Eileen Wakes and it is Saturday

(Another Port Brokeferry piece... the first one properly for Saturday. I am off to be a writer for three days, or to let people believe that I am a writer. More later.)

EILEEN WAKES SWEARING AGAIN

‘Shit!’

The clock by her bed tells her she is late. Not by much, but late all the same. She gets to her feet and is stumbling towards the door before she notices that things are different. It is not her bedroom she is in and where the door should be there is only wall. Then she remembers where she is. And then she remembers she is late.

‘Shit! Shit and double shit!’

At the same instant Eileen is suddenly aware that she is naked and aware too that Magnus is climbing out of sleep.

‘I’m late!’ she says, like he could do something about it.

At first Magnus too does not know where he is. Knows only that he is being jerked out of sleep and a girl is swearing in his bedroom and he does not know why that is. Then he does.

Eileen is on her knees collecting her clothes together. ‘I promised Guthrie,’ she says. ‘I bloody promised him.’

‘It’s Saturday,’ says Magnus.

She stands then, her clothes all rolled into a single bundle, and she is still naked and not hiding it. She looks at him as though he might have said something cruel to her, her eyes narrow and her lips pursed as though she cannot believe what he has just said.

‘It’s Saturday,’ he says again and he makes no move to get up.

‘Bastard,’ she says. Then she rushes into the bathroom and shuts the door and slides the bolt home with a sharp snap.

He can hear her through the door. She is still swearing against the time.

Magnus, tempted though he is to slip back into sleep, gets up. The curtains are open and already the day seems brighter than all the days behind him. Saturdays are always brighter, he thinks, but today must be the brightest of all. He feels good about himself, feels good about Eileen swearing in his bathroom. He pulls on some shorts and makes his way through to the kitchen. He fills the kettle, decides it is too full, empties some out, and puts it on to boil. Then he switches on the radio, filling the room with music.

When she appears he has made her coffee and buttered toast. He has it all laid out nice on the table. If he’d thought, if he’d planned it, there would have been a flower in a glass of clear water and a napkin by her plate. She is dressed in yesterday’s clothes and her hair is tied back from her face. She is not wearing make-up and there’s a smear of toothpaste at the corner of her mouth. She sees what he has done, the toast and the coffee.

‘I’m fucking late,’ she says.

He looks at her and does not know what he has done wrong.

‘It’s Saturday,’ he says again and in case she hasn't realised.

She turns to go and is almost gone when she stops. She retraces her steps, back to the kitchen where he is.

‘I had a great time last night,’ she says.

He almost admits that he did too, but he holds his tongue, not sure that saying something would be the right thing.

‘Sorry about this. It’s just that I’m late. I’ll see you later, ok?’

He leaves a space in the air. She leaves one, too.

Then, ‘It’s Saturday,’ he says. ‘And already it’s the best fucking Saturday ever.’

She leans into him and kisses him. Takes the ticking-time for kissing.

Magnus tastes her toothpast after she has gone and thinks that all Saturdays should taste the same.

The Start of Saturday in PB

(This is the first piece from Saturday in Port Brokeferry. The first piece for each new day is always an 'official' document that adds to the history of the place, and the geography, and the character, so that the place has a dimension that reaches beyond the characters already 'living' through their stories. I think some readers may recognise the feel of this report... I hope so.)

DOUGLAS’ PRAYER CELL

Just out of the village, at the northern end, there is a rising footpath that takes you to the edge of red sandstone cliffs where sea birds nest in small numbers and the ground is carpeted with pink campion and scurvy grass. Thrift grows there too, sometimes called Heugh Daisy and in gaelic, neoinean cladaich, which means ‘shore daisy’. This sea pink variety of Thrift was sometime past used to make baskets, the stems of the plant woven together when freshly cut and the baskets used to carry caught fish and lobster and crab. The ground roots of the same plant were sometimes worn around the neck in a bag as a cure for tiredness and malaise suffered by children after a shock.

About a mile from Port Brokeferry, to where the path peters out and the going is much rougher, there is a point called Crianfaich. The reason for the name is not given in any local guidebook, nor is there any obvious translation. It is here that, by a circuitous and at times perilous downwards route, we can approach the entrance to Douglas’ Prayer Cell. There is a need for ropes and climbing gear.

It is very like another cave we have investigated somewhere on the coast of Wales. It was perhaps once a natural cave, the result of wind and high seas cutting into the red stone and finding a point of weakness, but at some time in the not too distant past it has been extended through the use of picks and chisels so that it now forms a chamber some fourteen feet square. The walls remain rough and here and there the words of prayers have been crudely cut into the stone. In places time has erased some of the words of these prayers and elsewhere a black moss that bleeds red when squeezed has begun to cover some of what has been written.

In the centre of the chamber is a small circular altar made of dressed stone and raised up on a platform of three steps. The bottom step is worn so that the stone seems to sag in the middle, giving rise to the idea that someone had spent long years kneeling in front of this altar.

Along one wall and cut from the natural stone is a shelf wide enough and long for a man to stretch out on. There are no further clues as to the chamber’s use or to how it comes to have the name ‘Douglas’ Prayer cell’.

Photographs of the stone-cut words have been logged under reference numbers 15-21 PBDouglas2002. Photographs of the altar and the route to the cave have been logged under reference numbers 22-44 PBDouglas2002.

Locally, little is known about the cave. An older inhabitant of the village talks of a minister called Douglas who lost his wits on account of a blow to the head he suffered. The Balfour Bell that is still used to call children to their lessons and has done so for more than a hundred years, is linked somehow to this accident against the minister. It is said that he was afterwards removed from his position in the church but that he continued to live in Port Brokeferry till his death, disappearing for days at a time, weeks even, and returning very much thinner than he was and unable to speak he was so chilled.

A preliminary search of local historical documents fails to confirm any of this tale, beyond the existence of The Balfour Bell which is indeed used to announce the start of school each day.

(In March 2002 a television research crew spent three nights at The Victoria Hotel in Port Brokeferry. They were in search of stories of interest for a series of programmes that examined the natural and social history of Britain’s coast. This excerpt is from a copy of the report that was filed. The cave in Wales that is referred to in the report was thought to hold more interest – there was an old poem that made reference to the Welsh cave and the descent to that cave was more dramatic, being only able to be reached when the tide was low – and so Douglas’ Prayer Cell did not feature as an item on that episode of the programme that looked at the North-west coast of Scotland.)

The Last Friday Piece From Port Brokeferry

(Next week I am off to an Arts Festival to deliver five events over three days... my head is spinning at the thought. Here's the final Friday piece from PB... then just Saturday and Sunday to complete the project.)

ONCE MORE ROUND THE GREEN

Athol Stuart walked once more round the green. It was late and he was tired. He picked up two empty beer bottles and dropped them into a bin. There were lights on in some of the trailers, but mostly it was dark and only the faintest sound of music coming from somewhere, maybe a radio playing.

The night had gone off peacefully enough, he thought. No drunk Dodie Bredwell to quieten and no Lachlan Davie either. Martin had reported that Lachlan had gone home early and he’d walked straight and with his head down. There was no report on Dodie, though Athol Stuart had seen him leave ‘The Ship’ with Alice Greyling, walking together and no space between them. He’d noted the raised eyebrows of men at the bar. Dodie and Alice – it made sense only now that he thought about it.

Berlie’s had shut on time and the crowds had been quick to clear. He’d seen Grace and that boy Kelso standing together, like they were dancing, her head on his shoulder and a boy and a girl holding onto each other.

‘There’s no need for you to worry, Mr Stuart,’ Grace had said. Didn’t stop him worrying though. He watched them kiss and then she broke from him and walked back along the street, looking over shoulder every few steps to see if he was still there and still looking. The boy did not go into his trailer until Grace had gone into her house.

Once around the green, then to the end of the street and back, and all being well he’d turn in, he thought. It would be a busier day tomorrow. There had been some new arrivals in Port Brokeferry and more were expected on the Saturday. Most of the cottages at the front had filled up and Struan Courtald had said the hotel was busy, and he’d rubbed his hands when he’d said it.

Busy at ‘The Bobbing Boat’, too. Athol Stuart had seen the tables outside the café fill up even though the day was dull and a cool wind had lifted off the sea. People in coats, determined to be in the open air, sat hunched over cups of hot chocolate, wearing smiles that might have been described as stubborn. Eileen was rushed off her feet, he had seen that. And Guthrie, too. There was a visitor to the village that Athol Stuart thought he recognised, someone from way back, maybe. She was with Guthrie at the end of the day, the lights out in ‘The Bobbing Boat’ and the tables and chairs cleared into the shop. He wondered if that meant anything.

