Douglas Bruton

Update

2012-01-21T02:46:00.001-08:00

Just had a story accepted by a nice magazine and just learned that another of my stories has had a good win - a story that belongs to my submissions for 2011 so is not in contravention of my resolution to enter fewer competitions in 2012.

In fact, I have not sent out a single story for 2012... by this time last year I had entered 4 comps... so I consider that an advancement. I'm still obsessively checking the thirteen comps waiting to declare from 2011's entries... but doing so less and less so that the notification of this week's win was a surprise and came out of the blue.

Am mostly keeping to the writing resolution and giving attention to bigger projects... have only written one short story since new year but have penned 10,000 words to a bigger project. Don't know how long I can keep this up. We'll see.

Must do more about sorting my stories into collections... I have enough for two good collections so far.

Hope the year is being good to the visitors that pop along here when I am not looking.

The first of 2012

2012-01-01T04:25:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to one and all.

It is customary to make resolutions at this time of year. This involves changing oneself in some way or determining to. It involves identifying something that is unsatisfactory in oneself over the year behind us and looking forward to how it might be different in the year ahead... so here goes:

1) I will write more; every day is the goal... something at least.

2) I will enter far fewer competitions; despite the success rate of this past year having surpassed any other previous year, the cost to one's sanity in failing 50% of the time is heavy.

3) I will complete some larger projects this year; and there are quite a few of them there 'balls' up in the air at the moment.

There! They are not many and maybe are not all... but they are, I think, enough.

I wish everyone who comes here a very happy 2012.

ENERGY

2011-11-26T06:31:00.000-08:00

Haven't entered as many competitions this year as in previous, but like last year I am close to thirty hits (one more please before Christmas). Got two stories highly commended by 'Lorian Hemingway' in the summer. Got a nod from 'Sean O Faolain' in the fall and just found out that two of my stories made the Bridport shortlist. Four stories have placed first and four placed second and three placed third in various competitions spread over the year. Can't complain.

Have so many projects on the go and yet have produced less this year than in other years. Don't know why that is. Wasn't even going to throw anything in to Bridport... wasn't sure I had anything to that standard that wasn't already farmed out to other comps. Eventually put some things in just to be taking part... so the pieces did quite well considering.

Haven't even been here on the old blog much either. Feeling a tad weary. Needing a pick me up to kick start things again. I know... the successes of the year should be making me whoop and holler... but still I am not switched on... not fully.

Maybe the new year will bring an injection of energy.

(Postscript added on December 11th or 12th - don't even know what day it is! Just to say I have broken the 30 mark with a shortlisting and there's still two competitions to declare before the end of December. A few bombs, too, this past month... was beginning to think that the elusive 30th might stay away for another year. Saying this as a way to boost my own energy.

Yesterday, which I know was Saturday, I got down to a brand new and biggish project and what spilled out as a start felt good...

And am already thinking about my goals for the year coming up... so my head feels more screwed on than it has for a while.)

CLOSE TO THE LAST WORD - SURELY!

2011-08-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

If people lie about you to make their accusations against you seem more plausible, then just maybe they are not so convinced of their original accusations or maybe their accusations hold no water. I have shown how Jane Smith lied about my IP number being the same as the IP address of an internet antiques dealer called William Shears – to discredit his voice that was raised against her accusation. I have shown how Vanessa Gebbie lied about her not being able to write for a year as a result of her fallout with me. But there is one person in all of this who has remained in the shadows and been quiet. I ascribed this quiet to some noble higher feelings in her – but I may be wrong, or so someone has informed me.

I was directed to a blogpost this 'noble' other person had written where she confessed that seeing writers she knew, who had started at the same level as her, going on to published success brought ‘a wave of bitterness’ rising up inside of her, an intense jealousy. Then I read a whole other blogpost by this 'quiet' person lambasting an editor for having the temerity to alter something she had written without her consent and prior to publication. And so I wondered why she had not used up one of her many blogposts to lambast me since it is her work that I am accused of having plagiarised. It seems odd that she has not been more obviously outspoken against me.

There is someone who remains anonymous who has taken my actual work and posted it up in the public domain in order that others can see the ‘thief’ I am supposed to be (and by the way this is copyright theft). The site they have set up has had more than 700 visits and there has not been the avalanche of condemnation in the comments on the site that even I expected (given the response without evidence that there was on Jane Smith’s Anti-plagiarism post that had earlier been directed against me). Nor was there even a trickle of condemnation. One (anonymous comment) said that perhaps I had taken too much from this other writer - that was it! Whereas, one William Shears voiced on the site disbelief at the absurdity of the charge against me and said he thought the two stories (mine and the one that I had ‘plundered’) were very different. Who it is that set up this anonymous site (in my name and with my work and without my permission) has been one of the puzzles in all of this.

Then there is the fact that someone has been writing to places where my work has been posted, and to competitions I have done well in, and places where my work has been accepted, to declare me evil and bad. This person has some influence it seems, is a name in the world of the short story, with the result that in certain competitions my submitted pieces are not even read (though my entry fees have been cashed!) and some places have simply withdrawn my work. Until now I have not known who this mystery person was. I do now. Perhaps you can guess!

With some of my competition winnings this year I approached an Edinburgh solicitor expert in matters of intellectual property - so it said in the firm's blurb. I submitted my story and ‘hers’ and, being careful in my wording not to prejudice the response I wanted from the solicitor, I asked if there was a case to answer. I did not reveal the identity of either writer and had removed the titles. I did this because I genuinely wanted to know; Jane Smith had said that she had shown the pieces to lawyer friends of hers and they had said an infringement had been made, but I wasn't sure I could trust what she had said anymore. The solicitor I contacted (not cheap by the way) has taken some time to get back to me. Now that he has I can share with you what he said. Although it was clear that the second writer (that was me) had read and been heavily influenced by the first (that’s her) in his opinion there was no legal case to answer, that the second did not infringe legal copyright, and more than this did not go beyond what a court would see as permissible in the realm of influence. There was lot more that he said but he concluded that no court would likely entertain the case and that this did not represent an example of plagiarism. He advised me not to take it any further (assuming wrongly that I was the writer of the first piece) and to accept that this kind of ‘borrowing’ was not out of the usual. I realise that this is only one opinion and that the matter may be still seen as at the least debateable, as matters of this kind are... if they were clear cut then there would almost be no need for lawyers!

But, at last, and it's as official as I can make it: Douglas Bruton is not a plagiarist.

With my next big competition win (and it will have to be substantial, I realise) I will look into the matter of what I can do to deal with those people who have publicly and privately (through backdoor e-mails) wrongly accused me. This is close to my last word on the matter, I think...

VANESSA GEBBIE'S FICTION WORKHOUSE (2)

2011-07-14T02:08:00.000-07:00

I had intended to post here an honest exposé of VG at the helm of FW and how she operated and how after only 4 months she entrusted me with the reins of her 'baby' and afterwards how she thanked me profusely for the very good job I did in steering FW forward. I have written the post, but at the eleventh hour have pulled it. Rereading it, I thought it might be hurtful in its honesty, hurtful towards VG, and, you see, I am not that kind of person. It would serve no purpose to publish it save to hurt VG. If I have hurt her with posts below I am sorry, but have only done what I did below to defend myself against her and others. I am still doing that.

I have recently been writing under a pseudonym. I feel I have been forced into this. I entered a comp last year, throwing in 3 very strong pieces (two have won comps since (one a very a big comp) and the other was an unpublished winner from elsewhere and has since gone on to be highly commended). I entered them into a comp where I had done well several times before, always been on the shortlist and been on the podium twice. I bombed. It made no sense. This happens in entering comps, so I just shrugged. But then someone sent me an anonymous e-mail saying I was not being read by some comp judges... but every comp I had entered had duly accepted my entrance fees! So I felt I had to adopt a pseudonym if I was to be sure in my head that I was being judged fairly.

A writer called Benjamin Judge accepted some of my freely given pieces for a site he had set up. Then my pseudonym was unmasked and he presumed that my adoption of the pseudonym had a malicious intent. It did not. Even VG has written and subbed under a pseudonym before and her mentor AK and many others besides. I did so in order to be read and in order to save others from being targeted by an 'anonymous' person who seeks to undermine my successes at every turn: I had three stories accepted by 100 Stories For Haiti; these were subsequently pulled because someone threatened the editor that he/she would go to the publisher and inform them of my 'past' and so risk having the plug pulled on the whole charitable venture. Again freely given work, to do good only, and again the rug pulled out from under my feet.

Vanessa Gebbie, Jane Smith, and Tania Hershman have all at some time acknowledged that I am a writer with some ability, even some talent. The word 'gifted' has even been used. And yet I am forced to adopt a pseudonym to be read.

Someone on Benjamin Fudge's blog commented that I was a sociopath. This person is called Beebe Barksdale-Bruner. (A sociopath: someone who commits antisocial and sometimes violent acts against others and shows no guilt for the harm that they do. *(see below)) I do not know this person and she does not know me and clearly has not read my blog or any of my defence. Calling a person a sociopath without appreciating the sensibilities of the person and without any consideration of the impact of that act of calling, does, it seems to me, rather epitomise what a sociopath is. I hope Beebe stumbles along here and sees the sense of what I am saying. I bear her no malice.

I have apologised to VG and JS and to TH. I apologise to Benjamin Judge and to anyone else I have hurt or who feels let down because of me... but in what I did, including the posting under a pseudonym, I do not admit any wrong-doing. I have asked for a definition of what plagiarism is and what it is not. I have pointed to how writers going back to Shakespeare and coming right up to date with VG have taken from other writers and shown how I simply fit into this process. I have resolved not to write in this way again (without any admission of guilt in what I did, save that I am sorry for any hurt caused). If Benjamin Judge or anyone else can suggest how I might now go on being a writer and having my work seen and read, I would appreciate it, because I am a writer and worth being read... after all Benjamin Judge, you posted several of my pieces and thought they were good.

* This definition is written in my own words, but it conforms in general to what can be found in a standard dictionary. Online dictionaries sometimes refer you to the word Psychopath as they are related in meaning.

It Never Ceases To Amaze Me

2011-07-12T15:05:00.000-07:00

“People lie…all we can count on is the evidence.” (Gil Grisham, “CSI”)

It never ceases to amaze me the ease with which some people lie and how easily the lies can be accepted by others. Just spotted this on the blog of a writer I once knew; she was talking about writers using other writers’ ideas:

"I really object to the word 'stealing' here. Having been the victim of a real thief of published and unpublished work, who went on to subject an erstwhile close working colleague to a couple of years of abuse in one way and another, I can tell you that theft really is a ghastly thing. When people are talking about 'inspiration', I wish they'd be wary of calling it theft and thus encouraging people like this.  

Not that it is relevant, but my treatment, after going out of my way to give this man professional encouragement, help, and a platform for his work in the form of publication in a text book, among other things - knocked me back so that I could not write for the best part of a year. I am not young - and time is something I do not have. My abuser found my upset hilariously funny and stupid. I was ridiculed in public for months, by a professional man who ought to know how to behave better. Misogyny perhaps? Certainly a deeply cruel person. I would not wish that experience on anyone."

I am the mysoginist ‘thief’ she refers to. She once called me ‘kind’ and ‘soft’ and ‘dear’; now I am cruel. She several times described herself to me as ‘unkind’ and ‘not nice’ and having ‘teeth’ that can ‘bite’… but here she says I am cruel!

Anyone who really knows me (and this writer does not) would laugh at the labels 'mysoginist' and 'cruel', really laugh. I am considered a very very gentle man, and driven by equality in everything, and non-judgemental, and fair, and thoughtful, always seeing both sides and always trying to be understanding of all differences of view... all this I am considered, to a fault, by people who know me and by the pupils I teach. So, let me get to the evidence, the lies, that demonstrate the untrustworthiness of what this woman writer says so you might know too: see my bullet points below.

She says that she could not write for the best part of a year. A quick perusal of her two blogs will tell you otherwise. (You can look for yourself!)

In the time she is talking about (Aug 2009 until August 2010) this writer posted more than 150 blogposts and some of these run to a thousand words or more.
She went on numerous writing retreats during this period where she said ‘What did I achieve? Lots!’ That’s what she said on her blog. (The year before any of this happened, she reported once that writing was going slowly and on another occasion she had done none at all and had only read books – both of these occasions involved breaks away from the world.)
During this ‘lost year’ she said she worked hard on her poetry, something that was new and she was developing.
She also promoted, with over 15 blogtours, her textbook on short story writing, as well as promoting it in the real world with various live events.
She put together and published another edition of a magazine she edits.
She was a competition judge for probably the biggest fiction comp in the world, and for another very big comp only six months later.
She put together a complete collection of flash and micro fiction of her own, which she has so far had placed with two different publishers.
She put together another collection of short stories for publication and this has now been published.
She worked on her novel, which involved adding tens and tens of thousands of words to what she had, and then extensive rewrites over the period.
She applied to the Arts Council for a grant and following the success of her application was involved in even more intensive and extensive rewrites.
She contributed fiction and poetry to very many publications over this time and had many pieces accepted.

I do not begin to touch on the business of the rest of her life, suffice it to say that she is never still for long and had a lot of personal difficulties to deal with in this time.

But how can this writer claim that she could not write for a year and suggest that I somehow stole a year from her when the years are so precious to her now that she is older? There aren’t many writers who could claim to have done as much as she has in the same period.

She lies about herself quite spectacularly; how much more easily does she lie about others?

Her mentor and writing guide, the person who taught her so much, runs a writing camp thing. I once considered doing a spell at this camp. I asked her what she thought. She said the man who ran the operation was a great teacher and I might learn a lot from him, but that he was also a bully and probably a misogynist too. He was, she said, after falling out with him, the reason she set up her own writing place called ‘The Fiction Workhouse’, a gentler more friendly writing club. If she doesn’t like you, if she falls out with you, then her default setting if you are male seems to be to label you a mysoginist.

I did not steal from this writer as she claims. She says everywhere that I stole very specific ideas from her, but she nowhere has specified what those ideas are and no one seems to have picked up on that. I worked very closely over the internet with this writer. We wrote a novel together spread over nine months, a novel of letters winging back and forth; and several stories we wrote together, too, and we critted each others’ work in close detail. If I absorbed stuff from her work then I did no more than a good writer does. One of her favourite novels is ‘Austerlitz’ by W G Sebald. In it there is a moment that looks into a window in Tierzin, one of the Nazi Death Camps near Prague. In the window we see a box of seashells. This collaborating writer in the novel we worked on together and set in Prague and the surrounding country, was writing about Tierzin and a woman incarcerated there. The woman owned the same box of seashells. At the time I read this I thought it was a lovely piece and strange and magical. Then I read ‘Austerlitz’ and was surprised by the shells in the window. I do not say that she stole from Sebald, but can see that she absorbed from him something from his book, and that in writing about the same place, Tierzin, the shells crossed over into her writing. This, it seems to me, is normal and natural and not theft. I have not stolen from this writer as she claims. If I had, she would have sought legal representation in suing the pants off me – that’s what she would do and that’s what she didn’t do, that's the teeth she would bite me with.

I look forward to the publication of her upcoming novel so that I might then openly discuss what she claims I stole from that work and which I also hotly deny.

I find it hard to believe anything that this writer says now... but others swallow her lies with surprising ease. Check the evidence - it is all that we can count on.

This writer I write of is called Vanessa Gebbie.

VANESSA GEBBIE’S FICTION WORKHOUSE (1)

2011-07-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

I am a hoarder. I rarely throw things away, thinking they might have a use further down the line someplace. E-mails I hoard, too, and in reviewing how I come to be where I am I have been rereading many of those e-mails, over two hundred from Vanessa Gebbie alone.

In April 2008 Vanessa Gebbie, having read some of my work, invited me to be a member of her hand-picked group of writers working in her closed on-line site called 'The Fiction Workhouse' (FW). I was like a kid in a sweetshop on my first visits to the Fiction Worhouse – I remember the time so clearly. One of the first pieces I read there was a flash fiction piece by VG in which a young girl was observing an older man. Members were encouraged to read each other’s posted work and to pass comment on the posted pieces. Eager show-offy puppy as I was, I went one better: I wrote a reply to VG’s piece changing the point of view so that the man was now observing the girl. I wrote it in the same style. VG was so taken with what I had written that she wrote a response from the girl and so we ping-ponged back and forth until we had written between us 9 or 10 flashes. Then VG said we should each take away what we had jointly produced and using the pieces construct a complete story. This we did so that we had, in the end, two stories out of the process.

VG was excited at this new way of collaborating and wanted others in Fiction Workhouse to see what we had done and to see what fun this kind of collaboration could be and how it could produce very good writing. A brief online discussion took place about how we should submit the pieces, whether to competitions or to magazines. I was keen to acknowledge VG’s contribution to my piece. Someone else on FW suggested we sub only one of the pieces and that we go for co-authorship. VG got quite cross with this person and broke off discussion; instead, she e-mailed me privately. This is what she said:

“I was a bit thrown by X’s view that we should only sub one of the stories, and then as a joint thing. I can’t agree! Don’t know what you think… but we’ve invented a new form of collaborating in which the work becomes two very different pieces. Some of the images are the same, sure… but the themes, characters, focus, the whole story is entirely different. I have no trouble with them being treated entirely separately, do you?”

I didn’t. I was excited that as a writer she saw ideas as I thought they should be seen, as common property rather than private property, a sort of socialist view of ideas. She had used some of my ideas and I had used some of hers and there was no sense on either side that this was wrong. Indeed, VG wanted to hold it up as model for others to work by.

So taken with this way of working was VG that within a few weeks, on a quiet night in FW, she asked if I wanted to ‘play again’ and if I did she suggested I flash something up on the site to get the ball rolling. And so we did it all over again.

This sharing of ideas was established between us, so for VG to now cry 'thief' seems strangely absurd.

Early in 2009 VG was in South America. She still popped into FW sometimes, at a distance, to post prompts to stimulate members into writing. At this time she posted half a dozen. No one responded at all - no one except me: I responded by writing something to each of the prompts, show-offy puppy eager to please VG and not wanting her to be upset that others were not responding to her prompts. VG posted no more prompts but she sent me an e-mail saying there was a piano tuner in Ushuaia and there must be a story there. That's all she said. I responded: I wrote a complete story. On her return from SAmerica I was excited to show her and asked her if she wanted to see. I was a little crestfallen when she said she didn't want to see it as she was sure it would be extremely good and she did not want my ideas in this case to influence the story she wanted to write. There was no sense that I had done anything wrong in writing mine - why should there have been? Later, when my story did well in competitions, VG got upset. Whatever your thoughts about this, and the facts are as I have presented them, what is certain is that there was no malicious intent to misappropriate VG's ideas. So why does she cry 'thief' still, without giving any specifics of what I am supposed to have stolen from her?

"I am not a nice person," she once wrote to me; on another occasion, "I am not kind"; and yet another, "I have teeth and I bite". VG frequently fell out with the writers on FW and when she did it was all so acrimonious and she was known for her temper at FW and some of us acted as peacemakers on the site. And now she has fallen out with me.

Challenge to Karen Clarke et al

2011-07-07T02:51:00.000-07:00

Been a way for a while. An accident at work escalated into something more serious and so ended up in hospital enduring two operations under general anaesthetic. Slow road to recovery through the school summer hols lies ahead. Feeling crap. So that’s where I’ve been, and may not feel much like being here online for a wee while, and when I am I won’t be so chipper… that’s the drugs talking.

Anyway, I have a lot to catch up with: missed some competition entries for June, which was a shame, but health is more important than that; got some comp results to check up on: and the matter of someone leaving a comment here a wee time back needs addressed.

I don’t get many comments here these days (you find out who your friends are when something goes wrong), but one person did drop in to comment on a post of mine. She made two comments actually, but the second was just to goad me into publishing the first. There was no need for the second: I posted Karen Clarke’s comment with a response and a challenge. If you are going to criticise me then the least you can do is to think the criticism through. Karen said I showed no remorse for the ‘wrong’ I did two years back. I pointed out that I had apologised, withdrawn the ‘offending’ story and resolved to work differently; what I did not do was admit that I had done wrong. I did not admit this because rationally I cannot admit this. I challenged Karen Clarke to say where the line should be drawn given that all writers pick up their influence from other writers and that all honest writers admit to borrowing. I am still awaiting Karen’s reasoned response. I don’t expect much.

I have asked other writers the same question and when they get down to it they admit to not having an answer. Personally, I sit in the camp where using someone else’s actual words is an actual crossing of the line, but the evidence around me, in all things creative (art, writing, music, dance, theatre and film) is that the borrowing of ideas is natural and all a part of the creative process. That explains why the copyright law does not prevent such borrowing, cannot prevent it.

So, Karen Clarke and any other writer worth his or her salt, tell me, if you can, where is the line of what is allowed and what is not when it comes to borrowing others’ ideas and making them your own Make your statement and make it fit what happened with Shakespeare and a million writers since. Make it reasoned and sensible. Mud-slinging is just dirty, Karen Clarke, so try something more cerebral.

Congrats to A.G.Taylor

2011-06-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

I wrote a long while back about having made it to a very nice shortlist with my children's book 'The Chess Piece Magician'. I was one of five on the shortlist for The Heart of Hawick Children's Book Award. What this meant was that the organisation bought 70 copies of my book and distributed them to schools in Hawick. The children in Hawick then read the books on the shortlist and whole classes were inspired to do projects related to the books. All of that explains why I announced my shortlisting a long way back and am only now bringing the news.

Late in May of this year an event was held to announce the winner, to showcase the books and to display the children's amazing work. This year's winner is A.G.Taylor for his book 'Meteorite' and it's a cracker... so congrats to the writer.

For me, well, a shortlisting for an award was such a genuine thrill and having so many children reading the book and talking about it and doing work inspired by it... I have to pinch myself sometimes.

So, thanks to everyone in Hawick for this great award and for promoting books and reading in such a positive way.

Exeter Writers!

2011-06-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Joanna Campbell for her win at Exeter Writers in their annual competition. My 'The Precious Things of Imogen's Library' came in second. Some other good writers on the shortlist, too. Well done to them all.

My 'Imogen' came out of a 50 word flash I did in response to one of Sarah Salway's photoprompts from way back, a picture of bark laid on a banister rail... weird how the imagination works, because my spiteful love-wronged Imogen came out of that photograph... So, thanks must go to Sarah, too, for without her picture there would be no Imogen.

You can see the top three stories on Exeter Writers' website.

People in Glass Houses!

2011-06-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

There’s been an interesting discussion in several places on the blogosphere recently to do with something Carlo Gebler wrote about writing. The article is on www.contemporarywriters.com, I think. It bemoans the life of the jobbing writer in a way that has got some people thinking and disagreeing and wanting Gebler to just stop moaning and go do something else. Surely we all have the right to moan about what we do sometimes. But that’s not the really interesting bit.

Gebler says in the article: “I read primarily to steal. This attitude applies not just to books but to everything. In every situation ... there is another part of my personality that is scrutinizing my experiences and thinking two terrible things: What’s in this for me? And: Can I use this? Can I put it in a story? Can I put it in an article?”

This has caused some writers to tie themselves into crazy knots that reveal a want of logic in their thinking. One writer thought it a ‘ghastly admission’ that Gebler reads to steal; this same writer has borrowed from her own reading, admits to this, says such borrowings in her work are ‘legion’, so where’s the logic in her ‘ghastly’? ‘I was a bit sad to see a writer of his standing saying he ‘steals’ from others,’ says the same writer! Then she goes on to try and define ‘steal’ as inspiration to save Gebler. But that doesn’t hold water, so she then tries to say she was just shocked that Gebler was asserting that he reads in order to steal… seeming by this to be allowing that it is ok to ‘steal’ in some sense…. maybe that kind of stealing is what she calls ‘borrowing’! I borrow but everyone else steals!

Then on the matter of using other people’s lives to write one’s own fiction, this same writer says ‘I'm sure every writer finds inspiration in the work of other writers, and if not in noticing the lives of those around us, then where else?’

