appear to be wary of approaching her for fear of rejection. She correlates the increasing acceptability of potential partners with the length of time it was since she was last in a relationship and even makes an explicit plea via the diary for men to to be less reticent — saying that they would be shocked at the extent that ‘we can sometimes lower our standards’. This relates back to the point about exes and there are also plenty of examples where diarists describe incidents in their past when sex has often occurred spontaneously with an unexpected person.
  8. Volatility: people’s attitudes towards their partners are incredibly volatile. Two diary entries a few minutes apart can swing between radiant optimism and black despair or switch between profound love and vituperation — often as a result of a text, e-mail, casual remark or, sometimes, just personal contemplation. I’m not sure this comes across in a lot of fiction. Much creative writing workshop discussion focuses on rationally trying to examine the credibility of characters’ motives and actions — almost as if constructing some sort of probability decision tree. In reality people do not act impassively and deliberately — particularly not in emotional matters.
  9. There are more instances of  agreed ‘open’ relationships than I’d expected — both in the traditional ‘swinger’ style and those where partners were happy to allow each other to have independent sexual relationships (both casual and regular) with other people. Sometimes these were to accommodate bisexuality. This is the area where the editor says she was most surprised — and is happy to say she has reflected her discoveries in her own private life. However, I do suspect whether this is an area where the selection of the diarists has been a little skewed — but then I might be viewing this through my own moral conditioning?

The diaries encourage people to reflect on their lives in ways that are sometimes quite self-revelatory — re-appraising relationships. There’s also some speculation that’s quite thought-provoking about how one’s sexual experiences may affects one’s wider perception of the world.  A woman in her 20s who describes herself as bisexual and a masochist says: ‘I have a pet theory that much of the way men and women relate to each other, and hence how society is structured, comes from the psychological difference between penetrating and being penetrated.’ It might be physically fundamental but this may be at the root of many attitudes: I’d suggest that the vast majority of straight men aren’t able to even imagine the physical or psychological experience of being penetrated. This might make the fact that the experience can be extremely pleasurable for women quite mysterious and fascinating.

This relates, albeit anatomically rather than psychologically, back to an earlier post I wrote based on Graeme A. Thomson’s perceptive interpretation of Kate Bush’s work — the perhaps impossible desire to understand and experience what it is to be the other person in a relationship. Maybe a way for a woman to appreciate what her partner feels in being with her is to imagine how she herself might be touched by another woman?  Maybe? Who knows what goes on in other people’s heads and it’s why this book is so illuminating — revealing a few glimpses, albeit perhaps unrepresentative ones.

From a practical writing perspective, fiction writers would do well to study the diction used in the diaries. These are real people choosing their own words to describe their sexual experience. The editor believes that her British diarists are far more creatively verbose than their US equivalents — something that any reader would pick up from the styles of two publications I regularly read: Time and The Economist. (It’s also another reason why Stephen King’s views on brevity and adverbs don’t necessarily transfer without some refinement across the Atlantic.)

Nevertheless, there’s a refreshing absence of the sort of convoluted, obfuscatory prose that many writers might be tempted to use. People overwhelmingly describe their experiences as ‘we had sex’ (naughty passive voice there) or simply ‘we fucked’. Again, this is instructive for a novelist because, while people in polite conversation (for example at creative writing workshops) don’t generally talk in terms of ‘fucking’, these diaries show that’s the term that people most frequently commit to the page and, by extension, it probably indicates way that most people use in the privacy of their own minds. And, after all, filled also with all its hidden lusts and insecurities, one’s mind and imagination are the places where readers also engage with novels.

Schumpeter on the Art of Management

My ex-City coursemate Michael Braga shares with me a love of The Economist newspaper that must be very unusual among writers — many of whom probably consider its readers as the evil spawn of the global capital machine. I must admit I often disagree with its often over-opinionated editorial stance but it’s an unfailingly fascinating publication. Almost every time I pick it up I find half a dozen immensely fascinating articles — not just on current affairs or business but it has superbly concise science section (where Dr Olivia Judson used to write some superb articles on evolutionary biology that might have started my interest in this subject) and a similarly focused arts sections which features some great book reviews (including novels).

