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Wenlock and Mandeville — How’s About That Then?

Yesterday London 2012 introduced its two mascots, partly created by Michael Morpugo, who are called Wenlock and Mandeville. They look like metallic teletubbies.

Given that our City University group is based right in the centre of London, it’s quite interesting that not too many of us have set our novels in the city — it’s only the main setting for three people, if I remember rightly. There are two more of us who will use London as a partial setting, including me. Of those five, two people are setting their novels fifteen or twenty years in the past. Only three of us are writing about relatively contemporary London. This may be quite relevant as we look ahead a couple of years as the Olympics are going to make this country, and London in particular, a real focus of attention throughout the world. This has its good and bad aspects but there could be a big cultural knock-on effect as we’re already starting to see to a lesser extent with South Africa and the World Cup.

I’ve already written a passing reference in The Angel to the 2012 Olympic logo but I’m again quite intrigued by the serendipitous names that these mascots have been given in the context of my novel. Wenlock is apparently based on the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock. However, it’s also the name of a spit-and-sawdust real ale pub on the fringes of Hoxton and Islington that I’ve used as a setting — the Wenlock Arms. It’s the pub where Kim works — and I’ve just written a scene where she and James turn up there. I’ve slightly changed the pub name in the novel.

And Mandeville? It’s derived from the village of Stoke Mandeville, just up the road from me, which gives its name to Stoke Mandeville Hospital (strictly speaking that’s in Aylesbury) which was made famous for its spinal injuries by Jimmy Saville in the 70s. It’s apparently the biggest hospital site in Europe, although the Medizinischen Hochschule Hannover which is opposite the offices I frequently visited seems pretty huge to me (Kim was born there!). However, Stoke Mandeville is no doubt the only hospital that has a huge sports stadium. This is used for paralympic events — it was where they started — and has to be seen to be believed. It’s bigger than many football league grounds. I had a wander round the hospital buildings a couple of months ago when I had to find my way from A&E to the pharmacy, which are at opposite ends.

Stoke Mandeville is also the nearest hospital to where The Angel pub is set so I’m sure that one or two of the characters will find reason to end up there — I’ve already got a good plot opportunity for poor old Kim to be taken there.

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‘I Agree With Nick’

Seems to the new catchphrase of the moment — and very apposite as both Cameron and Brown desperately try to convince Clegg that they do agree with him just enough to get him to drop his core demands and prop up their minority parties.

I find politics absolutely enthralling, especially when politicians aren’t in control of events, as in elections, and are unable to spin their way out of setbacks, compromises, about turns, revelations of hypocrisy and duplicity and so on. Election night coverage is fantastic as the politicians have to constantly adjust their positions to the results as they unfold. They normally have to try and pretend they’ve understood the will of the people and accept defeat gracefully through gritted teeth or try not to sound too triumphalist or relieved if they’re winning. Normally by the weekend after the election we’re into some refreshing honesty with the new government trying to dampen the expectations they’ve just spent weeks raising and some public back-biting and candid blame allocation in the defeated parties’ ranks. Not this time, though — the intrigue continues with plenty of politicians petrified of what their party leaders might sign up to and some coded warning shots coming out in interviews.

The aftermath of the election promises to be more fascinating than the election night itself. I stayed up for the whole duration of the BBC Election programme — 9.55pm until 9.30am the next morning. I caught myself nodding off only once or twice for five minutes at a time around 5.30am. I wanted to stay up to see if the Greens won their Brighton seat (who I probably would have voted for if they’d stood in my constituency — which was had no serious candidates as boundary changes have put me in John Bercow’s speaker’s seat). I set myself up with two laptops streaming Sky and ITV’s coverage and which I used in conjunction with the BBC and Guardian websites to do my own analysis on the seats as the counts were announced. (I used up all my remaining mobile broadband allocation for the month by using it to watch the Sky pictures).

Election Night 2010
Jeremy Vine augmented by Two Laptops -- Election Night 2010

Here’s the scene from my sofa with Jeremy Vine on the BBC with Sky on the laptop and ITV on the netbook. (Jeremy Vine is in my academic year — he shares a lot of cultural reference points with me when I hear him on his Radio Two show).

Those on the City Course and close readers of the blog will know that I have about 50,000 words written of a political novel. It’s gone on the backburner a bit for two reasons. One is that I’ve used parts of the City course to develop a new idea — and that’s gone pretty well as ‘The Angel’ is probably a better structured novel. The other is that I’ve been aware of events making my political angles in the novel obsolete or dated — one point being that it involves a New Labour minister. Politics isn’t the main driving force of the plot, though, and a rewrite could probably have made it appropriate to a Tory administration.