But then the same writer goes on to say this: ‘As for 'using' the experiences of vulnerable people who are suffering because of their vulnerabilities, and making a profit out of it for oneself, not them - is that OK? I'll leave that as a question. If one does it with their permission, and the results help them in some way - is that OK?’

The want of logic is, I think obvious, and the knotted hypocrisy, too.

TWO YEARS AGO...

2011-05-21T04:09:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I was accused of plagiarism and this caused an online 'scandal'. I apologised to the writer at the time, the writer I borrowed from, not because I felt I had done anything wrong, but because I had clearly upset her. I withdrew the 'offending' story from the public domain in deference to her, but did not feel that what I had written represented a wrong thing.

The writer in question maintained a noble quiet on the matter, except to let it be known that she was hurt. I was sorry she was so hurt. This was a writer that I had been nice to. When she was being attacked on the website of a scientific journal, attacked for her science-inspired writings, I was the first to jump to a defence of what she was doing; when she was depressed shortly after the publication of her book of short fiction, I took a moment from her life and turned it into a cheery piece of fiction just to brighten her day. So I did not ever intend to harm her. I did not think what I had done would.

I still do not think that what I did in taking from her story to tell mine, is wrong, though I am careful these days not to write in this way. I know this hurt writer finds inspiration herself in what others write, and finds ideas there and does not think anyone ever comes up with an unprompted idea, and discovers solutions to how to tell a story she is struggling with in the way another writer has told his story; indeed, she is a 'borrower'. But, still she is hurt, and still I am sorry for that hurt.

About fifteen months ago I sent the 'cheery piece I had written to brighten her day' to a charity publication along with two other pieces. I was fortunate enough to have all three accepted. Then someone wrote to the organisers and the publishers and complained that I was a plagiarist. A small behind-the-scenes discussion took place which threatened to have works withdrawn by three writers including myself. The organiser did not think I had done wrong, not from a cursory look at the matter. Then I was asked to choose one of my pieces and to have this be the only accepted piece for the publication. I chose the cheery piece I had written for the hurt writer; I thought this was a good choice, and that it would be a nice thing to do. Someone took further offence and threatened to write to the new publisher if my piece was accepted, and so in the end my piece was withdrawn with my consent and without fuss in order that the charity publication be a success. It was.

I am not a plagiarist. I am a writer. I am a good writer. I should not be prevented from writing or from being read. I should not be prevented from doing good with my writing. I think even this 'hurt writer' should accept this. She thinks I did wrong... but no law has been broken, and no one has been able to convincingly argue that someone's moral rights have been trampled on. Indeed, I am more and more convinced that no wrong has been committed here. But I have apologised, and I do work in a different way now, carfeful not to further hurt other writers.

MANNERS!

2011-05-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

Is it plagiarism if you want to use an idea or image that appears in another writer’s work and you ask for their permission to ‘borrow’ it? If there is no acknowledgement on the new work to say you borrowed it and that you had permission so to do – then others, not knowing about the permission, are open to seeing it as simple theft? I know a writer who makes a stand against plagiarism and so you’d think she would not approve of this borrowing; but she has done just this and acknowledges the same quite openly on her blog. Surely this is using someone else’s idea? And as such this writer should be against it?

If this is not plagiarism, then someone who does the same without permission is doing exactly the same act, but simply has not followed the good manners of asking first. Does that mean that plagiarism of this kind is just a want of manners? And if it is, then should we be that bothered about such borrowings?

My own view is that it is silly to get worked up over this type of borrowing and that writers do this all the time and sometimes do it consciously and unconsciously. But if this sort of theft is alright, then there needs to be some thought about where the line of unacceptability can be drawn. Is this an arbitrarily drawn line and if it is, then who decides where it should go? Surely the copyright law was put in place both to acknowledge the impossibility of drawing such a line and to at least impose some sort of safeguard of a writer’s work… that’s why the specific arrangement of words is protected by copyright and why there is no copyright on ideas.

WHY?

2011-04-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Why do we do this writing thing? I think the layman, the man in the street, the man in my street (and the woman, too) think it is because of the money. I am not the first or the last to laugh at this. I just about break ahead at the moment, and that's with some biggish competition wins each year, and enough of them, and a children's book out there. I certainly do not make enough I could give up the day job, not even for a single month (not that I would anyway, thank you very much).

There's a great blogpost here: http://patriciaannmcnair.com/blog/

I think it says it all and says it in an amusing way, too, and this from a writer who might be judged to have made a success of writing... on her own terms.

Of course there are those who rake in millions, and there are those who eke out a living from it. But there are far more of us who simply do it for something other than money.

I used to act. It was like donning a mask and becoming an extrovert at no risk. I am a teacher and that is something the same. And now I write, and you know, it is not so very different. It is a way to express myself; it is me being creative (and I need to be that); it is something that I love (having loved reading first); and (I am told) my writing brings pleasure to others who read it... the better question is why wouldn't I be a writer?

It is not the money, not ever the money, not even the lure of it.

Forgive!

2011-04-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

I keep getting these pithy little pick-me-up quotations in my hotmail in-box. I don't recall requesting them. They just started appearing, as if from nowhere, like little gifts. I read them sometimes and then fly on past and consign them to the bin not always giving them the time they need. But it's Easter and the sun is trying to break through the clouds and a blackbird is singing it's heart out in the laburnum tree outside my window and the cat is stretched out on the slate tiles trying to find cool and this is in my in-box today and it feels appropriate somehow:

"He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass." (George Herbert)

So, to anyone who has done me wrong or harm, I offer forgiveness, unreservedly; and to anyone to whom I have done wrong or harm, I beg for it, humbly. And to anyone reading this, why not do the same in your world.

Happy Easter everyone.

RARE WISDOM!

2011-04-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

Was reading again Jonathan Lethem's article on 'The Ecstacy of Influence' and thinking again of this idea of the 'gift economy' as applied to the things we writers do. Still makes absolute sense, this does. You should check it out if you are serious with this writing game.

I entered a competition recently, one I have entered in the past and done well in. The person processing my entry recognised my name and thanked me for entering and said they were pleased that I had. Then the person said: 'Your stories are wonderful, and full of a rare wisdom.' How nice is that? To be read first of all, and to be remembered, and then to be thought well of, and wise! That's as good as getting a result in my book.

And it all goes to the idea of me, as a writer, gifting my stories to the world and hoping to be read and appreciated for what I have written and all the rest is just bullshit.

Sun is Shining

2011-04-18T04:20:00.001-07:00

After the usual rush of writing in January, I sort of stalled. It’s not that I didn’t have stories to tell, it’s just that I wasn’t sure why they had to be told. They felt a little frothy and superfluous. I wanted to say something in a story and something that had to be heard. That’s what I thought. And so production has been slower than usual.

I have tinkered with things and produced lots of flash fiction that may grow into something. I am working on a novel as well, and have penned nearly 20,000 words of that, and I am pleased at how it is going, so it’s not as though I have been idle. But still there was a nagging voice in the back of my head, that maybe it was time for something serious. So, yesterday I laid down a draft of something, was not altogether happy with the ending and not sure that it quite had what I wanted to say. I slept on it and woke to a much more complete ending. It is done now, and it is the first story in a long while where I feel it should be read for what it has to say as well as for the story and the writing.

And then today the draft of a second story falls onto the page, and it has something good in it too. And in my in-box notification that I am placed third in a story competition and I know I am on a shortlist for something else…nine competition hits so far this year and it feels good again… and I have a story available as a download through Ether Books for just 59 pence…and the sun is shining outside my window and birds are singing.

I hope there is something good where you are... whoever you are.

(Not wanting to put up a separate post for this, but something to add to the above: have just found out I am third in that shortlisted competition mentioned. So that makes nine competition hits: 2 in first place, 2 in second place, 2 in third place, and 3 commended; not bad to start the year, and 15 pieces printed or posted on the web so far. I should also mention that I have bombed in a handful of comps, too... it's not all easy.

And yesterday I think I wrote my emotionally strongest ever short story... it brings a lump to my throat at least.)

SAD SAD NEWS

2011-04-15T06:22:00.000-07:00

I have just visited the JBWB site (Jacqui Bennett's Writers' Bureau). There is some very sad news there. Jenny Hewitt who ran the operation and who was an excellent judge of creative writing and a truly nice person, sadly passed away on the 18th March. She was a keen voice in the encouragement of new writing and new writers. Whenever I entered a competition at JBWB I felt that I was writing for Jenny personally, such was the flavour of her personal notes of encouragement, always looking forward to reading the next entry - and she meant it when she said that.

I shall miss her cheery responses. Although JBWB will continue to operate as normal, it can never be the same without Jenny. She will be sorely missed by many people and many writers.

My sincere condolences to anyone close to Jenny.

Times they are a-changing... or are they?

2011-04-07T10:59:00.000-07:00

I have seen a few blog posts recently that stand up and say to would-be-writers and developing writers: read, read, read and steal, steal, steal - everything. It seems that everywhere I look I see something about art being about stealing and developing ideas that have come from other works. Has the world gone mad? Is this a 'Brave New World' we are creating for ourselves?

Well, not really. It's what I have said all along and others have said before me: we are the product of what has gone into our heads and so what we produce must be influenced by what has gone before. That's just common sense. But if it is to be something other than mere copying (which would be an infringement of the copyright rules) then it has to be something more, a development on what has gone before. It must add something to what is already 'out there'. That's how Art works.

But let's not think that this is anying new. Here, read Goethe:

“What am I then…? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thoughts,… their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.”

And so, those petty people who are so prissy precious about their ideas need to wake up and do some serious thinking and realise that their ideas are only really worth anything if they are passed on and made much of. There should not be a sense of having been stolen from, but rather that someone else has been fed and watered by what you put out there. When I give blood it makes me feel like I have done good in the world; when someone takes my idea and makes a new life out of it, then I should feel good also. Is the blogosphere waking up to this? Is that why I am seeing so much on the subject just now? Do we need to differentiate between plagiarism where actual arrangements of words are lifted and 'plagiarism' where an 'artist' uses another's ideas as a starting point for a new work of art?

I DIDN'T THINK SO!

2011-04-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Some private emails in support, but nothing from the people who were called on to respond... and over a hundred views of my blog since I posted two weeks ago. Could it be that there is no response because there can be no hard rules on what can and cannot be borrowed? Since all writers borrow on some level, and some even instruct others to take from the established writers there are, where exactly a line can be drawn becomes difficult... and perhaps even arbitrary.

There is a precedent for borrowing in almost every writer that has ever been, if they are honest and we are honest. It is the proven practice of writers going back to the dawn of writing. It is how art works and culture works and society. Then suddenly there were rules and they were copyright rules and they were there to protect the income of the writers who had published. That seems fair. I can see the need for that. But those rules were not there to restrict the free flow of ideas and the free exchange of ideas; they were there to protect the printed works and the printed words.

Then there were lawsuits and lawyers and it falls to them still to pick and pick at the 'small print' to decide if an infringement has occurred and cases are never so clear cut. I am not a lawyer and few writers are, so how is it possible that well-intentioned and honest writers are to be protected when they borrow? And how does the internet serve to bring about 'justice' in these cases when there are no internet police and just the baying of the loudest wolves to be heard?

Right now I have given up all borrowing... as far as that is humanly possible. That, it seems to me, is the only way. And yet I read a respected and great writer recently and he was telling new writers to take from all other writers and to take and take, and then to make what has been taken their own. Is that simply being irresponsible? Or is there some magic in that phrase 'make it your own'? I repeat that I have never taken something and then not attempted to make it my own; I have never stolen words, not ever; and I have always been honest in my borrowings. I have not been sneaky or clever, but have been open and plain, and there for all to see.

I am not, therefore, a plagiarist.

PLAGIARISM

2011-03-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

I once asked a writer who holds strong opinions on most things a searching question on how much a writer can borrow from another writer. There is no doubt that this happens and on a grand scale, all the time. There is no doubt that borrowing is natural and as much conscious as it is subconscious. So I wanted to know… how much can you take? This writer, Vanessa Gebbie, said she did not know. I know she borrows sometimes: images, characters, plots… conceals them enough that they might be said to be hers. I also know she openly condemns this borrowing if it is not concealed and a person is caught out. It seems to me there is something seriously unresolved here and so it is no wonder that

a) writers sometimes fall foul of the undefined rule,

b) that the public, not understanding, are so quick to be led to condemnation of the borrower/thief.

But the question, I think, is a real one and one that needs answered. And once it has been answered then we need to shout it from the rooftops… so everyone knows and understands. That seems reasonable. But that is unlikely to happen. Instead we have the wicked witches sticking pins into the backs of the unwittingly condemned and undermining the credibility of writers who may or may not have done wrong, but even if they have done wrong have done only what the great and the good in the literary canon have done and always done.

I have read a lot of articles on modern writers who have had to defend themselves from the label of ‘plagiarism’, but I read something recently that had something serious to add to the debate: Houellebecq, a French writer from the current crop of good writers, told an interviewer that lifting passages word for word was not theft, so not plagiarism, so long as ‘the motives were to recycle them for artistic purposes’. He was offended by the use of the term ‘plagiarism’ to describe what he had done. But the important thing he said was: "This is a skilled insult. Using a big word like plagiarism... always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism." I don’t think the witches are ever mindful of the serious damage they do with their free use of such labels. The accused is as much a victim as the person who feels their work has been borrowed from, more so if we consider that there is so much sympathy and support given to the one who has been borrowed from and who protests their hurt.

I have been called a plagiarist by some people who I know ‘take’ from other writers in their own work. These people cannot give a definitive explanation of what can and cannot be taken, what exactly is plagiarism. They continue to ‘stab me in the back’ in secret, writing to places where I have work accepted to discredit who I am… and all because they have decided I plagiarized two years ago. I have made apology to these writers; not because I admit to doing wrong because I don’t, but because I have hurt their feelings and I would never want to inflict hurt… that’s not who I am. I am a fierce defender of the act of self reflection and I have looked deep into what I did… I read widely on the subject, trying to understand what I did that was so wrong. I do not now take inspiration in what I read, not any more, and I have avoided doing anything of the same since 2009, but I still write. I am no nearer understanding what is allowed and what is not, given that the writers who shout loudest against me do themselves say things like: ‘I have been struggling with a story but I read a story today that gives me a structure that I think will allow my story to be told’! (This is a paraphrasing of what Tania Hershman said in a blogpost, and yet she feels so wronged by someone borrowing from her story!) But now, at least, I am more careful.

When a person does wrong, breaks the law (and I haven’t done that… have never stolen another person’s words and passed them off as my own) we, as a society, support the notion of rehabilitation. We forgive the thief and the criminal and the wrongdoer… so why is my reputation still attacked when no one has been able to say ‘he is still doing it’ (and they can’t say that, because I am not!)?

Last year I sent three flashed pieces to a site looking for contributions to help a charitable cause (100 Stories for Haiti). All three of my pieces were accepted and then, because someone had secretly and threateningly written to the organization and the publisher, two of my pieces were withdrawn, and then after another spite-filled communication the third was withdrawn… I am not even allowed to do good.

And this week my work was removed from a blog because the owner had obviously been contacted by someone who felt that my voice should not be represented… what kind of censorship is being endorsed here?

I am a good writer and even if you think I have done wrong, I have paid the price for that, a high price. How long does a person go on having to pay? I’d like to know. I know my blog is read, and I know it is read by some of those who 'are keeping an eye on me' and so I appeal to them to give me some kind of answer to what I ask here - and they can do it anonymously... or they can continue to hide behind an unattractive and nasty cowardice and say nothing.

Flash 2

2011-03-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

(This piece was done in a flash, with hardly time for breath or thought. I posted it unedited (as it is now) in some writerly place and an erstwhile writer colleague asked if she could use it as part of an essay she was penning about flash fiction. It was for a text book she was contributing to. I said yes, of course. Why wouldn't I? I give things away without a thought and can't really understand those who don't. It's just words, ideas, a story... why wouldn't I gift them to someone else? That's the whole point. And so I gift them now to you, whoever you are, reading this blog. I hope you might find something in what I have written, something that touches you and inspires you and makes you want to write about horses in a barn, and an insensitive father, and a woman who has dreams but dare not tell them, and a girl who is always the same distance away.)

DANCING WITH COBWEB

I am there in the barn, small moonlight breaking through a high window, the thick air warm, and the horses snorting derision. There is music playing, my papa’s fingers fluttering like frightened birds over the holes of his chanter and my mother singing at the sink, or at the oven. I can see in my head her hair pinned back, but a miscreant lock of grey falling limp across her face and her cheeks flushed and her eyes full of out-of-reach dreams. And she is singing, my papa hunched forwards in his chair, one foot tapping on the wooden floor, and blowing familiar music into the night.

And I am dancing, there in the barn, always dancing when there is music, my feet following the rhythm of my papa’s drumming foot, and me dancing in and out of the blue light of the moon, like it is a dream. And it is a dream, for I am holding someone in my arms and she moves with me, her feet in step with mine, shuffling through the spilled straw, and my hand at her waist, or where I imagine a girl’s waist to be. And I wonder if there is someone other than my heavy-footed father dancing in my mother’s head, if that is the dream I see moving behind her eyes when she sings.

And there is a girl in my arms. I can feel one small hand clasped palm to palm in mine, can smell her hair if I lean close, and the music turns us from one end of the barn to the other. And my faint heart runs breathless ahead of me, so that my head spins and the dirt-floor tilts and I fall. And she falls with me, and I hear laughter, my mother laughing And the music broken, and the horses still stamping their impatience.

And the girl’s hand down the front of my trousers then, with my hand, and there on a bed of straw in my father’s barn she gifts me make-believe kisses. And I see spiders in her mussed up hair, her breath smelling something sweet, like new-cut straw, and my own breath snatched.

And when I close my eyes I can see her, a girl I follow to school most days, my steps in hers only at a distance. Every day for almost a year now, the distance never shortened. She moves away from me and that is a kind of dance, too, though there is no music playing. And I hurry after. But though I see her plain as though she was really there in the barn and it was day, though I see her in my head, every dress she ever wore, the movement of her hair as she walks, the way she holds her books pressed to her chest as though she has dreams, too, hidden , there where her heart is – though I see all of this clear as though she is there, I do not know her name.

What you always dreaming for, my papa always says when he catches me. There’s work needs doing, and you always dreaming. Like you was a girl. You want to clear those cobwebs out of your head and see sense, boy. No dream is gonna get you a woman to cook for you, and to wash for you and to keep your bed warm.

And my mother’s eyes, still blue, filled with unspilled tears when she hears him say this. And the girl in my head, I call her Cobweb just for fun, and there in the barn, with the horses quiet again, and my father paused for breath and no music playing, I call her name and feel my body arch and the dream is warm and wet in my hand.

(PS The text book, in case you are interested, is The Rose Metal Press's 'Field Guide to Flash Fiction' and the essay is by Vanessa Gebbie)

SHORT CHANGED

2011-03-12T02:57:00.000-08:00

SHORT CHANGED

I have been involved in a debate going on at flashfiction.net regarding Hemingway's famous six (not to be confused with Enid Blyton's famous five!). The six in question are words: 'For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn', and the contention is that these six words constitute a story.

I am unhappy with this as an analysis of the six words. I maintain that the reader creates the story out of the six words and that the six words may be counted as highly evocative or art or poetry, but that the stories that might be inferred from these six words can be completely contradictory: story of a baby who died without leaving the hospital; story of a baby born with outsized feet or no feet or three; story of a couple who could not conceive... etc. The limit of these stories stretches as far as the imagination of readers or writers, which is very far indeed. It also underlines my point that the story is an invention of the reader not Hemingway the writer... that of themselves there is insufficient in those six words for us to say that here we have a story in any acceptable sense of what is a story.

Then Randall Brown of flashfiction.net challenged me to add to the six words sufficient for me to accept that now we had a story. I am not a fan of brevity for brevity's sake and see this drive towards absolute minimalism as gimmicky and uninteresting. So, instead, I took Hemingway's six (and by the way, in the end they are probably not Hemingway's, which I am pleased about as I esteem his writing a lot) and in keeping with the idea of flash (short short fiction) I created two 'stories' out of Hemingway's six words. One piece is traditional and one is experimental and I hope they both are sufficient for a story to be 'seen'. Here they are:

FIVE HANDWRITTEN CARDS IN A SHOP WINDOW (Handwriting the same)

1) For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

2) Home Sweet Home - missing all the 'sweet'. Looking to share with tenant of a kindly disposition and gentle words. Terms and conditions negotiable.

3) Genuine18 carat gold wedding band - no longer required. All offers considered.

4) Heart: used once, needs mending. Answers to the name of Ed. Barren women only may apply.

5) Baby name: never used. Rolls around the tongue, like hard candy, tastes sharp like lemons or onions, and brings tears. Will consider exchange for some other name.

And flash story number two:

ENOUGH (with a debt to Hemingway or whoever)

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

He held the card at arm's length, reading over what he'd written. He wondered if it was enough, if six words told the whole story of those shoes - Emmy's shoes, small as a doll's, and he dreams sometimes, sees Emmy in the dark of dreaming and her impossible first steps, the ones she might have taken, her tiny feet, soft as snow or clouds, and slipped into those shoes. He hears the hesitant dream-click and click of her breathless step and step, moving towards his outstretched arms or moving away, his hands clutching at only dark.

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

He set the card down on the kitchen table. He wrapped the shoes in pink tissue paper and laid them together, heel to toe in the box and the lid placed on top so they were in the sudden dark once more - another box-dark like the one where Emmy danced in breathless dreams or slept and did not dream, not ever.

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

He wondered if those six words were enough.

Flash Example 1

2011-03-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

(This is a flashed piece written in about twenty minutes. A once-upon-a-time writer friend that I was sometimes eager to impress was running a workshop for writers new to flash fiction and she posted up the prompt 'Tattooed With Mermaids'. I stumbled across her post and wrote this for her.)

TATTOOED WITH MERMAIDS

He didn’t like the sea, not really. Was sick on boats and couldn’t swim, that’s what he said.

Same as fishermen, I told him. Some of em don’t swim. I know, it don’t make sense, but I heard that.
He was nodding, a glaze to his sea-blue eyes that told me he wasn't really listening. But he was interested. Not in the things I had to say, but in me. He kept his hand on my waist, under my top, his fingers stroke stroking the skin.

So if you don’t like the sea, why? I asked him.

He shrugged.

His shirt sleeves were pushed up to the elbows and he was tattooed with mermaids, inked in blue and green with red nipples and coiling fish tails. There were dozens of em, swimming in a shoal, from his wrist to the shirt cuff, and disappearing there, up the rest of his arm, maybe.

I seen one before, or two, sitting proud, hands in the hair and breasts thrusting, like girls in magazines. But this was different. He had a whole sea-catch of them, like he had sunk his arms in a bucket of fish, right up to the elbows, and they came out covered in the silver scales of cod and sardine, and no skin to be seen, ‘cept the backs of his hands and his fingers.

How many?

He couldn’t say. Got em when he was drunk mostly, and he was drunk a lot, he said, his head swimming, the ground tipping and all sense drowning. If he flexed his muscles they moved, some, like they was in water, the way things seen through water change shape, rippling.

Don’t you ever fancy something else, like a heart with a sword through it? I seen that on a man’s arm and a curl of ribbon unfurling across the red with his girlfriend’s name written on it, only she wasn’t his girlfriend no more, just someone he fucked, used to.

He laughed at that.

If you was to guess, how many? I said.

You could count them if you like, he said, finishing his drink. It felt like a line, when he said it, one he’d use to catch other fish than me. I got mermaids swimming all over, he added, and winked so everyone in the bar could see, and kissed me on the forehead, like I was a child.

He was right about all over. I stopped counting at a hundred and ten, not sure if I had counted some twice. They were everywhere. Twisting into every pouch of him, pooling over his chest, and across his back, no two the same, their tails flicking every which way, some swimming towards his neck and others diving down into his shorts.

Jesus, I said. He was passed out on the bed.

Aside from the mermaids, he wasn’t much of a catch. His name was Lou or Lewis. We drank him towards another two inked bare-breasted fish tails, fucked once, and then I moved on, to deeper waters.