The Economist is also exceptionally well-written — much better than any daily newspaper or other weekly magazine, publishing its own style guide. It ought to be a good example to fiction writers.

So when I came across an article in last week’s edition, written by the business columnist, Schumpeter (no bylines are allowed), titled ‘The art of management: why business has a lot to learn from the arts’, I was intrigued.  It starts by complaining that the liberal arts world really doesn’t understand business and often misrepresents it by caricature (e.g. ‘Wall Street’). However, it soon moves on to castigate the philistinism and macho-aggression of the corporate world — there’s even a popular management book called ‘A Good Hard Kick in the Ass: the Real Rules for Business‘ — written, naturally, by an ex-marine.

Schumpeter argues that this culture results in poor communication, dysfunctional attitudes to risk and the stifling of creativity — failings that corporations are constantly trying to argue they have overcome (partly through spending vast amounts of money on snake-oil management training programmes — the kind of ‘put on a blue hat and you’ll be creative’ or if you ban people from frowning then the workplace will become more productive). Instead of wasting money on pseudo-scientific brainwashing the article sensibly suggests that a study or appreciation of the arts might suggest better solutions to these issues.

The article concludes by saying that, if business can learn from the arts, then in return perhaps artists should also take business more seriously and calls for writers, among others, to be more subtle in their examination of commerce — which it calls a central part of human experience.

I thought that sounded quite reasonable and while this might be a potential gap in the market for fiction that might be readily identifiable, it’s uncanny how I might have unconsciously constructed myself a CV that qualifies me to write in this sort of genre. As I wrote in a comment on the article on the web site, I’m originally an arts graduate but also have an MBA and I’ve often thought there are many parallels between the arts (communication, motivation, psychology and so on) and business than the syllabuses of business schools care to admit (perhaps to boost their pseudo-scientific credentials).

I realised that I’ve also tended to gravitate towards roles in business that have played to my ability to put a few half-decent paragraphs down on paper or a word-processor — and it’s a constant source of amazement how poor are many of the most successful business types at expressing themselves with the written word. (An interesting hypothesis about business’s uneasy relationship with the arts might explore whether this is borne out of personal frustration and resentment at individuals’ own shortcomings.)

So it’s almost a logical extension that I’m now taking this a step further and have now spent more time on creative writing courses than I did on my MBA — which is now in the process of being complemented by an MA in Creative Writing.

And, Schumpeter would be pleased to learn, that this is exactly what I’ve been doing myself with The Angel which starts with exactly the premise that’s explored in the article — as it takes a City trader and explores his latent ambition to learn more from the arts. Its central premise is the relationship between business and the arts — both in the background of the two central characters and in the plot, one strand of which is all about the pair or them setting up and running a business. While it’s a comedy, hopefully I can make this a subtle enough examination on the page to redress the current balance a little.

Do It Like A Dude

The Angel has an old-fashioned love triangle at its heart and, while I know the eventual outcome I want to write, I’ve been gripped by an internal debate about how much of this tension should be shown in the novel in terms of what the BBC call ‘sexual content’.

This is a difficult question to wrestle with in various ways although I’m convinced that all writers of novels (or of drama) that involve adults in close, emotional relationships must at least consider, but not necessarily write about, the sexual behaviour of the characters — even just to establish that there is no sexual relationship between them.

In real life, as well as in literature, there are many relationships that seem to defy gravity on intellectual, social or various other personal issues but must obviously work at a deeper sexual level — women falling for the bastard or cad or men being mesmerised by a pretty girl are stereotypes that are clearly true. There are many biological and psychological reasons why relationships aren’t driven by rationality — and that people often pursue relationships that logically they know aren’t good for them.