But a traditional change of government isn’t what we’re going to get — which means the legacy of Labour is likely to be felt for quite some time, either through their participation in a Lib Dem-Labour coalition or in their machinations if some alternative arrangement works. We’re also likely to have another election sooner or later.

Another interesting factor is the resurgence of interest in politics — with increased turnouts demonstrating the evidence.

So I’m quite encouraged that my political novel isn’t going to be obsolete or dated and might actually have something to say that’s going to be quite relevant to whatever happens in the next couple of years. Also, Oxford East, the constituency that my MP’s is based on stayed Labour against the odds. I just have to get writing the two novels — great fun as the election was it meant I wrote nothing myself.

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Oxytocin

There’s another story on the BBC website about the benefits of the ‘cuddle hormone’ — oxytocin. I referred to James’ view that human attraction was based on a whole mix of chemicals in the reading I did before Easter — and there was a quite a lot of feedback on whether the various things I’d referred to were hormones or not.

The story had links to an old web page from 2006 which caught my attention because it promoted something that was guaranteed to prevent fear of public speaking — which would be very handy for our reading evening on 30th June. It was titled ‘Sex “cuts public speaking stress”‘. It goes on to say ‘Forget learning lines or polishing jokes – having sex may be the best way to prepare for giving a speech. New Scientist magazine reports that Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, found having sex can help keep stress at bay.  However, only penetrative intercourse did the trick – other forms of sex had no impact on stress levels at all.’ It’s all to do with something called the vagal nerve, as well as oxytocin apparently. (Maybe James can do some reading up on it?)

It doesn’t say how far in advance of the speech you have to engage in this therapy to make it most effective, though.

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Three Universities in Two Days

I seem to be visiting a lot of universities recently. On Monday I went up to the Open University, where I met my MSc. supervisor and my ‘specialist advisor’ — both are a married couple of academics who work on the same area of research. My supervisor is Italian but has obviously lived here a long time so listening to her speech, which I tend to do on a weekly basis, is quite good practice for writing Kim’s dialogue. Strangely I was one of the few students (perhaps the only one) on the Milton Keynes campus because, despite having perhaps millions of students, none of them actually attend the OU itself on a regular basis — it’s all done at a distance (or in summer schools and the like).

Then it was straight down the M1 and A1 to City University on Monday.

Last night I went to the Wheatley campus of Oxford Brookes University. This was to go to an Association of MBAs networking event on creating a cv. Most of the other people there were students on the Brookes Business School MBA, most of them full time. It was quite interesting to chat to some of them afterwards about why they were doing the course — quite a few had enrolled due to redundancy and were looking to do something completely different (a little like James).

While I was there principally for non-writing purposes, it was also good background as the speaker, Corinne Mills, is a careers specialist. According to her consultancy’s website she’s been the careers expert on Chris Evans’ Radio Two show, Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five, on the Six O’ Clock News and in all sorts of print media. Unsurprisingly, she has an human resources background so I got myself re-familiarised with HR speak. I talked afterwards with someone who was MD of a leadership development consultancy (employing 18 people) whose business is to work with these terribly (self) important executives with massive egos — the world from which James has just been removed.

As it turns out, my existing cv seems to tick all the boxes already — probably linked to my ‘excellent written communication skills’ (as it no doubt claims dispensing with any modesty — as it must). Apparently 80% of cvs have spelling mistakes and 13% are seriously flawed in written content or presentation. There were a few classic, true-life errors quoted that passed the spell checker level of proof reading. One could apply to James though I might have to invent something original along the same lines if I wanted to use it in the novel: ‘My hobbies include cooking dogs and interesting people’.

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Transvestite Roofer From Banbury

Truth can be much stranger than fiction and I heard a superb example tonight. I’d driven up to a pub in a village called Stewkley, which is almost in Milton Keynes (though people there would not like to be associated with MK too much).

I was chatting to someone who’s a regular at the pub and he and his wife told an amazing story about a transvestite roofer (with huge hands) who used to come all the way to their village pub from Banbury (probably a good hour’s drive) to hang out in his provocative and skimpy clothing. (The logic he used was that he wouldn’t be safe, in various senses of the word, nearer his home — he apparently had a wife and three children who were in the dark about his alter ego.)