Navel Gazing and The Blogosphere

2011-02-26T01:30:00.000-08:00

There's a a niggling voice in my head about this blogging game, about its relevance and the noise that it makes. I sometimes trawl around the place, just listening to the 'chatter', and it seems to me to be quite maddeningly mindless - some of the time it does, and yet because it is written down it commands a little more attention than it should and it is somehow lifted in importance - seems to be lifted at least.

Don't get me wrong, some people tell you interesting things about their world or their day, things that you would tune into if you overheard them talking in a bus queue, and when they stopped speaking you'd want to ask them to go on and say more - if that wasn't a rude intrusion. Some people have useful information or tips that might be relevant to you as a novice in their field or as someone just interested in knowing stuff. But to be honest and blunt, some people are just concerned with the banal: Why when I say I am a writer do people ask what it is I have written as though they are asking me to prove it? They wouldn't do that for any other profession! What nonsense is sometimes spoken here on the blogosphere. What self-obsessed twaddle. If someone hearing that you do something is interested enough to ask for more information about what you do, be flattered enough that you seem interesting and get over yourself.

And so this has got me turning over an old chestnut of mine: why am I here? Not why am I here on this earth - that's a completely other chestnut. But why am I here blogging? I was encouraged to 'join the blog club' by other writers. They said I ought to, that it was the world we lived in, that it was another tool in the promotion of ourselves as writers (even though I hate all self-promotion and do not even plug my children's book in the school where I work because I feel that would be taking advantage of children I work with and for and care about). I can see that for some this blogging game works in the promotion of their work (even though we sometimes have to wade through the banal and the downright inappropriate - you wouldn't tell a stranger in the street the details of your own mental health... but people on the blogosphere feel that they can do that when the stranger has no face!). For long enough I was hanging up flash fiction pieces here on this blog, a couple a week, hoping that someone visiting might be interested enough to read my writing (after all that's the point of writing really, to be read). I have posted a whole novel in flashes here and that felt like there was a worthwhile point to blogging. This project has been at an end now for a wee while... and so I am like that guy at the party who is feeling a little awkward and wondering what else he can say to keep the girl beside him from moving away. And here I am indulging in a bit of navel gazing and wondering what I do now to justify this here blog. I certainly don't want to discuss my mental health or indeed the symptoms of my physical health; I don't want to discuss my job or my personal circumstances or my financial place in the world or my religion or lack of it; I don't want the banal matter of when I write and whether I use notebooks or pen or pencil or eat biscuits between paragraphs - any of that to occupy this space. But I want something.

So, I am considering another series of flashes and posting these up here. I know some writers would tell me that I could do 'better' with them and make money out of them in some other places... and if I had a head for business I might do that. But I am a writer and all I do is write; the business end of my life can take care of itself. And that sounds a bit like a manifesto to be going on with and one that I could live with. There. It is decided. I shall begin a series of flash fiction posts here next week, something to read. So, if you are interested, watch this space.

NOT SO SNARLY

2011-02-19T09:36:00.000-08:00

NICER TODAY

In the post this morning was something surprising and nice: two copies of Fylde Brighter Writers' new anthology called 'Out of Season'. As runner up in their short story competition last year with my story 'The Boy Who Stayed at School' (also winner of Southport Writers' Competition) I have found a place in there. Apparently, according to the introduction to the anthology, it was a close run thing between myself and Anne Wilson's piece called 'Ghost Training' - congratulations to Anne. The anthology is beautifully produced and available through Lulu... all proceeds going to a charitable cause.

And, having been on mid-term for a week, I at last got down to a new piece of writing today. Have been polishing lots of other bits and pieces, but today something new... and that felt very good, because you can sometimes feel like you might be losing the edge on what you can do and you need to do it again and again to prove to yourself that you can still do it.

And all of that leaves me in a nicer mood today... not so narky or snarly... so one good thing to end on:

A once upon a time writer I worked with (but don't anymore) has just landed a deal to publish her first novel and that sort of success deserves to be celebrated. Congrats to Vanessa Gebbie and good luck for 'The Coward's Tale' due out later in the year.

THE RUBBISH THAT THERE IS

2011-02-18T06:21:00.000-08:00

(Am on mid-term break just now and without my computer and time a little heavy on my hands so have been browsing the web (on my son's machine) and I am posting stuff here just to get things out of my head... like a Mr Angry or a Mr Disappointed, at least... you don't have to agree!)

There’s a lot of rubbish said out there. ( and maybe I am just adding to it!)

There’s a debate I see often aired in the ether, a debate about which is better, butter or marge, tea or coffee, white wine or red. Science may tell you today that there are things in new red wine that are actually good for you if you consume only a glass a day, but I don’t think that is what is meant in this sort of debate.

So which is better, the short story or the novel? That’s what I am really talking about. That’s the question that is so often aired. Usually the question is raised by an ardent short story writer in defence of what they do and usually it extols the virtues of the short story in such a nonsensical way. It sometimes involves a person saying what the novel is not and what a story does that the novel cannot. They make up a definition of what the novel’s limits must be and slip the short story into the space they have created. I have read one defence that says a whole world is conjured in a short story, that it is the germ of something that passes from the writer to the reader and takes root in the reader’s imagination and lives with the reader long after the page has been turned.

I am sorry, but there are great novels that do that for me, that do as much and more than a short story does. Don’t get me wrong; I love short stories and love writing them. I think they are a better animal than flash fiction. I think they have great power. I think they can be rich and moving and complete - even when they are not complete. I also think there are great short stories that I would prize as some of the best things I have read. But equally there is a whole library of novels that I would say do for me.

So, when it comes down to it, let’s be honest: marge or butter, tea or coffee, red wine or white - it’s surely a matter of taste, really it is, personal taste, and as writers we have to accept that the market seems to prefer the flavour of the novel over the short story… hence, perhaps, the need for these airy defences of the short story in order to cudgel people into seeing sense and ‘you really ought to drink red wine‘ and short stories have feelings, too.

I wish there was more of a market for them, but if we are to shout out their virtues, lets not shout out nonsense. So, Why Short Stories? Because they give us a different flavour... seems sensible enough.

NOTHING NEW

2011-02-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

The Greatest Story Ever Told (and told again)

He was born on the 25th December. His mother was made magically pregnant, filled with a ‘divine fire’. The child was born in a cave in a manger. His birth was heralded by a star in the east and three wise men were in attendance. The child was taken away by his mother fearing that he would be killed. He grew to be a great child-teacher in the temple. He was baptised at thirty. He had 12 disciples and performed miracles such as walking on water and feeding bread to a multitude. He raised a man from the dead and his name was El-Azar-us. He was known as ‘the way, the truth, the light.’ He was also called ‘the messiah’ and ‘the Son of Man’ and ‘the lamb of God’ and ‘the good shepherd’ and ‘the Lord of Heaven'. He was the fisher and associated with the lamb and the lion and fish. He was called ‘KRST’ and ‘Annointed One’. He was crucified and buried in a tomb and resurrected.

You would be forgiven for thinking you know this story. But this is apparently the story of the Egyptian god Horus as gleaned from ’The Egyptian Book of The Dead’. I do not pass comment on the implications this has for Christians today (anyone interested in this might want to see the online video called ‘Zeitgeist 1‘... though there is some reason to be cautious of the evidence given in that video, and all the conspiracy theories that follow are a bit hard to swallow). However, what the story of Horus does give us is another example of how stories and ideas can be taken from one source and given new life and made something richer by a new writer or writers, and that, it seems, is a natural process.

I love the Bible stories and cannot imagine my life without them. Can you?

HOW DO YOU BOMB?

2011-02-15T10:56:00.000-08:00

I bomb very badly.

I have a fair amount of success in writing competitions and I am usually philosophical about what that means. It's not that I am laid back when I do hit big, as someone once said; it's more that for every hit I get, there are a handful of misses... and the misses always hit hard.

I think I was pushed as a kid at primary school and being second in the class was never good enough. Then when they stopped pushing, I pushed myself trying to win the elusive top spot in everything I did. Maybe there's a psychologist out there who'd have an explanation for why that was and why it still is; I just know that 'winning', being the person on the pedestal, is something that has shaped me and shaped how I approach my work (and writing is work).

That's why losing is so hard. Losing at anything. I slide into a 'grump' for hours whenever I hear that my name is not on a shortlist. I undermine all my successes by measuring myself against those failures... at least until next time when hope springs eternal. There's always hope. That maybe explains why I have so much stuff entered elsewhere... something to fall back on when I don't win a mention with one competition.

So you see, I bomb badly.

And here I am saying, I bombed in Willesden this year. Again. Third time in a row. But... looking at those on the shortlist... well, there are some very good names on there and one or two I'd count as friends. So, congratulations to everyone who didn't bomb in Willesden. Really, heaps of congratulations... and for the rest of us... there's always next year... or the very next competition result to be announced.

FOR THE SAKE OF LOVE

2011-02-13T02:03:00.000-08:00

What's Love Got To Do With It?

Interesting that recently I have seen a fair amount of stuff on 'love in Fiction'. Last night it was Sebastian Faulks and he was looking at love in the novel. He started off by saying something about where we get our ideas about love from and deciding that we get it from books. I first fell in love at the age of ten (before I had read any books that contained love, and before we even had a television and the only film I had seen was 'The Jungle Book' - and ok there is that bit at the end where Mowgli is so smitten that he ditches his friends for the girl!... but I am not sure that my falling in love had much to do with that). But maybe Faulks does have something of a point.

I read literature at University and I soaked up Shakespeare and Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. Did these reading experiences define for me what love is? Did they lay down the blueprint of what I expect from love - unreasonably expect? And does film now do the same in fashioning these expectations for the whole of society?

I write a lot, and love and relationships enter into the writing. Vonnegut professes not to write about love because as in life so in fiction: it takes over. And it can. It takes over my writing... a lot of the time it does. But it is the failure of love and the madness and the pain and the yearning and the obstinate hope that colours what I write. I don't think I say anything new. I don't think I teach anything about love... but the idea that a reader might learn something about what love is from reading me, that feels like some kind of responsibility.

Then I read an interesting question somewhere online: Do men read love stories? They might say they don't. I don't do Mills and Boon, (I protest I don't) but clearly I do the rest (see my university reading above). 'Love in the Time of Cholera' and Barriccio's 'Silk' and Winterson's 'The Passion'... I have read and loved these. Maybe they have shaped my imagination and maybe that imagination shapes my view of love. Maybe. But maybe it is our experience of love that rather shapes what we read and how we see love. Few of us fall in love just the once and marry our childhood sweethearts and live happy ever after... 'the course of true love never did run smooth'. We mostly fall inexpertly in and out of love at first, experiencing all the pain and rejection and longing, before some way down the road finding someone to build a life with. And even then, another few miles down the road we may find love beset with further trials (a cooling of passion or infidelity and divorce and heartache). Maybe it is this that shapes our view of love, and what we write or read (what we are drawn to read) is what mirrors our experience of love... a bit.

The web of influence on who and what we are is a complex one... love books, though.

THRILLED

2011-02-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

FEEDBACK

I have a story called 'The Touching of Esther Roberts' posted up at JBWB (Jacqui Bennett Writers' Bureau). I've had a fair amount of feedback to this story recently and all of it positive... that can be worth more than gold.

Here's a sample of things that have been said (and I only put this up because I have been called 'laid back' about my recent writing successes and really I am so very thrilled by what readers have said. Maybe more readers might be encouraged by what's said here to go take a peek at my Esther Roberts. I hope so.)

'I truly enjoyed your story'

'So much conveyed in quick elegant lines'

'It brought tears to my eyes'

'You have a wonderful way of creating atmosphere, empathy for your characters and that feeling of being there.'

'This is a story I shan't forget'

'Fabulous story'

I am honestly overwhelmed to have had such a connection with these readers.

Thank you.

PENTLAND WRITERS' GROUP

2011-02-05T01:12:00.001-08:00

Last year I was encouraged to enter a short story competition being run by a writing group I had formerly been a member of. It was the Pentland Writers' Group's way of celebrating 10 years as a group. I wanted to show support, but the competition was themed and I hadn't got anything that fitted. The pesky e-mail reminders for the approaching deadline kept appearing in my in-box, and eventually I caved in to the pressure and I sat down and wrote something. To my surprise my story was chosen as the overall winner. The story is called 'The Ten Loves of Lizzie Salt'.

As if it wasn't enough and already great to have won, I was invited to be a part of an event hosted last night by PWG. They put on another of their local and public readings together with songs and music from Gerda Stevenson and the Carlops Jazz Group. The weather was atrocious and that is always a concern. It was lashing rain when I left the house. I hoped, for the group, that this would not put a damper on things!

I needn't have worried. The reading took place in the Carlops village hall and it was what might be described as 'stowed out'. They had to get extra chairs to accomodate everybody in the hall! The audience was entertained by poetry and stories from members of the writers' group - and there were some very good new voices there (new to me) as well as some warmly familiar, and also good, older voices. And there was music and song - beautiful songs in scots written by Gerda and fabulous music - to break up the readings. The interval offered wine and nibbles and a chance for the audience to buy the newly launched new anthology from the group.

I feel I was given the peachiest spot of all for I was the final reader. I always read my work out loud before sending it 'out there' - but reading it to oneself is a very different experience to reading it to someone else, and different again from reading it to a packed and appreciative audience. I had my eyes opened to my own story... like reading it and it is someone else's. I love performing and performing my own work is just icing on that cake. The audience enthused about the piece and I left the event with the warmest of glows - not simply because I was in love with the story again (as I was when I wrote it), but because writing in the area where I live seems to me to be in a healthier state now than ever.

A big warm thank you to everyone at Pentland Writers' Group (PWG) - for the competition without which I would not have birthed this story of mine; for picking me as overall winner; for inviting me to an event where I got the opportunity of sharing my story with a public audience; for including my work in their lovely anthology; and for the warm welcome I always receive from PWG. Thank you.

A Bomb and a Hit

2011-01-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

So, this is the last that January has to offer 2011... and news just in:

a) I bombed completely in one competition... one that I would dearly have loved to have made a mark in.

b) I have won a second competition for the year... The Sentinel Literary Short Story Competition and the judge there thought something about the language was 'brilliant' and my story stayed with her after she had read it. That was a nice thing to say, a nice thing to hear.

c) Oh and an agent has made contact on the back of an earlier comp success and has asked to see a novel... so, I had better get busy.

DO YOU SMELL?

2011-01-30T09:14:00.000-08:00

Book or Kindle

I try not to be Luddite in my thinking about new technology. I do. I try to be open to change, a little. Ok, so I’ve never grown out of being a 70’s hippy and I am a creature of habits and those habits established over long time. But I do try to keep an open mind about the new. After all, I am a teacher of high school kids and it would not do to be of the ark and not knowing what they are talking about . Imagine my surprise then when this week one of the fifteen year old girls in my class confessed that bookshop owners might think her visits to their shop a bit strange as she flicks through the pages of new books and breathes in the scent of them. ‘I love the smell of new books,’ she said, a little guiltily.

Smell is not my sense of choice. My olfactory tool is a bit blunt to look at and a bit blunt in its operation, too. So, I am telling one of my sons this today, about a bookish fifteen your old girl sniffing the insides of new books. I know he likes books, though he is particular. He is an art student and funds are always lower then they could be. He admits that he can understand this pupil’s fascination with the smell of the pages of books, though for my son it is the smell of old books that he enjoys - maybe that has something to do with economics, I don’t know.

I don’t get it. Not the smell of them. But I accept that there is clearly some appeal in sticking your nose between the covers of yesterday’s blockbusters and today’s new bestsellers-to-be - for them what have sensitive hooters.

And this brings me to my question to you: what does your Kindle smell of? Do you hold it to your nose and breathe in the scent of it? Will it have a different smell when it is old and dog-eared? Will the new Kindle have a smell built into it? Is the lack of a smell perhaps an advantage? You tell me.

An Essay on Flashing

2011-01-23T03:43:00.000-08:00

(Sometimes the things making noise in my head are just thoughts and they want to be out there as much as the creative things. I gift you this. See what you think.)

THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES, OR FLASHING

I have had some success myself with writing flash fiction. I was one of five shortlisted in Smokelong’s Kathy Fish Fellowship Award 2008; I have been highly commended by Biscuit, honoured by Binnacle and short and long listed by Flash 500. My work has appeared in prestigious magazines, both print and on-line, and in a text book guide to flash fiction as an example of what can be achieved. And I enjoy writing flash fiction.

I have written a whole novel that works as a series of flashed pieces, though these are interconnected pieces and not wholly self-contained so might not pass muster as true flash. I have written a homage to my late father in fifty flashed pieces, like anecdotes that might be told by family and friends at a funeral gathering, but again they sort of hang together. The point is I am no stranger to flash fiction and I can see possibilities with the form.

And yet, I can’t help feeling that there is something wrong with what’s happening with flash fiction. I can’t help feeling that there’s something of the Emperor’s New Clothes about it’s current popularity.

I am a teacher of English in a High School. In the upper school students can study English at different levels. They have to submit a folio of essays to be marked. If a student studying at the lowest level produces an essay of the same length as a student studying at the highest level (say 1200 words) then the student at the lowest level is penalised. This is the case because there are set upper limits for essay length at each level and they differ. You might wonder why there is an upper limit at all, and maybe the answer would have more to do with expediency than writing - after all, someone has to be paid to mark the work and time is money! But that a poorer ability student has the task of expressing him/herself in fewer words than a student of higher ability does seem to be a little back to front.

Maybe there isn‘t a connection here, but it seems to me that the rise of flash fiction has more to do with expediency than it does with writing.

Competitions should be about developing good writing - in a perfect world perhaps. Or about encouraging writing , or identifying talent, or giving recognition for writing achievement. But competitions, when all is said and done, are mostly about raising money or raising the profile of the organisation staging the competition (which may have a link to money-making too). Writers are more often than not charged for their entry and the entry fees pay for the competition. You can charge as much for a flash fiction entry as you can for a full length story, but judging the flashed pieces becomes less time-consuming a task than judging stories where the limit is in the thousands of words. (This may also explain why there are so few competitions where the word limit is higher than 3000 words.) And imagine, there are some flash fiction competitions that set the limit at a hundred words, and some even tighter than that.

We live in the internet age and the argument runs that flash fiction sits well with that ‘web surfing’ level of focus. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the reason for the rise and rise. Maybe that’s why Hemingway’s six worder is lauded as the pinnacle of economy and pathos, where I see only six words.

I read ‘Einstein’s Dreams’ again recently, by Alan Lightman. I read it again because I remembered enjoying something about it and at the same time being somehow dissatisfied with it. It is clever. The writing is good, even brilliant. But the flashed time pieces that make up the novel, seem ultimately unsatisfying, or at least satisfying only at a certain level. It’s like leafing through a book of sketches by a brilliant artist. I love seeing sketches, and can see they have worth in their own right. Personally my sketches (when I am being a visual artist) are often much better than the finished works. But hang a brilliant sketch next to a brilliant finished work and there’s no contest in me for which I prefer. I love the pieces in Lightman’s book and he does at least try to hang them together in some way; he seeks to unite them with his prologue-interludes-epilogue pieces, and I think whilst this can help place the flashed time pieces into their context it does not ultimately make for a good complete book for the reader. The individual pieces are brilliant, the concept is brilliant, but somehow for this reader that is not quite enough.

I read a new writer’s collection, just published last year, all of the pieces are ‘flash’. I had heard good things about the book and I was intrigued. And sure enough there is some cleverness in something of what I read. And the prose is easy and not damnably bad. And I could see what was going on. But ultimately, reading the book was like feasting on hors d’oeuvres and really quite unsatisfying. I wanted more. The pieces read like sketched thoughts and I wanted the fully flavoured finished story. Bite-size is not how everything should be; we need something more to chew on. And flash has, I think, yet to find its proper place at the table.

I enjoy writing flash because I enjoy playing with words and stories. Often my flashed pieces are like quick sketches, and many flashes, like seeds planted, have grown into something more. And one or two of these may become more leafy still. (sorry for all of these mixed metaphors!) I will continue to write flash and to use flash as a key to unlock my inner voices and as a way of quickly getting down on paper what might otherwise be so fleeting as to have flown before I could pin it down. I will also occasionally marvel at short pieces and think ‘that’s it!’ when I find what a true flash can do. But I will also try not to be fooled into seeing new clothes where there is nothing.

What about you?

A Guest of My Old Writing Group

2011-01-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

I forget things just now. Maybe it's an age thing. Maybe it's because my head is filling up with ideas and I am not writing as much as I should be - because I am also trying to do research for a biggish project that is taking some shape in my head. Anyway, I forget things, and have forgotten to post up a piece of information here. So, this is me remembering.

I have been asked by my old writing group to join them in a public reading in Carlops. This was supposed to happen at the end of last year, but the weather shifted it to February 4th. This will be a fun evening, hearing what friends have been up to creatively and sharing what I have done and a captive audience looking for performance. Love it.

I should do more of these, I think.

And today I wrote a new short story - so I could make space for the 'real' project to be heard in my head. I wrote a story that has an interesting structure, telling itself three times and telling itself different each time. Remember John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and how it ends and then offers you a second ending and then encourages the reader to choose between the two? I thought this was so clever when I read it. My story is, I think, in the same tradition. It was tricky making it work and I so am pleased with the playfulness of it and its neatness and also its relationship with a real experience I had.

And somewhere I saw stuff under the heading 'Why Write?' and thought it an odd question to draw so much comment. Write because it is a joy to do. Write because you enjoy writing. Write because it is fun to do so. If it is different for you - a struggle, a pain, a trial - then maybe do something else... life's too short. At the very least I am with Susan Hill on this - not having patience with writers who whinge about how hard it all is.

Longworth Editors Short Story Competition

2011-01-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

I can say now because it's announced and in the public domain: I won the Longworth Editors Short Story Competition. I was pleased with this win because it was with a story of mine that I liked so much I wanted it to do well... and it just goes to show... it had hit ok in other comps... commended but no prizes... and then here it wins... have faith in what you have written is the message, I think.

A couple of ideas are taking up time at the moment... so am being a little quieter than usual. Some good might come out of this... we'll see.

AND IT'S ONLY JANUARY

2011-01-09T01:52:00.001-08:00

2ND RESULT OF THE YEAR and it's only Januuary!

Just found out that I was commended in a competition where the proceeds have gone to a good cause. Claire Apps runs a site to support those who have suffered from or those who want to take a stand against Domestic Violence. She has just completed the judging of a short story competition on that theme. Congrats to everyone who entered and to all those who won prizes.

If you are interested, Claire is running another short story competition. This time the theme is 'future' and the proceeds will go towards an equally good cause. Check it out!

News in!

2011-01-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

Have been quite busy over the holiday period. I wrote five new stories, a couple of which I think are worth something. They were a bit of a new departure and lots of fun to do, too. Then I got down to work for the day job - that was more serious, but I made some progress there aswell.

News just in (and this feels good coming so early in the year) : I have just been informed that I have won another short story competition. Was told in November that I had made the shortlist, then heard nothing so thought I had not done better than that, and was pleased with that anyway. Then today, an e-mail to say I had won and some feedback which praised the language in my story.

Last night I had quietly resolved to give much more of my attention to bigger projects this year... then this happens.

Whispers are in my head for a further novel idea... needs more research than the other ideas I have, but those whispers are beginning to make themselves heard... and so, may become shouts before much longer and then I will have a project to consume me.

Happy New Year to all writers and any readers that come here.

A New Year Letter

2010-12-30T09:39:00.000-08:00

Well, the year's almost done and looking back it has not been so bad.

I finished a second children's novel. (and we'll have to wait and see how that does)

I completed the Port Brokeferry project at close to 80,000 words.

I wrote thirty short stories and dozens of flash fictions.

I finished a special 'thing'; I wrote 50 flashes on my dad, who passed away some years back, and I did not want that he be forgotten. The whole project has the the title 'Art in Heaven' (as in 'Our Father who art in Heaven...') and was done for my brother who was celebrating a special birthday. This was a big and important project and it meant a lot to get it completed.

I scored 29 hits in competitions including 4 first and 4 seconds.

