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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.

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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.

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‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie and the Bulgarian Carrot

For various reasons I’ve been incredibly pushed for time over the last week — principally related to a suspected outbreak of an unpleasant type of virus in the household. While it didn’t affect me directly, it had quite a knock on effect but I won’t go into the gory details. I was also quite addicted to watching every news programme and political discussion going that read the runes of the post-election negotiations — and I got most indignant at times about one potential outcome. Also, while it’s wonderful at this time of year, especially where I live, to see the trees coming into leaf and the days lengthening, it brings all kinds of tedious jobs in the garden like lawn mowing and weeding. I got nearly 200 little bedding plants delivered in plugs during the week which needed potting up, which I couldn’t do until this evening, so I lost quite a few. I also got five chilli plants delivered — one has the great name of ‘Bulgarian Carrot‘.

While I was otherwise occupied time was running short all week and I had a couple of novel course related pieces to produce. Most worrying was my looming tutorial with Alison on Monday for which I needed to send up to 3,000 words ‘by Friday’. I also have a major stage looming in my MSc dissertation and had to postpone my regular Skype chat with my supervisor by two days. I hastily revised the ‘problem overview’ section of the dissertation (2,000 words in all) and sent that off for review by Thursday afternoon (I’m very behind on that). This meant I had about 300 words written by about 3pm on Thursday for my tutorial. With the liberal assumption that ‘by Friday’ would mean by about 5pm on Friday I sat down to write a chapter as quickly as I could.

I wasn’t particularly well disposed to writing towards the end of the week. In Emily’s class we were reading extracts that we had potentially chosen for the evening event in June. I wasn’t sure what to use and hadn’t had time to write the Prologue idea (see previous posting). Alison had helpfully responded to an e-mail that I’d sent out bemoaning my inability to choose and she suggested a section from Chapter Two where Kim pelts Nic with paint from the roof of Village Underground. I quite like that bit too but it was over 900 words. I managed to pare it down to just under 700 in an editing session on Wednesday afternoon and then read it a few times for timing — marginally over 4 minutes.

Because of the virus issues, I had to miss the class I’ve started doing on Wednesday afternoons at City Lit and drive instead to London. I set off late and got stuck in traffic, due to an broken down horsebox, and then it took twice as long as on Monday to get from Finchley to Islington. So I arrived about 25 minutes late for a 90 minute class.

We had quite a few readings to hear and I happened to sit at the end of the row and was last in the reading order. I spent most of the class wondering if time would run out before it was my turn as well as being very impressed with the quality of the material that everyone else was reading. Some people read familiar stuff we’ve already heard and others read out reworked pieces that were significant improvements on the originals. A couple of people read completely new material — and it was all good — frighteningly so.

We ran out of time before Simon and I could read. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood anyway but I knew people had to have their tutorials so I asked Emily if I could mail the piece to her as I really wasn’t sure whether it was the right one. She then took pity on the two of us that hadn’t read and let us run on late. Simon read his novel’s opening of his — which had impressed us all the first time he’d read it.

I read mine but found what seemed to work ok on the page tripped me up as I read it out, although I’d generally managed it ok when I practised it — mainly stumbling over tongue-twisting alliteration. A few people in the class had read this chapter but most hadn’t — including Emily — so the location and situation were new to them as well as one character. I got a few laughs as I read, which was good, but the feedback afterwards seemed to be somewhat underwhelming. People seemed to think other scenes might be better. Emily said it was a good scene — very visual — but perhaps I should use something about when James and Kim go on a bender together — had I written that yet?

I came back home in a pretty foul mood. I think Emily had a good point about the choice of scene — I want something that features both my main characters — but I brooded over whether that meant I’d not yet written anything good enough to read out yet. The readings had also shown me how much progress other people were making on the course and made me think that somehow I was regressing. Almost as soon as I got home I went upstairs to bed and wouldn’t talk to anyone.

So I wasn’t in too much of a hopeful mood to set down writing for the tutorial the day afterwards — but nothing focuses me like a deadline. I wrote most of a first draft on Thursday night — about 2,000 words — then got up at 6am and added another 500 or so — and I added in the 300 I’d previously done. By 10am — when I Skype’d my MSc supervisor, I’d got a first draft of 2,800. I printed it out and made many corrections on hard copy then revised in Word. I then printed it out again, read it out loud, and did a further revision. By 3.45pm I was able to e-mail it off to Alison.