I ended up having a first hand account told to me by the landlady of an incident that ended the chap barred from the pub — and it wasn’t a case of prejudice and bigotry as he’d obviously been made to feel welcome in the pub for quite some time before the inciting incident, as novelists say. I may re-use this story for ‘The Angel’ in some form. It shows there’s nothing quite like getting out into the field to do your research.

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HR People

I’m a fan of Scott Adams’ ‘Dilbert’ cartoons and I particularly like his view of HR people. One quotation goes something like ‘I hired a new director of Human Resources to handle the downsizing. I needed somebody who acts like a friend but secretly delights in the misery of all people.’ I know people regard the transformation of personnel departments in the 1980s into Human Resources departments regard this as a metaphor for a shift from paternalistic employers of the post-war corporatist era into Thatcherite sweatshops that regard humans as machines (or resources). All the while the managers (and HR people) proclaimed ‘people are our greatest asset’ (until they don’t want them when they become an expensive liability). I liked the Dilbert cartoon where the pointy-haired boss suddenly admitted that people weren’t the company’s greatest asset — they were sixth. When asked what was above people, he revealed it was carbon paper.

I guess most HR people go into the career with the best of motives but they must get pretty brutalised by the calls on them made by many managers. At the top level they are often drawn into highly secret board level plans to take an axe to the workforce (and to advise how to do it as cheaply and quickly as possible while remaining within the law) but at a lower level they will have to work to expedite the petty vindictive feuds of bad managers who decide to persecute someone they don’t like. In this case they’re between a rock and a hard place — incur the wrath of the manager if they don’t sack someone or join in with the bullying. No wonder they’re so keen to try and do the nice, fluffy things like dreaming up company-wide motivation programmes where employees (usually managers) are sent away to hotels for interminable Power Point presentations, after which they are given the opportunity to either drink themselves stupid in the free bar or engage in casual sex with each other (or both).

I think my somewhat cynical view of the typical relationship between employer and employee — or between the serfs and global capital — is showing through here! (This is a view, by the way, that has been confirmed by having done an MBA ). However, it’s all great stuff for a character in a novel. Emma will work in HR and the requirement for her to go and stay over to organise these shindigs in country house hotels will allow a bit of freedom for James and may also give her an opportunity to get a bit of revenge in kind for what she suspects (wrongly, at least at first) her husband is up to with Kim.

I was able to give Emma a bit of thought as I happened to attend a workshop run by The Corporate Infrastructure Forum on ‘Involving the Business In IT’ (something that IT people, generally being more sensitive and reflective souls than other professions like accountants or lawyers or HR people, often sit around navel gazing about: ‘Why does no-one love us?’) This started with a presentation by a chirpy researcher (with a PhD) who’d been working on a project called ‘Sustainable Organisational Performance: What Really Makes the Difference’ for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which is the professional organisation that any self-respecting HR person belongs to (Emma will, of course). It’s all very admirable stuff, which will probably come as a revelation to many managers, about how happy and motivated employees will tend to work harder and so their employers will have consequently better businesses — aligning objectives, balancing short and long-term objectives, concentrating on the employees’ ‘locus of engagement’.

While the presenter didn’t look particularly how I imagine Emma, it gave me quite an opportunity to pick up on the vocabulary of the field, current thinking, even things like how she would use her hands to make points quite empathetically, as the speaker did. Overall, despite her faults, Emma will be professional, conscientious and good at her job — even if does involve delighting in all human misery. I had another thought, which I must add was entirely unrelated to the woman making the presentation, that Emma may have a fondness for having sex in public places — which will be good for a plot device and I think she’ll also be quite voracious. Also, it may help James introduce Kim (and the reader) to the geography of the village and its locality — I’m thinking of places like stone circles or iron age hill forts as Emma will also have a bit of a new-age side to her and like to tap into the energy of these places.

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Kim

In The Angel my main female character is called Kim. She was called that before I decided to make her a German and I’ve not changed the name yet and I’m not inclined to at the moment. It’s quite an androdgynous name in also being used for men but probably the most notable current uses are American actresses like Kim Cattrall and Kim Basinger — such is the influence of American culture that Kim could probably be a genuine name in Germany (though I’ve not come across many although Wikipedia says Kim Basinger has German and Swedish ancestry). It also has an oriental manifestation as both a first name and surname — think of North Korea.