Also, despite (or perhaps because of) much more openness about ordinary people’s sexual behaviour — look at the covers of most women’s magazines and a few men’s — no-one really knows with much certainty what everyone else is up to. There are plenty of surveys but they’re almost by definition self-administered so no-one can verify how truthful are the responses (it’s considered that men tend to exaggerate, women to under-report). This is probably truer the more unusual the behaviour is. Paradoxically, despite sexual behaviour being driven by very deep biological and psychological motivation, most people seem to be anxious to know what’s ‘normal’ — if only to then outwardly appear to be so.

For this reason it’s probably one area where workshopping might yield responses which would be not that representative of readers as a whole. I’ve participated in a few workshops where the writing has involved descriptions of illegal drug usage. People tend to be quite guarded in their reaction — ‘I have a friend who told me that this description is more like ecstasy than speed’ — not wanting to be thought too boring and unconventional as to never have tried the drug but certainly not wanting to admit anything like familiarity with it. And why should they do anything else? Participating in a writing workshop doesn’t oblige anyone to reveal their history of drug usage.

Assuming the feedback gets beyond the tittering ‘Bad Sex Awards’ stage and one gets an honest and adult discussion, it’s still probably true to say that a similar type of reaction applies to sex as it does to drugs: an understandable wariness of revealing personal experience through expressing views on the writing (although people’s experience of sex must be much more widespread and doesn’t (normally!) have associations of illegality). This is wariness is probably more true the more unusual, or even deviant, the behaviour. Consider what might happen if (say) a woman wrote a scene where a man pays a prostitute to perform something exotic for him and one of the men in a workshop starts to correct all the details — she might get useful feedback but no-one would look at him in quite the same way again. (There are all sorts of intriguing permutations about who may be bluffing who in this sort of scenario.) There may be an exception when the action described is so extreme and unusual that it can be thought of abstractly and impersonally — in the City course there was one novel that dealt with incest and this was so bizarre that it was surprisingly easy to comment about.

Reading fiction is also appealing to many people because of its privacy. If you’ve never touched drugs, and don’t ever intend to, you might still have a fascination for imagining what it might be like to snort line-after-line of coke at a glitzy party or have some hallucinogenic trip. Similarly, most readers of the Twilight books don’t want their blood sucked by a vampire but that doesn’t stop them being amazingly popular. So it is with sex in fiction — there’s no doubt people like reading about it but a lot of this enjoyment is probably down to its absolute privacy.

While I’ve been agonising about how much of my characters’ sex lives I show or tell or hint at, I’ve realised that I may being incredibly prudish by the standards of popular culture with which young people are familiar. One of the most popular songs of the last couple of years is about, to put it mildly, curiosity about the same sex — Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’ (‘and I liked it’). My eyes popped out last year when I saw my children quite happily watching Katy Perry’s video for ‘California Gurls’. While I think it’s pretty harmless and, in some places, quite hilarious (the whipped cream aerosols) — she ostensibly appears in it stark naked (albeit lying down) — see embedded video below from YouTube.

Katy Perry says she was brought up a strict Christian and has been critical of her current rival — Lady GaGa, whose exuberance I quite admire. My teenage, secondary school age daughter asked me if I knew what the song ‘Poker Face’ was about? ‘A card game,’ I said innocently. ‘No. It’s about a woman having sex with a man while fantasising about it being another woman.’ ‘Oh!’ Things have definitely moved on a bit since ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

Similarly we were listening to the Top 40 rundown and I asked the title of the Rihanna song at number two. ‘”S&M”, dad.’ I’m not sure if my teenage daughters knew exactly what this meant but the lyrics of the song didn’t leave much doubt: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones/But whips and chains excite me.’

People might argue that this is all about boundaries being pushed but I’m not sure where the limits will stretch to after the precedent set by a new singer from Essex, who’s just won a BRIT award, called Jessie J. Her first single was called ‘Do It Like A Dude’ and, while I’ve only heard the less explicit version, there’s no doubt what it’s about — something that ‘Lip Service’ pushed the boundaries of terrestrial TV (albeit digital BBC3) by showing — although even then Ruta Gedmintas was only shown from the back. (And I don’t think ‘Do It Like A Dude’ refers to same sex relationships either.)