I got ideas for two novels to add two already simmering in my head, and more Port Brokeferry spin-offs beginning to excite me - lots of those. No signs then of the creative juices drying up.

Yes, so not too bad a year.

And the year ahead? Lots I HAVE to do this year. Lots of projects I need to bring to some kind of fruition. I have goals, as I did last year, and they are a little more ambitious, so I may be a little quieter here than I have been. Maybe - quiet isn't something that sits easy with me... again we'll see.

But for now, a happy new year to all who pop in here. I hope the year behind you has been equally productive and the year ahead already holds some promise.

Best to all.

D

THE END

2010-12-20T10:07:00.001-08:00

(And here it is, the final piece for the Port Brokeferry project, and we can discover who this Col is that Mad Martin seeks after and why he is so elusive... and in my head another couple of Port Brokeferry things are percolating so it might be that this is just the beginning! If you have been following this 'story' then you'll remember that each new day in Port Brokeferry has begun with an 'official' document of some description... and so we end on the same, which rounds the whole thing off kind of neatly.)

OLD NEWS

(Below is reproduced a newspaper article pertaining to events that happened in Port Brokeferry’s not too distant past, though there are many in Port Brokeferry who do not now remember all that was said in the article and some who have never known. Those there are who cut out the article and have kept it in the back of a drawer in the kitchen, or tucked away in a box up in the attic space, and they only rarely rediscover the yellowing newsprint and read it now as one who reads fiction, not really believing that the people referred to in the article are real. One there is who keeps it in the glove compartment of his red Ford Fiesta, but he does not live in Port Brokeferry any more.)

A MOMENT OF MADNESS

In a small sleepy fishing village called Port Brokeferry situated on the north-west coast, there was a moment of madness last Sunday, when two teenage boys were involved in a high school caper that turned into catastrophe.

The boys, Colin Galbraith (16), and Martin Stuart (15), had both been drinking. It was late and the boys were still out, even though they were expected at school the next morning. A third boy, Athol Stuart (16), no relation, was with them until shortly before the incident, but he had not been drinking. He said they were ‘quite far gone with the drink’ and were at that ‘silly stage where everything is funny and a good idea’. They had earlier played ‘chap door run’ at some of the houses on the front, and they’d pulled flowers out of one of the gardens, and scattered the contents of a rubbish bin along the main street.

Athol Stuart had then said ‘enough was enough’ and ‘no harm done’ and that they ‘should call it a night’. But they had not yet finished. One of the boys had the idea to turn back time. He proposed that they wind the hands of the village clock back a few hours. They also thought that would justify their lateness the next day at school. There is a clock high on the wall of The Victoria Hotel on Port Brokeferry’s main street. Athol Stuart left at this point, declaring their plan nothing but ‘madness’.

Colin Galbraith and Martin Stuart managed to somehow procure a ladder from the garden of a local handyman and it fell to Martin to climb up to the clock. Athol Stuart afterwards said ‘Martin was always trying to prove himself, being the younger of the three, and Colin was always setting him tasks. Dares, really. And Martin always wanted to be the hero.’

Martin Stuart was successful in altering the time on the Victoria Hotel clock, but then he must have lost his balance and he fell from a height of around twenty feet. He landed awkwardly on the flagstone pavement and took a serious knock to his head that rendered him unconscious. It is thought that Colin Galbraith took fright and fled the scene, though Athol Stuart says that could not be, that something must have happened, for the three boys were the closest of friends.

The body of Martin Stuart was discovered by Athol Stuart when, with an attack of conscience, he thought better of leaving the two inebriated teenagers by themselves and returned to the main street.

A Doctor Kerr accompanied Martin Stuart to the hospital. It is not yet known what the full extent of the teenager's injuries might be, and Athol Stuart and Colin Galbraith are said to be helping the police with their enquiries.

The Penultimate Port Brokeferry Postcard

2010-12-17T15:56:00.000-08:00

(This is the penultimate piece for the Port Brokeferry project and we have heard Mad martin looking for Col all the way through, and here is Col... but the mystery of why he keeps to the shadows will have to wait for the final piece.)

COL

It was not the first time he had been home. And he still thought of it as home. Still, after all this time away. Some years he had missed. Something had interfered with his plans in those years and had kept him in the other place that he did not think of as home. He thought all those missed years a little darker when he looked back on them, like there was nothing worth remembering in them, except what had not been. So he tried to get back more and more. Just once in the year, when Port Brokeferry was busy enough he might not be noticed in all the new people there.

He came by car and he came alone. Just for the day. He arrived in the morning early, wearing dark glasses till the town was about its business and enough people on the street that he was just one more. He came on the weekends mostly. Sometimes a Saturday, sometimes a Sunday. Depended on the weather. Wouldn’t be the thing to be walking the beach in the rain, or the streets of Port Brokeferry. Besides, in the rain the crowds were thinner and he might be known.

He came to see. How things were. How Martin was. And Athol. He came out of a sense of duty, and something else that he could not explain, even to himself. Today had been a good day. As good as these Port Brokeferry days ever get. It was busier than in some years and that had helped. He liked to get there early enough he could watch Martin down on the beach feeding the gulls from his pockets. He knew that was how the days started in Port Brokeferry. And seeing Martin in his kilt, standing just in the sea, it was like going back to a different time, when it wasn’t just Martin, but Athol and Col, too, standing looking out to where the blue-grey smudge of the sky sat on the blue-grey smudge of the water, looking and wondering what it would be like to sail away from Port Brokeferry and into the stories that Finn told when there was a drink in him.

Not much changes. Col knew that. Guthrie had taken over from his dad with ‘The Bobbing Boat’, looked the spit of his dad, too, like it could be that Col was back in that time when they were three and not easily separated, and ‘up to no good’ the policeman said then, and now Athol was the policeman. Funny how things turn out.

And ‘The Ship’ was just ‘The Ship’. And Struan Courtald was still working at The Victoria Hotel, though he’d got a waistcoat now, with shiny buttons, and a fob watch on a chain, and he was a little thicker about the middle, but still tilting his hat at Ina McAllister, used to be Ina Shale. And then there was Berlie’s, always there for the same two weeks, and though it had changed through the years – different music, and louder with more lights – some things were the same.

Mhairi’s Port Brokeferry Giftshop was quite new and he did not know who Mhairi was. But today he’d stopped to look in at the window. There was a picture of Martin on the beach, a painting. And he could not pass it by. He paid for it on credit card and afterwards thought that was a mistake. Then, having stored it under a grey sheet in the back of his car, he was not sure of the sense in having bought it at all.

He came each year to see how Martin was. He knew that Athol looked after him and that was something. He kept a distance though, in case he was seen and recognised for who he was. Just close enough he could see that they were both well, Martin and Athol. Just the two of them, when once there were three.

He stayed till the end of the day, till Athol had seen Martin to his door and seen him safely inside and then closed his own door. Col knew there was nothing more to see after that. He climbed into the car and waited. Like he was catching his breath, like he was preparing himself to dive into the shock of cold water, like leaving was something hard.

He saw the woman from the hairdresser’s, Christine her name was, if the sign above the shop was to be believed. She was a bit unsteady on her feet and a man who was just as drunk was with her and they took the long way from one lamppost to the next, stopping to kiss in the centre of each pool of yellow light. And because they did not know they were seen, the man was touching her under her clothes and the woman made no protest and only laughed.

He waited till they were passed. Then Col reached into the glove compartment of his car. Folded into four was a piece of old newspaper. He carefully unfolded it and read what was printed there, even though it was too dark to really see the words.

I can see the sun going down

2010-12-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

(This is the third last piece in this Port Brokeferry project... and a mystery visitor right at the close...)

ATHOL STUART SEES THAT EVERTHING IS JUST AS IT SHOULD BE

Athol Stuart saw to it that Berlie’s closed on time and that the people cleared from the green without incident. He kept an eye on Martin, too, and the lady he was talking with. Athol thought that maybe he recognised her, though he also knew she was a visitor to Port Brokeferry. Sometimes the young leave and later, when years are passed, they come back again to see if it is still here and still as they remember it. Maybe she was once young in Port Brokeferry, Athol Stuart thought.

The light was on in the police station. He figured that Grace was busy putting in an hour’s cleaning up after him. He never checked. He never needed to check. Some people you could count on and Grace was one of those people.

Athol Stuart walked the length of the street. Not in any hurry. There were people he knew and people he didn’t. More visitors had come in today. No trains on a Sunday, but some had come on the only bus and some had come by car. There were more parked cars on the street than usual. One had edged up onto the pavement, a red Ford Fiesta, and he thought about leaving a note to draw attention to the small infringement of the rules.

He noted the time on the Victoria Hotel clock. It was later than he’d thought. Already the street lights were blinking on, blinking yellow and orange. A man stood back from the lights. He was smoking. Athol did not know who he was or why he was not going somewhere. Athol said good evening to him, not to be welcoming but just to let him know he had been seen.

Athol Stuart saw Guthrie closing up and he asked how business had been. Guthrie said it had been a good day, but from the way that he said it Athol Stuart did not think that he meant what he said.

He stopped outside Mhairi’s Port Brokeferry Giftshop. He stopped to see Martin on the beach again, the picture of him. The window was altered, the things displayed in it different. Three smaller paintings hung where the other had been. ‘Sold already, sold over cheaply,’ Athol Stuart said, and he wondered what Martin would make of the picture being gone so soon.

He popped into ‘The Ship’. He did not intend to stay. He could see that his being there, in uniform, made a difference to some. They sat straighter in their chairs, lowered their voices so as not to draw attention, and looked over their drinks in his direction, to see what he was about, when all he was about was making sure that everything was as it should be.

He noted that Dodie Bredwell was not in his usual place again. Instead, Dodie sitting with Alice in a corner. Magnus was playing chess with Eileen, but they were moving the pieces according to their own rules and laughing and she was calling him cheat. And Lachlan Davie, already drunk, was with Christine again. He had his arm around her, supporting her, and she was nuzzling his neck, and Athol Stuart knew it was Sunday in ‘The Ship’.

Then back on the street again. And in the short time he’d been inside it had become dark outside. He walked back to the green. He tested the door of the police station and it was locked, as it should be. He checked that there were no lights on in old Tom’s and he saw Lillian busy in her kitchen, her curtains open so that she could make sure that Tom was alright – force of habit. Martin was petting the dogs outside the green trailer and making noises like a dove to them. Athol Stuart got him to his feet and they walked together to Martin’s door, and Martin told all about his day.

They were observed and did not know that they were. The same man that Athol had seen smoking earlier. He was more in the darkness than before, not seen this time but seeing. He watched Athol Stuart take Martin home. Watched the policeman wait for the light to go on in Martin’s house and for the door to shut. Then he waited until Athol had gone into his own house before he walked to his car parked on the street, a little up on the kerb.

He sat for a while without putting the key in the ignition. He sat just looking ahead of him. In the back of his car, under a grey cloth, was Mhairi's picture of Martin on the beach.

Shit!

2010-12-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

(One of my favourite cartoon strips as a child was Oor Wullie and I can still see him smiling and sitting on an empty bucket, in my head I can... no shit! Ever nearer to the end of Port Brokeferry... and some stories reach some sort of end - as much as stories ever end.)

ST AUGUSTINE AND A BUCKET OF SHIT

Kelso had stepped into the church. It was not that he was thinking to pray. He did not believe in any of that, just as he did not believe in the palm readings that old May gave at the fair. She’d read his palm for free, said things he had heard her tell to others, that there was a girl in his life who was important and that the future was clearer and brighter. And she would be like the sun in his world, this girl who meant so much. Nothing about his being a father and a child between this girl and himself. Nothing about that or his thoughts all muddled. Storm-tossed is what it felt like in his head. All May had was just words for people to cling onto, and if they’d paid money to hear what old May had said, then those words took on a false importance for them.

Inside the church it was like an escape from everything. The air was cooler and still and there was the sense of being outside when you were in. Outside and alone, shut off from everyone and everything. ‘The peace that passeth human understanding.’ It was something he had heard when he was younger. A minister had come to the school and it was something he had said, standing tall on the stage at the front of the school hall. Kelso hadn’t thought he’d really been listening, but the words came back to him now.

Kelso crept to the far end of the church, feeling like he was trespassing, creeping like a thief. He sat in one of the wooden pews at the front and just sat, looking at the smallest movement of the coloured light across the floor and up the walls, and at the same time not really looking at all.

‘I sometimes just take the time to sit,’ said the minister. ‘It can help to get things straight in my head when I am troubled.’

Kelso had thought he was alone, but the voice of the minister did not startle him. He waited for the minister to speak again, expected that he would, that there’d be something about God and God listening and understanding and a confession of help wanted coaxed from him. They sat in quiet.

Then Kelso spoke. ‘It’s all just shit isn’t it?’ he said.

There was a quiet after his words. Time enough for the minister to consider his response.

‘I think St Augustine put it in just those words, something about life being a bucket of shit that we had to carry around with us always. The same for him as for everyone.’

Kelso was surprised at what the minister said. It wrong-footed him. Then he thought that maybe the minister had intended that it should.

‘What makes a man a saint if his life is a bucket of shit?’

Kelso expected that the minister would talk about God then, and the blessing of God, and what it is to pray, to really pray. Instead the minister just shrugged his shoulders.

‘Is that it? Is that all you’ve got? Nothing!’

‘What is it you are looking for?’ said the minister.

‘A way out. A way to go back to the start of things and not make the same mistakes.’

‘There was a girl I knew once. Before I became a minister. She was everything to me. And I thought it was the same for her. I thought we would last. That we could survive whatever the world threw at us. All Augustine’s shit.’ The minister laughed at that. ‘But clearly we didn’t last, otherwise she’d be here or I’d be there, wherever she is.’

Kelso did not get it. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘In here there is an escape of sorts. But it’s only temporary. You don’t want to stay in here. Cut off. Never seeing anyone else. You have to go out again, into the world. And you carry that bucket of shit with you and it never gets any lighter.’

Kelso hadn't come in for answers. He left without any. He did not turn towards Berlie's when he left the church. Instead he headed in the other direction, back along the road that had brought him into Port Brokeferry, and maybe he carried something heavy with him, and maybe it was, as Kelso'd said, and St Augustine had said, and the minister, too: maybe it was all just shit.

BWA

2010-12-11T07:03:00.000-08:00

If a writer publishes a book that purports to educate others in the ways of deconstructing argument, you’d expect that writer to be very careful and clever about the arguments they hang up in the public domain. It all goes to credibility, don’t you think?

Yet, in a thinly veiled attack on The British Writers’ Award, one such writer recently made judgements based on comments 'read elsewhere' and jumped to big conclusions from these unverified comments. When some of the comments transpired to have little or no foundation in fact, this writer did not make appropriate apology or address the error. Instead this writer snipped and sniped at other perceived failings in the BWA.

This writer has some experience in the publishing industry, tells you so you know, and then makes bold declarations about what is possible and what impossible in publishing, but no satisfactory argument is given to persuade us of the truth of some of these pronouncements. Apparently a book cannot be edited adequately in the space of a month, it just cannot – I think it would be like a roomful of monkeys typing the complete works of Shakespeare in a morning.

This writer jumps from suspicions held to damning judgements. This writer performs all sorts of statistical manipulations of data that are crazy at best and at worst just fabulously wrong – mostly the manipulated data is wrong! The BWA states that they made little or no profit from last year’s awards competition, that what they did make from the entry fees collected funded the financial prize to the winner. This bold writer has them pocketing nearly a quarter of a million pounds.

I do not doubt this writer’s stated credentials, but I do question the writer’s arguments, we all should, and I do not accept that this writer is the absolute font of all wisdom on the subject of publishing. This writer is someone who has published a book which purports to be a handbook on how to construct intellectual argument, and how to punch holes in the arguments of others; I am a little surprised therefore at the weaknesses in the arguments of this writer.

Are You Looking?

2010-12-11T01:12:00.000-08:00

(Here's another piece that brings us closer to the finish line of this Port Brokeferry project.)

EVERYONE’S LOOKING FOR SOMEONE

‘Have you seen Col?’

Berlie’s was open for the afternoon. They had to close before six-thirty, but a Sunday afternoon could be good business. Mad Martin had interrupted Wallace, who was himself asking after the whereabouts of someone. Wallace looked Mad Martin up and down before taking the time to answer the question he’d been asked.

‘I have not seen your Col. Or maybe I have, for how should I know? I do not know this Col. What does he look like?’

Mad Martin was confused for a moment. Like a cloud that passes quickly in front of the sun and the shadow changes everything for just the time that it takes to blink, so the confusion moved across Mad Martin’s face. Then:

‘He looks like Col.’

And Wallace laughed, like he’d been beaten in a game by a child. There was only sense in what the kilted man had said. And before Wallace could ask his next question, Mad Martin was onto someone else and asking if they had seen Col.

Evelyn and Morag were there, at Berlie’s. They’d gone for a drink again, as they had after work the day before. Morag was keeping an eye on Evelyn, making sure that she wasn’t about to throw herself at the first available young man. They were on the dodgems, sitting together in the one car and laughing together. Bran from The Silver Herring was there, too, and they were pretending to make space between them for him. Like an invitation it looked.

‘Where have you been all my life?’ Evelyn cried. And all the words seemed joined together she said them so fast.

It was the drink talking, Bran could see that, but he kept looking back over his shoulder, to see if it was something else, too. He saw the man he thought of as Berlie, skip between the cars, and lean in close to the two girls from ‘Christine Cuts Hair’ and take their money for their next shot.

‘I was wondering,’ said Wallace to Evelyn and Morag, ‘if you had maybe seen the boy, Kelso. He works here, and as you can see here he isn’t. Have you seen him at all?’

Evelyn said something about Kelso having crawled back under the rock he’d crawled out of and something about good riddance and how he was a bastard and some other things besides, all of them worse than the last.

Wallace thought he understood and he skipped quickly from their car to the next. Morag took Evelyn’s hand in hers and said something into her ear and their attention was back on Bran and where he had been all Evelyn’s life, and they were soon laughing again.

‘Have you see Col?’ said Mad Martin and this time he was asking a lady from the Victoria Hotel, the one he’d seen sitting in the dark of ‘The Bobbing Boat’ café with Guthrie. ‘Have you see Col?’ he said again.

Moira shook her head. ‘No Martin, I am sorry but I have not seen Col? Is he lost?’

And again the cloud of confusion passed briefly across his face.

‘I know you,’ Mad Martin said. ‘I know you from before.’

Moira smiled at Mad Martin. It was, she thought, good to be in a place where she was known and remembered. That was what home should be, she felt, and Martin was just the someone she'd been looking for this afternoon. 'And I know you, Martin,' she said. And the way that she said it was kind and soft so that Martin did not walk away from her. Not for the rest of the afternoon. And every little while he turned to her and asked again if she had seen Col. And every time Moira smiled and said again that she was sorry but she had not seen Col.

Sinnie and Callum and Doves

2010-12-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

(Here's another PB piece, and I am fond of Sinnie as I am of Corinne, and Callum, too, even though some may have thought his looking through windows was a bit sinister at first... turns out he is as 'nice as ninepence'.)

DOVES ARE SO MUCH MORE RESPECTABLE THAN OWLS

‘I never know,’ said Sinnie, ‘about Sunday. I never can tell if it’s the start of the week or the end. On the seventh day He rested, it says, and so I think it should be the end. But from here we look forward so it feels like the start, too. Isn’t it so that the Jews treat Saturday as the day of rest? They call it the Sabbath and they do not do business on that day. And that being the case would make Sunday the first day of the new week. So you see how confusing it is?’

Callum wasn’t sure how they had got onto this subject. He’d dropped in with a granary loaf and had accepted Sinnie’s offer of a cup of tea. ‘The days fold into each other,’ he said. ‘My days do. That’s what I find. Especially at this time of the year, for I am up every morning the same in the summer, and the shop is open Sunday mornings just exactly as every other day. No rest for me. So the days, my days, fold one into another, like dough when it is kneaded, folded into itself.’

‘Precisely. And so it is that Sunday doesn’t feel like the end,’ said Sinnie. ‘Not to me and not to you. For me, today, it feels like a new start. Yes, that’s how it feels to me. And maybe that is all the explanation that is needed.’

It wasn’t quite what Callum had meant, but he said that he was glad that she felt that way and that he’d been worried, not seeing her in the shop.

Sinnie leaned forward in her chair, and she touched Callum’s arm. ‘You do a good job watching over us all, Callum. Yes, you do. None of us getting any younger and there’s the comfort of you watching over all of us in the street. That’s being a good neighbour.’

Callum drained his cup and set it back in its saucer on the table. Sinnie fetched her purse and offered to pay for the bread that he’d brought. He waved away the offer and said she could maybe treat herself to extra scones next time she was in the shop and that would be money in his till.

‘That’s funny,’ Sinnie said. ‘You saying that. For there has been an end to the dreams of owls and a new dream this morning. It is something of a relief, I can tell you. Do you see what I mean? How it feels like the start and not the end. And today I dreamed of doves, not flying like the owls, but strutting like old men in frock coats, only their coats were white, and they wore shoes with spats, and they were dipping their heads, like bowing, and pecking at breadcrumbs on the ground. And there was one flew to my gloved hand and I broke a scone into pieces for it to feed on. Do you see? So maybe I will treat myself, and the birds in my garden, too, and some extra scones added to my order, if you please. Callum, I can tell you this in confidence, but I am a lot happier with this new dream. Doves are so much more respectable than owls, don’t you think?’

Callum had not ever considered the ranking of birds according to respectability. But it was easier to agree, and so he nodded and said, 'Exactly so.' Then he got up to go. He thanked Sinnie for the tea and moved towards the door. He stopped, as if he was considering something. He wanted to say how he missed old Tom and how the old man's passing was like an end of sorts, and that being the case meant today felt like the start of something different. But in the end he said nothing, not wanting to dampen Sinnie's mood, said nothing except that he wished Sinnie a good afternoon, and left.

The last we'll hear of Corinne in PB

2010-12-04T01:20:00.000-08:00

(As a child when walking to the shops I made up games to pass the time and the walking. I raced oncomers to landmarks between us, but I couldn't run, could only walk, and walking fast so my legs were wobbly. Of course, they didn't ever know my small victories, or my failures. I play those silly games still. Not walking now, but writing. I set myself a target this year: 30 competition hits. We are in December and I heard this week of my 29th: onto another waiting shortlist. Only one more result to come in for me in December, so we'll see. Here's more from the ending of PB - and I do like Corinne.)

THE SCHOOLGIRL CORINNE LOOKS FOR MONDAY-MONDAY

The day drags its feet. That’s how it seems, this long slow Sunday. No different from any other Sunday, except what she wrote in her book. About a boy called Munro and he took her hand in hers. And now it is an age till Monday comes, and she will see him again. And she wonders till then, all the long slow day, wonders if he will take her hand again.

She keeps the door to her bedroom closed. There is music playing in the room and she is reading from the book she took from the library. And she turns to a poem called ‘To A Child Dancing in the Wind’. She holds the book in her hand, her two arms raised, and she dances, there in the small space of her room, for it says ‘Dance there upon the shore’, the first thing that it says, and it’s like he is telling her to do what she does, this poet called William. And with the window wide and the air moving in her room and the sound of the sea, faintly, and the gulls crying somewhere, it is like she could be the child. ‘What need have you to care’ says the poet, ‘For wind or water’s roar’. And Corinne, her yellow hair flying behind her as she dances, knows that he does not mean wind and he does not mean water. It is something about the buffeting of life and the poet is old and has suffered rejection from a Maudlin woman. ‘And tumble out your hair,’ she reads, and she shakes her head and her hair. ‘That the salt drops have wet’ – and she thinks of tears then, in those ‘salt drops’, and she does not make sense of what she has read, not with those tears, but it matters not to her, for she knows poetry can be like that: one moment knowing and understanding and the next lost in the words on the page.

‘Being young you have not known

The fool’s triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won.’