He passed old Tom’s house and went in to check on the door. It was locked. He looked across at Lillian’s. The house was in darkness. He took from that there had been no news. ‘No news is good news,’ he said to himself, though he did not always believe that was true.

At ‘The Ship’ end of the street everything was quiet. As quiet as it ever is with the wind rattling the cables on the boats, making a sound like small bells always ringing, and the sea shushing and shushing and Athol Stuart’s slow steps as he turned and made his way back.

He saw ahead a dark figure coming towards him, weaving a crooked path, moving into the brighter yellow pools of the streetlights and then moving out of them again. His shirt was not tucked into his trousers and he was carrying his shoes like he didn’t want to make a sound. Athol Stuart stopped. He watched the man turn into one of the cottages, watched him searching his pockets until he found his keys. Then he waited for the man to go inside. It was Kyle Downs and Athol Stuart knew there was trouble there. He shook his head and thought it was a shame for Susan Downs and a shame for her daughter, Corinne.

Athol Stuart stopped outside Martin's house. He leaned towards the door and he listened. Everything was as it should be, so he turned into his own house and left the street behind him.

Another Friday PB piece

(Yet another Friday night piece from Port Brokeferry)

BUSINESS AT BERLIE’S

Thursday night at Berlie’s many of the rides had been free, at least to start with. Thursday night was always the same, first Thursday of the run. It was about announcing the arrival of the fair. The rides were a little longer and sometimes ran with only three or four people on them. And being the first night, the smiles of those working the stalls were a lot brighter. Making a splash is what Thursday was about, so that Berlie’s would be the talk of everyone’s Friday and that would bring them back in numbers to Berlie’s at the end of the working week.

Friday night was different. It was about making money now. There was a new zeal in the stall-holders as they urged the people of Port Brokeferry to spend spend spend, with the promise of prizes that only ever looked good at the fair where the lights were bright and the music loud. And Friday-night rides did not run until they were full, all the cars filled to bursting and ‘one more in here’ the boy with the leather satchel across his shoulder called.

Kelso was working the dodgems. Looked like he was dancing the way that he moved between the cars, skipping from the bonnet of one to the other. Girls called to him and waved when he turned their way. He flicked his hair from his face – they liked that – and he made jokes with them, and steered their cars into the paths of others, skipping away at the last minute before the girl-scream collisions.

Some cars got stuck. They’d turned the wheel too far in the one direction and could not work out how to get the car out of the jam they were in. Kelso kept a look out for them, then hop-scotched his way to the stuck car and twisted the wheel with an easy expertise, as if by magic setting the car back on course. The boys scowled at Kelso’s superior skill; the girls flirted with him and they called him sweetheart and touched his hand, pretending it had been by accident, and laughing too loud when they did. That was how it was in every place they stopped, how it had been with Evelyn, a whole year back.

They came drunk to Berlie’s some nights, girls in groups with too short skirts and too much make up. Ended up without their clothes, some of them, in the dark of one of the trailers, waking to what they had done and regretting it mostly. Kelso had regretted it too, sometimes. Evelyn was one of those times. They’d got carried away. He’d been drunk, and that explained the tattoo on her arm. He’d forgotten that he’d done it.

‘I thought it meant something,’ she’d said in the street.

It hadn’t. Not with any of them. Just part of the way things were. Except then there was Grace. That was different. He couldn’t really say how it was different, except that he had thought about her for a year. Maybe it was all tied up with the growing sense in him, that he wanted more than the merry-go-round of Berlie’s, but alone in the dark of his trailer he had spun stories of how life could be better and in all those stories he was standing hand-in-hand with Grace.

Then Evelyn said she thought his name scratched under the skin of her arm meant something.

‘Over here, Kelso, over here.’

Two girls in matching jean jackets and white skirts and white shoes, called to him, blew kisses for him to catch and laughed as their car turned away from him.

‘I was drunk,’ he’d told her when she came to his trailer late on Thursday. The lights of the fair were out and Grace had gone home. The air in his trailer smelled of her, the smell of Grace mixed in with the smell of oil and cooked meat and cigarette smoke. ‘We were both drunk,’ he said.

‘Fuck,’ said Evelyn. She was crying. ‘I’ve been wearing your name on my arm for a whole bloody year and all you can say is we were drunk!’

He wanted to say he was sorry. It wouldn’t help, he understood that, but he still wanted to say it. Instead he shrugged his shoulders, as he had done when they’d met in the street earlier. It wasn’t what he wanted for her, but maybe it was easier than telling her about Grace.

She called him heartless and bastard and cunt and she kicked things over in his trailer, broke things. He didn’t stop her. She deserved that.

Kelso helped the two girls in jean jackets climb out of their car at the end of the ride. He could see their pants as they lifted their legs over the side of the car. One of the girls squeezed his hand as she stepped unsteadily on to the flat surface of the dodgem floor. He smiled and let go of her hand.

It was different now.

Friday night in PB

(Here's another Port Brokeferry flash.)

AN ODD FRIDAY NIGHT AT ‘THE SHIP’

They’d gone for a drink after work. Like it was something they always did. Twice in the one week and already it felt familiar to them both. And just as eyebrows had been raised in the staffroom when neither of them had turned up for lunch, so in ‘The Ship’ they were raised when Dodie Bredwell did not take up his usual seat.

They sat at a table in the corner, removed from the rest, and the air in the bar felt thinner than usual and quieter too. There was something out of the usual about that Friday night and there were men in ‘The Ship’ who did not know where to look or did not know how they should be with Dodie Bredwell’s stories out of hearing for the first Friday that they could remember.

It was an odd Friday night in ‘The Ship’, and no mistake. Of course, the fair was in and that always made a difference, but it was more than that. Definitely odd. No escaping it. Guthrie did not meet with Magnus for a game of chess. The board was set up in the usual place and the men in ‘The Ship’ kept looking to the empty chairs as if they knew something was missing but could not say what.

And Lachlan Davie did not look up when Christine was at the bar, stared instead into the froth of his beer, as if there might be a message for him written there. And Christine said him good evening, all smiles in her words. ‘Good evening, Lachlan.’ And in the saying of his name there was more than just ‘good evening,’ but Lachlan pretended not to hear. Christine left the bar without drinking the glass of gin and lemon that she had ordered and paid for.

And Kyle was in only briefly. Leaned across the bar so no-one else could hear and asked for vodka by the bottle. He paid and left without speaking to another soul. There was a mark on his neck, like a bruise, like he was a teenager again and maybe there was a new girl in his arms when he went out into the dark.

And Evelyn, drinking alone and drinking hard, like she was washing away who she was, and she looked as though she had been crying, and she did not speak to the man who sat down beside her, not a single word, so that after five minutes of trying the young man gave up and moved to another table and another girl who could be charmed.

But oddest of all was Alice. Never seen in ‘The Ship’ before this week, and there she was again. Alice and Dodie Bredwell, the two of them turned in on themselves like they had secrets to share.

The barman brought their drinks to the table, carried them through on a small tin tray, and that raised eyebrows, too. He’d thought about draping a white tablecloth over his arm like he was a waiter in a posh restaurant. A bottle of white wine they’d asked for. Picked it from the wine menu that was hidden behind the bar, the plastic leather-look cover sticky with spilled coke. The barman served the wine in a bucket of broken ice and set two long-stemmed glasses down in front of them. Dodie Bredwell only ever drank beer, so that wine was odd, too.

‘He calls her Alley-cat,’ said the barman when he returned to the bar and the men there already deep in their drinks and confused that there was more noise outside than there was inside in their Friday night ‘Ship’. ‘And he keeps touching her, like he’s checking that she’s real.’ The men nodded then, as if they suddenly understood, and they winked and grinned at each other and clinked their glasses together as if toasting some event of small importance. ‘And she calls him Toadie. All these years and he has names for us all, names we were never born to, and he was just Dodie Bredwell with his own seat at ‘The Ship’ and Fridays and Saturdays he holds court here like he owns the place. And she calls him Toadie.’

There was laughter then, sounding louder than it was in the unusual quiet of 'The Ship' on a Friday night, but the laughter did not draw Dodie Bredwell's attention away from Alice Greyling, from the woman he called Alley-cat. She was talking, her hands making bird-like movements in the air like she was performing a spell, and all she was doing was telling him the stories of her life; and he was listening, the man that used to be Dodie Bredwell was listening, and maybe that was the oddest thing of all.

Angry - Not Me

THE SOURCES OF YOUR IDEAS

How should a writer of fiction credit the source of his ideas, given that all ideas have their source somewhere?