I was very pleased to have been able to write so quickly although in retrospect I think the piece is flawed by a few misjudgements about plot and tone more than there are problems with the writing. I ran the risk of planting issues in Alison’s mind before she read it by asking ‘is it too melodramatic?’, ‘are the main characters sympathetic?’, ‘is the balance between humour and dramatic action ok? ‘.  Some of the description is a bit clunky but what can I expect?

Part of the reason why I feel happier with the writing is that it’s moved back into a situation where I’m very at home — a pub. Kim works at a pub that I’ve based very closely on a spit-and-sawdust boozer in Hoxton that I’ve visited a few times, the last being a couple of months ago. I’ve tried to describe the varied clientele and the down-at-heel ambience. Before Kim goes in to work she winds James up by telling him he’ll be unwelcome if he looks like ‘a City arsehole’. He then asks her if it’s the Blind Beggar that she’s taking him to. This, unknown to Kim, is a pub notorious for its connections to the Kray twins (it’s also where the Salvation Army started, which is ironic for a novel about a pub) — click on the link to find out more.

This immediately made me think about how the Krays and their associates are such an ingrained part of popular folklore — but something that’s probably not very well-known to people who’ve only been in the country for the last few years. Even though the events were 45 years ago and these people were in reality unpleasant, violent criminals, the exotic names of some of the players in the Kray story have entered a collective cultural consciousness — Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie is my favourite but also ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser and ‘Nipper of the Yard’ (though he was on the good side).

In a section that no-one but me will probably like, but that cheered me up writing it no end, James reels off these bizarre nicknames to Kim, who is utterly bewildered. It also brings to mind the brilliant ‘Cockney Wanker’ cartoons in Viz which features some hideous East End boozer — which has two framed portraits on the wall — one of Winston Churchill and the other of Hitler.

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Sunlight at the End of the Tunnel?

Just as the weather has started to turn after the greyest, most miserable winter, I’ve been struck down by a horribly persistent virus that I thought a week ago was a cold but now I’m wondering if it might be some sort of flu. I’ve managed to drag myself into City University three times in eight days – two Wednesdays and a Saturday for my reading — but was certainly unfit for work duty between Friday and yesterday (Wednesday).

What’s most depressing is that the virus seems to be tapping my energy to write stuff. I did the piece of Kim’s hometown when I was coming down with it but have only done another 500 words since then. It’s been well over 10 days since I was able to get out for a run — and the weather for it is fantastic now compared with a week or two ago. I’m hoping I can get out and run tomorrow — I don’t always use the time to think about writing but sometimes it gives me a good opportunity to think these through. It also generates the various endorphins and dopamines (or whatever) that make me feel invigorated to get stuck in to things. (Incidentally I had James do a bit of internal monologue about hormones or other body produced chemicals involved in physical attraction. When I read this out on Saturday at City it caused a bit of debate. I didn’t have chance to say that I deliberately wrote it to show his confusion — not sure if that actually worked — but I originally started off from the premise that he’d be fantasising about touching Emma in a way that would set  off her oxytocin level — the human-bonding hormone or whatever it is.)

To try and impress the joys of spring, here’s a photo of the grass verge outside our house. I planted it a few years ago with crocuses and have added snowdrops in the green over the last couple of years. It looks wonderful when the sun is out on days like these. Soon the snowdrops will go over but hopefully they’ll come back stronger next year. (I’ve ordered another 100 to add to them.) This is quite an unselfish flower display as we can’t see it from the house — the main benefit is to people walking by — some of whom repay the compliment by letting their dogs crap on the grass.

Spring 2010 -- At Last
Spring 2010 -- At Last

This morning I had a tutorial with my Open University MSc. dissertation supervisor — Dr Lucia Rapanotti — who I discovered, is a real Italian. It was the first time I’d used Skype and, quite bizarrely, when I put the webcam on it inherited the settings that had been last used by my children — which included the image manipulation software that doctors the image in supposed funny ways. I couldn’t find a way to turn it off so throughout my tutorial, my supervisor saw my image with huge cartoon horse ears attached to my head! Talk about making a good first impression.

The MSc. work is hopefully part of a plan that will allow me to develop a specialism in an area of IT (IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture) which could lead to some opportunities to write and do consultancy. If I’m successful then this would fit reasonably well with doing creative writing as well — write the technical stuff to pay the bills and try and hammer out as much creative stuff as I can until the point where I might be able to ditch the more boring stuff. Still, I’ve not proved I can make any money from either yet so I need to do a lot of work to get to a point where I might. That’s why it’s pretty frustrating to be laid up ill — so much to read and write and the clock’s ticking.