When I was doing the Open University Advanced Creative Writing course I was picked up by the tutor when a female character says the word ‘twat’ (as an insult about a man) — ‘a woman wouldn’t say such a word’. While this could be the view of a certain demographic of readers, if the generation who have been brought up listening to Rihanna, Katy Perry, Lady GaGa and Jessie J take up novel reading then it  will take considerably more to shock them.

The Oak and the Book Club

I went to three pubs in Aston Clinton tonight (a village about 4 miles south-east of Aylesbury).  The last one we went to, The Oak, is probably about as similar to The Angel as any pub could be. It was even struggling and rumoured to be on the point of closure at the end of last year. However, Fuller’s (the brewery owners) spruced it up a bit and brought in an entrepreneurial landlord called Steve who, with a partner called Joolz in the kitchen who handles the food, has turned the place around. I’m not surprised as the bar staff were extraordinarily attentive.

Oak, Aston Clinton
Oak, Aston Clinton (from Fuller's Website)

The place was buzzing tonight — the public bar area was absolutely jam-packed and a bunch of locals were sitting around the bar — two of whom I was introduced to by a mutual friend.

One of the tables was occupied by about eight or nine women and when I saw the distinctive orange and white of the cover of David Nicholls’s ‘One Day’ I realised they were holding some sort of book club or reading group there. I saw other books being handed round the table but couldn’t identify the titles.

I thought this was all good research for the novel but also thought that there might be a wonderfully circular scenario here to aspire towards — if I was to have the novel published and then it be discussed in the book group of a pub it was partly based in — and then perhaps I could write about that? Maybe that’s too much circularity?

The Girl With The Sun in Her Hair

My friends at Village Underground posted a link on their Facebook page to the video below on You Tube shortly after it was announced that John Barry, the music’s composer, had died. Its nice to know that the people who run one of the ‘coolest’ venues in London have a similar appreciation to mine of the man’s music.

I love the music’s sense of drama, romance and vulnerability — a little like the atmosphere I’d like to convey in certain parts of my novel. If Village Underground like the track then so will Kim, who would appreciate its archetypal sixties nostalgia without being remotely naff or cheesy. It apparently originally started off as the music for a Sunsilk shampoo commercial in the 1960s but was also used elsewhere — including in the Bond film which has my joint favourite John Barry theme — Nancy Sinatra’s superb ‘You Only Live Twice’ — a song that has the most unexpected melody.

My other favourite is Lulu’s hilarious ‘Man With the Golden Gun’ which is so packed more full of double entendres than the whole script of a Roger Moore Bond film. The subject of the song has ‘got a powerful weapon’, ‘who will he bang?’ with his ‘golden shot’ — lines that Lulu sings with such verve.

What I really liked about John Barry’s music, particularly his Bond music, is how he managed to work in recurring themes and motifs. I always admired how songs like Duran Duran’s ‘View to a Kill’ wove in the original Bond theme. His work also had the quality of being commercial and accessible but simultaneously often quite unconventional — such as using the harmonica in ‘Midnight Cowboy’ or the cimbalom in ‘The Ipcress Files’.

The German Fourth Plinth 2013

Here’s me for various complicated, meandering reasons, writing a novel about a German artist in London, which seems a bit esoteric but, come 2013, almost every visitor to London is going to see a memorable work by a German artist — in the form of a huge blue cock. German sculptor Katherina Fritsch has been chosen to fill the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for the whole year — see photo below from the Fourth Plinth website.