In academic works it is customary to credit sources in a bibliography at the end of the work, or in footnotes at the bottom of each page or tagged on as an appendix. Those are the ‘club rules’ for that type of writing. But for fiction the issue is very much more complex, not just because ideas come at us from all over the place, but also because there are times when we do not even know that an idea we have has its source in something specific.

There is an excellent book called ‘The Road to Xanadu: A study in the ways of the imagination’ by John Livingston Lowes. It basically goes to enormous length to dissect Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of The Ancient Mariner’ and to show the sources of Coleridge’s ideas in the poem. Coleridge read voraciously, sucking in everything he read, digesting it, feeding his creative sub-conscious so that when he wrote the poem what he wrote was informed by everything he had read even when Coleridge himself was not always aware of how much his reading influenced what he wrote. At over six hundred pages long, this text by J L Lowes is an excellent illustration of how it would be close to impossible and patently absurd for fiction writers to credit the sources of all their ideas in the way that academics do. All creative ideas have their source in something else. An imagination needs fed before it can begin to work and what feeds it is everything, including everything seen or read or heard. As a result a writer does not always know where his/her idea comes from. Crediting creative ideas in the way that academics credit their ideas (and the way that J L Lowes has done for Coleridge) doesn’t make any real sense…unless you have a very specific interest in researching or knowing this aspect of a work. It is certainly not what the average fiction reader wants to trawl through – over 600 pages of footnotes for a single poem – unless the fiction reader has a very particular interest in how the imagination of a particular writer works.

If a writer was to contemplate crediting every thought and idea that fed into the writing of a novel, he would never be done, especially if he were a writer who was thorough in his self-reflection. So what does a writer do? Yann Martell acknowledged the spark for his novel ‘Life of Pi’ in a foreword. I thought that was a generous and honest thing to have done, but the anger of the ‘plagiarism police’ was not assuaged, rather it was fed; and I am certain that there were many other ideas in ‘Life of Pi’ that had their genesis in something else that Martell read and are not credited in the same foreword. I, myself, have never tried to hide the ‘sparks’ for my own works, whenever I have been aware of them, and I have taken flack for two of my stories because they have their source in something else and I have not tried to hide their source. I am not here whinging about that flack, but I do believe that those who have been angriest and loudest in attacking me, have not got a sure grasp of how the imagination works, how creativity works, or of what constitutes plagiarism.

Visual artists allow themselves to be influenced by the works of other artists. It is accepted that artists do that. Film-makers do it, too. It is done because that is how creativity works. Shakespeare recycled the plot of 'Romeo and Juliet' and wrote his own words into the poetry of his play and came up with something that was better than all its sources and was 'his own'. Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' clearly has many sources including Boccaccio's 'Decameron' and the poetry of Petrarch and Dante, and the work of Ovid and The Bible. We are here talking about two of the giants of English Literature and how their imaginations worked, responding to written works that already existed in their world. If writers today were honest, they would admit that they do not create in a vacuum and that the ideas they have do not come out of nothing, but instead come out of everything that they have seen, heard, read. Writers should be allowed to do this, otherwise how could they really function? As to crediting their sources by attaching something to the created work for every idea, that doesn't really make sense when 'everything' has a source elsewhere (even if the sometimes the source is somewhat oblique).

Just Another One

(Another Friday piece from Port Brokeferry.)

CALLUM KNOCKING ON DOORS

There was no-one to mind the bakery, so it was later than he’d planned when he shut the shop long enough he could call on Susan Downs with a bag of rolls and some ring doughnuts.

She did not answer the door to his first knock, and though the house was quiet he knew she was in. Some small movement in the house and a smaller noise told him she was there and that she had heard. He knocked again and called her name, loud enough that it was noticed by others in the street.

Callum could almost hear her behind the door, hesitating, her held breath and her hope that he would go away. Weighing up the ‘should she’ or ‘shouldn’t she’, he could hear that, too. He called her name again, without knocking this time. ‘It’s Callum,’ he said.

Susan opened the door. Not wide, but enough that he could see he had woken her from sleep and that she was dressed the same as she had been when he had looked through her window early.

Callum held out the two paper bags. ‘Just a little something,’ he said. ‘Left overs really. Margaret says I’ve not to be bringing home any more doughnuts or she’ll not be fitting through the front door without I’d have to widen it.’

Susan tried a smile. It did not really fit.

‘And so I thought of you, and of Corinne. Just a little something to cheer you both, you know.’

And Susan Downs did know. She said that was kind of Callum. She said it was really kind, and they both understood all that was not said between them.

He knocked on Lillian’s door, too, on his way back to the bakery. But she was still at old Tom’s, so when he knocked again and then a third time, there was no answer.

Then, before returning to the shop, he called on Sinnie. She had not been in that day and Callum wondered why that was. Wasn’t she in the shop every day, mornings mostly, for scones or cakes, and a granary loaf every second day?

‘I was just worried at not having seen you today, Sinnie,’ he said when she opened the front window and stuck her head out to see who it was. ‘Just wanted to make sure everything was alright with you.’

Sinnie nodded. ‘Fine,’ she said. And she looked across at the Victoria Hotel as if she was expecting to see someone there. Callum waited for her to say something more. She didn’t. She stayed at the window, her gaze fixed on the entrance to the hotel.

‘Only you seem away in a dream today, Sinnie.’

Sinnie looked at Callum, and it was as though she did not immediately recognise him.

‘I said you seem as though you are away in a dream today, Sinnie.’

She nodded. ‘Dreaming about owls again, and flying on the back of a giant owl, and I was without my clothes. I have written it all down. And the owl is maybe Struan Courtald. Wears a waistcoat the same and the silver buttons all done up. And he said something to me. The owl in the dream.’

Then she was quiet again.

Callum looked away along the street. He could see someone looking in at the bakery shop window.

‘Would you be after a granary loaf, Sinnie? I could drop one in on my way home at the end of the day, if you like.’

Sinnie looked across to the Victoria Hotel again.

Callum edged backwards along the path. He said he would do that, he'd pop in with a granary loaf for her. She did not answer. He shut the garden gate behind him and waved over his shoulder in case she was looking, and hurried back to the bakery and a customer who wanted doughnuts but settled for a slice of carrot cake and a jam tart in a silver foil case.

Back To Work

(Wrote two stories before going back to work yesterday... yes back to work... summer's over... but today it is warm again and the sun is shining and my sunflowers in the garden are sunny-faced. Hey ho! Carrying on with Friday in Port Brokeferry, here's another piece...)

A PATTERN TO ROSE’S DAYS

It was only the second day, but already Rose felt that something like a pattern was emerging, her days finding themselves mapped out and ordered the same. She’d risen early again and, though the sun had not risen with her, she’d watched the day shift towards something brighter than it was. The air was cooler she felt, but she’d sat the same as before, a chair dragged over to the back door and the door open so that the wind blowing off the sea was in her face. She tasted salt when she licked her lips.

Rose nursed a cup of black unsweetened coffee, holding the cup in her two hands and the cup held close to her face, so close she could feel the warmth brushing against her skin. She remembered as a child, how her mother would lay one palm soft against the side of Rose’s face, soft and warm. And she whispered in Rose’s ear, her lips close enough the words were like kisses. And it was a list that she whispered, a list of all the good things in their world: pancakes with maple syrup; Saturday mornings and three of them in the one bed with the curtains open; sand-castles with paper flags on sticks stuck into the towers; ladybirds on the ends of their fingers; the sound of bees trying to find a way through the shut glass of their kitchen window; money under the pillow and the broken milk-tooth gone; drinking banana flavoured shakes through a straw and the milk so cold it made your head hurt when you finished it too quickly.

Beside her on the kitchen table was the open notebook Rose had begun writing in, and an uncapped fountain pen laid on top: an invitation to writing. She picked up the pen and began again. Small pieces she wrote. Like snapshots of her day, the people in it and the place where she was. Postcards to herself, it felt like. Postcards from Port Brokeferry, she thought, and she wrote those words as a title on the front of the book.

She did not notice how cold it was, working without break well into the morning. It was a knock at the door that interrupted her. She considered ignoring it, but when the knocking sounded a second time, she set down her pen and went to see who was calling on her.

It was the postman. He cleared his throat and then read the name that was written on the front of an envelope he was carrying. It was Rose’s name.

‘That’s me,’ she said.

He held the letter out for her to take.