And she stops then, her dancing, and she is suddenly afraid, and it is something about what he has said, this sad man whose poetry book she stole from the library. And Corinne wonders if Munro will take her hand on Monday, if he ever will again. And she recalls that Mr Bredwell’s name for the boy is Monday-Monday, and Munro does not know why, no one knows, and maybe there is no reason. Except there is a song that she has heard. Not a new song. And the first line is ‘Monday Monday, so good to me’ and that lifts her for a moment, and then she thinks that there’s another line in it, the old song, something about not knowing if he ‘would still be here with me’.

But Corinne is being silly with such thoughts, and she knows that she is. The last two lines of the poem on the page in front of her say as much:

‘What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?’
And there is no reason, for Munro took her hand in his, and it was enough. That's what she wrote in her book. And the day is long, this slow dragging Sunday, and Corinne looks for Monday-Monday and knows it will be good to her when it come. And then she is dancing again and her hair tossing and she has dropped the book of poems on the floor of her room.

Another visit to PB - not many left!

2010-12-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

(Been busy clearing my head of stories this week, getting them down on paper. Been tied up with so many projects this past six months that it is good to be exploring other stories that just stand by themselves and are not part of anything bigger. That feels good. Here's another Port Brokeferry piece.)

BLAIR DOESN’T DO DREAMS

Everyone in Port Brokeferry gets something through the mail. And Blair delivers them all. Postcards, letters, birthday cards and parcels, bills and circulars. Not on Sundays, of course, or on post office holidays. But everyone at sometime has something delivered. From one end of the village to the other; from the green at the last reach one way to as far out the other as Jess’s Ship and Pamela with her small gifts for him when she has been gone. There’s even mail for Berlie’s when it’s here, two weeks each year, and he hands those letters and small packets and filled orders for parts and bulbs, to the man called Wallace who is in charge. Blair even delivers to himself. Not posting them through his own door, that would be odd. But laying the new mail on the edge of his kitchen table until he has made himself tea and can sit with time to read what has been delivered.

Everyone in Port Brokeferry, except one. And Blair does not deliver anything to her, never has, for it is her job to sort through the mail and so anything that is for her she sets aside and does not slip into his postbag.

Blair does not always remember his dreams. Is usually in too much of a rush to get into the day and to collect the new mail that is to be delivered, door to every door. He thinks he maybe doesn’t do dreams. Would say as much if you asked him. ‘Not like Sinnie,’ he’d say. ‘Sinnie and her dreams all clear pictures and she recalls every word spoken and the colours and the smells.’ No, Blair would tell you, he does not dream.

Except he does. He wakes on Sundays and holidays and he has slept later than usual. And he lies half in sleep and half awake, and he thinks about the day ahead and the different it will be from all his other days. And he remembers his dreams then, bits of them. Only he does not believe they are dreams. Thoughts are what they are, he thinks. Fanciful thoughts on what could be and what isn’t.

But in truth they are snatches of things Blair has dreamed. And in one of his dreams he is knocking on Izzy’s door and handing her a letter. He pictures her standing with one hand outstretched, waiting for the letter he has taken from out of his postbag. And she says she has a secret and she asks him if he wants to know.

Blair holds out the letter for her to take. He shakes his head. He knows secrets about all the people in Port Brokeferry. He knows things he wishes he didn’t. He knows the minister loved a girl with blond hair before he came to the church and the minister sees that girl in Corinne Downs and he fights against what he sees. He knows that Callum looks in through windows when people are sleeping, and that he spends the longest time looking in on Margaret, his wife, turning and turning in her dreams. And he knows that Grace has waited for the boy called Kelso, a whole year she has waited, and he knows why that is.

‘It is a secret about me,’ says Izzy. In the dream, that’s what she says. ‘It is a good secret.’

And Blair knows about the order Izzy made, for a bottle of German cologne, and he knows about Johannes and Izzy’s mother and the years of postcards from a place called Koln and small parcels that stopped coming.

And Blair says he does not want to know the secret that Izzy wants to tell him. Instead he hands her the letter and something else.

And beside his bed, in the waking real world, is a small bottle of perfume that Pamela gave him, one of her small gifts to him, a bottle shaped like a cresting wave in frosted glass. She gets lots of free samples and she thought maybe Blair could gift this bottle to a girl he likes. And in the dream he hands it to Izzy, wrapped up like the small parcels that used to come for Izzy's mother. But only in the dream and in the part of the dream that the waking Blair does not remember. So the bottle sits by his bed, undelivered.

Less than ten pieces left to post!

2010-11-30T12:31:00.000-08:00

(Onto another longlist in a competition and outside it's been snowing again. Have only just recovered from last winter! Ho hum! Hope to have this whole Port Brokeferry posted before Xmas, so here's another piece.)

HUNTLY MAKING SENSE OF WHAT HE FEELS

I see only the space where she was. At the window. Looking out of mine and into hers. Looking as I have always looked. For as long as years on years, and I have not ever counted them and so they seem without number. But she is gone from her window, when my back was turned. Only the space and a memory of her standing there. And I miss her.

I should be happy for her. Isn’t it what I have wanted for Alice Greyling? If not me then someone else. That’s every thought I had for her. And I gave up waiting, so why did it take so long for her? Find someone, I said in those first letters I wrote. Find someone to make Alice smile. Someone to stop Alice looking out to the empty sea and dreaming lost dreams and getting older faster than anyone should. Find someone, I wrote. And now she has, and I should be happy.

And I am. I must be. I am happy for Alice Greyling. The girl and the woman. Glimpses of Alice laughing these last days, and the years have slipped from her, and clocks can be turned back, it seems. Not all the way back, but a little. Alice no longer pale, no more the ghost of who she was. Instead a brightness in her and in all her steps and they seem like skips, like a young girl hop-scotching her way to and from school. And I am happy for her.

I know him, too. The man who has done this for Alice. The man who has rescued her from deep dark waters. He is a teacher, just as she is. Not from Port Brokeferry, but here time enough we think he belongs. Always laughing, was Dodie Bredwell. Never saw him but he was laughing, that’s what it seemed. And there did not appear to be a serious thought in his head. Only now there has been a change in him, too. Like he has traded some of his laughter with Alice, and taken some of her seriousness for himself. I have seen them together, hand in hand, a tight hold on each other, and Alice skipping and Dodie skipping after.

And I am happy for Alice. It’s everything she deserves. And more than I could give her. More than I give my wife, I think, with some regret. Stuck as I am. In this chair, and the wheels can turn, but it’s not like skipping. And it’s not what she thought she was getting when she married me. Lucky is what I am. Not because I love two women, but because one loves me. She has offered to take me out. It will do me some good, she says. And it will. I think that tomorrow I will take up her offer. And I will wear a brighter face and be brighter, knowing what I have. And no more Alice-letters and no more standing in my life looking into hers. I am happy for Alice even though I miss her, too. But now she is living again, and it is time for all those around her to be living, too.

And then and there, I feel something, a skipping of my heart. And I never thought to be so sensible and I laugh at that.

200th post!

2010-11-28T06:46:00.000-08:00

(This is my 200th post on this blog and the Port Brokeferry piece below might make it seem as though I had planned for it to be posted on this day... all just a neat and clever-seeming coincidence. )

ROSE’S IDEA AND IT COULD JUST WORK

The telephone interrupted her from her work. She thought of it as work, what she was doing, and she was irritated at having to stop. She considered letting it ring, but then thought she should not. It turned out it was her sister, Carrie, checking on how she was.

‘I’m fine, really I am. Better than fine. The best.’

Carrie said that she was thinking she’d come out sometime mid-week. Just for a day. If Rose wanted. If she was feeling the need of some company. Carrie thought she could spare a day, or maybe two, and it would be good to see the place again.

‘It would be lovely to see you, Carrie. Really it would. And you would love it here. Not sure if it’s how you remember it. Different, I think, from how it is in the pictures we’ve got, but it’s still lovely. I’m enjoying the peace and being away from everything. There’s really no need for you to come. Not if it means putting yourself to any trouble. I am writing again.’

Rose hoped that last thing might dissuade her sister from visiting. At least for the moment. Rose had plans, and a rhythm to her day that she was enjoying. And the writing was going well.

‘Yes, almost as soon as I arrived. In the notebook you gave me. No, that doesn’t make them your stories…Just short pieces, but then I had an idea and I am quite excited about it. A bit early to be saying that, maybe, but I am…What’s my idea? Well, it’s being here that has given me the inspiration, being here in Port Brokeferry. I wrote something about Uncle B… no, not biographical, something imagined. Yes, you were in it and mum and me. The photograph you sent gave me the start. And it was the first I had written for a while and, though it was only a short piece, I thought it was not that bad… No, Carrie, that’s not the idea. It just gave me a nudge in a particular direction. I immediately wrote a second thing. Something more up to date. About someone else I’d seen in Port Brokeferry, and it was another short piece, like a sketch, and I wrote a title on the front of my notebook then. It just came to me. In a flash, like it can do when you are writing. And I thought I had something.’

Rose was excited and talking fast and waving her free hand in the air like she was painting a picture or drawing music from an orchestra, and she was out of breath.

‘What’s the title? I’ve called it ‘Postcards from Port Brokeferry’. And the idea is to write short pieces, about the people. Yes, short like a postcard. A hundred of them. Maybe more. I want to populate a whole imagined village, a place like Port Brokeferry, with a hotel and a café and fishermen’s cottages that can be rented for the summer, and each piece adding to the whole, but each piece short, so that you can read it on its own and it still is something, but taken together it will be like a large jigsaw that shows the place. Like making my own ‘Milkwood’. All voices and people dreaming and living. Yes, Dylan Thomas. And a whole village captured in small bits.’

Carrie said that she was thrilled to hear that Rose was writing again.

‘I think it could just work,’ said Rose.

Carrie asked how the weather had been and was she eating properly and did she need anything sent from the city, maybe some books to read or her mail fetched from her apartment.

Rose told Carrie not to fuss. She was fine. She really was. The doctors had been right, she said, and the place was a tonic, all the tonic she needed, and she was writing again, and that was something.

And Carrie agreed that it was.

Nearly

2010-11-26T09:52:00.000-08:00

(Some of my flashes have been doing quite well recently in out-of-the-way places. But a few fuller stories are beginning to make a noise in my head again. I am on the home stretch of two projects - this Port Brokeferry thing, and another project that may find its place here in the future. For now another PB piece and the end is just that bit nearer.)

AS LONG AS DOCTOR KERR IS PAYING

They have driven along the coast. Sunday instead of Saturday. That hasn’t happened before. But then everything will be different from here on in. That’s what he thinks. He has written the letter, in pen, and the words all sitting in their place on the lines of the page, but the words all loop and swirl – hard enough for Marjory to read and she has been reading what he has written for years. Marjory typed it up and he signed the bottom and it was sent in like that, his penned copy filed away.

‘I regret to inform you of my intention to resign.’

Marjory has pulled off the road and parked her morris traveller where they can take in the sea, spread out before them. And if he closes his eyes the sea is all there is, like the car is become a boat and they are adrift on the water. They have both wound the windows down and they are drinking tea that Marjory poured from a flask. They will get out and walk in a while. For now they are just sitting, listening to the breathy rush of the waves and the small wind whispers in the grass and the noise of Doctor Kerr breathing through his nose.

‘And what of this?’ says Doctor Kerr.

Marjory does not know what he means. She leans forward and looks out of the window in case there is something there that he refers to. The beach is empty and the sand brushed flat like it is new.

‘What of what?’ she says.

‘I don’t know how many years it’s been. Indeed, I can’t remember what it was before. You and me, driving to a quiet place, and a walk to stretch the legs, and sometimes lunch in a place where we are not known and people looking at us, thinking we are man and wife though you are younger. What of this when there is no working week to escape from?’

Marjory knows he is worried. He did not speak on their drive and that was not how it usually was. She knew he was thinking things through. All the changes that were just a stone’s throw ahead of him. Maybe he was regretting the sending of the letter. And wondering now what he would do with his time when it was done. And how the days, weeks and months would be mapped out. And maybe who would make his cups of tea through the day and fetch his stick from where he had misplaced it. They were like husband and wife, that’s what she thought sometimes.

'What of this?' he says again.

‘Depends who’s buying the lunch,’ she says, trying to make light of it. And she grins at nothing at particular.

And Doctor Kerr does laugh. And he cradles the plastic cup in his two hands and tastes the plastic in his tea.

‘But seriously,’ he says.

Marjory pats his leg and tells him not to worry. She says she will still be around. He can’t be cleaning his house without her help and he’s too old to be learning to cook. And Saturdays or Sundays they will go out for a drive the same as always.

‘I’d miss this,’ she says. ‘And my days will need to be filled too. We’ll face this together, Doctor Kerr.’

He clicks his teeth together and nods his head. ‘Together,’ he says.

‘But about those lunches and who’s paying,’ she says. ‘I think we should talk about that.’

He laughs again. They both laugh.

Church in PB - after all, it's Sunday!

2010-11-23T13:11:00.000-08:00

(Keeping going with Port Brokeferry... in case you have not followed this thread: Lynn works at the fair and she has been seen with Kyle Downs. Elspeth, Kyle's sister, visited Lynn to ask her to back off and let the man go back to his wife and family... here's the fallout of that.)

ELSPETH’S CHIFFON SCARF

Elspeth accompanied Susan Downs to church. It was something that they did from time to time, and Elspeth thought her sister-in-law needed a little extra support just now. They met outside the house and that was normal. Kyle was not one for church and prayers, never had been, and so they did not seek to include him in their morning. Susan looked bright enough, Elspeth thought. Said she’d slept well when Elspeth asked. Then she remarked on the weather, and the smell of Callum’s baking, and she noticed Mad Martin dropping breadcrumbs on the beach and gulls at his feet.

Elspeth had to be more direct. Susan was giving nothing away. ‘And how is it with you, Susan?’ she said. ‘How is it really?’

Susan looked at Elspeth, taking the measure of her question and seeing at once what she meant.

‘Kyle was home last night,’ Susan said. ‘Crept in, he did, trying not to be heard. Made a bed for himself on the sofa. Slept in his clothes. Slept fitfully by the look of him this morning.’

Elspeth thought that was all good. She said something of the sort and made a mental note to herself to do something for the woman called Lynn, something to show her thanks. She had a chiffon scarf that she’d never worn. It would hide the mark on the woman’s neck, Elspeth thought.

Susan was not sure that it was all good, that’s what she said. About Kyle being back. Wasn’t sure that any of it was good. She confessed that she’d already been calculating what it would be without him there. No Kyle, just her and Corinne. ‘It would be something harder, maybe, especially for the girl, at first, but something better, too. No walking on eggshells for either of us, no creeping around things, scared to say anything and not knowing if he is coming home or where he is if he doesn’t. And people in the street not knowing where to look when they meet me, or if they should speak, and what they would say if they did speak. She is old enough she knows what is what, Corinne does. I am not sure it wouldn’t be better, for Corinne as much as for me, with Kyle not there.’

Elspeth hadn’t expected that, hadn’t seen any of that coming. She felt a little uncomfortable at what she had done in seeing the blond woman at the fair and so did not mention it.

‘I’ve taken him back before, Elspeth. You know that, and given him another chance. Tried to forgive him, too, and that was harder. And now this, and he thinks he can come back, quiet and as quick as thought, and everything will be as it was.’

‘I’m sure he doesn’t think that, Susan.’

The minister was at the door of the church. He shook the hands of the men and women and made small observations to show that he knew them and thought of them, everyone. And they smiled back at him and passed on into the cool of the church.

‘Ah, Mrs Downs and Elspeth. Good day to you both.’

Elspeth wondered why the minister still called Susan Mrs Downs and called Elspeth by her name.

‘I am so glad to see you both,’ he said. ‘And Mrs Downs, I wonder if you could pass on my thanks to your daughter. For being with Lillian yesterday. It was very good of her.’

Susan said that she would and she and Elspeth went inside.

They took their seats and when Susan spoke again her voice dropped to a whisper.

‘I don’t want to be bitter, Elspeth. And he’s your brother and all. But maybe there’s a line should be drawn under everything and something new started. For him, too. It is wrong what we have together and we can all see that now.’

Elspeth made no reply. She bowed her head as though she was praying. But she wasn’t. She was thinking about her brother and the trouble he was. Susan was maybe right. Maybe it was time for things to be different.

The organ began playing. Elspeth looked up. The light spilling through the stained glass window was split into all colours. Like there was a rainbow thrown in pieces on the floor of the church. Elspeth thought then that she wouldn't give Lynn the chiffon scarf.

Sunday Breakfast in PB

2010-11-21T02:49:00.000-08:00

(No news today. My Plan is to have the last of these Port Brokeferry pieces hanging here before we reach Christmas, the whole project complete. So here's another one.)

BREAKFAST WITH GUTHRIE

He let her into the café and then locked the door so that they could be alone and not disturbed. He kept the lights off too, not drawing attention to the place. He pulled out her chair so that she could sit, and unfolded a napkin and laid it on her lap. Guthrie was showing off. She could see that and she laughed.

‘It’s like a real date,’ she said.

‘Something we missed out on,’ he said.

He’d made coffee and there were fresh scones from Callum’s bakery – ‘still warm,’ she remarked – and grapefruit halves and fresh orange juice. And of course there were the flowers in the glass tumbler. She could see that he’d gone to some trouble.

‘I’ve thought about this place,’ she said. ‘Over the years. And wondered if it was still here and if you were still here. It’s funny being back and it looks the same and it looks different, too. And Eileen, she reminds me of myself as a girl. And you like your dad, slipping extra silver into the tips jar when she isn’t looking. The same but different.’

‘I’ve made some changes,’ said Guthrie. ‘And it is a good little business. Better in the summer than the rest of the year. But we do alright. I left for a while. Like you. Worked for a sour-faced man serving fancy drinks to men in suits and women in pearls. But I missed the sea, the sound of the gulls and the smell of the air. And I missed Port Brokeferry and the people here. So I came back.’

She understood. She said she did.

‘And now you’ve come back, too,’ he said.

Guthrie made to take her hand and she shrank from his touch. It was unexpected and caught him by surprise.

‘It’s different for me, Guthrie,’ she said.

She looked pale. She looked pained. Just briefly. Like she was revealed for a moment. Smaller, too, it seemed. Guthrie was dealing with his own small hurt and so did not notice. And then she was smiling again, the pretence resumed.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Breakfast with Guthrie was not meant to be like this. There was a reason she had made the arrangement and it was not for this.

‘No, it’s not you Guthrie. All this, it’s sweet and I should have come back sooner, and if I had then who knows, it could have been something else and not what it is.’ She did not look at him. Kept her eyes focussed on the plate in front of her. ‘Only there’s something you don’t know and it is why I came back and I never expected to find you here. I don’t know what I expected, really. Wasn’t thinking straight. And then seeing the name out front and you behind the counter and the girl dancing between the tables – it was like looking in on myself and how I once was.’

Guthrie did not understand. She was smiling. It did not quite fit with what she was saying.

‘Like I was not really here, except as an observer of who I once was.’

Guthrie waited for some sense to be made of what she was saying.

‘I’m sorry, Guthrie. None of this is what I want to say. It is hard for me. And I’m not getting it right, even though I have thought about this since I arrived back in Port Brokeferry.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Guthrie. ‘I shouldn’t have… it was silly… to think that you…’

She leaned across the table and pressed one finger to his lips. Like they were actors in a film, and she held the gesture as though she was waiting for the director to yell ‘cut and wrap’.

‘I am not well,’ she said. ‘There were doctors, specialists. So many of them, and they said I am not well. And it’s serious and there is not the time I thought I had. Guthrie, there is not the time. And why I have come back, it is not to do with us, with you. It is something simpler than that. It is the feeling of being home and that is a place where things begin and end. And so I am come home.’

He did not know what to say so he said nothing.

'And this,' she said, trying again to bring it all back to the moment. She waved her hand to take in all that Guthrie had done, the table and the plates and the flowers and everything. 'This feels like being home. There is time at least for this.'

Still Sunday, Still Port Brokeferry

2010-11-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

(Apparently I get a mention in the Tehran Times and other cultural publications... for a competition win I had this year... now that feels pretty weird. Here we go with another Sunday Port Brokeferry piece.)

TALKING ABOUT GRACE

The baby had kept Grace awake. That’s what she told her mother, though Helen had not herself heard a thing. Grace said she’d not get up yet, if that was alright, and she’d try to catch up on the sleep she missed. Helen thought Grace had been crying. Something about her eyes. It was hard being a single mother so young, Helen thought, even with the support of her parents. Helen said she’d see to things and she’d take the baby with her to church and maybe that would help.

Over breakfast Helen and Edwin talked.

‘Something is not right,’ Helen said. ‘With Grace. Something is wrong. I don’t know what and I can’t explain how I know. But I know.’

Edwin was feeding the baby from a warmed bottle.

‘There’s been a difference in her these past few weeks. A good difference. Like she was getting on top of things. More like herself. Haven’t you noticed? Like she’s been building up to something. Moving towards a better place.’

Edwin hadn’t noticed, but he said that he had.

‘She’s been taking more of an interest in how she looks. Dressing nice and wearing make-up. Her hair nice, too. And a lightness in her. Even more so these past few days. Smiling, even when she did not know she was being watched. It was the old Grace back again. That’s what it felt like. Didn’t you think so?’

Edwin said that he did. He was looking into the baby’s face, so that it was like he wasn’t talking to Helen. He was nodding and smiling at the feeding baby. Helen had read somewhere that it was important to do this, had told Edwin what she’d read. Something to do with the baby getting so it recognises the faces in its small ken and feeling safe.

‘And now there’s been a change,’ said Helen. ‘Sudden. Like the bottom has fallen out of her world again. Couldn’t get anything out of her yesterday, but there was a difference in her. Like a weight is on her again. I just don’t know what it is.’

Edwin set the empty milk bottle on the table, wiped the baby’s mouth with a white cotton cloth, and passed the baby to Helen.

‘She’s been out, too. Walking, she said. Walking out by the cliffs. She was seen. Yesterday. And a lad with her.’

Helen was supporting the baby in a seated position and patting the baby’s back.

‘That’s it then,’ said Edwin. ‘There’s your answer. Boys! Boys is always trouble. And it’s a bit harder with her having the baby. She must have told him and he’s maybe run a mile. If I was sixteen and a lass told me the same, I know I’d have run. Like a frighted rabbit. You wouldn’t have seen me for dust.’

‘That’s not a help, Edwin. Don’t you go saying that in Grace’s hearing. It’s hard enough what she has to look forward to without you saying something like that.’

‘I was just saying,’ he said.

‘Well don’t.’

The baby burped and Helen said what a good girl she was and patted her back some more.

Edwin sat back in his chair. He was thinking. He wanted to say how good things had been on The Silver Herring yesterday and how Kerry had helped and seemed in a brighter place. And about the Finn story he had told and the children all listening and Mad Martin and a woman staying at the Victoria Hotel – a woman he sort of recognised, but wasn’t sure from where. He wanted to tell Helen some of this. But he wasn’t sure if they’d finished talking about Grace, so he kept a quiet between them.

Helen was turning over how things were and without realising it she was moving closer to solving the puzzle. She wondered who this boy was, the one Grace had been out walking with. She thought maybe he was with the fair. There was a boy there, about Grace’s age. And after all, the fair arriving had occasioned Grace’s wearing her new yellow dress, like it was the reason she had ordered it from the catalogue, just so she could wear it when the fair was in Port Brokeferry.

The baby burped again.

Ever nearer the end

2010-11-16T12:34:00.000-08:00

(Still Sunday in Port Brokeferry and we move ever closer to the end of the project ... and already there is another project taking some sort of shape... that feels good (sh!). For now we have a few 'chapters of PB left before Sunday is done.)

LIKE IZZY WAS A CHILD AGAIN

It was like she was a child again. That was what she thought. There was singing coming from her mother’s room and it had been a long time since that was so. Seemed to Izzy that her mother singing had not been heard since her father had gone and now there was a song hung on the day.

‘What’s put a dance in your step?’ her father used to say. ‘What’s set all your words to music? Your thoughts all kicking and pirouetting?’