The name is often shortened from Kimberley, which has a South African association with the town or city of that name, which apparently was named after one of the Lord Kimberleys the derivation of whose name will be discussed below. (Incidentally, the Guardian’s obituary of the fourth Earl of Kimberleyshows him to have been a rather colourful character: ‘Johnny Wodehouse, the maverick, six-times-married fourth Earl of Kimberley, who has died aged 78, was as arrogant in his politics as he was in wasting his considerable inherited fortune on gambling, womanising and alcoholism.’ The current Earl is, by contrast, a computer programmer.  I’m not sure what it is but there’s something about that I like. )

Interestingly, my Kim has a history stretching back about eighteen months. She was in a short story which was reworked into a screenplay for the Open University Advanced Creative Writing course and she cost me marks as previously recounted by making ‘Twat’ her opening line. When I was thinking of The Angel she popped up again as a partly developed urban, ‘edgy’ character.  I still wasn’t sure why I’d called her Kim, though I had come across a female one of the South African variety in an office situation – who I’d heard a few stories about but never properly met (oddly enough I just saw her in the work gym today).

So I’ve been wondering why I’ve persisted with an androgynous, non-Germanic Christian name for a character who has little in common with stars of Hollywood slightly erotic film and TV (unlike Emma who’d clearly love that sort of thing). I realised that it’s blindingly obvious and goes back to the etymogical origins of the name as in Lord Kimberley. It comes from ancient English and means royal fortress and Kimberley (or Kimblerly) means field of the royal fortress — and they are both derived from the place name Kimble in Buckinghamshire, which itself was named after one of the most ancient English kings, Cymbeline, of the Shakespeare play and the remains of whose castle are still in evidence in a field in Little Kimble. (In a further twist to the power theme I think I’m right in saying that the land on which Cymbeline’s castle stands is actually part of the nearby Chequers estate.) I have to say I find something quite transcendent about the immediate vicinity of the castle — often the weather seems to change as you pass. Here’s an interesting ‘fact’ about the castle from a website on the Ridgeway, which passes close, as do both route of the 7,000 year Icknield Way — the most ancient road in Europe — ‘Legend has it that if you run  seven times round  Cymbeline’s Castle on the Chequers  Estate, the devil will appear’.

Cymbeline's Castle from a Distance
Cymbeline's Castle from a Distance

And The Angel pub is located in a fictional place that’s not too far away at all from Kimble. In fact The Swan at Great Kimble is one of the pubs which will lend attributes to The Angel. So Kim sticks for me because the name is so intrinsic to the location of the novel. I’d never twigged that before but it seems so obvious in retrospect. Of course, Kim is going to explore the area all around here and draw spiritual and psychic energy for her art. I’ll avoid her running round the castle a full seven times though or my careful plotting will go awry.

I’m working on making it plausibly German — perhaps an Anglicised contraction of her real German names or a conscious multi-culturally inspired identity?

Beacon Hill as Tor
Beacon Hill Doing A Good Impression of Glastonbury Tor
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Bean Doing Some Research

I’m writing this from ‘The Bean’ a cafe on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. I had to come into London for a meeting with a colleague in the rather different surroundings of the Holiday Inn, Mayfair. He was offering me some careers advice along the way, which was both good and bad, because more or less everything he said convinced me that I’d be more suited to a novelist’s lifestyle although this is not something one can approach a recruitment agent for.

While on the tube to Green Park I had something of a flash of inspiration while reading a review in The Economist of some books about the credit crunch. It’s a little depressing as the recession and financial crisis are already appearing in fiction — which will possibly make my themes a little dated — although the Economist seemed to think it would take a year or two for anything particularly thoughtful or reflective to come out (my inference from the article anyway). That set me thinking of the many interesting parallels between my three themes — money (finance), art and sex. I had one particularly thought that I’m going to think about further but it could have ‘legs’.

I’ve had another look at Village Underground, from the top deck of a bus this time, which is useful as I’ve been furiously writing about Kim’s tenure there which may form the opening chapter of the novel. I have a few different ideas for openings and I’d like to use Alison’s tutorial on Saturday to see what works best. The problem is I have to write them. I was up until past 1am last night and up again writing by 8am.

On the way here I stopped by the Tate Modern. I was hoping to see the Rothko Seagram pictures, which I thought were there, as I watched the Simon Scharma programme on them on DVD a few days ago — more research. However, they appear not to be there and today’s strike by the PRS (or whatever union it is) meant most of the galleries were shut so hordes of foreign school parties were all crammed into Balka’s box instead, which I guess probably gave it the opposite ambiance to that which the artist intended.