Katharina Fritsch's Blue Cockerel
Katharina Fritsch's Blue Cockerel

It seems there’s something of a Zeitgeist at the moment for finding out more about Germany. One of the biggest selling non-fiction books at the moment is Simon Winder’s Germania, which I’ve bought but only dipped into — hopefully I can blog about it when I’ve finished it. In the introduction to the book, he suggests that it’s only now, with the passage of more than sixty years since the last war, that preconceptions and prejudices are being dropped and the rest of the world now realises that, unlike, say, France or Italy, that Germany is relatively little known.

In fact the most read and commented on post on this blog recently has been the one on the BBC4 Germany series where I comment on the Al Murray documentary and the art and walking programmes.

So, bizarrely enough and certainly without any specific intention, I might have stumbled on to some themes in the novel that people are suddenly getting more interested in. I’d better hurry up and finish writing the thing.

Good Night on BBC2

A couple of novel-related programmes on BBC2 tonight.

The Great Outdoors is a short series that was on BBC4 last year. It’s about a group of ramblers enjoying the countryside and features Ruth Jones of Gavin and Stacey fame and who’s shortly to star as Hattie Jacques — who, in turn, I remember well from Sykes along with Derek ‘Corky’ Guyler and his washboard — if this means zilch to you then congratulations on being young — as well as the Carry On films.

I watched a few odd bits of when it was on BBC4 — mainly on the prompting of local newspaper The Bucks Herald which said it was written by local writers and was filmed largely on the Ridgeway locally around the Chilterns. While I’m not exactly sure where the embedded clip below was filmed, the beautiful landscape shots are very typical of the local area where The Angel is set and it’s quite  incredible to think these areas are within forty miles of the centre of London. The beauty of the countryside is one thing that Kim will fall in love with.

Earlier is Michel Roux’s Service. I caught the last half of the programme last night. It’s a series a bit like The Apprentice and Masterchef (without the cooking) whereby the eponymous restaurateur will train some young people (for whom the term ‘rough diamond’ may have been invented) into developing the service skills required for a Michelin starred restaurant. Needless to say, in the first episode they were hopeless in a pizza restaurant and we’re now promised they’ll go back to basics in a greasy spoon and curry house.

I’ll watch this quite carefully as my novel has a restaurant customer service angle — it won’t be the main focus but it will provide some incidental materials. I’m also quite intrigued by the systems that are used to manage restaurant service delivery. As with making a Christmas dinner at home, it seems simple because lots of people do it but it’s very difficult to get right.

I’ve not often eaten in Michelin starred restaurants but I did once have a wedding anniversary spectacular at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir Aux Quatre Saisonspushing the boat out with a surprise bouquet of roses waiting on the table after the champagne in the garden before we got started on the however many course meal it was. Of course it cost more than the monthly shopping budget but demonstrated how excellent customer service makes you think it’s all worth it — until the credit card bill turns up.

My Dissolution and the American Canon

Over Christmas I came across a box of old books that had been gathering dust in an attic ever since I left university. A lot were pretty useless, except as curiosities — a book on American foreign policy that goes up to about 1982 would give quite a rose-tinted perspective.

However, I managed to pick a good dozen or more novels that are taught just as regularly now as they were a couple of decades ago.

1980s Paperbacks
1980s Paperbacks

Quite a few books (Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglas, Rita Mae Brown, Richard Wright) probably date back to a course I did on American literature at the University of California Santa Barbara, which probably should have been more accurate called Afro-American literature. It was taught by a lecturer called Elliott Butler Evans who saw the whole canon of American literature through ‘cultural semiotics and ethnicity’. (The quotation is taken from this page on the UCSB website, where he still appears to be teaching.)

I must have learned to read literature to take into account the Afro-American perspective reasonably well as I think I got a B+ on that course.

There’s also quite a few books by 19th century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. I did a year-long course in my final year at Birmingham taught by Brian Harding, this country’s greatest expert on the writer (at least at the time), who’s since edited many editions of Hawthorne’s work.