Izzy wondered if he knew. About the soldier boy still writing to his wife. About Johannes sending cologne-gifts from a place called Ursulaplatz. Izzy recalled a day when the house smelled of cologne, always more in the air when a new bottle had arrived, and always a song from her mother on those days, too. And Izzy crept through to her parents’ bedroom this remembered day. The door was not full-closed and Izzy heard her father say that he loved her and how much he loved her. And that smell, he loved that, too. And Izzy put her face to the crack of the open door and she saw them. Her father standing behind her mother and his arms holding her, close as close. They were looking out of the window and rocking gently from side to side, like they were dancing.

Izzy left her bed and still in her nightdress she tiptoed through to her mother. And it was like being six again, for Izzy smelled 4711, breathed it in. And it had been a long time since it was like that. And like before the door of her mother’s bedroom was not quite closed and like the child she had been Izzy peeped in on her mother.

Izzy’s mother stood at the window looking out on the day. No father there. But it was like there was: Izzy’s mother wrapped in her own embrace and swaying, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. And Izzy thought again that it looked like dancing, like it had looked all those years back.

‘I love that smell,’ said Izzy. And she said it quiet, not wanting to break the spell. ‘I love that smell.’

The singing stopped, but Izzy’s mother continued with her dance.

‘Your father loved it, too,’ she said.

Izzy knew that.

‘Said it was always summer when he smelled that cologne on my neck. Or maybe it was Johannes who said that and I misremember.’

And there it was, the shock of his name in Izzy’s mother’s mouth. She had never heard that before and the six year old child in her started.

‘It is a German cologne. From a place called Koln. But then you know what I am telling you otherwise I would not be wearing it again. And your father loved that smell and said that he did. And I have missed it, as I have missed your father, as I still miss him. But this morning it is like he is back again. Here in the room with me. Funny that smells can do that.’

Izzy held her breath. Stood at her mother’s bedroom door and tried to make sense of what was her mother’s words.

'Thank you, Izzy,' said her mother.

Port Brokeferry - another Sunday piece

2010-11-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

(Port Brokeferry - another piece.)

ANOTHER CROSS ON THE CALENDAR

Athol Stuart scored a cross through another day on his office calendar. Another week behind him and another one beginning. He was not wishing the time away, or looking forward to a different time. Just a cross put through the day so he knew where he was. He noted the day, the month and the number. It meant something. He tried not to think about it.

Athol Stuart made his own tea today. Helen did not work on a Sunday and Grace only put in an hour at the end of the day. If he was being honest, he didn’t need Grace on a Sunday either, but she had the baby to think on and it was a small thing that he did in giving her the extra hour. Ordinarily it was a quieter day for him, too. But the two weeks of the fair being in Port Brokeferry meant that he had to be seen. Here and about, just keeping an eye on things and making sure people knew he was there.

It was busier than last year, he thought. Quickly busy, the season just starting. More visitors than in other years was what was being reported. That was good news for the town. The hotel would do well out of it and the small businesses, and all the cottages at the front had bookings for the summer. But strangers did not always understand about Martin and his search for Col. They pulled their children near, thinking he might mean them harm with his questions and questions. They sometimes told him to go away and later reported Martin to Athol. They said they did not want any trouble, and maybe he meant well, only there was no one with him.

They were a little better after Athol had explained and after he had reassured them that he was no threat. ‘It’s just his way,’ he said. ‘Gentle as a child really. Gentler.’

Then they were all relieved smiles and ‘sorry to have troubled you’.

‘Only he keeps asking if we’ve seen Col? Over and over. Asking each one of us, and he won’t take no for an answer. Asks us again when he next sees us. Who is this Col?’

It was better if Athol was on the street, and Martin not too far from where he was. And there’d been some disturbance last night with Lachlan Davie. At the fair and he was bending the ear of the blond woman there, Lynn or Lynnie. Not that he was meaning any harm either. Just a bit full of the drink is what Lachlan was. And there’s something between him and Christine from the salon. And he was trying to tell the Lynn woman, asking for her advice. That’s how drunk he was, asking for advice from one such as her. Like anything she said would make sense. Athol would have to look out for Lachlan, too. And Susan’s Kyle, looking out for him as well; he was with the same woman the other day, that Lynn, his trousers undone and lipstick on his shirt.

Athol redrew the cross through the day that was yesterday and shook his head, like he could shake away all the nonsense of Kyle and Lachlan and the visitors not knowing how to be with Martin. And all the nonsense that was in the Port Brokeferry streets at this time of the year, a sort of madness. It was the same every year, as far back as memory. When it was not the fair, there were dances to see out the winter and bring in the summer, and the music of pipes and drums raising the blood, and the young men were daft with drink and the girls not so careful as they should be. And today, this new day, was the anniversary of something, yet another madness, one that Athol tried not to think on.

He drained his tea. He buttoned his jacket and spit-patted his hair flat. Then he went out to watch over another summer Sunday in Port Brokeferry

Port Brokeferry - and Sunday unfurls

2010-11-07T10:28:00.000-08:00

(Another Sunday piece from PB)

SOMETHING OF AN EXPLANATION FROM MR STRUAN COURTALD

He made a show of looking her over. Just as he had at the start, when it was all new to her and his approval was sought then every morning. Her skirt was the right length and freshly pressed. Her blouse was white and smelled of fabric softener. Her hair was brushed back from her face and a plain black band held it in place. She was not wearing eye make-up or blusher, and her ears were hung with simple silver and pearl stud earrings, something she had bought with her first pay packet. No other jewellery except for the watch he had given for her birthday.

‘Perfect,’said Mr Struan Courtald.

‘Thank you,’ said Sharon, and she dipped her knees a little so that she almost curtsied.

Then there was an awkwardness between them. Sharon was not sure if she was dismissed, and Mr Struan Courtald was stuck on how he should continue, for there was something he wanted to say to her.

‘Is that all, Mr Courtald?’ she said.

He looked at her and considered sending her back to the kitchen without any further word. But then he recalled the discussion he had had with Sharon’s mother the day before and he steeled himself.

‘Mr Courtald?’

‘There is something, Sharon. If you have a minute.’

They were interrupted by the sound of someone coming down the stairs. Mr Struan Courtald checked his watch against the clock behind the desk. It was early for a guest to be about. The lights were not yet on in the breakfast room. And it was a Sunday. Mrs Moira Fairlie said them a quick good morning and hurried on out of the hotel before Mr Struan Courtald found the wits enough to hold open the front door for her.

The quiet it was when Mrs Moira Fairlie had gone felt heavier and Mr Struan Courtald did not quite know where he was and what he had said and not said.

‘I do have a minute, Mr Courtald,’ Sharon prompted.

He took up his position behind the desk again. He fiddled with his pen and looked down at the book on the desk.

‘It was something you said, Sharon. Yesterday. I wanted to make sure that you understood. That you had not got the wrong end of how things are.’

Sharon had been expecting this.

‘About the watch,’ said Mr Courtald. ‘About your mother and my visits to her. And what you must be thinking, I do not know.’

‘I think you are a very kind man, Mr Courtald. It is not for me to think more or less than that.’

He looked up briefly to see if she was mocking him. She was in earnest.

‘There was a time,’ he went on. ‘For she was always a bonnie lass, your mother. And I did think that one day… a long time ago now… long before you were in the world…only that day passed. And then there was your father. I knew him, you know. And his early going was an unexpected sadness for everyone. And because I loved your mother, I just wanted to help. And you were the spit of her and she asked if I could see my way…and you picked things up so well. Look at you. You make her proud, and me proud, too. Then I took to visiting. More than is proper, perhaps. But it is not what you think. Not what others think. We are not… well, we are friends. And I wanted, we wanted, that you should know. And the watch was what it was, something I wanted to give you. I am sorry.’

Sharon felt again the weight of the silence that came between them, and she saw in it a signal that he had done.

‘I think you are a very kind man, Mr Courtald. There is no need for you to make apology to me. I think myself very lucky and my mother lucky, too. She asked that I tell you she has a Battenberg in for your morning tea and she hopes that you will call.’

Then Sharon made to go before adding in a voice that was all smiles, 'I think it proper that you do call, Mr Struan Courtald.'

Another win and another PB piece

2010-11-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

(And news today is that I have just won another competition. I am very surprised with this win. I had thought the announcement must have been made and I had missed it, and then out of the blue a trophy and a winner's certificate and some cash. I have never won a trophy before, so this is loads of fun. Here's the start of Sunday (the last day) in Port Brokeferry.)

THE DAY IS SLOW IN BEGINNING

Like most places, Port Brokeferry is a little slower in starting on a Sunday. However, Mad Martin knows no clocks and is on the beach the same as any other day. Just like in Mhairi’s picture he stands with his shoes off and his socks, his feet in the lacy water’s edge. The gulls circle nearer and nearer, their eyes sharp to any movement Mad Martin makes to his pockets where breadcrumbs are and the leftover scones Callum delivered the night before.

The street is quiet and the air still. Even the boats in the harbour seem like pictures of themselves, everything still. And quiet, except for the gulls flocking round Mad Martin and somewhere, just faintly, the sound of music. Maybe there is a radio already tuned into the day.

The lights are on in the bakery, the same as always, and the smell of morning rolls and cinnamon whirls and fruit loaf drifts on the air, as if to wake those sleeping in Port Brokeferry. And Callum is talking to himself and if you listen you can hear he is saying how much he misses old Tom and he reminds himself to drop in on Sinnie later in the day, Sinnie who was not in the shop yesterday and who, when Callum chanced a look in through her bedroom window this morning, was sound asleep and not writing down any dreams in her notebook as is normal.

The Bobbing Boat café will not open until very late in the morning. The times are on the door and Sunday is the only day that is different, not starting at nine but half-past eleven. But Guthrie is there already. He has taken a clean damp cloth to the tables and given the front window the once over. He stopped to watch Pamela remove her shirt and drink from her water bottle and catch her breath before heading back along the beach. She must be a model he thinks, or an actress from films. Guthrie has one table set for two. And napkins by the sides of small plates and some picked flowers in a tall glass tumbler. It is a breakfast date that he has and he wants to make an impression.

Eileen does not wake swearing this day. Not because it is a Sunday and she is respectful of that. Eileen sleeps past waking. It is her day off. Guthrie says Sundays he can manage the café by himself, and so she did not set her alarm the night before. She and Magnus talked late into the night anyway, and so they are both sleeping late, in Eileen’s bed this time.

And Rose is up today as she was yesterday, with the back door thrown wide and a cup of tea in her hands and she is reading again some of the things she wrote yesterday: The piece about how it could have been with Uncle B, and something about a man in a kilt and a grey suit jacket looking for someone called Col and Rose has written that Col is an imaginary friend from childhood, and being grown the man in the kilt has lost him.

And Corinne. Not up, but awake. Her head on the pillow and her eyes fixed on a small blemish on the ceiling. Like a watermark, and she sees in it the shape of a fish or a crescent moon. She is thinking of Munro and wondering if he might be awake and thinking of her. Or dreaming. He could be dreaming and Corinne could be walking about in his head. He held her hand yesterday. Did not say anything, but he didn’t need to. Just holding her hand was enough and when she got home she wrote his name in her book, at the top of the list of things she loves, and she thought of crossing out Mr Bredwyn’s name, but remembered the book of poems she had taken from the library and decided to leave the teacher’s name below Munro’s and just above W.B. Yeats’ name.

Sleepy and slow the start to this day in Port Brokeferry, and it is a time for dreaming, and taking time to oneself, and finding one's feet, and not looking at the hands of the clock too closely. It is Sunday.

The Start of the Last Port Brokeferry Day

2010-11-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

(We are at the start of Sunday in Port Brokeferry. This is the last day of our week here and things will come to a head for some of the stories. Each day has opened with an 'official' document that adds to the authenticity of the place. Sunday is no different.... so here it is.)

THE FARAWAY PLACE IS CLOSER TO HOME THAN YOU THINK – an extract from a sermon delivered by Rev. Alexander Donaldson B.D., minister of the church at Port Brokeferry 1935-39.

On Wednesday, as you all know, I shall be departing these shores to take the word of God to our mission in the North East of China. I go to a city called Ningbo. It is a seaport and the name means ‘Tranquil Waves’. What my life will be like there I can only imagine, though the place is real enough and can be found on a map of the country. The journey will take the length of two full weeks, with God’s blessing. Missed connections may see it stretch to nearer a month. I am prepared.

But when I think of Ningbo, it is, I believe, not so very different from Port Brokeferry. The men there make a living from the sea, in boats with nets that they mend by hand just as our men do. And the women bear the burdens and blessings of children and the children go to school to be something more than their parents. And the people sit around their fires at night, gathered together as families, and they tell stories of their fathers and grandfathers and the lives that they spent and the great deeds that they performed, made greater and greater with each telling of the story. I am sure that I will find in Ningbo a home from home.

I take with me the virtues of Port Brokeferry, everything I have learned here at my mother’s knee and standing by my father’s side wanting to one day be as tall as a man may be and as good. A gentleness in my manner of speaking I take with me, and a warmth in my dealings with all of God’s creatures, that is what I have learned here. A generosity of spirit, too, and a belief in the inherent goodness of man, a goodness that is everywhere in evidence here in Brokeferry, and I believe all this will be found in the fishermen and their families in Ningbo.

The world is not so big a place as it once was. Ancient cartographers drew monsters at the edges of their maps and men with no heads or with the heads of dogs. Ningbo is not such a place. The world is shrunk to something more recognisable, and people are the same the world over, the same here as everywhere.

My favourite story from The Good Book, is the tale of The Prodigal Son. I hope to one day return to Port Brokeferry, to stand again before you, dear friends, standing as I do now, and that maybe there will be a fatted-calf-welcome waiting. On that day, the things I will tell you of the place I have been, will be no different than the things I take to tell the people there. The people from Ningbo will look at their own maps and their fingers point to a place called Port Brokeferry and they will say, ‘all of life is there in that small place’. For the faraway place is closer to home than you think and God is everywhere if he is looked for. I go to show the people of Ningbo where to look.

(The above is an extract from the last published sermon from the pen of Rev. Alexander Donaldson once of Port Brokeferry. He was three times winner of the Heather Balfour Trophy and was awarded a scholarship to the University in Aberdeen where he graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity in 1932. He returned to Port Brokeferry in 1935 remaining as minister at the church there until 1939 before leaving to take up missionary work in the far East. Alexander Donaldson accepted a post at mission buildings in Ningbo in the North East of Zhejiang province, China. He quickly established himself as a kind and warm-hearted man and a befriender of the poor. In 1940 Japan bombed the city of Ningbo. They dropped fleas carrying bubonic plague onto the streets of Ningbo. The Rev. Alexander Donaldson died in the same year.)

The Last Saturday Piece for PB

2010-11-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

(Just when I thought the door had closed on October and my haul of competition hits was complete and impressive and enough, I find there's even more! I am there on another shortlist and I am second in another competition. That's 24 competition hits for the year so far and October has been the richest month and that feels quite good. Here is the last piece for Saturday in Port Brokeferry. Sunday will be the last day of this project so we are moving towards the close of this creative exercise.)

BERLIE’S IS ENOUGH FOR WALLACE

It’s called Berlie’s but for as long as I have been a part of things there’s never been a Berlie. Tom Gough was in charge before me and a man called Cathal before him. There was a Berlie once, years and years back. A woman called Berlie, only it was spelled different and she was nothing to do with the name that hangs on all our posters.

Been on the road longer than not, I have. Suits me, really. It’s who I am. I hear some of them talking behind my back, like I might be sick and not know, and they talk about what’ll happen when I stop, but I don’t see that anytime soon. It’s all the family that I have is Berlie’s, and it is like a family and I’m the old man. I look after things. Look after them, like they might be mine. Settle disputes when they’re thrown up.

Take Lynn. I know she’s a bit loose. Likes a drink, she does, more than a drink, and I’ve told her before about the trouble she leaves behind her and she listens to what I say and for a while at least she tiptoes the straighter line. But men are just drawn to her. Like flies to shit, I have heard said, but that is unkind. She’s not as young as she is in her head. That’s what I think. And life’s for enjoying and she does enjoy life. There’s no arguing with that. But tonight there was a man deeper in his drink than she was. Lachlan’s his name. And he wouldn’t leave Lynn alone. Nothing malicious, but I could see she hadn’t an interest in him, so I had to gently move him on at the end of the night. Athol Stuart was a help in that. He’s no bother if you stay on the right side of him is Athol Stuart. Can’t always say the same for that Mad Martin. Mad is what he is, for sure, though the dogs like him well enough and there’s no harm in him.

You have to be made of a certain kind of stuff to stick the life that Berlie’s offers. It’s not for everyone. There’s May. Older than me, if anyone’s counting. She reads fortunes in the bottoms of tea cups, or in the lines on a person’s palm. It’s all hokum, and she knows it, but she looks the part and she’s good at what she does. I don’t ever see May sitting in a brick house waiting for the dark to come down. It’s not part of who she is. Been with Berlie’s since before me and she’ll be with Berlie’s till the end, I reckon.

But then there’s the lad, Kelso. At first I thought he fitted right in. He had a way with him. And with the lasses. Like he was in a sweetie shop and no one there to stop him dipping into any jar that he chose. If I’m being honest, I saw something of myself in him, I did. Not that it’s like that for me now. Things settle with the years and a man changes. I curl up with May some nights, but it’s her company I’m after.

But Kelso. There’s a difference in the lad now and I don’t see him lasting beyond this season. There’s a girl here in Port Brokeferry. She’s a looker, too. He was with her last year and maybe the change in him started then. I see he is back with her again, like they’ve picked up where they left off. Mind you, there’s one or two others still tilting their hats in his direction so maybe I don’t know it all. And this afternoon he came back with a quiet storm in him and something is not right there. I’ll maybe have to keep an eye on the lad.

You get to see things in this business. The best of places, mostly. Like seeing only the postcards of a town and snapshots of the people. That’s not enough for some. Some want more. They want to be rooted someplace, the ground beneath their feet familiar and the faces passing their windows faces they recognise. I can understand that. Of course I can. But it’s not for me, the settled life. Berlie’s is enough for me and I like it fine.

And the best time of all is at the end of the night, like now, and a quiet comes over everything and the show lights are all out and the people all gone, and I see May's light is still on in her trailer, and I take my time and enjoy a last cigarette before turning in.

More news and more PB

2010-10-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

(October has proved to be quite a good month for me. Aside from my appearance on Schmu radio and the workshops in Aberdeen; aside from the Bridport Judges giving my work a nod and a shortlisting in one competition and a highly commended in another; aside from all those I have just been told that I am the winner in another competition. Just the ray of sunshine a writer needs at this darker time of the year. Wow! Here's more from Port Brokeferry.)

KNOWING WHAT’S TROUBLING HUNTLY

‘It tastes different,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. Not so sweet and not so peppery. Different.’ He sets his knife and fork to six o’clock on the plate and pushes his plate away from him as though he is finished without having really started.

He doesn’t come out with it straight away. Never does. But I know. There’s something on his mind. Been in his head since early doors. I know, just like I know when he’s sad and he won’t say, or confused or worried and he will not admit that he is. He says he understands when he doesn’t and I know those times, too. I’m Huntly’s wife and I know him and I know there’s something troubling him today.

I offer him something else to eat. I ask him if he’s sick. If he is not himself today. But I know the answers before he brings them out.

‘No, nothing else to eat. No, thank you. I’ll be fine. Really. Don’t trouble yourself. I just think I might be coming down with something.’

But he isn’t sick. I can see that. I lay the palm of my hand against his forehead and there is no temperature, and I never expected that there would be. I stroke the side of his face and look him in the eye and offer him a cup of tea. And he says maybe that would be good.

He’s been quiet today. Quieter than usual. More turned in on himself. And he has not really settled to anything. Even the newspaper has been unread. He opened it but I could tell he wasn’t reading. Turning the pages is all, one after the other and not taking in what was there.

I make him a cup of tea and place it before him. He looks up and smiles, but the smile is not real, just the shape that he puts his mouth to.

And I think I know what it is that’s been on his mind, for it’s been on mine, too. There’s a change in things and I do not know how this will be for Huntly. It’s about Alice. Every morning for years, at her window and dreaming of something lost, and Huntly watching her from a small distance, and these last days she’s something found to take its place. He must have seen the difference.

It’s been a long time coming, I think. And it makes sense really. Well-suited. The surprise is that it has taken so long and that they did not each see it before now: Dodie Bredwell and Alice. I’ve seen a change in her. She is suddenly brighter and I’ve seen her laughing and she moves different, like there is a new lightness to her body. Happier is what she seems. The first time for almost as long as memory: Alice, happy. But I know that Huntly won’t see it that way. Not at first. It’ll be like he’s lost something now. Something he never really had, but lost all the same. That’s what he’ll think.

‘How’s your tea?’ I ask him.

He nods and smiles and it is again just the shape of a smile. And I know him, and I know it will take some time for Huntly to adjust and he will need my help in that.

‘Maybe you’d like to go out tomorrow,’ I say. ‘It’s set to be another warm day. And it’d be good for you to get some air and some colour to your cheeks. You’ll feel better for it. I know you would. I just know it.’

And Huntly nods again, but I know what that nod means.

Another Port Brokeferry Piece

2010-10-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

(This week I have been asked to do a public reading in December. By my old writers' group, which is nice. Here's another Saturday piece from Port Brokeferry.)

AND THERE WAS TIME

It had been a good day for business. Three trips to The Snag and back and seals came to the boat each time. And a dolphin was spotted, some way off so that Kerry wasn’t sure, but it caused some excitement on that trip.

Edwin was in a good mood. He called Kerry his lucky charm and the free pass he’d given her was, he said, his best investment. And being so high spirited, when he returned to harbour at the end of the day, there was Mad Martin waiting and Edwin gave the time to tell a Finn story, as he’d said he might.

‘What’ll it be?’ said Mad Martin. ‘What’ll it be?’

And Finn’s boat was far from land. As far away as it was possible to be. Sea and ice in all directions, as far as the eye can see, and further. And whales spotted at a distance some days, recorded in the ship’s log, and looked for and lost again. And once, a bird, with wings as wide as a man is tall, circled overhead and then left without coming near.

‘The story of Lagan MacNeill,’ said Mad Martin, and he pulled his jacket tight-closed about him even though the day was still warm.

So cold it was that words froze on the lips and men were disposed to sleep when they should have been awake. And Finn was at the wheel alone, a lit oil lantern giving small warmth to the air, small warmth and a sooty taste to each breath. And the sound of the sea against the rise and fall of the ship was a measured drumbeat that rose up through his feet.

‘Slow and slow and slow,’ said Mad Martin and Edwin pressed a finger to his lips for Martin to hush, for there were others listening to the story. Children there were, their first day in Port Brokeferry and this would be a memory they would take home with them. And Kerry had stayed to hear Edwin’s tale. And a woman who was rooming at the Victoria Hotel and seemed somehow familiar to Edwin, like he’d seen her before.

Slow the progress they made, slow the thoughts they had, and slow the cold blood moving in their veins. Everything slow, like time moved differently there, where the fishermen were. And they each one felt alone and cut adrift from everything. And Finn at the wheel, peering through the grey light, wiping the misted glass clear so he could better see.

‘And what he saw then,’ said Mad Martin. And Edwin threw him a look that Martin understood for he had had that look before.

And what he saw then! said Edwin. For out of the grey loomed a ship with its sails furled. An old ship such as Finn had only seen in pictures, and once such a ship berthed in a city port for visitors to walk on and wonder at how things stood in days that were gone. And here was a ship something the same, and a crew sailing her. Ten, Finn counted, and they were to a man singing, their voices deep as a growl.

Edwin growled when he said the word and Mad Martin put a hand over his own mouth and he made a small noise, like a whipped dog whining.

And at the wheel of that ship stood Death.

Moira smiled and the children that had gathered copied Mad Martin with their hands over their mouths.

As certain as I stand here before you: Death. All flesh stripped from his bleached bones and clothed in flowing black and grinning a toothy grin. Death, and a ghostly crew. Finn could see that now – the blank blank looks on the faces of the ten men who manned the ship, if men they could be called. And their song was all sound and no words, Finn could hear that too. Not really a song, but a rhythmic moaning that fitted well with the drumming of the sea against Finn’s boat. And Finn called on his own crew, called them out of sleep, rubbing their eyes and not believing what they saw.