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Something Borrowed…Leads to Plugging Some Gaps

The end of my last extract, which unfortunately I didn’t have time to read on Saturday, had a fire scene in The Angel. For some reason I was looking around on the internet for fire and ice imagery and came across some references to a classic novel which has a couple of fires. I decided to ‘borrow’ a bit of the action, although the original language was definitely not in keeping with the tone of what I was writing.

Here’s some selected parts of the source — no need to worry about quotation as it’s very out of copyright:

‘I hurried on my frock and a shawl: I withdrew the bolt and opened the door with a trembling hand…I [was] amazed to see the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke; and while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue wreaths issued, became further aware of a strong smell of burning…in an instant I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep. “Wake, wake!” I cried. I shook him but he only murmured and turned: the smoke had stupefied him…I rushed to his basin and ewer…both were filled with water. I heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my own water-jug,  baptized the couch afresh…the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last.’

This gave me the idea to have Kim empty ice on James to try and wake him, although my fire wasn’t dramatic enough to have flames inside the room:

‘ She coughed. The air stank. The smoke detector at the end of the hallway bleeped incessantly. She ran to the top of the stairs. Catching an orange glint in corner of her eye she stopped and looked out of the window. She saw flames through the outside glass door of the function room…”James. James. Wake up. Wake up. There’s a fire.” Kim shook him hard…flames were licking at the thatched roof…Turning the bar sink taps on full, she grabbed two bar towels and plunged them into the water. She picked up a plastic bucket and filled it from the ice machine. Carrying the bucket, she rushed upstairs, pressing a wet towel to her face. In her room she found James had put on his jeans but had then fallen asleep again on the bed. The thatch was now ablaze outside the window…Kim threw the ice in his face. “Get up you stupid man. There’s a fire. I’m not leaving you here.” As he awoke, a finger of black smoke entered the bedroom.’

I guess almost every writer who’s ever read Jane Eyre will probably have consciously or unconsciously borrowed something from the novel but it was quite fun to do. No one noted on any of the scripts that they’d spotted it, although had I got to read it out then perhaps it may have been more obvious.

I think there’s a bit of a Jane Eyre archetype in the plot of the book. While James isn’t really a Mr Rochester, Kim is going to be coming from somewhere different (Germany) to London and then will meet James and fall out and reconnect with him later (perhaps?) but I think her St. John Rivers phase will come before James. Hold on! That’s given me an idea for the sort of character she can hang around with in London — a supporting character and a bit of sub-plot that I noted I was lacking with the post-its.

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Back to the Tate

Had a meeting in London today between Mansion House and Cannon Street that I’d partly arranged in the hope of hitting the pub with friends afterwards and getting well lubricated. This didn’t come to pass but I didn’t waste the trip as I zipped over the river to check a few details out in the Tate Modern.

I wrote a piece for last Saturday’s tutorial by using the Tate website to look up the paintings so I thought I’d better go and see them for real before I revised the piece. Good job I did as I now know better where they’re physically located in the room. They are principally Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’, Warhol’s ‘Marilyn Diptych’ and Rauschenberg’s ‘Almanac’.  I may also use Claeus Oldenburg’s ‘Giant Three Way Plug’ as it didn’t realise it hung in the air or was so big.

I went down and revisited the big box — not as spooky this time as there seemed to be more light and there were more people around — and also checked out the Cy Twombly paintings which I found all to be called Bacchus (untitled) in a collection called Material Gestures. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever ‘got’ a painting which to all intents and purposes looks like someone’s had a breakdown while doing some interior decorating. I can’t find it on the web but there’s a review in the Telegraph that shows a similar work. I’ve now found Twombly’s site. There are two Bacchus paintings at 21 and 22 on this page.

Next door to the Twomblys was something which was, re-assuringly, the sort of pretentious rubbish I’d normally expect. I can’t seem to find it on the website and I was quite interested as there was a warning about the room containing sexually explicit material. Unfortunately it was some old bloke’s home movies of himself stark naked in a mask hitting himself on the head with a boxing glove and smearing himself with paint (I luckily missed the bit where he uses bodily excretions). Not something that I’ll probably use in a novel.

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More On the Ground Research

I wrote a section of ‘Burying Bad News’ in the summer which was a flashback to 1995 when Frances was a young GP in Feltham, in south-west London (famous for its Young Offenders’ Institution which takes the worst young criminals from the whole of London and visitors to which can often be seen on the local trains and buses).