1980s Paperbacks
1980s Paperbacks

That was in the days when we were taught in a weekly tutorial for five students — all sitting in Dr. Harding’s office (at the time the one next to David Lodge’s) around a big table: great for in-depth discourse on one of the most influential authors developing the American literary tradition but not so good if, like me, you’d been in the pub instead of reading the works beforehand.

Somehow I managed to get a decent mark in my finals on Hawthorne but the enduring image I retain from that course was when an attractive but quiet female student called Gill (I wish I could remember her surname) once turned up in fishnet stockings and leather boots. I still remember watching her, quite stunned, walking down the English department corridor.

1980s Paperbacks
1980s Paperbacks

The Orwell ‘1984’ as well as Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ came from another UCSB class — taught by Professor Frank McConnell who was the most popular lecturer at the university. He was described as being  ‘known for his renegade lifestyle and his love for teaching’ — unfortunately this was in an announcement made by UCSB when he died in 1999 aged only 56. Sadly, his renegade lifestyle probably contributed to his early passing away. I remember him doing Roger Daltrey impressions, swinging his microphone in front of a huge lecture theatre full of hundreds of students — rather different from the Hawthorne seminars.

There are other iconic books in the pile — Steinbeck, Updike’s ‘Rabbit Run’, Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’. I don’t have any recollection much of what’s between the covers of John Dos Passos’s ‘U.S.A.’ — I was never going to let a book that thick stand between myself and the student bar or pub.

The Tom Stoppard play was one I appeared in when I was in the sixth form — not sure how that got in the box.

Any guesses what subject I studied at Birmingham?

And Io Io Io

I braved the elements yesterday and went to the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at our local church, which looked rather spectacular in the snow. I took some rather lovely photos just as the light was fading, which I’ve reproduced here.

St. Nicholas's Church, Great Kimble
St. Nicholas's Church, Great Kimble

For ‘The Angel’ it’s always been my intention that something happens in the village around Christmas which symbolises Kim’s surprisingly seamless integration into the community.  And in the sort of place where ‘The Angel’ will be set then it’s a fair bet that some sort of church carol service or similar might be a good candidate event.

Thinking about this led me on to a variation on my annual musing on the completely bizarre words that we sing to many of the most popular Christmas carols. It’s peculiar that British children sing such arcane and, in some instances, nonsensical lines but at least we all grow up with their familiarity. I wondered what a foreigner who’s otherwise fluent in English would make of the carol service hymn sheet.

St. Nicholas's Church, Great Kimble
St. Nicholas's Church, Great Kimble

Possibly the worst offender of the lot is ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ — the title of which is normally misinterpreted because the hark is an exclamation, grammatically separated from the rest of the sentence. The tune, adapted from Mendelssohn is fantastically stirring but it wasn’t the original melody that Charles Wesley wrote his words for in the 18th century. Surely even then this quatrain from the second verse sounded odd:

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
Hail the incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with man to dwell;
Jesus, our Emmanuel.

‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see’ — apart from the butcherly imagery it’s a really clumsy inversion to get the rhyme with deity.

‘Adeste Fideles’ has apparently existed in Latin since the 13th century but the translation we sing as ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ is mid-Victorian. This has a couple of great verses ‘Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation,’ for example, but the second verse is pretty lame:

God of God,
Light of Light,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb;
Very God,
Begotten, not created

The third line is particularly eccentric — ‘he abhors not the Virgin’s womb’. What on earth is that meant to mean? And the fourth line seems to have thrown in the towel with a three syllable line requiring elongating to five syllables to fit the melody.

St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Great Kimble
St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Great Kimble

Almost certainly the most popular church services these days are the Christmas Eve midnight masses which are conveniently timed to siphon people out of the pub and into the pews. (They’re about the only times when churches are full so maybe the clergy are missing a trick the rest of the year?)

It seems some carols have been specifically written to be sung by ranks of pissed people — ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ is an exhortation to go to bed drunk, of which I entirely approve. Even so the line ‘This holy tide of Christmas all others doth deface’ should puzzle even the inebriated.