It was from her sister. Must have been sent the day that Rose left. It was brief, saying nothing that Carrie had not said at the station as part of her goodbyes. But wrapped inside the single page of the letter was a black and white photograph that Rose recognised, though she had not seen it in years. It was from their time in Port Brokeferry, when they were children. They were on the sand, her mother and Carrie and Rose, three smiles and eyes narrowed against the brightness of that day, and suncream or ice-cream on Carrie’s nose and a grey shadow on her mother’s cheek. And just creeping into the picture, there where the scissors had cut, was the arm of a man, his hand empty, looking for someone’s fingers to hold. Rose did not remember his name, just that they called him ‘Uncle’ and he was one of the good things in their world once, his name something her mother whispered in Rose’s ear. She turned the picture over and written on the back, in pencil that had worn thin as smoke trails, was Rose’s name and Carrie’s and her mother’s name, Sylvia, and Uncle B. Nothing after that ‘B’, the rest cut from the photograph and cut from Rose’s memory.

After a snack lunch, sitting by herself at the kitchen table, Rose spent the afternoon typing up what she had written in her notebook. She had the radio on turned low and a glass of red wine to hand.

In the evening she walked the length of the beach and back again, filling up the time till bed, the sound of the fair hanging over everything in Port Brokeferry. And Rose tried to catch once more the whispered good things that her mother kissed into her ear, all those years ago, Rose straining to hear again the name that she had forgot.

KERRY IN PB

(Quickly posting another Port Brokeferry piece here to make up for the few days when I didn't.)

KERRY’S FREE PASS

The afternoon was no better than the morning, the sea all whipped up and the sky smudged grey. Nevertheless, Kerry took herself down to the harbour and ‘The Silver Herring’ with its sign saying there’d be no sailings today on account of the weather.

‘Have you seen Col? Have you seen him today?’

Mad Martin was pretending to be one of the stone fishermen, his hand to his brow flat like a salute, shading his eyes as though it was sunny or bright and looking out to sea.

Kerry shook her head and said that she was sorry but she had not seen Col.

‘There’s no sailings today, Kerry. That’s what Finn says. No sailings. Finn is brave but the passengers would not pay to be sick.’

Kerry thanked Mad Martin and made her way towards the boat and its rising and falling walkway. Bran was there polishing the brass fittings. It was one of the jobs that needed doing since the boat could not go out. He stopped what he was about when he saw Kerry, and he took her outstretched hand to help bring her aboard.

‘No sailings today,’ he said. ‘Seals will have to manage without us for once.’

Kerry smiled at him. ‘Yes, Bran, they will,’ she said.

‘Is it Edwin you’re after?’ Bran said. ‘He’s down in the engine room. Something about shafts and pins and oil. I’ll take you down if you like.’

Kerry pushed her windblown hair back from her face. ‘Thank you, Bran, but I know where the engine room is. I’ll not keep you from making ‘The Silver Herring’ shine again.’

Edwin was black like the day when she found him stripped to his vest and smeared with oily fingermarks on his arms and his face. The only thing bright about him was his smile and even that slipped a little when he saw it was Kerry.

‘Sorry about your Ward,’ he said. ‘Helen told me. I knew something was up, you not being with us to visit the seals several days in a row. That’s what I said to Helen, something’s up. But I never reckoned on that. I’m sorry, Kerry, for the loss I mean.’

Kerry did not nod or smile or speak. Not for several minutes. Like they were observing a respectful silence on account of Ward’s passing. Edwin, too, kept his peace, waiting for her to say why she was there.

The boat, even in the shelter of the harbour, moved awkwardly about them, the floor seeming to ripple, the walls titling towards them and then away from them again, a little.

‘That’s what brings me here really, Edwin. Only things will be different now that he’s gone from this world. Not so easy for me as it has been. All he had and all that he was belongs to someone else. So I am after looking for some work. Just to pay my way, you understand, the small bills that look bigger and bigger when there’s no money coming in. And I was thinking then about what I could do. And I thought maybe there was some help I could be here on ‘The Silver Herring’.

Edwin sucked in air, his lips pursed like he was drinking through a straw. Times were hard and he’d taken on Bran when he could least afford it. He scratched at his head like it was a real puzzle that Kerry had set him.

‘To be honest, there’s not much money in boat trips these days, not unless the sun makes a summer for us. Not much at all. And next to nothing when the season is over. I can’t see that I could give you much to do, Kerry.’

She said she understood.

Then a thought occurred to him, appearing out of nowhere it seemed, appearing as thoughts can do, suddenly and a surprise to Edwin. Magnus had been at him again about his books. Receipts needed filing and figures written down and made to balance. He said to Magnus that he’d get round to it, but truth was he was not much one for paperwork.

‘The books need seeing to,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t pay enough to feed a pup, but if it might help? And I can throw in a free pass for trips out to The Snag, a whole year of free trips, seeing as how you have been such a regular of mine. The work’s mostly filing and making figures add up. Magnus at the bank does the final balancing. When that’s done we can see how things are. Just if you like.’

‘Have you seen Col, today?’ Mad Martin called to her as she walked away from the harbour. ‘Have you seen him?’

Kerry waved and laughed, and her laughter was blown ahead of her into the street.

Yet More From PB

(It's strange having the two summer projects finished... my head feels empty and the thoughts rattle there. I have a few story ideas and an idea for a screenplay... but I am so tired from the two summer projects that I think I need a break... back to the day job on Wednesday! Here's another Port Brokeferry piece.)

MOIRA HAS SOMETHING TO TELL GUTHRIE

She was dressed, her hair brushed and her make-up on, dressed like she was expecting someone or going somewhere. She’d smoothed up the covers on her bed and thrown the window wide to let in the sea-air and the sounds.

She was crying. No sound, but tears wet on her cheek and in the cup of her hands held palms up in her lap. There was a pain in her. The doctors had warned her to expect as much. She’d been given tablets to take the edge off. The strongest they could prescribe. She was to take them as and when she needed them. Today she had not wanted to so she hadn’t. She sat in the one chair next to the small writing desk and suffered the pain.

‘Guthrie,’ she said.

There was no reason for saying his name, except that she was thinking of him more these days. He hadn’t changed. Not really. He was older of course, his waist a little thicker and his hair a little thinner and grey at the sides. But he was still the same man, inside he was.

They’d sat together in ‘The Bobbing Boat’ with the door locked and the lights out, only the yellow of the street spilling in through the café window and turning to dull gold the table between them, and the cups and the spoons in their saucers.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ he’d said. ‘You look just the same.’

It was not what he wanted to say. He never did put into words what was in his head. If he had, years back, things might have been different. She wasn’t sure if she’d have wanted that, things being different. She’d have stayed if Guthrie had asked her. And maybe that’s what she had wanted, that he ask her. He’d wanted her to stay, she knew that. Way back then she’d known it. But the words were never spoken and so she had slept with the new teacher and then left. Now she was back and Guthrie was telling her she looked the same when it wasn’t true and when he really wanted to ask her why she was sitting there with him in the near dark of ‘The Bobbing Boat’ at night.

‘I’ve come home,’ she’d said to him.

‘Home is where the heart is,’ he joked.

But it wasn’t a joke, not for him and not for her.

She brushed the tears from her face, and breathed in deep. The pain had passed leaving only a dull memory of where it had been. She checked that the pills were in her bag, a brown plastic bottle of them. The bottle rattled when she shook it. She got to her feet and crossed the room to beside the small sink in the corner, a short blue pleated curtain masking it from the bed. She ran the tap till the water was cold, filled the glass tumbler and drank it off in a single draught. It tasted like water she had drunk as a child. She looked at herself in the mirror. Pinched her cheeks pink and smiled at her reflection.

‘Guthrie,’ she said again.

In the yellow dark of ‘The Bobbing Boat’ she’d reached one hand across the table and taken Guthrie’s hand in hers. It was what he’d wanted to do, what they’d done years back, when they were kids and Guthrie’s father ran the café.

‘Home is where the heart is,’ she’d said and she’d bent her head to kiss the back of Guthrie’s hand and he was not laughing any more.

'There's something I have to tell you, Guthrie,' she'd wanted to say, but her words, like Guthrie's words, were not spoken then.

STANLEY FISH: PLAGIARISM IS NOT A BIG MORAL DEAL

WAS SHAKESPEARE A PLAGIARIST?

There’s a lot written on the internet about ‘plagiarism’. I write a lot about it. Some of it shows good insight and intelligence and some doesn’t. It is a popular practice to reference and link to articles written in newspapers as a way of supporting a point of view. I read a lot of these, the internet scribblings and the newsprint. It is a subject that interests me and one that, it seems to me, is dividing academics and writers. We seem to be moving towards a crisis in our thinking on matters related to authorship and originality and ownership.

In an article in the New York Times by an academic called Stanley Fish (Stanley Fish: Plagiarism Is Not A Big Moral Deal), he cites a personal experience of seeing a couple of his written pages appearing in a colleague’s book almost verbatim. His upset at this theft has stayed with him and has fuelled his musings on the subject of plagiarism. I can understand his upset and I think he does have a case here: his written words were used without attribution and without permission, even if the chain of that theft meant that his colleagues were more lazy than criminal.