I used to work there in the late 80s/early 90s and often travelled through there for the rest of the 90s. The whole town centre was a 60s planning disaster and over the last five or ten years it’s been completely redeveloped. My old office has been turned into Yuppie flats and the local boozer (whose beer garden was the only bit of green in the whole centre) has been flattened.

I went back there last night and spent two or three hours in the Moon on the Square — a Wetherspoons pub which replaced the infamous Cricketers, which was a place where 70-year-old Irishmen offered each other out for fights, customers let their rottweilers roam around and pushed trolleys full of shopping into the pub from Tesco’s next door (Tesco has relocated down the road and has been joined in Feltham by Lidl, Aldi and Asda).

The whole area is a vast improvement on what it was like at the point I set my chapter. The beer was very good in the Wetherspoons too. It’s good to revisit the places that I’ve used for settings. I drove on the bridge over the Stokenchurch Gap cutting last week and I’ll try and get to the Tate Modern again tomorrow .

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Some Research

I was in London yesterday for work purposes and had two quite contrasting experiences that could be used in research for my novels in progress. I had a meeting with a management consultant at Price Waterhouse Cooper’s famous office at 1 Embankment Place — this is the semi-circular roofed building over Charing Cross station that was featured in the last series of The Apprentice (the toga wearing corporate hospitality task episode) and it’s even recreated in plastic bricks at Legoland. We used a little wood-panelled boardroom with all services and facilities laid on by attentive staff (obviously meant to impress financial movers and shakers — I turned up in jeans and a jumper).

My PWC friend and I did a conference call to Palma de Mallorca where the chap I’m doing some work for is based. He was rather pumped  up on testosterone and threw in phrases like ‘we really want them to drop their pants for this one’.

I had an hour or so to kill before I had to head back so I decided to take the tube to Mansion House and walk across the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern — both of which are mentioned in one of my synopses. On some previous occasions I’m ashamed to say the free toilet facilities in the Tate Modern have been more of a draw to me than the artworks. However, I had a more considered look around this time, albeit briefly.

I’d seen Miroslaw Balka’s huge empty container from the outside previously but this time I ventured inside. I even got to the back wall — something that seems quite a challenge when you make the first tentative steps. (Basically the box, which is 13m high by 30m long is completely dark and empty inside.) Although one wall of the container is completely open, surprisingly little light penetrates inside so as you enter and walk straight ahead, it’s really like entering a blank void (apparently one of the allusions the artist wants to make is to the Holocaust). Once you get to the back of the container and turn round you realise you can see reasonably well in the opposite direction (towards the opening) but framed against the light are other visitors to the gallery who you observe facing you and tentatively making their way forward into the void. This is quite clever and the most effective part of the experience.

I took a photo of it on my phone which is a bit blurry but perhaps the more effective for it — see the people by the side for an idea of the scale of the box.

Miroslaw-Balka----How-It-Is
Miroslaw-Balka----How-It-Is

I don’t consider myself a great fan of modern art. I can’t make my mind up whether I need to work harder to understand it or if that’s pointless because it’s all a big con. (I imagine there’s some truth in both positions.) However, I did enjoy three huge paintings by Cy Twombly which were basically red spirals and loops on a big white canvas. I’m a bit annoyed as I forgot their title — something to do with wine I think and they’re quite new. I can imagine some scenes in my novel where the characters go round the gallery and have difficult conversations while they look at particular works and those Twombly paintings would be very good (and not too hard to describe!).

Today I went to corporate IT land — Thames Valley Park in Reading which is home to all sorts of corporations including British Gas, Oracle and Microsoft (who I was visiting). On the way back I decided to do a (very long) detour to Oxford to visit a location I’ve written about in a section of ‘Burying Bad News’ — the Cowley Road. I deliberately took a less direct route so that I could drive right along the length of the road from about 10 miles outside Oxford at Stadhampton. I could see the industrial part of the city looming up from a few miles away and then drove past the Mini factory and right down the road itself through the suburbs and outer city centre in the rush hour traffic ending up at the roundabout with the Angel and Greyhound at the bottom of Magdalen Bridge and then back again (getting stuck in big jams on the ring road).

I’m not sure whether to fictionalise the name of the road. I’ve certainly used artistic licence to make it seedier and grubbier than it actually is — although I noticed a few sex shops and dodgy bars. However, I’ve managed to doublt check that virtually everything I’ve described is really there — particularly a lurid row of takeaways, lots of newsagents and small grocers. In fact I may add in the pawnbrokers and cheque cashing shops…and there are plenty of buses going up and down so that’s true to life as well.