A couple of carols seems to have taken this principle further and have been written by people who are pissed. There can’t be any other explanation for the second verse of ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High’.

E’en so here below, below,
Let steeple bells be swungen,
And “Io, io, io!”
By priest and people sungen.

The rhyming of swungen and sungen must be unique in the English language and, perhaps, the quotation of ‘io io io’ is either an intriguing example of self-reflexiveness or simply that Charles Ratcliffe Woodward, the Victorian composer who wrote the words, had simply given up (the tune is several hundred years old). This carol is infamous for the long, extended ‘Gloria’ in the chorus, during which the amount of wavering in the singing voice  is a sure indicator of whom in the congregation on Christmas Eve is the most pissed.

As with most great pop songs, it’s the melodies that make Christmas carols enduringly popular, not the peculiar words. Many hymns also have incredibly rich and resonant tunes that have been embedded deep in the collective consciousness — something for which we have early 20th century composers such as Vaughan Williams and Holst to thank (amongst others) due to their work collecting folk music. In fact, I’d argue that carols and hymns have been one of the main influences on British popular music — the likes of the Beatles will have had the sort of education where these melodies were drilled into them. Another influence was soul music which itself adapted the melodies of these hymns sung in the American south.

One of the universally best-known melodies of all is ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night’ — another very ancient tune. The current words can be forgiven for being somewhat archaic as they were written around the start of the eighteenth century by the then poet laureate, Nahum Tate. It’s interesting that otherwise obsolete words, such as ‘swaddling bands’ or in ‘thus spake the seraph’ are still familiar to most people in the country.  The carol ends with one of my favourite quatrains — evoking an incredible angelic  certainty about the Christmas message:

All glory be to God on high,
And to the earth be peace.
Goodwill henceforth from heaven to men,
Begin and never cease.

The Paradox of the Dishy Russian Researcher

I was wondering whether I had something of a plausibility gap in the premise of ‘Burying Bad News’ as I have an MP with an attractive young, Eastern European aide (though mine, Ana, comes from Latvia, which is inside the EU and makes her eligible to work here without a visa). But splashed all over the papers today is something a lot juicier from real life than how my plot is set up. As the Sun inimitably describes the story:

A DISHY Russian who worked as a British MP’s aide is facing deportation as a suspected spy. Sexy Katia Zatuliveter, 25 – employed in the House of Commons as an assistant – is understood to have been detained after a lengthy investigation.

So maybe not so good from the perspective of originality but certainly good for plausibility. It gives me more reason to complete this novel once I’ve done a first draft of The Angel — although the two are connected by literary connecting doors as it is. Sally turned up in The Angel in my reading at the workshop yesterday.

On a politically-themed tangent I’ve just seen David Cameron’s signature in the guest book of our local church. He visited the two local churches on Tuesday 30th November — putting his address as Chequers — which is only on the other side of the hill.

Signature in Church Visitor Book
Signature in Church Visitor Book

I also bumped into the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, on Friday night — he’s our local MP and was in Princes Risborough for the turning-on of the Christmas lights.

Tattoo Culture

I mentioned in a previous post that the Belle Vue pub in High Wycombe has recently opened an art gallery. The second exhibition starts on Tuesday next week, 23rd November and runs until 28th December — open 12-11pm, free entry.

It’s called Tattoo Culture and features the work of photographer Mark Page, who is one of the UK’s most sought after erotic/fetish/alternative photographers. He sent me the photo below, titled Wild Thing, which is a much compressed version of the original artwork taken from the brochure and poster for the exhibition.

Wildthing -- Mark Page
'Wildthing' -- Artwork for 'Tattoo Culture' exhibition by Mark Page

I’ll certainly try and pop into the Belle View to have a look — both from the pub/art gallery perspective and also because Kim in the novel will be into body art as well. Mark told me that the photos on display in the pub will be very mild compared with some work in this genre. Further information can be found at his website: http://www.photoswithattitude.net/ (you have to be 18 to enter the site).