‘But…’ said Mad Martin.

But, said Edwin, one man there was who could not be roused. A man who slept on. And Finn shook him and slapped his cheek and called his name, as loud as a call can be. And he did not wake. Not ever. For he was as deep in sleep as ever man was and as cold, too – out of breath and out of time.

And the Ship of the dead turned away from them and Death was laughing and the ghost-crew of the ship was increased by one. That’s what Finn wrote in the ship’s log and he swears it was true, every word. And the dead man was Lagan MacNeill.

Mad Martin said not a word. And the children listening did not know whether to laugh or clap and so did neither. And Kerry nodded. And Moira looked out across the sea as if she might see the Ship of the Dead moored somewhere close by.

WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO THIS WEEK!

2010-10-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

BEING A WRITER (and not writing!)

I am just back from the city of Aberdeen where I have been doing a few book promotion events. On Wednesday 20th I ran two creative workshops for children as part of the Aberdeen Art Gallery's exhibition of The Lewis Chessmen (the second leg of their Scottish Tour). The workshops were a great success and the children really worked hard for me, which was terrific considering they were all officially on their mid-term break. Parents also hung around for the whole event, in numbers, and said afterwards how much they had also enjoyed the presentation and how inspiring it was. Ticks all the boxes I had hoped to tick, and books are selling through the gallery shop, and though I would never say it was a doddle (because I do work quite hard), it was fun and easier than the 'day-job'.

On Thursday 21st I returned to Aberdeen Art Gallery for a second event. I was interviewed for Shmu Radio and The Reading Bus Project that runs in Aberdeen. Two boys, David and Thomas, did an excellent job and had some really searching questions for me. I have never been interviewed and recorded before so this was very exciting. I was also asked to read from the book and that was recorded, too. And, what was really terrific, (all of it really) was that Jenny, who runs the project, and her American team-mate, who was overseeing the operation of the recording equipment, had both read my book - that really impressed me. They both enjoyed it, too, and that was a bonus. And in the 'down-time' at the end of the recording, the two young interviewers were seen huddled in a corner reading their own copies of the book. It doesn't get much better than that - a real ego-stroke moment.

Thank you to everyone who was involved in the organisation of these two events.

More from PB

2010-10-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

(A few more pieces of mine hung up on the web this weekend, in strange places, but fun, too. Still Saturday in Port Brokeferry - and here's another piece.)

JUST AS THE MINISTER HAD ASKED

Corinne was with Lillian. Just as the minister had asked. They were in old Tom’s house and that was strange. They both thought so, for they talked with their voices lowered, like people in church. Lillian was talking about Tom and telling Corinne what she would miss about the old man. Corinne wasn’t really listening. Not really. But it was enough that she was there, just as it had been enough she’d sat reading to old Tom when he wasn’t really listening to her.

‘I used to keep an eye out for him. Looking from my window I could see if he was up and about. And if he caught me looking he’d wave and throw me a wide grin. I made him soup some days. Was making it for myself anyway and easy enough to make a little extra for Tom. He liked a good vegetable broth with ham cut into pink pieces. And Callum dropped in every other day with leftover bread. That’s what Callum said, leftovers, but I think he kept a loaf back specially for Tom.’

They started in the bedroom. Lillian threw back the curtains and opened the window to freshen the place. The bed was unmade and Corinne could see the shape of Tom left behind in the sheets. Like a part of him was still there. The mark of his head left on the pillow. Lillian stripped the bed, carried the sheets and pillowcases off to the kitchen and fed them into the washing machine. Towels, too, from the floor of the bathroom. And she cleared the dirty dishes into the sink and ran a bowl of hot soapy water.

‘He had a daughter, you know.’

Corinne didn’t know.

‘Angela. There’s pictures of her in a book someplace. Stick-pin thin and hair as dark as crow stares. Always laughing, in the pictures at least. Left the village as soon as she could. Itchy feet and wanting to see the world, just like the young do. Got as far away as it is possible to get from Port Brokeferry. Went to South America and became a nurse.’

Corinne had picked up a clean tea towel and was drying the dishes before they’d had time to drain. She felt she had to be busy, too, like Lillian. Cups and small plates with flowers on the rim and flaked gold bands. She had to open several cupboards before she found the places they belonged.

‘Angela married a man from Colchester. All that way to Peru and Argentina and she marries a man from Colchester. Name of Matthew. And that’s the last old Tom knew. There were letters once and then postcards and then nothing. For years nothing. All Tom’s last years. He just read the same letters over and over. Sad, don’t you think?’

Lillian cleared the fridge of food. Some things she put in a plastic carrier bag for Corinne to take back to her mother and the rest she threw into the bin that stood at the kitchen door. Cupboards she did the same, cleared the shelves, and bread that was hard she got rid of, and three day old scones or older.

‘I’ve written to her. To Angela. To the last address he had for her. Not the first time I have done that and no reply to any of the other letters I sent. But I thought she should know that her father had passed. She ought to know that. So I sent a letter, saying how he hadn’t suffered and how he thought of her right to the end. It’s what a daughter would want to know about her father, I think.’

Old newspapers Lillian threw out and junk mail that had piled up on the table in the kitchen. And she reached under the sink for bleach and bathroom cleaner and cloths.

‘You’re a quiet thing, Corinne. Here I am prattling on about a man you never knew and you listening like I was a schoolteacher and here was a lesson worth listening to.’

Corinne smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

‘Or maybe you’re not really listening and your mind is elsewhere. On a boy maybe, and he is all you can think about. The way his eyes look at you and the gift of his smile and the brighter the day is when he is in it.’

Corinne blushed. 'His name's Munro,' she said, and that was all that she said.

More from Saturday in Port Brokeferry

2010-10-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

(Another Port Brokeferry piece.)

ONE BUTTON ON STRUAN COURTALD’S WAISTCOAT, UNDONE

Not in the garden this time, though it was a bluer brighter day and there was no wind. Sinnie and the women from the fair, the one dressed in black with coloured cloth tied to the ends of her crimped hair and her wrists all heavy with jangling bracelets. Her nails looked bitten and still dirty, her fingers marked too, like she had been fixing one of the generators maybe. And they were sitting inside, Sinnie and the woman, at the table in the kitchen, and all the doors closed.

‘Just between ourselves?’ Sinnie said. And she was fingering the edge of the tablecloth and her voice almost a whisper though they were alone. ‘Because I wouldn’t want this getting out. Only you were such a help the last time and I just don’t understand.’

The woman from the fair helped herself to sugar, three teaspoons like before and like before she did not stir the cup.

‘No clothes on this time,’ said Sinnie. ‘Two nights in a row and sitting on the back of the waist-coated owl and I am wearing no clothes. I think it is what you said and I blush to think of it. Me and Struan Courtald. Known him since he was boy in short trousers and I was a slip myself. Struan! Why Struan? It makes no sense. He’s with Ina McAllister, everyone knows that. Everyone except maybe Ina’s girl, Sharon.’

‘There’s sense in dreams and nonsense, too. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t,’ said the woman and she reached across for a digestive biscuit, lifted the plate and offered one to Sinnie who waved the offer away, her impatience barely disguised.

‘I can’t look him in the eye. Not anymore. Said good day to me this morning, there in the street, and all my words came out tangled together and he looked at me funny and asked if I was alright. I pointed to one of the buttons on his waistcoat – it needed fastening.’

The woman nodded and her face was serious.

Sinnie got up from her chair and immediately sat down again.

‘Is there more tea?’ asked the woman from the fair.

‘More tea?’ said Sinnie.

‘Just if it’s no trouble. I’m a bit dry, you see.’

Sinnie checked the pot. There was more tea. She put milk into the woman’s cup and filled it to the lip. Then she set the teapot down on a ceramic tile that showed a white bird like a seagull or a dove. She watched the woman heap three more teaspoons of sugar into the cup and once again the woman did not stir it.

Then the woman sat back in her chair, waiting for Sinnie to continue.

‘And last night he said something.’

‘Who said something?’ said the woman.

‘Struan Courtald. The owl. In the dream he did. There I was sitting on the back of Struan Courtald and wearing no clothes and he spoke. I remember the words precisely. Woke up soon after and wrote them down in my book. It’s better to write them down as soon as you wake, otherwise they become confused or forgotten.’

There was a quiet then. Like Sinnie was drawing breath. Or pausing for dramatic effect, as storytellers do. But then there was nothing. The woman from the fair sipped at her tea and looked out of the window at the sea, flat and as smooth as glass, she thought. Then not glass but the pavement when it is wet and the sunlight on it turns it to silver. Still Sinnie did not pick up the thread of where she was.

‘And?’ said the woman after a time had passed. ‘What was it that he said?’

Sinnie, unable to give utterance to the words, opened the book and pointed to what she had written when she woke. She held one hand over her mouth and watched for a reaction in the woman’s face.

In a voice that was unmistakably Struan Courtald’s, the waist-coated owl said, ‘Sinnie, I will wear my waistcoat unbuttoned for you.’

'Do you see?' said Sinnie. 'And then a button on Struan Courtald's waistcoat, this morning, undone. What could it mean?'

Saturday at The Bobbing Boat Cafe

2010-10-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

(Another piece for Saturday in Port Brokeferry)

PARDON GUTHRIE’S FRENCH

‘The Bobbing Boat’ café is awash with people. All spilled out onto the pavement and beyond the chairs and tables arranged there. And Guthrie and Eileen are rushed off their feet, scarcely a moment to look up from what they are about, and everywhere regulars rubbing shoulders with visitors, sharing tables and apologising for doing so.

Aidan is there with his tea-for-two-space and a single fruit slice on a small plate. It is as if he is expecting someone so nobody asks for the seat beside him, though there’s plenty that look at it, as if maybe they can see the someone Aidan is expecting, as if the person must be there sitting all quiet and not drinking the tea.

When Magnus turns up at ‘The Bobbing Boat’ Eileen is pleased and flustered both at the same time. ‘It’s Saturday,’ he says, ‘and this is as close as I can get to you for now.’ She calls him a daft bastard, but she says it under her breath so that Guthrie does not hear, and she kisses him quick as fizz and directs him to Aidan’s table.

‘He’ll tell you he might be waiting for someone, but no one ever comes,’ she says to Magnus and she hurries off to see to another order.

‘Is it Magnus?’ Guthrie says to Eileen. And what he means when he says it is as clear as glass and Eileen can see through to the thing that he means.

‘It is Magnus,’ she says. ‘And I won’t hear a bloody word about him from you Guthrie, if you’ll pardon my French.’

Aidan pours Magnus a cup of tea and offers him milk and sugar and a share of his fruit slice. ‘Is it Eileen you’re here for Magnus?’ he says, and he does not wait for an answer. ‘She’s all glitter and spit, she is. Nice as ninepence sometimes but cross as sharp sticks if you do her wrong. You’re a lucky man, Magnus from the bank. Been waiting for her to sit down and have a cup of tea with me for more than a month. I know, and you’re maybe right – thinking I’m old enough I could be her father, but I’m just talking tea, so you’ve no mind to worry.’

Magnus laughs and says Aidan is alright. Then he says that he wouldn’t mind a piece of the fruit slice after all, if it is still on offer.

‘That woman is here again,’ Eileen says when she reports back at the counter for two black coffees and two bacon rolls, back at the counter where Guthrie is running calculations in his head and ticking off the orders he has already serviced. ‘Out on the green bench across the road. Like before. Just sitting there looking to catch your eye.’

Guthrie stops then. Just long enough that he sees her. And she sees him, stopped and looking. She waves, not so that she is not seen, and her face lights up.

‘Is it Moira?’ Eileen says to Guthrie and her voice is all twitter and tease.

'It is,' says Guthrie. 'And not a bloody word,' he says, 'not a bloody word,' and he is blushing when he says it and can't hold back the smiles, and he has lost where he was in his calculations and the orders needing filled, and the coffee machine is making a noise again, a broken hissing noise, like it could be laughing and trying not to be.

The third piece of good news in a week

2010-10-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

(Have been away seeing friends. Back today and I find two more of my pieces hanging up on the web and I am on another competition shortlist that is still being judged. The number of competition hits for the year is almost at my best yet. And I have another children's novel making a noise in my head...

Here's the next bit of Port Brokeferry.)

KERRY’S BETTER DAY ALL ROUND

There were three sailings scheduled for the Saturday, and it was busy at the harbour with the extra visitors just off the bus and more expected later in the day when the train came in. Edwin got Mad Martin and Bran to hand out leaflets advertising the boat trips out to The Snag and back. ‘One leaflet per group,’ he told them. No point in throwing good money away, and the leaflets cost money.

‘Tell about the mermaid, Finn,’ said Mad Martin. ‘Or what was found in the belly of a whale. Or the one about the fisherman that married a fish.’

Edwin promised to tell Mad Martin a Finn story later in the day, if he had the time.

‘The story of the lost boat and the starfish compass?’

Edwin said again, ‘If there’s time.’

And Mad Martin told everyone about Finn’s stories and how there’d be one on the boat if there was time and how Finn told the best stories.

Kerry came down and offered to help too, with the leaflets. It was the least she could do, she said. She was in better spirits, seeing a way forward for herself, a way to stay where she was in Port Brokeferry. Sad for Ward and she’d heard about old Tom, as well; but better in herself.

‘There’s a new picture in Mhairi’s shop window.’ Mad Martin told everyone about that, too. ‘And Martin is in the picture and Col is not there. Have you seen Col?’

Kerry smiled at the visitors who looked funny at Martin and what he said. And she directed them to the ticket office where they could book a trip out on The Silver Herring. And she told them about the seals on the rocks and assessed the weather for them and promised them a good sailing. ‘Not so good yesterday,’ she said. ‘But today is a brighter day.’

There’d been another letter for Kerry. From Ward’s woman. She’d written how sorry she was and how bad she felt about everything. She said she couldn’t think straight, not with him gone, even though she’d known she’d face the loss one day. It was sooner than she had expected and now there was the funeral to arrange. Her brother was helping her, she said. Then she’d written some words from Ward. Things he’d asked her to pass on. Ward’s words written in this woman’s hand – that was strange. And she’d enclosed a cheque for Kerry. Ward’s woman could have torn it up, Kerry knew that. It was not a small cheque and tearing it up would have been easy and no one would ever have known. She hoped that Kerry would be at the funeral, this woman who had taken everything from Kerry and here she was giving something back.

‘Mhairi has a new picture in her window and it is Martin with no shoes and no socks and no Col. Have you seen it yet, Kerry?’

Kerry told Martin that she hadn’t but that she would.

‘Better hurry,’ said Mad Martin. ‘It won’t be there long. Mhairi is almost giving it away. That’s what Col would say if he saw it. Almost giving it away it costs so little. And Mhairi laughs at Athol Stuart, the policeman, when he says it, too.’

And there is a queue at the ticket kiosk and the music from Berlie's reaches down to where they are and there is the sound of laughter hanging in the air and a girl with a balloon on a string smiles up at Kerry and it feels like a better day all round

Another Nod From The Bridport Judges

2010-10-03T02:55:00.000-07:00

(Another good piece of news and unexpected: The Bridport Prize judges have given another nod to my work. Not yet on the winners' podium, but another shortlisting credit. Over 6000 stories entered this year so this recognition feels very good indeed. And here's the continuing story of Port Brokeferry.)

FALSE EYELASHES AND SMELLING OF PARMA VIOLETS

Elspeth climbed the three steps and knocked on the door. Then she stepped down onto the grass again and waited. The music from the fair was loud, drowning out the choke and growl of the generators that were hidden behind painted boards showing girls with flashing blue eyes and bright teeth and perfectly plump breasts. It was like there was a party on the green and she hadn’t been invited, like she was a sour neighbour there to complain about the noise.

Elspeth heard a woman’s voice calling from inside the trailer. Still she waited at the foot of the steps. Waited for the door to open so she could see the woman face to face. Then she would decide what she was going to do.

The woman was blond, her hair all lacquered curl and lift, and she was wearing a man’s shirt with the collar turned up and a belt around the middle. She had on a creased skirt that Elspeth thought was too short for a woman of her years, even if she had the legs.

‘What is it?’ said the woman. ‘I’m sort of in the middle of things.’ She had to shout to be heard. She had one false eyelash on and one off, and her lips were pale and her cheeks smudged pink like a doll’s. She had a mark on her neck like a bruise or a bite. ‘Got to see a man about a dog, a very thirsty dog, if you get my drift,’ she said.

‘It’s Lynn isn’t it?’ said Elspeth.

The blond woman looked her up and down, taking the measure of this woman who dressed plain like a schoolteacher. ‘It is Lynn,’ she said. ‘And who might be calling on Lynn?’

Elspeth did not offer up her name, but asked if they might talk, privately, just the two of them. Inside.

Lynn disappeared back into the dark of the trailer leaving the door open and Elspeth climbed the stairs and followed her.

It took a moment for Elspeth’s eyes to adjust to the dimness of the trailer, even with the light leaping in through the open door. And there was a muffled quiet inside – the music stayed outside. Lynn sat in front of a mirror, leaning close to the glass, and she was applying a glossy red wax to her lips with a small brush. She pressed her lips together, then pouted like she might kiss her own reflection.

‘A private talk?’ Lynn said when she had done.

Elspeth was looking at the mess of the bed and the discarded clothes dropped on the floor and empty beer bottles collected in drunken arrangement in one corner of the trailer and the dinted crowns of bottletops arranged on the narrow sill of the window.

Lynn caught her looking. ‘Wasn’t expecting company,’ she said. ‘Leastways not the sort of company that minds how things are.’ And she picked up the dropped clothes and pushed them into a drawer, and pulled the bed straight without really making it.

‘It’s about Kyle,’ said Elspeth.

Lynn sat on the edge of the bed then and left a space for Elspeth to continue.

‘He’s my brother, you see. And he’s going through a bad patch. With his wife. Things not as they should be between them. You know. And he didn’t come home last night. And I know he’s been here. With you. And it’s none of my business, it isn’t, and I should leave well alone, I know that. Only there’s a girl. His girl. My niece. Pretty as a picture, she is, and still at school. Not yet finding her way and this could be…and I thought… if you just knew…’

Elspeth broke off then. It was all there. Everything she had to say. Not as direct as she had thought she’d be, but there if this woman called Lynn could read between the lines.

Lynn turned back to the mirror and carefully fitted her second false eyelash. She blinked and winked, first with one eye and then with the other. Then she spritzed a sweet perfume onto her neck, sweet like bubblegum or parma violets.

‘I hear what you’re saying, Kyle’s sister. I do,’ she said when she’d done. ‘And I can see that you mean well by your brother. But like I told you already, there’s this man I’ve got to see about a dog and it’s a right thirsty bastard.’

And it was left at that. Lynn retraced her steps onto the green where the music was all hop and jiggle and she could hear the screams of girls on the waltzers. Then she walked away from the party, once again feeling like the complaining neighbour and not really sure that she had been heard.

News and Then Grace and Kelso in PB

2010-10-02T02:11:00.000-07:00

(I do well enough in the writing competitions I enter, but it comes as the pleasantest surprise to find myself on a shortlist where my writing was entered by someone else. My children's book, 'The Chess Piece Magician' has made it to the shortlist of a neat award. Results are not till next May, but it means that lots of children will get to read my book as they decide which book on the list gets the winner's prize. Win or lose, this just feels so good to have made the shortlist of five. And below another Port Brokeferry piece... a bit sad, this one.)

THE CONFESSIONS OF GRACE AND KELSO

They met outside the village. Way out above where Douglas’ Prayer Cell was cut into the red stone cliff face. They walked there separately, so that they were not seen, seeming to come from two different directions. Grace had got her mother to mind the baby and Kelso had begged a couple of hours off, even though Berlie’s was already thumping when he’d left.

They met with things to say and neither of them sure of how they would tell the other or what would happen once they had. They met at first pretending that nothing was any different, not fearful of what was ahead. The moment was all there was. And what would be was a way in front of them.

Maybe she said his name and he said hers. They embraced and held onto that, not counting the time that passed, not caring if all time stopped then and there.

Maybe that is too fanciful: they embraced and held that embrace for some minutes without a break. Then when time was something between them again, still they held onto one another, not sure of what they were about to do.

‘I have something to tell you,’ said Grace. Maybe she said it quiet. Maybe he didn’t hear. ‘I should have told you before. On that first night you were back in Port Brokeferry. I should have told you then. But I wanted it to be like it was. A year ago. I wanted to go back to that time, when it was easy and there was just you and just me. It is different now.’

‘I have something to tell you, too,’ said Kelso. His voice was serious and his words not certain. It was, as she’d said, all different. Thinking of coming back to Port Brokeferry had kept him with Berlie’s, it was everything that had kept him there, and now he was back and Grace was Grace, and he did not think he could leave when the fair left. Not this time. But staying meant something hard, too. He had to tell her about the girl called Evelyn carrying his name scratched onto her arm and how it meant nothing and was something that was before Grace.

‘There’s something you should know,’ he said. And the words were what she had wanted to say next and that confused her. ‘There’s a girl called Evelyn. She works at the hairdressers.’

Grace knew Evelyn. She sometimes cut Grace’s hair. She was nice enough. Grace did not know why Kelso was talking about her.

‘And last year, before you and I, before we were what we were, well, Evelyn and me, we…’ And he wasn’t making much sense. Grace broke from him then. Held him at arm’s length and looked him in the face.

‘It was the one time,’ he said. ‘We were drunk and it was the one time. And she has my name tattooed onto her arm. That’s how drunk we were. But it meant nothing; it means nothing. Grace, you have to believe what I am telling you.’

Grace understood and she did believe him. She had to. There were bigger things to be borne. She stroked his face with the flat of her hand and Kelso felt it was alright again, that it was not so different after all, that they had gone back to how it was.

‘Kelso, there’s a child,’ Grace said.

He didn’t understand.

‘It’s yours,’ she said. ‘Mine. Ours. I should have written to you, but I kept it to myself. No one knows. I wanted to tell you on that first night. I tried. I said a lot can happen in a year, remember? And it has. But you said you didn’t want to ever be trapped again and this felt then like it might be a thing to trap you.’

He wasn’t holding her now. And she wasn’t holding him. It was different again, just when he thought it was the same. For a long enough time they stood with space between them. Not speaking. Not anything. And time was again something that held no importance for them.

‘It’s not a trap,’ she said, bringing them back to the moment.

Kelso didn’t say anything. He had not the words for this.

Wash Her Mouth Out With Soap

2010-09-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

(I must apologise for the language one of the women uses in the Port Brokeferry piece below. I most certainly do not approve. It was not my idea that she should say that - that can happen in fiction sometimes. Please don't judge me by what Evelyn says.)

ALL MEN ARE CUNTS

Christine was like a bear with a sore head. Even when she answered the phone the words she said came out harder than they were meant to. And she was not warm to the ladies that appeared in the shop ten minutes before their appointments, not her usual breezy self at all.

Evelyn thought it had something to do with her not having been in the shop the day before. She understood that Christine had picked up her customers and had put in a full shift. Evelyn took the blame and told Morag she was sorry.

Morag looked at Evelyn funny, like she had not understood.

It was mid-morning when Morag offered to get Christine a cup of tea. The first rush of clients had given way to a moment’s quiet. The appointment book said there’d be another rush about eleven and then they were busy again in the afternoon.

‘Or maybe you’d prefer coffee?’ said Morag, thinking perhaps Christine had spent another drunken night with Lachlan and needed something to restore the pep in her.

‘Tea,’ said Christine, and the word came out snappish and spat.

Evelyn volunteered to help Morag with the tea. Not that there was much to keep two busy, but it gave her a chance to talk quietly with Morag in the back of the shop.

‘Sorry?’ said Morag.

‘For not being in yesterday. For Christine having to take on my clients and being as cross as crabs this morning.’

Morag waved a hand in the air, as if to say there was no need to apologise. ‘It’s not for you she is cross. It’s Lachlan. He was seen drinking alone in ‘The Ship’ last night and no sign of her nibs. They must have had a falling out. Flowers one day, flung words the next.’