In the same article Fish cuts through all the philosophical and intellectual debate and dwells on the accepted ‘club rules’ for what is permitted in terms of copying and attribution. He compares it to the rules of golf (and I could not help but think of the film ‘Happy Gilmore’!) Fish is talking about words for the most part, and perhaps academic ideas. In fact he says: “But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some)”. And for me there is something important here that is missed by many internet writers who appropiate the support of people like Fish for their arguments against plagiarism, and that is the distinction between copying of actual words and the using of another’s ideas especially if we are talking creative ideas.

Shakespeare’s play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is not in one sense original. The plot in its entirety existed in several forms before Shakespeare decided to use them as the basis for a play. Even a cursory look at the source material for his play will demonstrate how much Shakespeare’s play depends on its source material. But he did not, I think, use the words from the source material. Instead he wrote his own poetry. For me, this means that Shakespeare is not a plagiarist. You may want to say that he ripped off these other writers; you may even have a view on that; but what he wrote was his own – his own words – and what he did with the material was original and fresh and new, and what he produced was superior to anything that had gone before.

Someone once said flippantly of plagiarism, and rather simplistically, ‘theft is theft’. The fact that notable academics all over the world are now writing papers such as Fish’s article, and disagreeing on the many issues related to plagiarism, demonstrates one certainty: the matter of plagiarism is not one that is simple. Many of the articles I have read are to do with academic plagiarism. The free availability of information through the internet and the ease with which this can be copied and pasted and the habits of illegal downloading of music and movies through computers by young people, means that there is a crisis in our universities in this regard. But to jump from that to saying that ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martell is plagiarism because he got the idea from another written book is a frighteningly hard body-blow for creativity.

The world of literature is dominated by writers who have appropriated the ideas of other people and who have then made them their own, given them new life or a different life. The rules that Stanley Fish talks about in his article do not obviously apply to this area of ‘imitation’. If a writer pens a story about punk androids that do not know they are androids, we are not then to assume that the writer owns the idea of androids thinking they are human and not knowing the difference. Another writer can come along and write a story or film about android children that think they are real children and do not know the difference. It would be absurd for this not to be possible. The thinking of Thomas Jefferson when he and his contemporaries were examining issues of intellectual property and laws to protect innovators, allowed for this: the free movement of ideas. Stanley Fish is writing about the verbatim theft of words or the lifting of academic ideas. Setting aside the ‘sampling’ debate of the new music and the new writers (Helene Hegeman), it is easy to see that the rules that exist in copyright laws apply to this specific type of theft and it is easy to understand those ‘club rules’. But the law regarding the use of another’s creative ideas is not and cannot be so clear cut; nor can any thinking on this matter be so removed from debate about philosophy and theories of mind and an understanding of how thinking works and how creativity works.

Stanley Fish says plagiarism is a 'learned sin'; but he is referring specifically to the obvious theft of another's words. He is not here addressing the creative use of another's creative ideas. It is not just that the issues here are greyer and harder to define; it is that creativity involves an artist interacting with the world and everything in the world; ideas of the creative kind are so dependent on that interaction and on the complex way that the mind works and on the acknowledged imitative element in art and on a recognition that there is such a thing as the creative subconscious, that issues to do with overstepping the 'club rules' are not ever so clear cut or so easy. That is why copyright law stipulates that an idea may be copied - because the alternative would be detrimental to the whole development of art and literature.

Yet more thoughts about ideas

THE SPREAD OF IDEAS

Why do writers keep details of their current writing projects under wraps? Some will tell you it is because they know that other unscrupulous writers may steal their ideas and they fear this. But they often keep the details secret even from their friends, too, so they are either saying that their own friends cannot be trusted, or it is something else. Sometimes it will be because they don’t wish to lose the need to tell it through the writing by already having told it through the spoken word and I get that. But just maybe they also know a truth that is not often admitted when writers get all protective about their ideas. Read on.

I have just finished reading a very interesting article called ‘The Economy of Ideas’ by John Perry Barlow. The sub-heading for the article reads: ‘A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)’ It is articulate and intelligent and thoughtful and thought-provoking. I was put in touch with the article by a one-time librarian called Neil – thank you, Neil.

The article is apparently used in University Law courses throughout the US and it raises a lot of questions about where Copyright law is headed with the digital age upon us. Well worth a read, though it is many pages long and covers a lot of material. You can find it here (You can't just tap on the link I have highlighted. You have to copy and paste it into the bar above. I do not have the technical know-how to make it a direct link, sorry.): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html

One of the things John Perry Barlow touches on is the nature of ideas. Ideas are viral, the article says. That is their nature and that dictates the way they behave. And thinking of ideas in this way makes a lot of sense. Ideas want to spread, the good ones more than the bad (the strong more than the weak… there’s a whole evolution thing going on with ideas, too.). When my cousin was growing up, David Bowie and Marc Bolan were new and big on the scene. I favoured the Marc Bolan look… a sort of glamorised hippy… but my cousin favoured the Bowie look (all that Ziggy androgynous thingy). I did find the Bowie look interesting, but not as interesting as my cousin. And he was not alone. He and thousands of others rushed off to the hairdressers to have their hair dyed and cut a la Ziggy and he started wearing make-up and girls’ clothes. The idea was to look like Bowie and he sort of did - he was tall and as thin as sticks... but even the small and the dumpy looked a little like Bowie, too. My cousin and all those others were infected with the Ziggy virus. Only when a cure was found (a new virus fighting off the old) were the girls’ clothes consigned to the bucket, and the girls’ make-up, too.

The point is that Bowie’s idea to dress and look in a certain way was contagious. Once it was ‘out there’ the idea spread and very quickly others were using his idea. That is the way of ideas. It maybe explains, amongst other things, why we have had a rash of teen vampire books and films recently – not just the exploitative nature of those industries but the infectious nature of a successful or good idea.

I went to see ‘Inception’ the other day. I thought it was brilliant and very clever. The specials were only marginally spoiled by having been so big a part of the trailer and thereby having lost a little of their wow factor when actually seeing them in the context of the film. The guy who made the film is being hailed as a highly original mind, and there is a lot about the film that is exciting and ‘new’. But there is equally stuff we have seen before. It is like the film has been infected with ideas from elsewhere. A train suddenly driving up a city-street; an eroding cliff-face, but the cliff is made of old and decaying buildings; the military style storming of a snow-bound bunker-style fortress – all of these, I think, I have seen before… but maybe the film is being cleverer than we think… because these things in the film are part of the dream sub-conscious of one of the characters… and we would expect these ‘outside’ ideas to have infected his way of dreaming in precisely this way and maybe that is what the film-maker is showing us: that ideas creep into our head from everywhere else and we can’t help that because it is done at the level of our sub-conscious as well as our conscious thinking.

And maybe writers know this at some level, and maybe they keep the details of their new writing projects secret for fear of infecting other creative minds and those other writers then writing something that explores the same ideas, those other writers (which includes friends) being unconscious in their use of the infecting idea, or if conscious then unable to not write about the same idea because it now infects all their thinking. Ideas are viral, and their nature cannot be legislated against - UK copyright law accepts this when it says that the order of words cannot be copied, but the idea can. They spread, that is what ideas do, that is what they thrive on... they want to be copied... and the only way you can stop them spreading is through isolation - keep them entirely to yourself... because once they are out there, they are beyond control.

Back to Friday at Port Brokeferry

(At the start of the summer break I had two targets: to finish writing the first complete draft of this Port Brokeferry project and to complete the first draft of my second children's novel. I am back to the day-job work at the middle of next week... but both pieces of writing work are complete. Yay! And I wrote a few more stories as well, and a whole bunch of flashes - which are just thought exercises for me. And now? I'm pretty tired and a little sad to leave the characters in my children's novel... at least for a wee break until I get the energy to start polishing and tightening. Here's another Port Brokeferry piece to be going on with.)

A WORD WITH KYLE

Elspeth worked in the paper shop again. Kyle phoned her about twelve. A big favour, he said. Promised to make it up to her. Just a few hours, he said. Maybe less. She agreed. It was easy enough work, the early afternoon shift. Kyle sounded like the old Kyle, she thought.

Then, in the time it took her to walk to the shop, she’d thought things over.

‘What’s this all about, Kyle?’ she said, and her voice was sharp and the words clipped.

He looked away from her. But he could not hide what was in his head. Elspeth had seen this before. Just the same. And she knew the trouble that was in front of him.

‘Who is it?’ she said, and she mentally began running through the names of the girls it could be. Then she recalled seeing a blond woman talking to Kyle at the edge of the green the night before. A woman from the fair. All tits and arse, her mother would have said. It had been nothing really, the two of them talking, only now Elspeth thought it might be something.

‘Look, you can’t do this,’ she said. ‘You can’t do this to her. To Susan. Think about it. There’s consequences. In two weeks the fair will be gone but what you are doing will still hang around your neck and be something between you and Susan. Is that what you want?’

Kyle told her she didn’t know what was what. She didn’t know anything.

‘I know you, Kyle Downs, and I know you are thinking more with what is in your pants than with the brain that God gave you,’ she said.

Kyle ran his fingers through his hair and forced the air out from his puffed cheeks, forced it slow and making a noise that was like the wind when it is small. There was a look on his face, like he was a boy again and he had done something wrong and been caught and didn’t know what to say.

‘I’m all fucked up,’ he said. ‘Everything is. I’m sleeping on the sofa in the living room. Been like that since Christmas almost. Things are all broken and there’s no putting it back together.’

Elspeth touched the back of his hand. ‘And how does what’s going on with this blond woman help matters?’

‘Her name’s Lynn.’ Still Kyle could not look at Elspeth.

‘But how does it help?’

He shrugged, even more like a small boy in front of her, like the small boy he had been once. ‘I don’t know. It just does,’ he said.

Elspeth turned the sign on the shop door to ‘closed’ and flicked the snib. Then she took Kyle into the back of the shop. There was a table there and a stainless steel sink against one wall. Elspeth filled the kettle and put it on to boil. She rinsed out the teapot and dropped in two teabags. Kyle checked his watch when she wasn’t looking.

‘It’s never easy,’ she said with her back to him. ‘You have to work at it. And even then sometimes it isn’t right. But still you have to work at it. There’s Corinne to think of. What do you think this is doing to her?’

Kyle sat slumped in the one chair. Elspeth sounded like his mother. He didn’t know what to say.

‘Brokeferry is too small for her not to find out. And when she does? Is that what you want Corinne to know about you? And how long do you think Susan will put up with people talking about how it is with you and her and everyone giving her pitying looks in the street and inviting her for coffee and the awkward silences when they don’t really know what to say?’

Elspeth had heard things and she knew something of what Kyle had told her.

‘It’s all too hard,’ he said.

Elspeth turned to face him. ‘It’s the same for everyone. Some make it look easy, but there are bad patches in any marriage. Remember? Mum and dad not speaking for a whole month, not even a word, and all because she’d gone and bought a new dress when they had no money to pay for the ordinary bills. Remember? You have to work through the bad things.’

‘It’s been months, Elspeth,’ Kyle said. ‘And things have been said and there’s no taking them back.’ He was dismissive, waving one hand in the air as though she could be brushed away. His thoughts were with the blond woman called Lynn drinking alone in her trailer and looking at the clock and wondering where he was.

ANOTHER THOUGHT

CHEGGERS PLAYS UNPOP

(For UK readers: See what I did there?)

Now I have to say at the outset that I have never ever been a fan of Keith 'Cheggers' Chegwin. In fact I have only ever found him to be a barely ignorable irritation. But I have been considering something that came to my attention recently and it involves the said Keith. You see, he has been posting jokes on twitter and has caused a bit of a stir because some of the jokes ‘belong’ to other people. Yes, we’re back with issues of ownership and copyright.

I have not investigated this particular matter too closely, not beyond a cursory reading of two articles on the subject of Keith Chegwin’s twittering, but it has once again forced me to think about this Intellectual Property issue. Laws regarding intellectual property were originally put there to ensure appropriate remuneration for the ‘originator’ of a piece of work – like a story or a poem or maybe even a joke (it’s broader than that, of course). But it was also meant to allow for the free movement of ideas. UK copyright law actually stipulates that it protects the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. UK copyright law even says that an idea may be copied, but it is the words that may not be copied. So, what does that mean here?

If Keith Chegwin has used these jokes ‘belonging’ to other comedians by adding something to the joke, and thereby changing the joke and ‘making it his own’, then this would, according to copyright law, be legitimate. However, if he simply reproduced the joke, unaltered from its original state, then that would be an infringement of copyright. As I said, I have not looked into the charges against Keith Chegwin so cannot comment on whether or not he has done wrong in posting what he posted on twitter. (In fact, I think I recall that in this matter Keith Chegwin was not actually claiming that the jokes were his and did in fact say that they actually weren't.)

What I can say, however, is that it seems odd to me that a joke requires such protection and this seems to me to be symptomatic of the litigious society we have moved towards. Groucho Marx jokes are frequently recycled and Tommy Cooper jokes, too, and catch phrases. Does any of this constitute ‘theft’ in any reasonable sense of that word? If at a dinner-party I tell a joke that I heard at a stand-up comedy show, am I infringing copyright in so doing? If I put it on a blog, does that make it more likely to be copyright infringement? If Keith Chegwin posts one of Jimmy Carr’s jokes on his twitter page, is Jimmy Carr deprived of any money through this use? Is Jimmy Carr’s reputation as a comic diminished in any way? Is he prevented from using the joke again so that his livelihood is compromised by Keith Chegwin’s posting of the joke on twitter?

Apparently Keith Chegwin’s response to charges of plagiarism here has been to label the offended comics as ‘precious’ and to admonish them to just write newer stuff. Does he have a point? Once a joke has been put into the public domain, presumably the comic has made his money out of the joke, and people have laughed at it, and if they have they have possibly wanted to hear more and paid to see that comic’s live show or forked out for his DVD… doesn’t that joke, put into the public domain, then cease to be owned by the teller of the joke? If it is exceptionally funny, will it not be passed from person to person, at work the next day or in the pub or over coffee? Isn’t that part of the battle that comics face, that tv forces them to always be coming up with new material because once it has been aired on television their material is quickly old and so of little use to them? Is it then churlish of these comics to be upset when someone else tells ‘their’ joke? What if someone else makes money out of their joke, or someone else's reputation is enhanced by the telling of the joke, does that then mean we are in different territory? If I tell a Jimmy Carr joke in a job interview, and thereby make a positive impression on the interview panel, does my getting of the job require me to in some way remunerate Jimmy Carr? It can very quickly become ridiculous when taken to its logical conclusion.

Don't get me wrong. Some protection is necessary, that was why Thomas Jefferson laid down guidelines for Intellectual Property legislation. But it seems to me, in this money-driven culture we move in, that what has been lost sight of is that the same law was intended to allow a certain freedom in the movement of ideas from one person to another. If I see something funny in the street, I can’t wait for the opportunity to tell someone what I saw and do so at the soonest next opportunity. When a great joke gets into my head, put there by Jimmy Carr telling it on national television, it begs for me to tell it to someone. I can’t wait to tell it, to make someone else laugh as I laughed. I HAVE to tell it to someone. That’s how jokes work, just as it is how ideas work – like a virus, spreading from one mind to another. That’s how jokes and ideas want to work and it would be absurd to think that a society could legislate against that happening… it would also not be desirable for society to so legislate. It seems a little absurd then to be thinking of protecting such things as ideas and jokes as though they were pieces of property like wallets, because they are not such things.

I would be surprised if Keith Chegwin faced prosecution for his twittering of 'other people's' jokes. I don't see how that could happen. I apologise if this appears to be a fan letter to Keith Chegwin. I am not and never have been and probably never will be a fan. But I am a firm believer (more and more firm the more that I read on the matter) in Thomas Jefferson's original conception of intellectual property and what he was trying to do. I believe that Keith Chegwin has the right to retell the jokes he hears, especially if he tells them in his own inimitable style... and then we are back to Keith Chegwin as a barely ignorable irritation.

HERE'S AN IDEA

HERE’S AN IDEA

I was reading the last recorded interview with Philip K Dick, the science fiction writer, and he was talking about an idea of his and how he owned that idea and if anyone else used that idea they’d have to ask his permission and if they didn’t then there would be attorneys to deal with. I think he was just goofing around and not being really serious, but I thought it worth thinking about.

The idea in question was one he floated in a very early story of his and then in the book that led to the film ‘Bladerunner’. The idea was that an android could exist and not know it was an android, think it was a human being. It is an idea that surfaces in many science fiction novels and in several films, too. But Philip K Dick claims it for his own and says he was the first to come up with that idea, citing the early date of his story as proof. Most of his other ideas he says are a rehash of ideas that were already out there.

I don’t know much about Philip K Dick but reading the last recorded interviews I did find out that he had a serious interest and more than a passing familiarity with philosophy and he made particular reference to Descartes somewhere which I remember being quite impressed with when I read it because Descartes was something I studied when I was a boy at university. And then I got to thinking, putting the pieces of my thinking together.