Evelyn felt a little better.

‘I think Christine actually enjoyed her spell with the old scissors and comb yesterday. Finished ahead of time we did and she shut the shop up early. Said she’d meet me in the ‘The Ship’ later on for a drink and she was buying. Only she wasn’t there as we’d arranged. And Lachlan was, empty glasses stacked before him and cursing all women till his words came out making no sense at all.’

Evelyn checked that Christine was still at the desk. Then she rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and showed off her ‘Kelso’ tattoo. No words to go with what she did, just revealing the scruffily written name in blue-black, bleeding under her skin so that the letters seemed furry in outline.

It was not a surprise to Morag. Not really. She knew about Kelso, had guessed at least.

‘Fucking stupid, don’t you think?’ said Evelyn.

Morag shrugged, not committing herself to an opinion that might later get her into trouble.

‘He’s with Berlie’s. Now he’s back and he says there’s someone else. Just like that. Says that it meant nothing what we did. And I should have known. He was drunk and so was I. Of course it meant nothing. Except I spent a year convincing myself it did. Bloody waste of time that was. I’ll get it removed. You can do that. Not pretty afterwards, but that’s the price.’

‘Sorry,’ said Morag. ‘We could go for a drink after work, if you like.’

‘All men are cunts,’ Evelyn said. Then she rolled down her sleeve again and fastened the cuff button. She poured out three cups of tea, one after the other, not saying another word till she was done.

‘Yes,’ said Evelyn at last, setting the teapot down on a cork mat that was there for the purpose. ‘A drink, sounds good to me. A few drinks. And who knows, maybe some guy will get lucky tonight,’ and she laughed when she said it, walking back into the shop carrying tea for Christine.

Morag thought she would say something, about men and what Evelyn had said they were, but then she decided to hold her tongue.

News and then the lovely Mhairi in PB

2010-09-25T01:37:00.000-07:00

(Some uplifting news this week: a former colleague from the Fiction Workhouse asked me to look over a story they had written and were thinking of entering into a competition. The person said some flattering things about how helpful and how thorough and how insightful my crits always are. And two of my stories have got onto the shortlist for a nice competition bringing my total number of hits to twenty for the year so far. That feels very good. And some of my pieces are being hung up on the internet... have been a bit lazy about sending stuff out there this year. And here's the next installment of Port Brokeferry... and there is a girl I know who runs such a shop and her name is Mhairi!)

MHAIRI’S NEW PAINTING

There was a new picture in the window of Mhairi’s Port Brokeferry Giftshop. A larger piece than she was used to painting so that she had to rearrange everything in the window around it. It was in Mhairi’s style, even though the brushstrokes were looser and broader, as befitted the larger canvas. The colours were hers and the lines hers, too. And it was recognisably Port Brokeferry: the beach, and the sea coming in or going out, and the sky all burnished and blue and the sand a wide yellow stretch. And, if there had been any doubt that it was the beach at Port Brokeferry, there was Mad Martin in the picture.

‘It’s Martin. And he is not with Col. Just Martin. And Mhairi is there too, though you cannot see her, for she is behind the picture. But she is there all the same.’

It was only right that Martin should be the first to view it, and so Mhairi had arranged for Athol Stuart to bring him along early to a small unveiling in the window of her giftshop. There was a cloth draped over the picture at first, like it was a secret or a surprise. Then Martin was there, sometimes looking over his shoulder as if he was expecting that someone else would be there also, and Mhairi pulled back the cloth, slow, like she was performing a trick on stage, and she revealed the painting specially for him.

Martin in the picture was wearing his kilt and his grey suit jacket, the same as he wore every day, the same as he was wearing now. His painted shoes were off and his painted socks too. He was shown from behind, looking away from the artist, looking out over the sea, the foaming edge of which was like ribbon lace.

‘It’s Martin,’ he said again.

Mhairi grinned at him from the other side of the glass and nodded as though she was translating into movement Martin’s approval. When she came out to where he stood, and where Athol Stuart stood, she asked Martin if he liked it.

Martin was pressed up against the glass, as if he might enter the picture again if only he could find a way through. He did not reply to Mhairi’s question. It was as if he hadn’t heard, so Athol Stuart spoke for him.

‘It’s a grand work,’ said Athol Stuart. ‘Yes, a really special piece. I hope it stays in your window a long while, Mhairi. I hope it does.’

There was a small cream coloured card tucked into the edge of the mahogany wood frame. The picture had a title. In blue writing with all the letters curling and coiled, it said: ‘On The Beach at Port Brokeferry, with Martin.’ The price was written underneath.

‘Though I fear it will not be with us long, seeing what you charge for it,’ said Athol Stuart.

Then Martin did speak, showing that he was listening all the while. Spoke without taking his pressed-face from the glass.

‘Charge more, Mhairi. So that nobody will buy it. So that it will be there in the window for a long time. And I will come and see it every day. For as long as it is here. Long enough that Col will see it when he comes, too.’

‘I’m glad that you like it, Martin,’ she said, and she fetched a smaller sketched version from inside the shop. The same picture, but everything thrown down in a hurry, and the colours all washed through and the pencil lines showing. It was framed too, and Mhairi had signed it in the bottom right hand corner.

‘This one’s for you, Martin.’

A Bit of Heaven and a Bit of Sin

2010-09-19T01:53:00.000-07:00

(A fitting Sunday piece for Port Brokeferry... although in PB it is still only Saturday!)

PAN DROP MINTS

The minister sat with Lillian. Side by side on the sofa in her front room, turned into each other. He held her hand, his head bowed as though he was praying. She was telling him about Christmas with her late husband, Preston. And how Tom came over for Christmas dinner and he always brought soap in blue or yellow tissue paper. And he stayed late. Stayed even when Preston had departed this world. And there were letters that she read to him, letters from a daughter called Angela to a father called Tom.

The minister should have been listening. But he was dealing with his own loss. He’d been a friend, old Tom. They’d played cards together, every week for as far back as his earliest days in Port Brokeferry. They played for pan drop mints. Some weeks Tom was up, some weeks the minister walked away with a pocketful. He dropped them into the clutch-cupped palms of the children who came to church on a Sunday. Bits of heaven, bits of sin, he thought. Never touched them himself.

‘So, minister, what do you think?’ said Lillian.

He should have been listening. He said he was sorry. He hadn’t slept and his mind was on all that he had to do. Lillian squeezed his hand and said she understood. She said she was being silly, burdening him with all her nonsense.

He called in on Doctor Kerr after he’d been to Lillian’s. Just to let him know. And to let Margaret know, too. It was like he was there for an appointment. They talked in the surgery, Doctor Kerr behind his desk and Margaret standing beside him.

There were tears in Doctor Kerr’s eyes and he pressed his lips together, like there were things he could say but he kept it all back. Margaret talked for him. Polite things. The things you’d expect to hear.

The minister was elsewhere, his thoughts at least. His hand was in his pocket, riffling through the cards he had picked up from Tom’s bedroom the day before. It wasn’t just cards and pan drops that he shared with Tom. They talked. About the news and what was what in the world, their world shrinking through the years to the limits of Port Brokeferry. The minister tested some of the material for his sermons on old Tom. Changed a few things too after speaking with him.

‘Minister?’

He should have been listening. He apologised. Said he’d been by Tom till the end.

‘I just wondered if he’d suffered,’ said Margaret.

‘No, there was no struggle and no pain. He slipped away easy. In his sleep, the doctors said. Yes, a blessing. But already I miss him,’ said the minister.

Then he called on Susan Downs. He didn’t know why he did that. He’d heard things and thought she might need a kind word. Maybe it was just that.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Susan, only I thought I might invite myself for a cup of your tea, and maybe a slice of toast. If it’s no trouble. Only I was in the hospital last night and old Tom passed away.’

Susan made the minister a cup of tea. He took it black with two sugars. She made him some toast, too. They sat at the kitchen table. She was sad about old Tom. She said so. But then she began talking about Kyle and how it was with them, all the bad stuff that was between them. And now Kyle was seeing a woman called Lynn who came with the fair.

The minister nodded, looked sympathetic and thoughtful. And he was thinking, but not about Susan Downs.

When there was an end to her talking and space left in the air between them, the minister spoke. ‘I was wondering if I might ask your daughter, Corinne, to sit with Lillian a while today. I think Lillian could use the company and Corinne was such a comfort to old Tom. She was reading him poetry. Before. I think it helped.’

‘Corinne?’ said Susan Downs.

And there she was, as though conjured up by the minister talking about her, or Susan Downs saying her name: Corinne, just out of sleep and her hair all tangled and tossed. And she was yawning and stretching, being herself, not knowing there was company.

The minister said, ‘Good Morning, Corinne,’ and as soon as he said it, her name, he felt he had said something he shouldn’t have and he was off balance, and didn’t know how to proceed, so he offered her a pan drop mint from a white paper bag.

And Corinne was off balance too, and she took a mint from the minister without really knowing what she did.

In Alice's Bed

2010-09-17T02:58:00.000-07:00

(Continuing with Alley-Cat and Dodie Bredwell from Port Brokeferry, here's yet another Saturday piece... and I always said that Dodie was someone to like...)

A BOY CALLED MORAY

‘Is he a nephew or a younger cousin, or your father as a boy? Or is it someone you taught once? Is that it?’

Dodie was talking about the picture by her bed. The one of the boy in a fisherman’s jersey and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Alice should have put it away before. Every morning that she can remember she has woken seeing the boy’s face, seeing his smile thrown off the yellowing paper into her room. She called him sweetheart some days and bastard on other days. Always there, always young, and Alice moving further and further away from him, it seemed, further away in time. Still she’d kept him there in the gilt silver frame. But these past few days somehow Alice had forgotten he was there.

‘He’s someone I knew, that’s all,’ she said.

Dodie picked up the picture in its frame. She wished that he hadn’t.

‘I want to know everything about you, Alley-cat,’ he said, looking at the picture.

‘I am forty six on my next birthday. I am a teacher, but you know that. My favourite writer is Hardy, and I like Bach, and Play For The Day on the radio. I take my tea weak with no sugar and my toast with honey. I have a birthmark like a swallow tattoo on my shoulder and, unaccountably, I am in bed with a strange man who calls me by a strange name.’

‘Tell me his story,’ Dodie said.

She kissed him then, kissed the man she called Toadie for fun. He did not turn into a prince and she thought about saying as much. But he was still looking at the picture, still wanting to know.

Alice looked away from him and away from the boy mending nets who’d written his name on the back of the picture in case she forgot. The curtains were open and she could just see the furthest reach of the sea, just where the sky lay down on top of it. Bright blue the sky today, and the sea a blue-mist smudge beneath it.

She drew breath.

‘He’s a boy. I knew him once. When I was just a girl. He meant something to me then. His name was Moray. He worked on one of the boats. Fishing. There were a lot of boats then. A shrunken fleet, but still a fleet. They went out from the harbour here. And when they were gone the women kept oil lanterns lit and sitting in the window, so the boats and the men could always find their way home. My mother did the same once, for my father. I thought they were silly, those women. The boats came back or they didn’t and it wasn’t the lights that brought the men safely home. He said he wanted to marry me. Said he’d tell his mother. I watched him walk the length of the street to his mother’s house. But I don’t know if he told her, don’t know if she kept a light on for him that night or if that was my responsibility once he’d told her. There was no light in my window, not that night or any night, and Moray did not come home from the fishing. Not ever.’

Dodie set the picture down beside Alice’s bed.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, returning to herself, and she turned to face this man in her bed. ‘He was just a boy.’

‘And you were just a girl.’ Dodie stroked her hair. ‘My Alley-cat, a girl. Now there’s a thought.’

'Your Alley-cat,' she said. And she laughed and touched his lips with her fingers and then with her lips. When she opened her eyes again he was still not a prince. And this time she told him as much.

Sharon at the Victorian Hotel in PB

2010-09-14T13:58:00.000-07:00

(Here's another Saturday PB piece.)

TOUCHING THE BERLIE’S FAIR BEAR FOR LUCK

Sharon touched the Berlie’s Fair bear for luck and went upstairs carrying Mr Struan Courtald’s cup of tea.

He was expecting her. This morning no different to any other, except perhaps there were more names in the book today, more visitors to Port Brokeferry for the start of the season. They’d taken on an extra girl to help with cleaning the rooms and making the beds. Edwin’s wife, Helen, helped in years past, but now she had Grace’s baby to think on, so they had found someone new. A girl from the school. In her last year and wanting some money, enough to take her places. It was Mr Struan Courtald’s responsibility to make sure she was turned out right.

Sharon set the cup down on the desk in front of Mr Struan Courtald. Then she stood back waiting for him to complete his inspection of her hair and her skirt and the buttons on her blouse and the shine of her shoes.

‘Thank you, Sharon,’ he said. That was all. Like she was dismissed and could go. He hadn’t even looked up from the register that he was checking. Looked like he was checking it, at least.

She did not move. She waited for him to take notice. She waited in silence.

Then the phone rang. Mr Struan Courtald picked it up.

‘The Victoria Hotel, Port Brokeferry, how can I help you?’

His voice was different when he was on the phone. All clipped and official sounding. None of the usual warmth that she heard when he spoke to her in the mornings. Even today’s ‘Thank you, Sharon,’ was softly spoken. She watched him on the phone. Watched him listening as intently as she had listened once to him teaching her how to set the knives, forks and spoons of a table. He made a note of something in the book and thanked the person at the other end of the phone and hung up.

It was then that he saw that Sharon had not left, had not returned to the kitchen. He lifted the cup to his lips and sipped at the tea. ‘Thank you, Sharon. The tea’s fine.’

Still she did not go.

He put down his pen and gave her his full attention. ‘Is there something?’ he said. ‘Something your mother said you should say, perhaps?’

‘No, Mr Courtald. My mother gave me no message today, though I am sure she will expect you to call on her later. She likes it when you call. Looks forward to it. Never a secret, you see. Mr Struan Courtald called today, she says when I get home, and the difference in her is all bright and her cheeks flushed pink.’

Mr Struan Courtald did not know what to say.

Sharon brushed a loose wisp of her hair back from her face. She cleared her throat, like Blair the postman did sometimes, only a quiet sound that was hardly a sound at all, a quiet prelude to speech. Then, without looking at Mr Struan Courtald, she continued with what she had to say, something she had practiced in her head before this day.

‘I just wanted to say thank you, Mr Courtald. For everything. For your visits to my mother. For the teaching you gave me so I could secure this post, all the time you spent making sure that I was up to the task. That was the phrase you used, ‘up to the task’. And for the gift,’ Sharon said. ‘Thank you, Mr Courtald, for the watch that you gave me for my birthday, that you gave so quietly I thought at first it was from my mother. But it was from you. I do not know why it is that you did that, but it is a lovely watch and I thank you for it.’

Mr Struan Courtald still did not know what to say. There were things he might have said, but not then, not standing there behind the desk of the Victoria Hotel and Sharon standing on the other side, the image of her mother years back and Mr Struan Courtald was just plain Struan then.

‘That was all,’ Sharon said, and she turned, pirouetted like a dancer, and went back to the work in the kitchen where Dugald McVey was already preparing breakfast. Sharon touched the Berlie’s Fair bear again for luck.

Uncle B in PB

2010-09-11T02:13:00.000-07:00

(Here's another piece from Port Brokeferry. Remember that Rose is here in PB to recover from some sort of 'breakdown' and that she is a writer trying to get back to writing, and she has been to PB before, as a child with her sister Carrie and her mother and a mysterious other that she knows only as Uncle B.)

INVENTING UNCLE B

The back door was open and Rose was already writing in her notebook. On the table in front of her and propped up against an empty sugar bowl, just where she could see it, was the photograph her sister had sent her, the one with ‘Uncle B’ written on the back but the man himself cut from the picture.

He was neither old nor young. Neither tall, nor short. But to the girls he filled a space as big as any hole can be. He was all the father they knew so that they did not understand why they called him Uncle B.

B for Brian or Bob or Ben.

And Uncle B loved the woman who was their mother, said he did over and over, so much that she protested sometimes, her protests all bright-eyes and smiles. He wrote it in the flat wet sand and the frothing sea made of it a secret again when it came in and washed clean what he’d written.

Their mother’s name was Kate and, laughing like it was a joke, ‘Kiss me Kate’ he whispered to her, and Uncle B whispering was never so quiet that they didn’t hear and his kisses never so concealed that they were not seen by the two girls. And all their sunshine days were measured out in those kisses, and in the dark of storybook nights they compared notes on the kisses that Uncle B gave, tasting of ice-cream sometimes and other times of mint or cigarette smoke or beer. The ice-cream kisses were the best.

Rose drank from her cup and looked out at the day. Brighter today than yesterday and all the clouds chased from the sky. She felt lighter somehow, like it was doing her good being back in Port Brokeferry. And she was writing again. That was something. She set her cup down and returned to her notebook.

B for badger or bull or bear.

And Uncle B loved them, too. I love you Rosemary, he said, and I love you Caroline. And he carried them on his shoulders, taking turns, seeing the world from the highest high, and his hands holding their legs kept them safe. Like riding an elephant, they said, afterwards, and his shoulders rolling and their hands wrapped about his head like they’d made a turban out of their fingers.

And he built castles out of sand with sea-shells for windows and a cigarette packet for a door. And he invented a prince and a princess for the castle he’d made and a whole kingdom of frog-legged courtiers and maids-a-milking and a witch with a black sea-weed dress.

And Uncle B filled their heads with happy-ever-afters, and the summer seemed neverending and all their tomorrows promised to be the same as today.

Rose could not see where this was going. Something of the story she knew, for it came from her own head, and something mixed with memory is what it was, this Uncle B and his one-swallow summer. But they’d never talked about why he left, not Carrie or Rose or her mother.

Came a day that was not expected, a day when the sun dipped behind a cloud and the sky was bruised and the wind whipped up the sand on their beach. The mother and her girls still smiled for the camera – smiled only in black and white – and a man called Uncle B crept out of the picture, out of all their pictures.

They packed away their buckets and spades, the gingham cloth they’d spread on the sand, and the swim suits with matching sun-hats. They returned the shells to the sea, and walked barefoot up the sand one last time. There’s a picture of them then, just the three of them, and they are wearing coats and the street is wet and it is not Port Brokeferry anymore. On the back of the picture there is writing in pencil worn as thin as smoke. It says ‘And the sunny time was over’, and Uncle B was forgotten, like he had never been.

Rosemary asked her mother once, or maybe she thought she did, and she asked where he had gone and why, and her mother said that B was for brute and beast and bastard. And her mother swearing was the last word on the matter.

'B is for brute and beast and bastard,' Rose said out loud, and she looked again at the picture that Carrie had sent, at the man's hand reaching into the photograph and the grey shadow laid on her mother's cheek. 'Bastard,' Rose said again.

News and a PB piece

2010-09-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

(News just in: have just been told of another hit with my writing for this year... this time a competition win and quite a nice one, I think. Certainly there are some nice writers' names amongst the lists from previous years. A win is good news... even when you know it's just the view of one judge or in this case one panel of judges. And here's another Port Brokeferry piece from Saturday in PB.)

BACK FROM A LONG TIME AWAY

Izzy’s mother rose early. She would take her turn in the shop today, she told Izzy. And the mail, she would sort the mail for Blair. No, really, she’d like to, she said. And she meant it.

It was like she was back from a long time away, that’s what Izzy thought. And her being back made everything right in their world: the mother was the mother again and Izzy was the daughter. Always the same after Izzy’s mother had one of her turns. Izzy made a note to herself to talk to the doctor about it when she next saw him.

Downstairs, the day outside was already brighter than the fluorescent-lit day inside and already poking impatient fingers between the gaps in the shutters. Izzy watched her mother at work, sorting through the letters and the small parcels. She was wearing her glasses, but still she held the letters and postcards close to her face so she could read the names and the addresses. The larger parcels she set to one side. Izzy watched because she expected something. She’d paid first class postage, and it hadn’t come yesterday, so she felt it had to be there today.

Izzy’s mother asked about a woman called Rose staying in one of the cottages at the front. Old Annie’s cottage, she called it though Annie had been dead for longer than Izzy had been alive. There was a letter for this Rose and she wanted to check that there was such a woman. Izzy told her there was and her mother slotted the letter into the right place.

Then Izzy’s mother stopped what she was doing.

Izzy stopped too. Pretended not to see the start in her mother’s face. Pretended not to hear her mother’s held breath.

‘It must be,’ Izzy thought, and there and then, for the first time, a small doubt sprouted, and in the short space that it took for Izzy to go from ‘It must be’ to ‘It is’ her doubt mushroomed to something bigger and then it was as quickly gone.

There was a small parcel with her mother’s name on it and a franked German stamp in the corner. The name and the address had been printed on a white label and stuck to the plain brown paper wrapping. That made it different from the parcels her mother once received from Johannes, but still she did as she had done before, years back: Izzy’s mother slipped the small parcel into the pocket of her dress, did it quickly and looked up to see if she was observed.

Izzy walked away. ‘I’ll open the shop,’ she said, tossing the words over her shoulder as she went.

There was a company in Germany that Izzy had found and she’d written to them and it was not so expensive really and she’d thought it would be something bright in their day. Now it was arrived there was a new doubt and she was not sure if she had done it for her mother or if she had done it for herself.

Once Blair had set out with the mail and Izzy was busy serving customers, Izzy's mother crept into the back kitchen and she took a pair of scissors to the parcel she had received. Her hands shook. Inside she found a small white cardboard box lined with corrugated card, and inside that a bottle with a gold screw top, and a blue and gold label that she recognised, and 4711 on the label.

A Mini Book Tour

2010-09-05T02:39:00.000-07:00

I am returned from a five event whistlestop 'book tour' of the Western Isles. Because my children's book, 'The Chess Piece Magician', is set in a place called Uig on Lewis, the nice people organising the Faclan (Hebrides Book Festival) thought it would be good to get me to visit. I began in Stornoway with an event for four schools at An Lanntair (the Arts Centre in Stornoway). I had the whole beautiful stage to myself and a tiny lapel microphone so that even my smallest whisper could be heard at the very back of the auditorium. It was brilliant and just the kind of venue I can really perform in. I did story-telling and a magic trick (my only one) and talked history and writing and the book. I also got to meet a family on holiday and the two children, Kissy and Noah, had just finished reading my book (which they had loved) and they had asked specially if they could sit in on the event... of course I signed their copy of the book, but I also got to put my name on their keepsake holiday stone on which they had painted a Lewis chessman.

My second event was at the small primary school in Uig itself. I had never been to Uig before so it was a thrill to be somewhere that in my book I had 'invented'. It was a much more majestic landscape than I had imagined and I apologised to the staff and children there for making it a smaller place than it was. The children in the school were lovely and chatty and we had some fun together.

On my second day, after a ferry trip, I was further south in Benbecula and the Uists. I did two school events there, one at a place called Lionacleit and one at a place called Daliburgh.

Everyone was so welcoming and so warm and the children in each place got to help me on stage and were stars themselves. I also got to see some of the breathtaking scenery as we drove long distances between the events and the weather was kind and everything sunstroked and the water everywhere so beautifully blue.

My final day was on Barra. I had visited Barra before, when I was a younger man. My wife and I spent four holidays there before our children were born. It was, therefore, a huge thrill for me to be back there and this time as a writer and performer. The place was unchanged and so so beautiful. My plane landed on the beach (with the tide out) and would take off again from the same beach the next morning. Once again I was most warmly appreciated by all the staff and the pupils at Castlebay School had a great time as I entertained them for an hour.

Copies of my book and study resources designed by library staff in Stornoway will be sent out to all schools over the next couple of weeks. The resources look very exciting. I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who worked so tirelessly in making this trip so enjoyable and so easy for me. Thanks especially to Kathleen Milne and Felicity Bramwell who looked after me so well and to The Scottish Book Trust for funding such events. I just hope that the book festival staff like my next book and invite me back sometime.

Eileen Wakes and it is Saturday

2010-08-31T13:25:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-08-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-08-28T03:52:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-08-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-08-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-08-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

(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.