Descartes, in his bold attempt to arrive at some certainty of knowledge, asked the question (near the end of his quest) how do we know that our thoughts are our thoughts, how do we know that we are not a character in the dream or the mind of an all powerful all knowing being - God? In other words, how do we know that we are actually living human beings. It is a big moment in Descartes’ investigations and one that if ignored could bring his whole ‘I think, therefore I am’ conclusion tumbling down like a house of cards, and in a way Descartes seriously dodges the question by leaning on a ‘truth’ that for him, in the time and place and culture that he lived, was incontrovertible: God is good and not a deceiving God, so we cannot be deceived in thinking we are what we are.

Setting aside the weakness this brings to Descartes’ whole argument (more than a weakness, for it makes nonsense of his ‘Cogito ergo sum’) is this not the very same question that Philip K Dick’s android is about when it believes it is what it seems to be, namely human? At the very least, it is a version of the same idea, an asking of the same question: how do I know that I am really what I think I am?

So, it turns out that the idea is not in any real sense original, and nor is it something that can be said to be owned by any one person. It is an old idea in new clothes. In Dick’s own words, it is a ‘rehash’. And nothing wrong with that, I think, but it does throw again this whole ownership of ideas thing into question, and makes of it an absurdity, and leaves me once again thinking that ideas, because of their cultural roots, cannot be in any reasonable sense owned, that they inevitably owe something to something else. It also begs the question of what originality is precisely when we are talking ideas. What would an original idea look like if it was stripped of the novel way it was expressed, the particular voice of the writer for example, the particular words used? Would we discover that in fact very few ideas can be said to be in any meaningful way original?

And that is probably one reason why copyright law protects the particular expression of an idea (the particular words used and the specific order given to those words) but not the idea itself – it makes no sense to even think that an idea can be something that can be protected in the way that your real estate (property) can be protected. Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the first to look at Intellectual Property and the need for laws to govern this area of creativity, understood the difference. IP law was instituted to help remunerate the ‘innovators’ for the work that they do and by such fairness to encourage such innovation, but it was never intended that IP law would make ideas things that could not pass from one person to another freely. To think that it could or should do that is patently absurd and certainly not desirable if you have any understanding of what ideas are and how everything we say do and think is influenced by ideas that are not our own. Plagiarism, it seems to me, is to do with infringing this ‘copyright law’ and using another writer’s words and passing those words off as one’s own. Using someone else’s ideas is not the same and the precedents for doing this are many, from such giants as Chaucer and Shakespeare to Nabakov and T S Eliot, and everything in between and after and before.

People who hold no original thought (and actually I might mean everyone when I say that!) use the word 'plagiarism' with no real understanding of what that entails. Their ideas are not only second hand (as are all ideas?) and shallow, but their thinking is also second rate. For a most sensible view on the subject you could do a lot worse than read Malcolm Gladwell's essay 'Something Borrowed' or Jonathan Lethem's essay (online somewhere) 'The Ecstasy of Influence'. Both of these essays do justice to what plagiarism is and is not. But then finding them and reading them requires more effort than not, so easier to think you know what plagiarism is, relying on that second rate thinking we all do. It's your choice. Go search them out- read them and think about what they say - you might just have your mind opened.

Progressing

(The second children's book is almost complete... will be complete before the end of this week... the first draft at least. And I am really enjoying how it is coming together... always better than I planned... in so far as I ever really plan. Here's another installment from PB. Don't know where these characters came from... really, I don't.)

THE GOOD TIPPER

Eileen was late getting to The Bobbing Boat. No explanation, just sorry she was late. Guthrie didn’t seem to mind. He sent her through to the small staff toilet in the back to freshen up. She looked as though she hadn’t slept.

The morning was busy. They barely spoke save to pass details of the orders back and forward. Aidan came in again and ordered tea for two and sat alone looking out of the window as if he was expecting someone. Eileen passed no comment to Aidan or to Guthrie. She made sure the cups were not chipped and that there was a spoon for the sugar.

And the man who had touched her was back at the table by the door, his eyes following Eileen around the cafe until she came to take his order. She was as polite as she could be, not smiling at the man, but not swearing either. She wrote down his order and said it would just be a minute.

Guthrie asked if she was feeling ok. She admitted that she was a little tired, but aside from that she was great. She smiled then and Guthrie was reassured.

‘It’s been a long week,’ he said. ‘First busy week of the season. Takes a bit of getting used to. You should get an early night tonight.’

The woman called Moira came in about eleven. She sat at a small table near the counter and did not look at Guthrie. He wondered if he should come and take her order, but Eileen beat him to it.

‘Good morning,’ Eileen said. ‘Can I help you?’

‘It’s Eileen, right?’

Eileen nodded. Her pen was poised ready to write down what the woman wanted.

‘Moira, I’m Moira.’ And she held out one hand to shake Eileen’s. ‘I expect Guthrie has told you about me. You know, stuff about us way back. I used to do the job you are doing now. Just the same. Only not so smartly dressed and not so nice to everyone that came in.’

She was prettier than Eileen had imagined. Older, too. Though that shouldn’t have been a surprise. She thought of Guthrie as old and they were from the same time. She had long thin fingers and Eileen noticed that she was not wearing any rings.

‘And we were allowed to sit with the customers if they asked us. I expect that’s not allowed now?’

Eileen looked at Guthrie. She wasn’t sure what she should do.

‘Oh don’t mind him. He can be a bear sometimes, but mostly he’s the soft to cuddle kind. Take it from me, he’s fond of you. I see the way he looks out for you.’

Guthrie heard what Moira said. He laughed as if what she’d said was a joke.

‘I’ll have a pot of tea and something sweet.’

Eileen began listing what there was on offer for the day. Moira interrupted her and said Eileen should choose for her. Just anything. Then she pulled Eileen close and whispered something so that Guthrie did not hear.

Eileen delivered the order to the counter. Guthrie expected her to say something. She just looked at him.

‘What?’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘And a pain au raisin.’

‘What did she tell you? What did she say? Was it about me? What?’

Eileen smiled. 'She told me she was a good tipper and I should not spit in her tea,' she said.

Even More Good News

(Even more good news: I have just been placed third in a short story competition. Tried the same comp the previous two years without result so it is good to be on the podium there at last, and for a story that I really like. Here's another PB piece.)

HUNTLY’S WIFE KNOWS STUFF

He’s written another letter. Sees a difference in Alice. Doesn’t know what that difference might be and I won’t tell him. Not the whole thing. Not how Alice sat with Dodie Bredwell in The Ship on Wednesday evening and Dodie was quieter than usual. Not just quieter either. He wasn’t stacking up the empty glasses like he does on a Saturday night and wasn’t singing at the end of the session with Lachlan Davie. Instead he was with Alice till about nine. Then he walked her to her door. Nothing more in it than that, maybe. But that’s the reason she is different.

I asked Huntly if he wanted to go out. He’d said as much in the letter. So I said, ‘Do you want to go out today, Huntly?’

He looked at me funny. I thought then I might have given the game away. Maybe he already knows. There are few secrets in a marriage. ‘Just for the air. Just for a change,’ I said.

He thought about it for a moment. He looked out at the sky as if weighing up the possibility. Then he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not today.’

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t expected. I shrugged and asked him if he wanted something whilst I was out. A newspaper, maybe.

He asked me to come and see what he had in his hand. The closed cup of one hand, held like a fist in his lap but not so tight. Like he was holding something small and so fragile it could break.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Come closer and I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘Only it’s really small and when I open this hand I won’t be able to catch it again. So you’ll have to come close to see.’

I knew he was up to something. I could tell. You don't live with a man as long as I have lived with Huntly and not know him. His eyes said it all. There was nothing in his hand and the whole ‘come closer’ thing was a trick. Or there was something like a spider in his fist and he was going to make me jump with it. Men can be such boys sometimes.

‘I promise that there’s no spider and no dead fly. Just come here so I can show you what it is.’

See, he knows me too and can read things in me sometimes.

‘Trust me,’ he said.

So I had to. When he said that, I had to let him know that I did trust him. It was important to do that. I walked to his side. He beckoned me to lean in close. Then, when my attention was on his hand, he kissed me.

‘I’ll not go out today, but maybe one day. So long as you are with me.’

And I kissed him. And there we were behaving like a couple of teenagers in our front room. That’s how I know that what he says in the letters is not the whole story.

More Things Nice

( 'Great stuff as always' and 'A pleasure to read' - it's neat when a story competition judge recognises you and has such a positive thing to say to you. These comments just received last night. Here below is another Friday piece from PB.)

GOING OVER OLD GROUND

‘I’ve been thinking about retirement.’

He said it as if it was something new. He said it quietly, as if he didn’t really mean it. She’d heard the speech before and did not stop the filing she was doing.

‘It’s maybe time. Long past time. Don’t you think?’

Marjory said she agreed. It’s what she always said. And she did agree. She had been telling him the exact same thing for more than five years. But she couldn’t see what he would do if he did retire. She understood that it was this that kept him going. At least part of it was that. The pictures behind him on the wall also had something to do with it. He was connected to things here in Port Brokeferry and he couldn’t just walk away from everything. Retiring would feel like giving up on all of that. To him it would. She knew that was what he thought.

‘Well?’ he said.

There was no point in engaging in the discussion, she thought. It was well worn territory by now. They’d been going round in circles on the subject for several years. Whenever there was a crisis. She wondered what was worrying him today.

‘I am serious this time. What happened yesterday convinced me.’

‘What happened yesterday?’ she said, not knowing what he was meaning.

‘With old Tom.’

She stopped then. She laid down the remaining files and turned to face Doctor Kerr. He looked worn and anxious. His hand was shaking as he reached for his pen. Marjory noticed.

‘You did everything you could. He’s in hospital now. It’s the right place for him to be.’

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But I should have moved him to the hospital sooner.’

Marjory argued that it would have made no difference. She couldn’t see what he had done wrong. Nothing any different from how he would have done things twenty years ago. That’s what she said. He wasn’t listening to her. He was shaking his head and slowly clicking the pen in his hand.

‘No, Marjory. It’s time.’

‘Far be it for me to be trying to talk you out of what I have been saying is the right move for long enough. Maybe it is time. But not for the reason you give.’

He stopped clicking the pen and stared ahead.

It was silent for a while in the room. Not even the gulls on the other side of the glass seemed to have anything to say. Doctor Kerr breathed deep. It felt as though a weight had been lifted from him. He smiled at Marjory. ‘I mean it,’ he said.

Of course it would take time for the wheels to turn and for a new doctor to be installed. He’d perhaps need to help out a little at first. But he felt as though a decision had been made.

Then he wondered what Marjory would do.

‘It is the right thing, isn’t it?’ he said.

'It's the right thing for both of us,' she said, and she reached across the desk to take his hand.

Something Nice

("The very clever text and unraveling story based on the famous 'Lewis Chessmen' kept me gripped and unable to put this book down."

This was a review of my children's book, 'The Chess Piece Magician'. It was something I missed and have only just had it pointed out to me on a site called Armadillo. A sound endorsement, I think. Below, another something from PB.)

PAMELA RUNS THE LENGTH OF THE BEACH

He doesn’t know her name is Pamela or that she is an artist with a studio converted out of the roof space of her cottage. She does not sell pictures through Mhairi’s Port Brokeferry Giftshop or show her work in the town. Instead she sends her work down south to a gallery there that handles all her paintings. She is a big name in some art circles, but Guthrie doesn’t know that. All he knows is that three times a week, most weeks, she can be seen out running the length of the beach in Port Brokeferry, a bottle of water in one hand and a voice recording machine in the other. She stops at the turn, speaks into her machine and drinks from her bottle. Then she removes her t-shirt and runs back the way she had come in a vest.

Guthrie isn’t the only one who notices her. Some of the men think she might be a model. She has long blond hair and is tall and thin. Like she takes care of what she eats. She dresses in expensive clothes and keeps herself to herself.

She drives a small yellow van with rust on the back door. She uses it to transport her works to the station for sending away. Not the car of a girl who might be a model, but then they say that is just the kind of quirk a model would have. Then they add that if she isn’t a model, she should be. There’s no disagreement there.

She also does most of her shopping outside of Port Brokeferry and so has little reason to talk to anyone in the town. Blair knows her name and what she does, but he tells no one what he knows.

She has taken the cottage just outside Port Brokeferry on a three year lease. The cottage is called Jess’ Ship. There’s a chair inside made out of driftwood and held together with old rope. Pamela likes to sit in that chair, drinking iced lemon tea and looking out at the sea and the gulls hanging in the sky. She reads a lot and books arrive regularly through the post. She plays music very loud, rock music with thumping drums and screaming guitars. Blair has to knock several times to be heard. She always apologises for the noise. ‘It’s to quieten the voices in my head,’ she tells him.

Some weeks she is nowhere to be seen. She lets Blair know that she will be gone so that he does not make the trip out to her cottage with any mail. It is an extra fifteen minutes on his round when he has mail to deliver at Jess’ Ship. Then, on the precise day she has said to Blair, she is back again and running the beach and taking off her t-shirt at the turn and Guthrie watching her. And others in the town noticing what she does.

She brings small presents back with her, for Blair. Small things to thank him for bringing her mail. She takes the time to talk to him some days, at the door. She asks him about the history of the village and why the cottage is called Jess’ Ship and she wants to know what music he likes and what books. Then she gives him a pot of french confiture, or chocolates from Belgium, or a ring of Italian sausage. And sometimes she passes her books on to him. He doesn’t like to tell her that they are not his sort of books. Instead he tries reading some of them so that he can talk to her about them.

Stories

(I write stories to get them out of my head - but sometimes, even having done that, the story rattles around somewhere in the back of my thoughts... maybe because it is not finished or not right. An old story resurfaced this week, one I had lost some faith in, and I had to put some more work into it and now I believe in it again. That feels as good as writing something completely new. Here's another piece from PB... Edwin telling a Finn story and Mad Martin believing Edwin is Finn.)

ANOTHER BIG FISH TALE FROM FINN

By mid morning it was clear that it was too rough for The Silver Herring to tour round The Snag. Edwin made sure the lines were secure and gave Bran a list of cleaning duties to keep him busy. He posted a sign out front saying that due to bad weather there would be no sailings today.

‘Was just such a day as this when Finn was out in a boat very like The Silver Herring. No, it was a darker day than this. The sky seemed to sit on the surface of the sea, pressing down on it. And the sea frothed and surged, creating troughs and rises. They would have sailed for the nearest harbour except that the nets were out and they needed bringing in first.’

Mad Martin was barefoot and sitting on the harbour wall. The wind was blowing his hair into his eyes and he was leaning forward to hear what Edwin was saying.

‘There were six men on board and a girl called Jess. The boat was one moment high as though it was flying and the next moment plunging downwards as though it might be aimed at the bottom of the sea. There was a long drawn out silence at the top of the rise, a held breath before the boat fell and the sea smacked against the hull like the single heavy beat of a drum. You could feel that drumbeat through the souls of your feet. Finn said it was the only way of telling which way was up and which way down, that drum under his boots.’

‘Say about the water, Finn. Say about how it was like they were under the sea sometimes.’

Mad Martin had heard the story before. Edwin nodded to him. Several others had gathered to listen in on the story. The woman Rose was there. She smiled at Mad Martin’s contribution to the tale. Kelso was there, too. He had some leaflets in one hand but he wasn’t about the business of handing them out today. At the end of the story he might put a few into the shops.

‘Water was everywhere,’ said Edwin. ‘Over their heads sometimes. Falling heavy on their backs, so that it was like they were under the sea not sailing on its surface.’

‘Under the sea, not sailing on its surface,’ repeated Mad Martin.

‘The crew was as sick as dogs. Sicker. All except Finn and the girl, Jess. They were struggling to draw in the nets. The winch was playing up so a lot of the work was being done by hand. Just the two of them. It was the only time Finn wished for their nets to be empty and not dragging them deeper in the water.’

‘Only they weren’t empty,’ said Mad Martin.

‘Only they weren’t empty. No. Finn said it would have been the best catch they’d ever landed, if they’d landed it. Which was saying something for Finn. Said that if they’d brought it in there’d have been free drinks for a week afterwards and he’d have married someone. Course, he was prone to exaggeration. Best story-teller I ever knew.’

‘You are the best story-teller, Finn. Sure you are.’

‘Broke his heart to cut that catch free and to let all that silver slip away from him. Got bigger and bigger with each telling. And Jess got more and more like a teenager, though she could arm-wrestle any man in The Ship on a Saturday night. Took Finn a while to see that he had more than silver in Jess, real gold he had in her, and then when he does see Finn set his nets to catch her. ‘Course she told the story differently. But they both agreed on one point. In the torn nets that they rescued that day, they found a chain caught, with a silver ring hanging on it. And with that ring they were eventually wed. She was a story-teller too was Jess.’

Edwin pulled a chain from out of his shirt and on it hung a silver ring. You were supposed to believe it was the one and the same chain and ring.